by Jeff Klima
A squeak eked from my throat as the woman turned to me, one eyebrow thrust violently upward. I grinned the grin of he who eats shit for a living and splayed my hands outward, suggesting that ole Jeff Klima knew it was there the whole time.
"I planned on taking that last," I said, along with a silent prayer that those words alone might be enough.
She let me slide on the shower curtain, though we both knew she knew that I was lying. Her arched eyebrow had told me as much. The rest of my time there was spent in a frenetic silence with an emphasis on being thorough.
I had shown up in my dirty Cavalier with its faded Hawaiian-print seat covers, the antithesis to a logical crime scene vehicle. I called my ride the "Red Rocket," not because she was fast or sleek, but because my little red car certainly resembled a dog's penis. And if nothing else, I was sure I looked like a dick driving it.
As I loaded the last of the biohazard bags into the front seat of the Rocket, which bore no placards or other evidence of a legit cleaning operation, the homeowner came outside, checkbook in hand, and scribbled the payment out for me with the attitude of someone who knew she had just been taken for a ride.
I was grateful for the check but ashamed for not having charged her less. The heat lamp that was her merciless stare had long since wilted the confidence in me. I drove home, bags full of blood and shit brimming next to me, wondering how not to be such a pussy.
* * *
Because crime scenes seem to happen in patterns, we soon had a call for another gig. This one came courtesy of a lesbian whose mother had killed herself in a bathtub. It was an evening job, so Dirk didn't have a good excuse not to tag along.
The job hailed from Panorama City, a north Los Angeles County locale that was anything but panoramic. I'd made the mistake of going there once while shopping for a hat. Panorama City is to Skid Row as phlegm is to smoker's cough. It was our third job in Los Angeles, and this one had come our way as a result of some girl's finger randomly poking down on "The Trauma List."
The Trauma List is a leaflet police officers carry with them that lists all of the property remediation companies in California. Considering that there are a lot of property remediation companies in California and that the list rarely gets renewed, there was a good chance of someone choosing a company that was no longer in business.
We, Orange County Crime Scene Cleaners, were located at miserable spot number 252 on the list. That put us somewhere far down on page 4. Not a great place for a company to be when random choice dictated much of your client base. More difficult was that the list also contained companies that didn't clean up crime scenes at all but instead specialized in such facets of property remediation as mold removal and water-damage repair. The odds of us being found amid the likes of such noncompetition competition were terrible.
The list had been generated on a "first come, first served" basis, and Schmitty, with all his years in the industry, had a much more desirable listing at number 4. But since we were his guys for all of Southern California, when that chick's finger popped down at the number 4 slot, it might as well have found us all the way at the end.
We arrived in the early evening on a street full of dead trees. The houses were all ancient bungalows, small places built out of wood that had been more or less scraped together by the winner of some early twentieth-century bidding war. I knew the insides of the homes wouldn't look much better.
We pulled into the driveway to find a deep-green Volvo station wagon waiting for us; a rainbow lightning bolt decal was emblazoned across its back window.
The butch half of the lesbian couple (her mother being the one who had checked out) nodded to us gruffly. I nodded back, and Dirk gave me the go-ahead to negotiate—probably not because he'd been impressed by my acumen in screwing over our last customer, but because he was intimidated by dealing with hard-looking lesbians.
The more masculine lesbian was a tough one, the kind of person who would punch a tree when she was angry. It took her awhile to get calmed down enough to talk with us, apparently because there was some guilt over the fact that the body had sat stewing in its bathwater for over a week, unnoticed.
The couple had just driven from San Francisco (natch) to deal with the situation, and their emotions were still quite fresh. And here I was trying to affix a price tag to her mother's death. The "he" stalked off to deal with her hang-ups, pursued by her partner, and I was left with the goofy Dirk, who wore a cow's expression of placidity. After all, he wasn't the one who had angered the lesbians.
Finding the front door unlocked, we entered the house to an immediately obvious smell. A fly smacked against my cheek and I spat, swinging my hands anxiously. I had no urge to repeat the horror of my first job.
The bungalow was steeped in inky blackness. The day had been a warm one, and dry air hung heavy with a stench that I will forever recognize as the breakdown of unattended human flesh. It was musty and ripe, as if someone had opened a cellar door at the same moment they farted. Oh, and did I mention that this person seemed to have been living off meat sandwiches for about a year when they did it?
It's an odor unlike anything else you will ever smell. Even the stench of a rotting animal doesn't quite have the same noxious thickness to it. The scent of decomposing flesh sticks to you, clinging to your clothes and filling in the open spots in your pores. Even in the heat, I regretted not wearing my bunny suit to investigate.
We moved toward the bathroom, and the buzzing of flies intensified. Our flashlights, seeking out obstacles in the dark, occasionally captured the blur of a passing housefly instead. Out of my peripheral vision, I could just discern the outline of an overloaded hanging sticky trap. Dirk was ahead of me and fumbled around for the bathroom light fixture.
A streak of blood, the width of a wooden ruler, had dried to the back of the porcelain bath, extending down the outside rim. It was easy to recognize as the position her arm had lain in as it bled out. The flies were clogged three deep on the screen of the small window high above the tub, and they looked more eager to leave the scene than I was.
Insect carcasses littered the floor, extending out into the hallway. Far larger and far more ominous than those were the presence of several odd shapes on the bathroom floor. Tan patches, not at all matching the rest of the tile pattern and about the size of a two-dimensional flank steak, were sealed to the smooth squares of the tiled floor.
I got down on my hands and knees to inspect them. I had cleaned up some crime scenes in my day, and yet for the life of me, I couldn't recognize what I was seeing. I thrust my face down low, my nose almost connecting with one of the odd shapes.
"Fuck," I gasped, straightening up quickly, suddenly understanding.
A person, for all the different smells we give off, is really no different when dead than the average piece of meat. If you soak a dead person long enough, say in a bathtub full of once hot water, he or she, too, will fall off the bone.
The thin patches plastered to the ground were wide strips of the dead woman's skin that, saturated with water, had fallen off her corpse when the paramedics removed her from the bathtub. On the floor, under the heat of day in a house resembling a pressure cooker, the water had evaporated and the flesh had sealed, airtight, to the old tile. It looked as if someone had skinned a basketball and each piece had come off in large, smooth hunks.
It got worse. Paramedics had evidently done the work of pulling the drain plug for us, as it was hanging from its chain off the far ledge of the tub. The water had largely dissipated, taking most of the small parts of what spilled from the woman down the narrow drain. A too-big wad of waterlogged flesh had stopped the process cold, though, and a good couple inches of fetid, murky liquid remained in the bottom of the tub.
Rimming the rest of the tub, showcasing for us where the water line had been, was a nice ring of human grease that had dried tight to the porcelain. I shook my head, knowing that had I stayed at Beverages & More, I would never have had to deal with this…but I also would never have
gotten the opportunity to deal with it either.
We went back outside to lay some consolation on the lesbians while attempting to explain to them the extent of the cleaning that was necessary. Neither wanted to go inside the house to see firsthand, which was fine with us. If they didn't want to look, it came down to our word on how much the cleanup would cost.
On the way over, my boss and I had dared to dream that we again could charge $1,535, hoping that such a scenario was possible. It was, and more. Emboldened by their reluctance to enter the premises, I suggested to my boss that we up the price to $1,635! He almost shit himself at the prospect but then nodded in agreement. I went off to suit up, conveying the look of professionalism, while he, having not pissed off the bereaved, quoted our price.
The bunny suits were mostly a prop, Dirk had once informed me. We didn't really need them, except to guard against getting blood on our clothes.
"They're mostly for show," he would say, likening the cleaning of a crime scene to a performance art. "There aren't any diseases that can be caught from old blood."
Upset by the price Dirk had quoted, the "he" of the lesbians took off again, and I settled back against the truck, awaiting another long night. Finally her partner called her back and the negotiations were finalized, with Dirk agreeing to come down in price to around nine hundred dollars. It felt like a slap in the face to do the job for less, but money was money.
It was agreed that they would leave, we would clean, and they would come back when we were finished. It was a fair proposition, but first we had to reassure the "he" that our company was licensed and bonded by the state (I still don't know what that means!), and that we weren't there to steal anything. The idea that she even considered that notion horrified me, particularly because I had had a glance around and would be damned if there was anything worth taking. Last time I checked, my hard-on for thievery didn't extend to old TV Guides or mason jars full of buttons.
As I messed with my crates back at the truck, I heard the sudden rustle of plant life behind me. Instantly I thought of all the horror films I'd ever seen, where some soulless behemoth leapt out of the bushes to twist some dickhead teenager's head completely the wrong way. Or maybe he would simply squeeze my head until my eyeballs popped out.
I turned quickly, expecting the worst, and instead saw the watchful eyes of the neighborhood, come to stare. Eerie and unsettling, all the neighbors and their children stood amid the foliage of front yards, watching silently. I smiled and nodded, but none of them responded. They were just curious, but their curiosity was born of fear, and they didn't dare make the bold strides forward to confront me. I found it very intimidating.
With Dirk manning the blood on the tub, I started on the floor, first using the scrub brush to work at the human jerky, and then finally resorting to flipping it around and using the tapered lip of its handle to scrape piece by gummy piece off the floor of the bathroom and hallway. Apparently the house hadn't been wide enough to get a stretcher through, so the paramedics had had to tote her pliant, slimy, grease-soaked corpse through the hallway, dropping flesh hunks as they went.
After several hours of intense cleaning, Dirk and I each sought out menial tasks, since neither wanted to be the one who inserted his hand to unclog the greasy drain. Finally I snapped, sensing a losing battle. Holding the black trash bag open, I reached into the foul water until my gloved fingers connected with something agonizingly squishy, for which I grabbed and yanked. The drain opened up with a broad sucking noise, and I disposed of the loose flesh into the bag, trying hard not to look as I tossed it in.
There was a medical laboratory smell to the piece, which was about the size of a marshmallow, and it made me think back to when I had to dissect a frog in high school. I could feel the wetness through the thin layer of my latex gloves, and the natural, oily grease found in skin made my gloves slick to the touch. And still, for the sake of the job, for the sake of not having to go back to working for minimum wage, for the sheer knowledge that I had held a piece of a human being that most would run screaming in horror from, I persevered.
CHAPTER 9
child molesters don't last in prison
Can you fly, Bobby? —Clarence Bodiker, Robocop
I'd put off Dirk's pet project of soliciting the police departments for as long as I could. Every time he'd phone me regarding the solicitation of new business, I always had some compelling reason to delay the cold calling for just a few more days. The last thing that my fumbling, awkward side needed was to try to sell a half-cocked janitorial service to cynical authority types with guns. And then one morning, Dirk had an epiphany.
Even while on his job as a sheriff, Dirk still managed to dedicate large amounts of his time to helping our crime scene business grow. Dreaming up new gimmicks to increase our presence in the community, he'd finally hit upon the "million-dollar idea."
Being in the property and evidence division of the sheriff's department, Dirk was in a special position to make an "innocent" phone call. Dialing the police department for the city of Orange, a nice little suburbia adjacent to Anaheim, Dirk got hold of their fleet commander, a tough Old West cowboy type we'll call Glenn Johnson. Glenn was a no-bullshit kind of guy, so when Dirk called, claiming that the sheriff's department needed a line on a crime scene cleaning company, Glenn had just enough salt in his veins to take the bait.
Despite Dirk's claim to the contrary, Glenn was adamant that he'd never used a cleaning service to perform biohazard service on the patrol cars and jail cells, and that the officers of Orange had always done the work themselves. Dirk persisted, saying that he'd heard Glenn had used this new cleaning service, "Orange County Crime Scene Cleaners," and that he'd heard Glenn really liked them. Dirk was eager to call the company himself, but he wanted to make sure that Glenn really had, in fact, liked them.
Now, I don't know what stars aligned for this scheme, but again Glenn was interested. He, too, was sick of the officers exposing themselves to unnecessary risk. He didn't give a damn what the fat cats upstairs wanted and was eager to employ an outside service to clean the piss, shit, vomit, blood, and general whatnot out of the jail cells and police cruisers. And if Dirk had heard positive things about this "Orange County Crime Scene Cleaners" from somewhere within the law enforcement community, well, that was good enough for old Glenn. And lucky for Glenn, Dirk just happened to have their phone number handy.
Dirk, full of prankster merriment, then called to put me on notice that I could expect a call from Orange and to harangue me into employing a similar method on every other law enforcement agency in Southern California. He had done "his part" and delivered our first one; the rest were up to me.
Finally out of excuses, I picked up the phone. All I had to say was that I was looking for the "fleet commander" or person in charge of vehicle maintenance.
"The service will sell itself," Dirk said confidently. Once the other agencies found out that we worked with Orange, they would be chomping at the bit to work with us, too.
Dirk had previously supplied me with a list of phone numbers for all the various Southern California police departments. Of course, what he neglected to mention was that each phone number was the direct line to that department's chief of police.
Rather than some office phone that the sergeant in charge or, say, an operator could answer, only then to refer me around the police station, Dirk had supplied me with direct access to the top brass at each police station. And the top brass, by and large, hates phone calls from solicitors. Especially stammering, awkward ones calling under a pretense of urgency.
Chief after chief took me through the third degree, demanding to know what business an imbecile like me had calling his or her line and then possessing the audacity to ask him or her to transfer me out. Most, after I explained that I was attempting to make their biohazard issues easier on them, simply hung up the phone. The reedy squeak of my phone voice gave me away. Any man who talked like that on the phone couldn't do them or their agency a damn bit of g
ood.
If I did manage to get passed along to an operator, she would then inform me that their police station didn't have any sort of "fleet commander" and that the best person to decide if they needed biohazard service for their cars was the chief. I quickly abandoned that method of attracting new business.
* * *
In the meantime, I had received a call for service out in Claremont once again. I made a mental note to have our business send those two officers a fruit basket. It was only when I reached the neighborhood in my Cavalier that I realized I was back at the shit-smearing-uncle house.
Confused, I rang the doorbell and hoped that no one else had died as a result of my cleaning job…say, by slipping on a wet tile floor and cracking their skull open. A wrinkled old lady answered and introduced herself timidly. She was the mother of the homeowner, sister to the dead man, and the catalyst for his rampage. She'd moved back in and had noticed something that apparently I had missed.