The Dead Janitors Club

by Jeff Klima

  Pulling up to their south entrance per their instructions, I waited for the police to open their electronic gate. And waited. And waited. I was about to give up and seek out the main office when an annoyed electronic voice crackled over an unseen intercom: "Pick up the phone!"

  I spied a callbox obviously situated just outside my window. Feeling like a schmuck, I opened it and picked up the tan phone receiver located within.

  "Dispatch," the voice answered, and I couldn't tell if it was the same one from the intercom.

  "This is Jeff Klima…from Orange County Crime Scene Cleaners. I'm here to clean a car," I said eagerly, keeping my ear to the receiver.

  "One moment," the voice chirped.

  The metal gate crawled open before me, and I was admitted. Being allowed into the lion's den was an exhilarating experience, and I really felt like a vital part of the law enforcement family. An older man in civilian clothes met me at the top of the ramp and beckoned me down into the underground. I drove past all the ordinary cars and trucks that the average officer took to work every day and descended down into the fluorescent-lit abyss.

  Inside the underground parking garage, rows of gleaming blackand-white police patrol cars sat in lined formation, awaiting use. The man beckoned my big truck into an unused parking space and waited where he was for me to climb down and go to him.

  He was old and leathery, the kind of roughneck they'd cast as a gruff ranch hand in a western movie. He even wore blue jeans and a button-up shirt tucked into them, no-nonsense style. I was certain his steely eyes could look into my soul.

  "You're the guy, huh?" he said, as if disappointed by what he saw.

  I nodded, remembering Dirk's advice that I act like we did this sort of thing all the time.

  "Answer me one question—why should we use you?" This was not a man who wasted words.

  "We are a company built on pride. We make sure that we always do a great job…" I began, laying a line of PR bullshit that he wasn't having.

  "Why don't we just do the work ourselves?" he interrupted.

  I stood there, my mouth hanging slightly open. This was everything I hated about meeting strangers. I didn't have the answers he wanted, and I was afraid to say something that might make him angry. I noticed another man standing behind me in dress slacks. By their expressions, I could tell that neither man was going to let me off the hook.

  "We…take the liability off you?" I finally guessed, my voice cracking under the pressure.

  "Exactly," Glenn confirmed, nodding at the man in the suit. "They take care of our liability," he reiterated, his attention fully on the other man.

  "And are you licensed and bonded by the state?" Glenn probed me further.

  "Absolutely," I lied, still not sure what that meant.

  "Good for me," Glenn spoke to the other man again.

  "Me, too," the man said. Apparently Dirk had already discussed rates and everything with them over the phone. We were charging seventy-five dollars to clean a car and one hundred to clean a jail cell— no matter what the circumstances. If it was dust from a mosquito fart or if a lunatic had ripped off the top two layers of his skin and thrown them around the room, we got paid the same. Personally, I was hoping for a lot more of the former. The money was secondary; we were really hoping that by getting in good with them, we would get the call any time they had a real crime scene.

  Cowboy Glenn and the other man left me to the car, a black-andwhite Crown Victoria wrapped several times in yellow police tape and with a biohazard symbol smartly taped in the back window. As if that weren't enough, an orange traffic cone had been propped up on the trunk.

  I unwrapped all the tape, throwing it into my black trash bag, and opened the door to the backseat. Shining my expensive flashlight across the hard, plastic bucketlike seat, I could see the snotty glob of blood that had been smeared across the seat position often referred to as "sitting bitch."

  It was prisoner blood, something that gave me a chill. When a little old lady gets bored with life and blows her brains out, you say, "Gross," but you quickly deal with it. When a prisoner bleeds, three big letters come to your mind: HIV. I suited up fully, wishing now that my boss had sprung for clear plastic face shields like our competitors had.

  In place of facial safety equipment, I opted to hold my breath, tilt my nostrils downward, and close my eyes as I used a white cloth rag to absorb the red splash of mucuslike consistency. When it was all gone, the blood-slicked towel having been thrown into a trash bag and that trash bag having been placed inside another trash bag, I cleaned the rest of the car.

  I'd told Glenn to check back on me in fifteen minutes, but I was so intent on impressing him that when he showed up, I told him it would take another fifteen minutes. In that time, I detailed the whole backseat, shining the clear plastic window between the front seat and the back, polishing the glass on all the doors, and even shining up the black plastic floorboards. For a finishing touch, I sprayed a quick blast of our deodorizer, which had a rich, pleasant bubble-gum smell, just to knock out the odor of the chemicals.

  I stood waiting proudly beside the car when Glenn showed up and gave him the flashlight tour. I illustrated how I had taken the time to extract each seatbelt to its fullest extension and scrubbed both sides, how I had polished the metal plate that protected the officers up front from backseat donkey kicks, and even vacuumed out the front half of the car, removing candy-bar wrappers that roamed beneath the driver's seat like tumbleweeds in the desert. Most importantly, the blood, and any trace of it, was gone.

  Glenn nodded appreciatively and used his own pen to sign the contract I handed him. I put my own pen awkwardly back in my pocket, but it didn't matter; it was official. We had a contract with a police station, and that was guaranteed business. Dirk had claimed that we were professionals, Glenn had put us to the test, and I had passed it with flying colors. Despite my slovenly appearance, I had earned the old roughneck's respect.

  I lost it about two minutes later when I tried to back the truck out of the narrow parking garage.

  Dirk's truck was an "extended everything" behemoth, and before I'd met him I'd never piloted a truck in my life. I couldn't see what was behind the tailgate; I didn't know the numerous blind spots; and I wasn't used to sitting quite so high. So backing up wasn't done with a confident, smooth reverse into a casual pull-forward motion. To make matters worse, the parking garage had been built with narrow lanes that would perfectly accommodate normal-size police cruisers but didn't have much space for an oversize truck.

  Under Glenn's astonished gaze, I tried to execute a thirty-point turn, creeping dangerously close each time to inserting a tail pipe through various patrol car windshields. My side-view mirrors were only good for seeing Glenn's disgusted face closer than it would normally appear. While I didn't hit any cars that day, I'd once more managed to smash the hell out of my dignity.

  To my credit, we received a call from Orange a week later, summoning us back to clean another car. This time it really was AIDS-contaminated blood. A note left on the front dashboard of the car confirmed that the officer had transported a bleeding prisoner who was HIV-positive. I took all the same steps as before, not really knowing, but hoping that I was doing it all correctly and that nobody would get sick as a result of my methods. I still didn't have any training about blood-borne pathogens.

  * * *

  If I'd had any idea that second Orange PD call would be my last crime scene call of any kind for two months, I might have saved my money better. Believing that the good times were here to stay, I went into summer with no savings and the full expectation of more work.

  Each time I placed a fumbling, frantic phone call to my boss wondering why no one was calling us or no one was apparently dying, he told me that he didn't know. Surely people were kicking the bucket, but either their survivors didn't know we were out there, or nobody wanted to pay us to do the work. Each phone call would end with my boss and me repeating our mantra: "Pray for death."

 
; The miserably hot summer days faded into miserably hot summer nights. Chris and I were living in the frat house with no air conditioning and a hole in the ceiling that somehow vented dry, blazing furnace air down on us from the attic. Out of desperation, we'd attempted to block the hole with a boogie board, but someone had long since stolen the board for a beach trip. Kerry, miserable about my situation and hating that I wasn't working, convinced me to take a part-time job back in my old vocation: bouncing.

  My frat bro Donkey Kong had started working at Heroes, a sports bar in downtown Fullerton. They were in need of burly guys to maintain law and order. It was mostly a cadre of fit, aggressive wrestlers from various colleges in the area. They all talked about how much pussy they could pull down, and how much pussy they used to pull down while working there before management had ceased their midshift use of a loft space across the alley for "quickies." I was hired after the "good times" were over, and as such, the other bouncers didn't trust me. It probably didn't help that I wasn't interested in talking about their wrestling stories or listening to tales about the glory days of pussy-getting.

  There weren't a lot of fights at Heroes, which suited me fine, but the other bouncers were frothing for trouble. Anyone who'd get too drunk and need to be escorted out would frequently get the five-man rush, bouncers grabbing him from all angles and forcing him violently out the door. It was silly and bad for business. Most clients could be talked out, even at their drunkest, saving everyone from a scene, but that wouldn't help any of the bouncers score pussy at the end of the night. If it weren't for the bouncers, there would probably never have been a fight at Heroes.

  Though I was sick of bouncing, it was my only source of income and saved my life for several months. All my money was made on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, leaving me four other nights hanging out at the frat house and getting the drunkest I'd ever been. We'd finally discovered beer pong, which was making its way around the frat circuit long before it ever branched out into regular parties.

  Night after night we played merciless games, with everyone chipping in money for quantity beer over quality beer. The girls didn't like it, but that just left more for us. When we ran out of beer, we'd venture upstairs to drink cheap liquor, belt out Journey songs, and tell dick jokes. And my wild side and I were right in the midst of it, leading the late-night streaking runs.

  Sometimes we'd go "taping," which involved laying a strip of duct tape sticky side up in the street. A car would run over it, and the tape would stick to the wheels and get tangled up in the wheel hub, flapping around and making the unaware driver think he had a flat tire.

  We'd first learned of the game from a fellow frat bro, Phil. When he was several years younger, he'd played the game with his friends until a Domino's Pizza delivery driver ran over the tape. The driver stopped, and seeing the kids laughing at him, pulled out a knife and stabbed Phil in the arm. Domino's nicely compensated Phil's family as a result, and many years later we had a great way to alleviate boredom.

  We were also fond of stealing things as a prank, be it a giant pretzel machine, bike racks from the school, street signs, or the letters off of sorority houses. For all our differences from the other fraternities on Frat Row, when it came to drinking, we led the pack.

  It was the easily the best summer of my life, and for the time being, I didn't care if I ever saw a crime scene again. Then one night, one of my frat brothers got drunk and punched out a window (one of our few remaining non-Plexiglas ones), slicing open the vein in his wrist. The blood expelled from him in comical spurts like some bad horror-movie prop, and it went quickly enough that he began to feel faint.

  I put a compress on his wrist to stop the bleeding and ordered someone to call an ambulance. Apparently my time spent with the Boy Scouts in my youth had counted for something. After they took him away, I looked down resignedly at the large red puddle pooled on the concrete at the bottom of the broken window and went to get my crates. Drunken summer blues or not, I was a man with a calling.

  CHAPTER 11

  the murder bed

  Ordinary riches can be stolen; real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.

  —Oscar Wilde

  By September, the entire summer had yielded us one call from a Jack in the Box restaurant, which I had missed because I was out of town at a family reunion. In the grand scope of things, I was glad I missed it, because it was a call for service at midnight from a location in San Diego, an hour-and-a-half drive that Dirk had to make alone.

  It was his first solo crime scene, which was nice, but it also established a precedent between us. If I went alone, our half was split into thirds (the other half of course going to Schmitty); if he went alone, I didn't make any money at all. That revelation stung, considering all his talk that we were in it together. But, as he didn't have to tell me, it was his company.

  I also didn't know that Orange PD had called for service until I was heading back from my trip. There was a series of increasingly agitated phone messages from a sergeant questioning the quality of our work and if we were, in fact, still in business. I called Dirk in disbelief, asking why the police department hadn't contacted him in my absence.

  He casually informed me that he was also on vacation, having left a few days after me. Since Misty was temporarily unavailable for work, that left no one running the business. Dirk didn't seem to have a problem with that. In the meantime, I called the livid sergeant and apologized profusely.

  When I got back into town, Dirk told me that he'd handled the Orange PD problem. His method of handling it was to call another crime scene company and have them do the work. Dirk said our competition seemed nice about it, and he refused to believe that they would try to steal our client. All I could do was shrug.

  * * *

  A call finally came in one day from an apartment complex in North County, breaking our long dry spell. We had a murder on our hands. I picked up the truck and drove over to the address, which was part of a row of dingy-looking tenements. I would have missed the apartment entirely if not for the horde of news crews reporting from the front gates of the complex.

  I slowed the truck to a crawl, but with no signs on the truck proclaiming our business, I looked just like any other curious dickhead. The curb in front of the apartment was a mess of news vans and battered old cars, and the street wasn't wide enough for me to double-park, so I ended up having to drive several blocks down and park in a tow-away zone just to reach the complex.

  I hoofed it past the news teams, now pissed that they were hogging up the parking, and refused to offer them any "expert analysis," not that any of the bastards asked.

  I stormed into the office feeling irritated and bossy, not realizing that the office was also the superintendent's home. He was seated at a small desk by the front door, the TV in his living room blaring some Vietnamese infomercial. The super was talking to one of the complex's renters, a Mexican family, assuring them that it appeared to be an isolated and, therefore, personal murder. I tuned him out and watched the infomercial instead.

  Finally he broke from his negotiations with the family and offered me a seat on his couch. The wife had been afraid that because she lived nearby, she would be next. The poor superintendent had probably been dealing with similar complaints from other tenants all day long.

  "I'm sorry about that," the super said, and I turned, not realizing the family had gone. I'd been absorbed with the thought of buying a set of commemorative gold-plated dragon coins that the infomercial was selling.

  The super was a burly white guy, kind of like old-time wrestler Captain Lou Albano, and he had big eyes that sparkled with compassion for the victim. "Poor kid," he kept saying throughout our conversation. She was a Vietnamese girl in her early twenties and living on her own. Sometime during the previous couple evenings, someone had entered her apartment and stabbed her to death in her bed. Her older sister had been the one to discover her.

  Out of respect for
the victim and her family, the super wanted to wait for the sister, Candy Tran, to authorize my entering of the apartment. Desperate to work, I obliged him. In the meantime, though, I was going to move my truck closer. Several of the news organizations had finally given up in the heat of the day and packed it in, so I was able to pull the truck up right in front of the large steel compound doors. The doors had an auto-lock feature, so I realized that whoever had killed her hadn't just been wandering by.

  As I climbed from the truck, a whirling dervish in pink passed by me in the undeniable form of Candy Tran. She was a slender Vietnamese woman in her late thirties, with long black hair. I could imagine the theme music for the Wicked Witch of the West accompanying her, except that she was wearing a hot-pink tracksuit that made a whishing sound when she walked. I jogged up behind her as she confronted the super.

  "Yooouu saaaiiiidd heeee wasss heeerree!" she drawled.

  "He is, behind you," the super indicated. She turned and abruptly stuck a hand out for me to shake.