The Dead Janitors Club

by Jeff Klima

  Nothing was as tense at Kerry's house as the day my Denver Broncos upended her and her father's Pittsburgh Steelers in the only game they played that season. There was nothing like the sheer majesty I felt when Kerry and I watched the Anaheim Ducks beat the Detroit Red Wings in the sixth game from box seats that we lucked into. That year the Ducks won the Stanley Cup, and there I was, a superfan by immersion, living and breathing with every play.

  And so when I got the call from Dirk one day to roll out to Dodger Stadium, it was like a newfound dream come true.

  * * *

  Dirk "happened to have the day off," but I couldn't blame him for wanting to go. Everybody needed a good name-dropper crime scene in their repertoire. And by Southern California standards, Dodger Stadium was a hell of a good one.

  I still had my walking cane, but I had taken to leaving it in the car merely as an incidental. I still wouldn't lift heavy objects, but Dirk was fine with that. I think he felt really bad that the company couldn't provide me with health insurance or workers' comp.

  We cruised up the 5 freeway, him driving and me with my shades on, staring out into the expanse of LA. It had been a long time since we had rolled somewhere together, and I wasn't used to having the company. I hardly ever even listened to the radio, so I missed the silence when I would ride with Dirk, who chatted like a cabbie.

  If he didn't have conversation in his life, I think Dirk would have exploded a long time ago. He was obsessed with my previous career in porn and fascinated by it all, with almost a child's awe. He was always asking questions about what porn stars were really like and what was the craziest thing anyone had ever bought. He was a big enthusiast of pornography and would've loved to work in the porn business, except his wife wouldn't let him. She was the dominating type and not in the kinky whips-and-leather way.

  Dirk was also stuck on the song "Sexual Eruption" by Snoop Dogg. The lyrics had been changed to "Sensual Seduction" to make it more radio friendly. Dirk misheard it as "Sexual Seduction," though, and it had been adopted as his singing catchphrase to be spouted at any occasion.

  JEFF: Man, this is crazy going to Dodger Stadium…

  DIRk (singing): Sexual Seduction...

  JEFF: I wonder what happened.

  DIRk: We'll find out when we get there…We're supposed to talk to a Joe…or is it José?

  JEFF: …

  DIRk: What was the craziest thing that ever happened to you while you were working in the porn shop?

  JEFF: In the porn shop? Hmm, I don't know…I used to have this porn star that would come in, bring me weed, dry hump me… DIRk: So you might say it was…(again, singing) Sexual Seduction…

  The truck climbed Chavez Ravine to the waiting gates of the stadium's outer limits. After bandying with a guard who'd just turned away some random Dodger fans wishing to see the stadium and who took much convincing that we were legit, we were on our way as the truck crept through security and into the parking lot.

  I expected to see a mob of reporters or major scene activity, or both, as we drove around the perimeter toward the first baseline, but it felt more like an abandoned city. Construction trailers dotted the landscape, heavy machinery was set up for work, and yet there was no one around. We crept through the mess of trailers, the throaty growl of the Chevy truck announcing our presence in the early evening.

  Two men in hard hats eventually stepped out to consider us, and we waved them over. "We're looking for Joe…or José?" Dirk asked of them when they reached the side of the truck. I expected him to tack on a "Sexual Seduction," but he didn't.

  The men looked confused about both names. The one with a walkie-talkie asked into it, "Do we have a Joe or a José working on the crew?"

  "No Joes, lots of Josés," came the response.

  "We're from Crime Scene Cleaning," Dirk clarified.

  "They say they're here to clean up the crime scene," Walkie-Talkie reported.

  "Send them to Access Route 3…tell 'em to wait for a security crewman to escort them in. I'll send one over."

  Arriving at Access Route 3, we were impressed to discover the cavernous mouth of a tunnel extending down into the bowels of the stadium. Tall, Dodger-blue metal doors protected the entrance, though one had been left hanging open and swinging slightly in a still-winter breeze.

  There were no reporters or indeed any sign whatsoever that anything had gone down at Dodger Stadium. It was as if the park was keeping an extreme wrap on the situation. The beginning of the season was still two months off, so I'd ruled out fan or player death.

  Fifteen minutes later, our security guard, an older Mexican gentleman in dress blues, arrived in a small security pickup truck. He was an overly friendly type who spoke English slowly and with a lot of effort, tacking on "my friends" to any sentence in which he addressed us.

  Security Guard led us through the industrial cement hallways beneath the stadium, a location few ever get to see. There was no smell of beer, hot peanuts, or soft pretzels beneath the poured concrete innards of the historic park; rather, it was full of long, dark hallways, creepily antiseptic.

  After a bit of walking that could have been achieved much faster by a quick zip on one of the idle motorized carts Security Guard wouldn't let us go near ("I don't want to lose my career, my friends…"), we stopped at Access Door 33. Bent metal doors, contorted by God knows what, were strapped closed by yellow caution tape. Across the hallway, we could hear the hum of electronics doing their thing. The three of us beneath the stadium were otherwise alone.

  We ascended wooden planks set up for the construction that had been halted in the wake of the tragedy. The rickety boards, spanning gulches of concrete, groaned under my footfalls. I hopped from one to the next quickly, eager to avoid an accident myself.

  It turned out to be a fall. We could easily surmise as much from the impact point upon the unpaved concrete of the stadium's base. The worker had dropped from a distance in excess of forty feet, falling quicker than he could shout and meeting a gruesome demise on the jagged roughness below. That same quivering mass of red present at the disgraced minister's home was present once again, although this time it had been mulched viciously by the impact.

  Security Guard, though hesitant to leave us, was also clearly uneasy about being in the presence of some seriously bad juju. The temptation of the forbidden overwhelmed him finally, though, and he crept forward to take a look. The repulsion stretched across his face reminded me that most people weren't used to this sort of thing. I didn't see the scene as much more than one less rat in the race.

  Finally having satiated his blood curiosity, Security Guard retreated out of the access tunnel, across the wooden plank bridge, and back out into the safety of the corridor. There, the soft glow of ceiling-mounted fluorescents offered sanctuary. Inside the cavern where we were, there was only the hard burn of a pointed work light and soft red guts.

  The worker had fallen from his perch down into a sealed-off hollow cavern that comprised one of the load-bearing struts for the stadium. It was as if he'd fallen between the walls of a house, only the "walls" were comprised of thick, hardened concrete. Workers had had to drill through two feet of poured structure to access the splattered mess that had been their fellow employee. The excavation didn't make Dodger Stadium any less safe for the public, but it opened up a whole new mess of problems for us.

  The newly exposed cavern measured roughly twenty-five feet across and at least sixty feet high with measured concrete steps etched into the ceiling. The steps were the underside of rising rows of bleachers alongside the first base line. They were the good seats, where the rich people sat. I whistled at the prospect of how far beneath Dodger Stadium I was.

  We'd had to crawl over the chunky patches of blood and ripped skin to access the chamber, as the work crew had chiseled out the wall in exactly the place his body had fallen and hadn't factored in the need for a crime scene cleaner to move in and out of the space. Though the cavernous chamber was dark where our meal ticket had breathed his last,
the glow of a construction light from the corridor revealed an outline of the sharp sloping rise of concrete that was the floor of the room. It wasn't so much a floor as it was the bottom of a pit. It was unpaved and rough, and had been poured by numerous cement trucks fifty years beforehand, their drivers oblivious to the damage the knobby concrete would do to a fellow worker's body half a century later.

  I clicked on my flashlight, first to highlight the trauma we'd be dealing with, and then to play the beam across the room as I walked up the incline of the floor. The cavern wasn't airtight, because ragged and dark tunnels extended through the side walls of the subterranean cavern and into numerous other caverns probably similar to the one I was in. It was a creepy place, and I was eager to return to the safety of the blood and guts far below.

  We'd already gotten the authorization of payment via a walkietalkie to do the work. Considering it was Dodger Stadium, I would have done the job for free. Of course, since they didn't know that, a couple grand seemed perfectly fair.

  The sheer amount of chunkiness and blood caused me to immediately forgo the sprayer. I was all for AIDS protection, but there was only so much a chemical could do against the sheer volume of a human's gummy liquid insides. Using cloth hand towel after cloth hand towel, I scrubbed at the ground, lifting the jellied mess into the trash bag, feeling it collapse from my hand's pressure the way a water balloon might.

  Gnarled waves of unpaved concrete were exactly the sort of porous surface that I had always dreaded, the reason to employ my caveat in contracts, and as such, I resorted to using a crowbar and rubber mallet that Dirk had in his work crate to attempt to knock off the chunks of dyed rock base.

  After several hours of chipping away at minuscule flecks, which went skittering off beneath the wooden plank bridge, Dirk voiced a bit of sensibility. "We should just paint over the fucker."

  I quickly agreed, the magic of being in Dodger Stadium long gone from my heart.

  "I'll go get some paint," he announced cheerfully, eager to be free of my halfhearted assault on giblets of reddened rock. This meant that he would have to take his truck and go in search of the nearest Home Depot, leaving me in the barren pit, surrounded by poorly excavated chasms bathed in darkness and the weird stench of the air that occasionally emanated from them in short bursts like the breath of some overworked animal.

  "Are you sure you don't want me to go?" I asked hopefully, raising the crowbar and mallet like some poster boy for Russian servitude.

  "I'm sure," he said, leaving, the bouncing of the loose boards sounding his departure. I sat next to the mass of red ground beneath Dodger Stadium, able to only guess at the darkness of the night sky many ceilings above. My bunny suit, tied off at the waist, was a dirty crimson. I heard the muffled slam of one of the blue doors far, far down the corridor, and in that moment I knew what it was to be alone.

  In the cavern of concrete, my cell phone registered no bars, and I cursed Verizon for not sending the "Can you hear me now?" guy into the dungeons of the stadium. And it was there, alone in the dark of night, with no cell-phone reception and only my vivid imagination, that I began to consider the notion of ghosts.

  If someone had asked me at any other time on any other crime scene what I thought about the presence of the supernatural, I would have laughed in their face. I'd never felt a weird "cold presence" or a heaviness hanging over a crime scene that would suggest the presence of the supernatural. But there in that abyss…it was a bit like an atheist finding God in the face of impending doom.

  Alone in the poorly lit arena, above the viscous splatter of a miserable soul, the sounds of non-life quickly began to intrude upon my sanity. A small rain of pebbles sprinkled down on me from the ledge far above, and I had to remind myself that it was wind knocking the loose bits down as it had done the whole time Dirk and I were bantering and scrubbing. It hadn't seemed nearly as sinister then, though.

  Gripping the bloodied steel arm of the crowbar, I turned on my flashlight once more, flicking quickly through the ultraviolet settings that registered the uneven roof in a ghastly purple hue. I scaled the steep concrete as high as I dared, splaying the light across the expanse of silent night, wishing it captured a larger area in its beam. The added glow did little more than call attention to my presence, its rapid sweeping movements signifying to whatever hellish entity that might have been in there with me that I was exposed and vulnerable. I held the crowbar tighter, feeling the dense metal unyielding between my black-gloved fingers.

  "Who's up there?" I called, attempting lighthearted banter with the darkness extending past the lip far above, from which our victim had dropped oh so suddenly.

  No answer.

  I looked farther up to where the concrete hill plateaued above me into further darkness, and the concentrated orb of my flashlight illuminated similarly ragged tunnels etched into the walls at the top of the room. Something could come at me in the cavern from myriad entry points, and I found myself cursing my father for screening Alien for me as a three-year-old.

  "Can I get some more light in here?" I yelled again, wishing that the whispered air through the earthen tunnels was of human origin and that the human was friendly and capable of granting the odd request. It wasn't.

  I crouched low on the side of the concrete slope, not daring to go back toward my work, where my ample back would be exposed to the dark of the nearby crawl space. Visions of flat red eyes haunted me and made me regret everything I had done in life that might have made me hell-worthy.

  I didn't dare check my cell phone again, for it would displace my grasp on one of my two objects, the crowbar or the flashlight, and I was ill-equipped to suffer the disappointment of zero bars once again.

  "I'm not scared," I announced loudly, my voice betraying me in the midst of the dark. "I'm not scared," I said aloud again, this time more to myself. My inner monologue asked me whom I thought I was fooling. It also assured me in no uncertain terms that I, too, would meet my untimely demise in these dark hollows.

  The electronic snarl of some far-off compressor cut sharply through my bullshit and evoked the terror that I had been concealing poorly. Crowbar held aloft like the sword Excalibur, and the flashlight extended before me creating karate chop motions at the end of my pivoting arm, I ran for it. Ducking and slipping as I exited the hole, my bottom spotted red from odd concentrations of residue, I lumbered across the wooden planks, the wood creaking beneath me, and prayed there were no trolls below to snatch me into the terrifying unknown.

  I leapt down to the platform, connecting with the battered doors, fearing the creatures that had ravaged them, and headed down the length of dim corridors to the safety of the night beyond. My bloody bunny suit whisk-whisked as the material swished against itself and I ran for my life. I hit the exterior doors fist first and blasted through them, emerging from the depths and into the smoky darkness of the Los Angeles night.

  Dirk rolled up forty-five minutes later, casually munching a Big Mac, and found me still gripping the flashlight and bloody crowbar.

  Those Big Macs brought me back to reality, and I graciously accepted one of my own. With me leading the way to show my fearlessness, breathing not a word of my experiences or lack thereof, I carried the cans of paint back to where the red mess was exactly as I had left it. In fact, the whole cavern now seemed exactly as it had before…harmless.

  Not sure exactly how to go about painting over a human, I dumped the gallon can out atop the start of the puddle, its gloppy white thickness pouring out like batter onto a hot griddle. Shaking the last remnants from the can, I marveled at how the paint found its own way down the rocky face of the concrete, not quite washing over the blood trails.

  Using a roller, I began to push the paint outward, thinning it, ensuring that it spread over all the traceable red. As the encapsulating white paint spread and coated the uneven surface, the red mixed with it to form sickly salmon pink patches in the whiteness of the rock.

  I moved the roller around, pushing more paint ove
r the heinous pink blotches, but that just freed up more spots, making the man's death seem all the more sickening.

  "Damn it," Dirk swore. "That's all the paint I bought. Looks like you'll have to come out here tomorrow and lay a second coat."

  * * *

  When I returned once more to the ballpark's underground, I made sure it was during daylight hours. The second layer of paint didn't do much more to cover up where that guy impacted.

  I'll bet that if you finagle your way into the labyrinth of corridors beneath the first baseline to the battered access door numbered 33 and make your way across the rickety plank bridge, you'll find the rough exposure where construction workers hammered their way through the wall to reach their splattered coworker's corpse. And in the entrance to the massive cave of uneven concrete beyond, you'll find a large splotch of white paint with sickly pink patches creeping through.