by Jeff Klima
Just do yourself and your sanity a favor…and don't go at night.
CHAPTER 16
blood, blood, there's so much blood!
My father taught me to work; he did not teach me to love it. —Abraham Lincoln
There was nothing like an abundance of work to make my lazy ass wish for less work. We had been rolling like crazy lately, as a seeming wave of death was overwhelming Orange County. All of the people who had managed to cling to their meaningless lives during the dry months had now decided to unburden themselves, one on top of another.
A month ago I had visited the Hotel Pepper Tree, a garish place in Anaheim with a South Beach, Miami, feel to it (though I have never visited South Beach, Miami). I had gone initially with the intention of collecting payment from the ancient and shaking brother of the doll lady. He had come in from South Beach and had made a beeline to a place of familiarity and comfort.
In that initial visit to the Hotel Pepper Tree, I had been struck by the tropical, pastel feel of the place, full of palm fronds and the sound of running water. It wasn't located in the most colorful part of Anaheim, the spectacle that was Disneyland, and so it stuck out in the dusty, drab surroundings like an oasis in Antarctica.
What had captured my attention about the place was not its sore-thumb exterior, though, but rather its decorating scheme. In this temple to the tropical, the decorating scheme was completely Arnold. Evidently the owner of the place had been unwilling to completely shy away from his SoCal roots, and the twin corridors running the length of the building were adorned with a multitude of framed movie posters from the Governator's long career in Hollywood. It was Arnold Schwarzenegger's face glaring out at me from among the palm trees that I remarked upon later to anyone who would listen at the frat house. And then a month later, I was back.
Since my back still wasn't 100 percent normal, I brought Kim, from my work crew on the Sewer House, with me. She'd begged me to take her on a job, and though I had obliged on the Sewer House, she wanted more. Kim was attracted to the ghoulish side of life, the dark and dirty aspects of human nature, and as such, my job captivated her.
I had been unable to bring along Misty, the attractive woman who was actually employed by O.C. Crime Scene Cleaners, because she was too busy lately with school and her other job. Kim was attractive, too, though, and as she'd tellingly informed me at one point, she had her clit pierced.
Kim had been among the collective at the frat the day I had described the outlandish splendor of the Hotel Pepper Tree, and so it felt like a badge of honor that she could verify its gaudiness. We were there for a young man who had violently stabbed himself in his heart, cutting a hole in his Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt and creating a trail of blood that ruined his Seven jeans.
From there the blood had found its way across the wide, polished brown tiles and into grout lines of the floor that were a little too deep and narrow to fit the head of the cleaning brush. The half of the room that the bed was on lay undisturbed, save a four-foot-long narrow patch of carpet lying adjacent to the affected streaks of tile. Kim was through the roof at the possibilities of cleaning up this dead guy; I was thinking about her clit ring and how the bed opposite the carnage was unstained. I tempered that thought, though, with the memories of my karmatic diarrhea on the dog job, and we got to work.
Kim was adorable bundling up in her bunny suit (one of Misty's). She was concerned about the possibility of disease, so she actually taped her gloves to the wrists of her suit with duct tape, something she'd evidently learned off a TV show, as it was never anything I had been trained in.
I cinched my suit off at my waist, so as not to ruin my shorts, and crouched down slowly till I was at face level with the tile. I wasn't worried about disease myself, feeling like an old pro now that I had been cleaning crime scenes for a full year. Besides, what sort of disease could I possibly get from the blood of an impeccably fashionable young man who'd come down to a kitschy and flamboyant hotel to kill himself in an overly dramatic manner?
The work itself seemed easy enough. I cleaned the blood off the tile with my paper towels, and Kim mirrored me every step of the way, busting her ass to show her value as a team member. She was working as a waitress and hating every minute of it. If there were any way she could get aboard with the crime scene cleaning and get out of her old occupation, she would do it. I knew the feeling.
Dirk was a bit of a pervert and would have been more than happy to go for it, and I myself couldn't imagine the downside of having two attractive girls working with us. We were paying both of them peanuts. Dirk and I split pay in half for all the jobs we did and now excluded Schmitty from all the ones he didn't immediately contract us for, while we paid the girls twenty-five dollars an hour for their work.
Kim said she wasn't in it for the money, but had she known I was making $250 or more an hour, she might have changed her mind. She was a good worker when there weren't neighbors around for her to gab with, and I did my part to make sure she kept on task. In the end, she seemed to fit right in with us as a member of our unit. Of course, we were a motley crew of slap-dicks, scumbags, and morons with little to no moral fiber, so maybe saying she fit right in wasn't exactly the best compliment.
* * *
One day, just as it was starting to get into the summer heat, we got a call from the Corona Police Department. Kim was waitressing and my back was feeling okay, so I took the call alone.
I rolled into their station with Dirk's words fresh in my mind. He was adamant that we do everything "right" to impress the cops, because that would entice them to recommend us to the private sector, where the real money was.
The Red Rocket and I were now a familiar sight at Orange PD; I'd grown accustomed to a casual friendliness from most of the cops. I would joke around with them, pissing and moaning about having to clean up piss and vomit and complaining how they had it easy. Whenever unfamiliar cops would approach me about my presence in their underground gate-access-only parking garage, I would respond innocently with statements like, "Isn't this where I go to register as a sex offender?" or "My brother's in there…I'm here to bust him out!" They'd panic for a moment, and then realization would set in and we'd share a laugh.
So when I arrived at Corona PD, it was understandable that I was expecting a similar level of professional courtesy. Instead, the office had me fill out paperwork explaining what my business was bothering them with, and then they left me to fuck off for thirty-five minutes in the lobby while they halfheartedly attempted to page the chucklehead who had contacted me in the first place.
Corona was a newer town on the fringe of the desert, and the residents had that "new town on the fringe of the desert" attitude to show for it, as if they were fucking Palm Springs or something. My rock-star mentality was beginning to get the better of me, and I stood up to announce that they could clean up their own cop car—I had better ways to waste a day. But the lady at the reception counter was even too busy for me to announce my intent, so I meekly returned to my seat.
Finally I was summoned into the police yard, where eight or so fleet vehicles awaited deployment. It was a miserable, cramped yard as far as police-yard facilities went. I'd clearly grown snooty, having become accustomed to the blissful shade of the Orange PD underground. In the desert of Corona, the sweltering sun cut straight through the morning haze and beamed like a spotlight on me, making my skin feel unbearably sticky.
My contact, Winston, led me over toward one of the black-andwhites, its fiberglass exterior cooking in the heat. Winston opened the back door, and the stale stench of death bull-rushed me. Blood has a metallic odor to it, and when it has been cooking in mass amounts in the trapped air of a police car's walled-in cage, you can taste it on the front of your tongue. I didn't have to lean in to see that the backseat was gruesome.
The molded fiberglass buckets of the backseat had large puddles of the red stuff, and in the heat the top layer was beginning to dry, forming a gelatinlike skin across the liquid pools underneath. P
hlegmlike snatches of pulpy blood had been flung across the rest of the enclosure, staining seatbelts and the fabric overlay on the ceiling along with the frizzy wisps of carpeting laid along the back window. The twin steel bars that served as reinforcement for the Plexiglas window shield separating the good guys from the bad guys had caught the worst of it; one of them was drenched in a mess of red and black innards with a salsalike consistency. The guts extended out to the window shield, down to the floor, and up to the ceiling in a manner that spoke volumes about the level of violence that had taken place. It was as if a man had been caged up with a live chain saw too large for the enclosure.
"What happened in there?" I looked to Winston, wishing I had one of my assistants with me.
"Prisoner was drunk and didn't want to be arrested, so she beat her brains out on the metal support bar."
"She die?" I asked, amazed at her fortitude.
"What's it look like?" he retorted, and turned, leaving me to it.
It was far worse than any of the poop or vomit or HIV or hep C scenarios Orange PD had ever thrown at me. And because we were trying to shore up the all-important service contract with Corona PD, the job was being done for our "specialty police rate." I wanted to call Dirk out there just so he could see the sort of bullshit that he was sticking me with on a regular basis now, but he wouldn't bother to show.
I knew immediately that it would be in my best interest to suit up fully, because I was going to have to enter the car. With the wettest puddles of stewed guts splashed toward the middle of the ride and my back still not fully able to handle the contortions, I was going to have to climb into the thick of it and sit, my bunny suit absorbing the slimy patches behind me.
I geared up quickly and under the curious eyes of arriving cops who'd evidently never seen a crime scene cleaner before and were only just now learning about the vehicle's last occupant.
Most of the officers were less than thrilled to see an outsider in their clubhouse, and responded to my engaging smiles and polite "Howya doin's?" with an icy stare of mistrust. The ones who did talk were only there to engage in unfriendly mocking, telling me that I looked like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in my protective suit. They also mentioned my striking resemblance to that other obese, white-bodied entity of corporate gimmickry, the Michelin Man.
I smiled through it all as Dirk had implored me, bearing their insults from the back of the car, where I was surrounded by remains and the dense, sweltering desert air, heated immeasurably in the trapped confines of the backseat, scrubbing away. The more daring of the cops would wander up and leer down at me, reminiscent of the gangbangers from my first car job, guns at their hip, silently daring me to question them.
When the car was as clean as I could muster, I once more collected my things and got the hell out of there. Personality-wise, the cops didn't seem too much different from the thugs they arrested.
* * *
During what I later would come to realize was our heyday, it wasn't just crime scenes that were keeping me busy. The Public Guardian's office was proud of us for taking down the Sewer House with an efficiency that a government agency was probably unused to.
We'd actually had to rent a storage space to contain all the salvageable property we'd pulled from the mess—stuff like multiple drum sets, ornate lamps still in the box, and brand-new cooking gadgets. Along with salvaged jewelry and antique coins, it was a rather nice haul awaiting pickup by the county to do God knows what with. It was short by several thousand dollars and an electric guitar, but they didn't know that.
As a reward for our awesomeness, the county allowed us to bid on several more houses. Dirk sent me out with a camera to collect and document the homes in all their atrociousness for him to later compile into a bid. We were up against an unknown number of bidders for the work, if there was indeed anyone at all against us. For all I knew, the county had simply decided to say, "Fuck it. These are our guys."
I talked Chris into tagging along as he had done with me on the Sewer House; it had seemingly become a way of bonding for us to invade properties and assess the cost to remedy them. Dirk and I were granted a remarkable level of trust by the Public Guardian's office in that we were allowed to come by, pick up keys to properties vacated by death or insanity, and explore them at our leisure, unhampered by bureaucracy and county needling. As such, Chris and I would make days out of it, taking multiple sets of keys and hitting one property after another, exploring through the refuse like pirates, searching out money or loot that had been left behind by the owners.
In one house the mold was growing thick over the piles of kitty poop that had acclimated into small hills throughout the premises, and you had to be careful to not slip on the stacks of newspaper covering the floor, which would doubtlessly land you leg first in one of the ancient piles.
In another house that didn't seem too dirty at all, we emerged to find that our lower halves were thick with mites crawling up and down our naked legs. Removing our footwear, we spent the next few minutes slapping at and squashing the scrambling insects off our bodies.
At yet another house, we were attempting to open the garage door first when a rough-looking homeowner from nearby approached us cautiously. "Are you with the county?" he asked with all the suspicion of a self-important neighbor.
I nodded, figuring that it was close enough to the truth.
"I'm glad you're here," he admitted, his hard edge seeping away. "I hate looking at this house—it gives me the chills."
"Why's that?" Chris asked.
"Because the man who lived here was a child molester."
I had dealt with my fair share of those in the last year. "What makes you say that?" I probed.
"Weird sounds from the house…he was always taking kids there, but he lived alone…it was all weird. Everyone around here hated him. The police never would do anything. Finally they found him dead in his living room; apparently the place was kind of a wreck." The neighbor neglected to mention how the man had met his demise.
"We'll see," I said with a nod, looking intently at the alleged predator's den. I figured that the ex-owner was just an eccentric uncle or something who caught a bad rap from the overzealous locals. We waited until the neighbor ran out of things to say and retreated, promising that we'd consider his offer to join him for a beer later.
Although each was far beyond the level of "messy," none of the houses we'd seen had been anywhere near as bad as the Sewer House. The suspected child molester's house came close, with garbage scattered in abundance throughout the place and with emphasis on kitchen trash. But where the Sewer House had gone well over six feet of trash in several places, some around the ten-foot mark, this place had its highs in the one-foot range, which was still a goddamned pigsty.
The molester's house had its own unique charms, though, what with boxes of conventional pornography stacked around the place and lurid magazines draped over the wreckage. There was even a large box of porno tapes occupying the space where the toilet should have been, as the porcelain toilet was taking up residence in the living room.
Most telling about the man's personal hobbies, though, and easily the most chilling, was an old, boxy video camera set on a steel tripod and angled downward, waiting to record the action on the master bedroom's king-size mattress. Surrounding it were stacks and stacks of unmarked videotapes, partially or fully recorded through, their content unmistakably toxic. Upon further inspection of the house, all available cabinets were filled with similar videocassettes, similarly recorded. It was enough probing for us.
Desperate to not get burned again on the contracting, Dirk, armed with my documentation and recommendations, bid the jobs above and beyond what it would take to do the work, eagerly scheming out ways for us to milk the county on labor and sanitation costs.
Since our transgressions at the Sewer House, Dirk had become fairly no-bones about his desires to make money any way possible. Of course we bid the jobs too high, and of course we didn't get them. We should have realized
all county jobs had to include multiple bids. What Dirk took away from it, though, was that maybe, just maybe, the county guys did know what we had done on the Sewer House and they were denying us future work as a result. After that idea popped into his head, it was like talking with a conspiracy-theorist stoner. Paranoia abounded, and yet he was still after more money.
The county's goodwill toward independent property assessment came to an abrupt end shortly thereafter. In one of the only houses Dirk accompanied me to for the sake of bidding, a cozy little doublewide at a retirement community in San Juan Capistrano that we searched through (Chris was working at his job that day), $180,000 dollars was found in paper grocery bags under the sink.
Of course, Dirk and I didn't find the money; no, in typical "us" fashion, we overbid the assessment like crazy. The winner of the job, apparently a company of honest, good-hearted morons, found the cash and turned it over to the county. Some little old lady with no family members whatsoever was sitting on a gold mine of untraceable bills, and now it was all property of the government.