by Jeff Klima
"You," he said, pointing with an angry and crooked finger, doubtlessly riddled with arthritis. "You," he said again, pointing at the truck and at all of us inside as if it were all one big package. I climbed down from the truck, fuming, to confront the old-timer. Dirk followed my lead. Doug stayed put in the cab, seated "bitch."
"Sir, we thought that you just had to be in the facility before seven, not completely out of here," I tried to reason.
"No excuse," barked the man. "They told you to leave, and you lied to them."
I felt the blood rise on the sides of my neck, and I was reminded of the Sewer House and the miserable couple we'd contracted to help clean it.
"How could they tell us?" I snapped. "They don't speak any English!"
I imagined that Doug, inside the cab, was proud.
"You should have known. Now you're trespassing!" the old man said, returning my glare.
I stepped forward once more with the intention of pummeling the old bastard to the ground.
"What are you going to do?" He smirked the confident sneer of a man who has never been thrown a good beatdown. "Hit me? I'll call the police!"
I started to tell the old man that Dirk was a police officer, but Dirk shushed me, not wanting to bring that into the situation.
"Sir, we're sorry. It was all a misunderstanding…" Dirk attempted. "We're all done now. We're just going to leave."
"No," the old man said viciously. "You're not leaving now."
"You can't keep us here," I challenged, balling my fists up.
"What do you mean we're not leaving?" Dirk said evenly, still playing the diplomat.
"You've wasted an hour of my night…I'm wasting some of yours. I'm not opening the gates for at least an hour, maybe more. You're stuck here."
"You can't keep us here," Dirk uttered, his diplomacy shattered.
"Call the police," the old man taunted.
"Jeff, get in the truck," Dirk said hotly. "We're running the gates."
This was one of the coolest moments of my life. A childlike sense of wonder and joy blazed through me as I climbed back up into the cab of the truck, eager to cause mayhem, exhaustion forgotten.
"We're ramming the gates," I told Doug.
Dirk fired up the big truck's engine with a mighty roar, reversing hard away from the old coot, the wide-eyed Mexican couple, and all the stresses of the day. Backing down an alleyway, Dirk pointed the truck in the direction of the back gate, a broad one-piece affair that I imagined would shatter open with a nightmarishly sweet clang. That gate would know the full power of the Crime Scene Cleaners.
I was positively frothing with the possibility, and Doug seemed pretty amped as well. Far behind us, the old man and the caretakers watched our every move.
As we sidled back to blast through the hinged-metal span lying before us, we collectively noticed a small metal arm that stood to the side of the back entrance on our side, with the exit button for the gate. In a moment more anticlimactic than the one you are about to read, Dirk pushed the button.
The gate slid open sideways, creaking slowly as if it were an extension of the old man himself. My belief in life imitating action-movie dramatics was the only thing shattered that day.
"Good thing," Dirk reminded me, calmer. "We didn't buy insurance on the truck."
* * *
In a move that I have since come to regard as telltale Dirk, he called Howard the next morning to tell him that we were finished. Or maybe Howard called him. Either way, the next call was Dirk to me, bitching and complaining that Howard was upset that we'd left the carpet insulation. Of course, Dirk was unable to return to the scene (probably for another "trip to Disneyland"), so I had to go and do all the work myself. I dragged Chris along and paid him fifty bucks to help.
And what happened to those twin bags of Polaroids, you ask? Well, they went to the dump along with all the other smut. Dirk and I'd had a brief discussion that involved whether or not we should include all the sex stuff with Jasper's other possessions to let his mom know what a weirdo her son was. Ultimately we decided not to…it was the decent thing to do, I guess.
Still, I wished I had kept a few of those photos. Living in a fraternity house, there were all sorts of pranks one could pull with a lunch sack full of gay pictures. Fortunately for the benefit of pranksters worldwide, Jasper wasn't the only pervert who would die on my watch.
CHAPTER 18
we done wrong
Because I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that's why.
—Lenny to George, Of Mice and Men
The end for the Crime Scene Cleaners began with a van crash.
It was an unspectacular van crash, but I should have recognized it as an indicator of the future. The van in question belonged to the Public Guardian's office, and our latest confidante from their office, Billy, was piloting it. Billy was a goofy, fumbling, lisping man, the kind of guy that other guys would have written off as gay. His blondish mop of hair was pushed heavily to one side, as if it were the mother of all comb-overs, and he had a jauntiness that belied his actual age, which I would approximate as early fifties. And he had a really overly manicured blond mustache.
Upon arriving that morning, Billy had turned into the driveway of the target house a little too suddenly and jarred the side panel of his van into our large, rented, metal dumpster. A violent, banshee-esque shrieking ripped through the still air of the neighborhood, which was adjacent to Koreatown, causing any and all early morning passersby to stop and look.
Befuddled, Billy then backed the van up with the ragged corner of the dumpster still embedded in its side. Doug, his buddy Kool, Dirk, and I watched in shocked amazement, wincing as the reverse caused a sharper screech.
Finally Billy, lost for ideas, mashed down on the accelerator, producing a final deafening squeal that brought the last of the neighbors from their homes. The van bounced up onto the grass lawn of the home and came to a jarring stop, a nasty gash of sharply contorted metal punched in and raked along the side of the county vehicle.
Kim arrived in the aftermath, along with one of my frat brothers, Bobby G., whom I had recruited for the assignment. All of us stood in shocked amazement. Billy bounced from the driver's seat of the van, took a look at the damage, then took a look at Kim, and shrugged it off. "Not my van" was how he essentially phrased it in his lisping, goofy cadence.
The house in question had belonged to another hoarder. It wasn't one that Chris and I had surveyed together; rather, it was one that Dirk and I had looked at, watched over by the stern eye of the head of the Public Guardian's office. The house was a "get" for them, and they were taking it seriously.
It wasn't much to look at as far as dwellings go—a shoddy one-story deal in a shitty neighborhood filled with two-story homes. Behind it, the deceased's home also had five independent structures—two one-room guesthouses, two large sheds, and a large, enclosed sunroom that spanned the back of the house. This all combined to make the one regular threebedroom, two-bathroom home into one hell of a large task.
Since we had not won the cleaning contracts on any of the lesser properties that I had spent days documenting, Dirk and I came to the conclusion that we were the Public Guardian's go-to guys for really nasty jobs. When normal companies didn't cut it, you had to call in the superstars. And this property required superstars.
Gordon Chow had been the janitor of an elementary school that was roughly nine yards away (the Jeff Klima measurement of front lawns, not the football unit). With a name like Chow and living on the outskirts of Koreatown, he'd be Korean, you'd probably guess, sight unseen. But you, like me, would have been dead wrong.
Ol' Gordon was a heavyset white guy in his eighties who'd been found dead in his bed of natural causes. Gordon was being taken care of by a woman from across the street, so even though he died alone, he didn't have a chance to rot. But just because Gordon wasn't musty, decomposing, and filthy when he was discovered, that didn't mean his house wasn't.
Whereas the majority of hoarder houses I had come across were more in line with general disarray, largely just a collective of heaped trash, Gordon's house reflected that he was a bona fide collector. Where the Sewer House had a mountain of empty beer cans, Doritos bags, receipts, leaves, and other refuse to climb over, Gordon had records. Pressed vinyl recordings of every band you've never heard of, slipped from their crates and forged by time into a large mountain of musical waste. It was like someone had prepped an anti-disco bonfire, and all that was needed was a lit match.
The smell made for a bad work environment. The house, with its ill-working plumbing, had long since spewed water into the walls and floorboards, covering the surface areas with a grainy black mold. Black mold is the really bad kind, the kind that does major damage to your health under prolonged exposure. Worse still, it had begun to creep from the fixed surfaces out onto the trash layers, giving everything a soggy, filmy texture. As a result, all the records were ruined.
In oblivious homage to Raiders of the Lost Ark, the house was filled with dangers and booby traps, orchestrated accidentally by Gordon's insanity. The spiders were everywhere, and shelving, weighted under impossible loads of cheap, bubbly carnival glass gave way with the slightest change in atmosphere. Towers of inferior still-in-the box stereos stretched to the ceiling, their exteriors being devoured by the mold. In hindsight, it would have been smarter to drop that lighted match after all.
Donning paper painter's masks, my crew foraged their way into the mess, determined to blaze a path back out or collapse trying. They were an expendable bunch. I was mostly there for supervisory purposes, because I was unwilling to once again risk my back by hauling out box load after box load of the structure's many curios. As such, I had the task of once more setting up my chair on the front lawn and acting as neighborhood liaison.
The usual chattering oddballs made their way across to watch and offer commentary, but with their being mostly people whose first language was something Asian, I could typically only nod and smile agreeably. One neighbor, an obese white man on his electronic Rascal scooter, zoomed over early to welcome me to the neighborhood. His was the house with the twenty-five-foot antenna looming over the backyard, and he told me conversationally that his neighbors didn't like it, but fuck them.
As self-proclaimed mayor of the neighborhood, the guy, whom we'll call "Rascal Fats," was quite opinionated about everything we were doing. Rascal's daughter had been Gordon's caretaker, he informed me, the orange pennant flag raised above his backseat flapping in the wind.
"She's supposed to get the house," Rascal continued, jabbing a sausagelike finger in my direction. "If you guys find a will in there… disregard it. Gordon promised that my daughter could have his house. That will is old…It promises everything to a sister out in Florida who never even visits him. My daughter deserves everything."
"That's for the courts to decide," I said, raising ten defensive sausagelike fingers of my own.
"I should get to pick through the trash there and see what I want to take…My daughter took care of that man, so it's practically her stuff. She's the only other person who had a key to his place…She's the only one Gordon trusted…"
Rascal started his stupid scooter toward the pile of salvageable merchandise on the front lawn, and I jumped quickly in front to block him, casting out my palm as something akin to that guy standing up to the tank in Tiananmen Square. Rascal didn't like that, but he stopped short all the same.
"Why should you guys get to steal all his stuff? We're his neighbors."
"We're not stealing anything," I said angrily, though my anger might have been directed at myself. I had had my eye on a surroundsound speaker system that would complement my room at the frat house nicely. "Anything of quality goes to the Public Guardian's office, and they auction it off. The money then goes back into the estate…so if your daughter is the one who gets the house, she'll get the money, too."
I didn't believe that necessarily, but Rascal's piglike eye sockets narrowed greedily. "Have you guys found the will yet?" he asked, suddenly friendly.
"Nope," I shook my head. "But if it's in there, we will."
Having complete freedom on the first day under the unwatchful eye of Billy was a liberty we took for granted. It was his duty to search the house for that aforementioned will as well as any other valuables. The bag of money from the mobile home had caused quite a stir in the county office.
Instead of working, though, Billy decided to flirt with Kim, grinning that loutish grin of his and making what he thought were cleverly seductive comments. Kim, ignorant, babbled on about her impending engagement and how she'd recently cleaned up a decomposing body.
Meanwhile, Dirk and the gang were inside the house scouring for cash. Dirk had made the unbelievably stupid mistake of clueing in our coworkers that if they found any cash, they were to keep it secret from Billy, and the lot of us would split it. I could see why he would tell them that. He was paranoid that they'd pocket it themselves or do the honest thing and report it to Billy, and Dirk would lose out completely. He was hedging his bets, believing that many eyes searching would yield that humongous payoff that would tide us all over nicely.
I was furious at Dirk for doing that, not because I was suddenly above stealing, but because it was a stupid way to do it. The sort of people who willingly came in and cleaned out houses infested with mold, spiders, and the potential for raw sewage were not the brightest people on the planet. It especially didn't help that it was a crew full of chatterboxes.
All I needed was an ignorant dumbass like Doug to go foolishly spouting to Rascal that we were secretly splitting up any money we found. It was like that old saying about how three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead. With a team of idiots tearing through the house in pursuit of ill-gotten gains and a snoopy neighbor poking around, I should have known that the job was one giant disaster waiting to happen.
* * *
The second day on the job saw my crew returning to the house without Dirk. They had failed to find their financial windfall the previous day, and Dirk, tenured position with the sheriff's department or not, couldn't keep missing work. Everybody else on our side happily returned, though, their feelers buzzing like metal detectors circling pay dirt. They hadn't been in on the last score, and they honestly believed that all the bags full of dirty twenties, fifties, and one hundreds had gone to the county. They had seen that money, though, and its possibility was potential enough.
Billy also hadn't shown up for work that day, even though he had the keys to the house. Wanting to make the most of the workday, I instructed the crews to start working the sheds at the back of the house.
Judging by the content of the sheds, Gordon had two true loves in life—colored yarn and ceramic tile. I didn't know what sort of zany business scheme he had ventured into that could possibly have combined the two, but it was fucking ridiculous.
The first shed, poorly constructed and rotting from the inside out, was full of several tons worth of tile. Literally several fucking tons of tile were in that shed. Boxes upon boxes had long since collapsed the shelving inside, and rain had decimated the cardboard, leaving a horrendous collection of odds and ends. The crew spent the first hour and a half just moving shredded, pulpy boxes of the square, ceramic counter tile, nearly filling the day's allotment of dumpster without even venturing into the house.
Billy still hadn't shown, and I knew something would have to change. I contacted Dirk at the police station, my voice a familiar one to all the operators there. He then did the dual tasks of contacting the Public Guardian's office and posting an ad on craigslist offering "free tile" to anyone willing to come and collect it.
The Public Guardian's office said that they would have someone right on it, but nothing seemed to come of that. But as for the craigslist ad? We were swarmed. People will climb over smaller people at the opportunity to receive something free. I would just be happy to see it all gone. Truckloads of people showed up, each clamoring to
get their hands on as much tile as they could.
Of course this is America, so I was also swarmed with bitching, complaining assholes whining that it was too much work to receive free tile and that they didn't want to have to carry it all to their cars. But they all took what they could and drove off, the truck beds scraping the grounds under all the tonnage of tile, the wheel houses collapsing on straining tires, moving out much slower than they'd come in.
And yet there was still more tile, a lot more. Most of the people claimed they would be back once they'd unloaded their cars and trucks, but I knew they wouldn't. No sane person needed that much tile.
Equally as depressing, though easier to deal with, was the yarn. It rivaled the tile in quantity, leading me to wonder, "What weighs more, a ton of bricks or a ton of feathers?" What Gordon wanted with that much yarn, I could only speculate…but I didn't think the moon needed a sweater. No, Gordon doubtlessly had something much grander and far crazier in mind.