by Jeff Klima
Apparently I made a winning impression on the guy from the P.G.'s office. He was new to the game and possibly didn't know our reputation yet. I acted professional and pretended that I knew what the hell I was talking about when it came to odor neutralization. He seemed to respond positively enough, even telling me he'd call me the next time he had a gig. He would learn our shady history soon enough, I decided, but I gave him a business card to use until he did.
Dirk was starting to learn something about quality-control issues himself. On the Targus job we'd actually used a biohazard-removal company to pick up the bags of soiled material we'd taken from the house. Typically, the bags of blood and guts would end up at the dump, preceded by us removing the magnetic business decals from the side of Dirk's truck. The signs at all the disposal places definitely read "No Dumping of Biohazardous Material," but due to our white skin and innocent faces, no one had caught on.
There was too much waste on the Targus job for us to get away with disposing of it illicitly—and the stink of it all was far too obvious. So Dirk called a local company that we'd used a few times before, just to keep anyone from getting suspicious about what we did with biohazard. It was expensive, and it came out of our bottom line, but the fact that there had been a job was good enough for me.
Summer, if the previous year had been any indication, would be a bad season for us. It was hot, dry, and somehow devoid of death. One would think that with that whole "hot temperatures raise tempers" notion there would be a buttload of summer-related murders—or even just old folks keeling over in the dusty heat. But that wasn't the case.
I was going to make good money off that suicide, though, and like a squirrel storing nuts, I was planning to sit on that paycheck and make it last the whole summer, if necessary. I felt like I was beginning to understand the ebb and flow of the death business. Sure, we'd had our problems in the past, but that was all part of the learning curve.
In the wake of the mass suicide, I was feeling very up about the crime scene business and had begun to assimilate a deeper philosophical meaning to it. I'd come to think of those of us who cleaned up dead bodies as survivors of some bigger scheme. Like we were a cosmic force sent to deal with the horrors of death, and that in dealing with it, we would emerge stronger for it. I thought of us as a unit, banded together in the face of misery and despair. It was about then when I had an incredibly moronic epiphany: we should all get tattoos.
I promptly set about designing an emblem—something that would strike fear in the hearts of weaker organizations, something that would show our solidarity and our dedication to the cause. It had to be dangerously original and yet ominously familiar…something akin to a pirate flag or a shark fin.
I started toying with the idea of a giant biohazard symbol. With its jagged corners and rounded intersecting half circles, it certainly looked foreboding. It was subtle, yet it sent a message that we were not to be fucked with. It was perfect. And then I found out that homosexuals who were HIV-positive often got a biohazard tattoo. That was not the kind of message I was looking to send. While we did frequently work with AIDS blood…no…no…it was just a bad idea.
I revisited the idea of the pirate flag and, with enough cobbling and the help of the oh-so-basic Microsoft Paint program, created our logo. Based on the Jolly Roger's skull and crossbones, instead of generic crossed bones it had crossed mops! But those crossed mops weren't merely decoration behind the figurehead of our skull; instead they were slammed through the skull, penetrating it from all angles like violent spears. And there was blood. A whole fucking mess of blood, splattered over the skull, emanating from the four points of impact and out onto the surrounding area of the wearer's skin. It was dark yet colorful, dangerous and yet funny, clever but not nerdy.
Below each tattoo we would get the date of our first cleanup inscribed. For Dirk and me, that would be March 14, 2007, the day that old lady put the shotgun in her mouth, sounding the death blast that gave our company life. For Misty it would be a slightly less impressive start: Happy, the dog that had been gunned down by police officers. For Kim it was the gay guy who jammed a knife in his heart in the Miami Beach–style hotel. Russ would have the mass suicide— not a bad one to pop his cherry on. Hell, even Doug, whom I hadn't spoken to since that debacle with the will, could be in on it. He would list the date when he'd arrived to help clean up that creepy doll lady's house, a solid decomp, if there ever was such a thing. We would all be united for life, a team fighting together against the corrosive elements of death. All we needed was a name.
When I presented the tattoo concept to Dirk, he was genuinely honored that I wanted to get a lifelong brand that would celebrate our work. While he adopted a "wait and see" aspect regarding tattooing himself, he gallantly stated that the company would pay for any one of us who wanted to get the tattoo ourselves.
I got mine done before he had the chance to change his mind, using my company-issued credit card to pay for it.
"The Dead Janitors Club?" the tattoo artist asked, reading the name arcing just above the skull. "What's that?"
I proudly told him about the unity and friendship borne out of being a "dead janitor," and the risk and reward of being a human vulture. I think it impressed him.
When he was finished, on my left arm just below the shoulder was a large and beautifully wicked-fresh tattoo, just as I'd envisioned it. "There'll be other people in here to get this same tattoo," I promised the artist. Kim had already committed to getting one, and I knew that once they saw it on my arm, the others would be swayed as well.
I guess I should have known better.
* * *
Summer hit Los Angeles with a vengeance. The Red Rocket had been going on four years without any sort of AC or fan inside her, and it was close to unbearable. Whenever I had the kind of spare money I could have allocated to fixing her air conditioner, it was during much cooler months, when I'd forget how oppressive the heat was.
Since doing the Targus house, I had the money to fix the AC. But there was a new problem: I didn't actually have the money. The brother of the dead man, pissing and complaining after the fact about the amount we charged him, had not yet paid the bill. And if the company didn't get paid, there was no money to pay me. And so I was more or less in the exact same situation that I'd been in the previous summer.
Although everyone said they liked my tattoo, all of a sudden nobody else actually wanted to stain their body with one. And since the company was momentarily bankrupt, Dirk's offer to foot the bill was null and void. Not that that mattered—even Kim, who had been so gung-ho, suddenly got silent about the notion of actually putting needle to flesh. I was in a very lonely club of one, and with money owed but no money forthcoming, I wasn't so warm to the idea of being in the Dead Janitors Club myself.
The summer months passed and the bills piled up, and still there was no money. Russ was involved in a game of phone tag with the Targus brother and his wife, Dirk being reluctant to turn the matter over to Schmitty, who'd then demand a fourth of what would be a lucrative pot.
The money I owed to the frat, to the hospital (which had since declined my back injury forbearance claim), and to all the student loan institutions that I'd hoped to pay off with the "six-figure yearly income" I'd read about in that newspaper article so long ago all came overdue at the same time. With no prospects other than blind hope, I told them all that they would just have to be patient. There was to be no blood from this stone.
A long, hot two months passed by with nothing in sight. The brother still hadn't paid up, though Dirk assured me he would soon. But his promises to me mirrored mine to my creditors, and I knew that none of them could be trusted. I had just enough money left for a third of a tank of gas; after that I'd be just about dead in the water. My one ace in the hole was the company credit card. My own credit cards had been suspended for delinquency, but I knew if worse came to worse, I could charge gas or food to the company card, and Dirk could later deduct it from my paycheck, whenever that came.
And then a miracle happened, like spotting a seagull after being lost at sea. Orange PD called us. It was only to clean up a car, but still that was an extra $37.50 in my time of need. Where once I'd sneered at the prospect of driving all the way down to Orange PD in the dead of summer for a pitiful $37.50, now it seemed like luxurious work on a shaded oasis. And it's cyclical, I convinced myself, believing that I could see a pattern based on all the jobs of the past. Where there was one job, even a tiny one like puke in a cop car, others would come. We would be saved after all.
I drove out there, stopping by a Home Depot to pick up some supplies that we were out of, and handed the clerk my company credit card to pay for them. She handed it back just as quickly; my ace in the hole was declined. Just as my personal credit cards were delinquent, so too was our work account. I used the rest of the money in my savings to pay for the supplies so as not to look like the pathetic loser I was.
After I finished the police car, I stopped by Dirk's house to deliver the invoice and my Home Depot receipt so that I could be paid back when the company caught up financially. I wasn't going to press him, since I was sure he was under as much financial strain as I was. Sure, he and his wife both had other jobs—full-time, stable, secure jobs, but nonetheless, they certainly had more expenses than I did, what with the kid, the big house, a pool, and multiple cars. All that cost money.
Hell, I decided, Dirk is probably as bad off as I am. He'd told me often enough that he was flat broke, and the credit card being declined, like a busted poker hand on the table, proved it. Still, I always believed his repeated vows to get me some money one day. And then he unthinkingly opened the garage to get me some additional supplies.
You see, Dirk had stuff in his garage that I couldn't pick up at Home Depot, like our biohazard suits and our special disinfectant enzyme. So when he opened the door to get them for me, there in the midst of the garage, gleaming and proud, polished to a T, and unavoidable as an STD in a Vietnam-era whorehouse, stood Dirk's brand-new cruiser motorcycle.
"My wife got that for me…for Father's Day," he said quickly, noticing the look on my face. "I didn't even want a motorcycle," he babbled on, but the damage had been done. I just nodded silently and ignored whatever else he had to say. My famine was his feast.
* * *
Weeks passed after the cleaning of that police car, and my belief that more jobs were coming diminished with each passing day. We were a busted company that had ruined our relationships with other companies that could have offered us salvation.
Kerry, now long past the "I told you so" phase in our relationship, simply wanted me to find new employment, any employment. Shit, I wanted to find new employment. Dirk, apparently not having anyone else to confide in, called me every so often to reveal his exciting exploits in his motorcycle-training classes and, as a side note, to empathize with me and my tough times. You never realize how much you can hate a person until you are poor and they are boasting about all the fucking fun they are having not being poor.
But "when it rains, it pours" was part of the pattern I'd seen in crime scene jobs of previous months. So it was no surprise when one day out of the blue we got a call to clean up a suicide at a Motel 6, and two other calls came in concurrently. One was for a stabbing outside an apartment complex phoned in by our buddies at Orange Police Department.
The other was for a suicide at a mansion in the upper reaches of Beverly Hills. Excited that we'd cracked the "90210" zip code but not at all sure how we'd done it, Dirk and I both knew we weren't about to miss that one. We called in Russ to handle the Orange call while we raced from the motel up to the good side of Los Angeles.
We'd handled numerous calls in Los Angeles County before, but never one for the richy-rich, and at a Beverly Hills mansion, no less. Heath Ledger had died in January of that year, so we ruled his body out as the scene we were going to service, but the whole way up, Dirk and I listed every other celebrity as a distinct possibility. It made my dick hard to think of driving past the throngs of onlookers and news reporters as we made our way through the police barricade and inside the mansion's likely massive steel gates en route to the house.
My guess was that it was Ian McKellen, star of X-Men and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Something in his eyes made me think "suicidal" whenever I saw him on-screen. Dirk was of the opinion that it was a Steve Guttenberg type, some once-prominent actor who had long since slid into obscurity and taken the cheap way out. I thought his guess was too broad and kind of a cop-out, but then again, I didn't have a motorcycle. It had to be someone of note, though, to live so grandly way up in the heart of the hills of Beverly.
The day had already been a long one, but the thought of achieving my crime-scene-goal trifecta (mass murder, scene involving a child, and a celebrity) had me amped up enough for the work ahead.
"What if it's Oprah Winfrey?" I said excitedly.
After circling round the curved roads leading past immense steel gates and leering security cameras, we reached the address the man had given us over the phone. Twin gates taller than the cab of the truck stood impassive before us, thwarting lookie-loos and casual passersby. Two older men calmly opened the gates for us. Certainly these were the handlers for our celebrity, his PR flacks or whatever.
Outside the gate, there were no mourners, no news corps, no camera-toting mobs angling for a view, but this only got me more hyped. Clearly we had been brought in ahead of all that. We'd scooped the world! My mind reeled with possibilities: Quentin Tarantino, of a drug overdose? David Bowie, of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after a drug overdose? Rosie O'Donnell falling into a wood chipper…a big wood chipper? Sylvester Stallone, of old age? All of it seemed gloriously possible in the suddenly magical heat of summer.
The house, up a short driveway, though sizable and impressive with its gorgeous view down into the city below, wasn't exactly enormous.
Definitely not Oprah Winfrey, I thought, a little discouraged.
"Thank you for coming on short notice," said one of the men, a bespectacled fellow in his early sixties, nodding appreciatively.
"No problem…under ninety minutes, that's our motto," Dirk fairly stammered, and I could tell he was nervous as well. The closest he'd ever gotten to a celebrity was confiscating some of the guns belonging to Jesse James, the car-repair guru. I'd once seen a guy who looked a lot like Eric Roberts eating pancakes at a restaurant in Eureka, but that was about as close as I'd ever come. Maybe it was Eric Roberts! I thought.
The bespectacled man led us into the house while the younger man stayed outside, doubtlessly to ward off all the soon-to-be-arriving, grieving fans.
The décor of the house was nicer than that of any house I'd ever been inside before, but had an old-person vibe to it. I started thinking back to Ian McKellen. There were pictures on the walls from various decades, but we passed by them too quickly to recognize any faces.
The man led us up a stairwell inside the master bedroom (ooh-lala) to the second-floor office of the homeowner. A massive wooden desk with ornate, antique metal objects at each corner stood beneath a large painted mural of the MGM logo. I tried to remember if Steven Spielberg had ever done any work over at MGM.
In front of the desk, spilling out of the chair and onto the carpet, was a big pulpy bloodstain, very similar to the one created by the minister with the DUI and the spill at Dodger Stadium. I'd seen variations on it in my time with the crime scene business, but never one with such a massive, gelatinous chunk collected in the center of the blood. I now knew enough to be certain that it wasn't brain.
Dirk nodded, looking around the house. "This is a nice mansion," he said, fishing for information about the owner.
"Can you do the work?" the older man said curtly, unwilling to provide us with juicy details. My mind soared toward murder and a cover-up, but the bespectacled man dashed my sweet imaginings. "My father-in-law was sick and shot himself. My wife is downstairs with her mom."
When it came time to quote a price, Dirk
nearly fucked it up for us by severely overestimating what we could charge someone in a fancy house high up in the fancy hills, and then having to drop the price several thousand dollars to keep us in the game. It was a stupid mistake, but one I probably would have made myself. After all, clearly the star was dead; these were just the in-laws, clamoring for as much of the estate as they could get.
After we embarrassed ourselves and agreed on a much lower price, the man signed off and left us to our work. I'd been hoping that when he signed off on the contract, his name would offer a clue, but as a son-in-law, of course it wouldn't.
"I recognize that picture…" Dirk said pointing to a hanging black-and-white portrait photo of an old, bearded man. "The guy we're cleaning up used to be the head of MGM."
I knew what Samuel Goldwyn looked like and knew that he'd died many years ago, as had Louie B. Mayer, who also looked nothing like the man in the photograph. So if Dirk was to be believed, then surely we were cleaning up the elusive and seldom photographed "Metro" of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer fame. It had to be him; the mural was painted on the house like a tattoo.
We had to watch our comments and our speculation, because the son-in-law was a creeper, silently ascending the stairs at odd moments to watch our work and trying to catch us stealing something. I would like to have had a souvenir from the place, but I figured the son-in-law would make us empty our pockets on the way out.