by Gil Reavill
It was a situation you would never think about unless and until it happened to you. Who cleaned up after tragedy? After the millions of words spilled into print about the O. J. Simpson murders, no one ever bothered to write about who hosed down Nicole Brown Simpson’s breezeway (it was a team from the L.A. sheriff ’s office). Or, for that matter, who cleaned up Sharon Tate’s Benedict Canyon house? Or Ed Gein’s horror homestead?
“The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.” So Genesis quotes God, after the world’s first murder. Who cleaned up after Cain?
The Merrillville City Council was still debating whether to tear the building down. Neighbors from apartment buildings across the street dragged lawn chairs out to the curb and sat with beer coolers beside them to watch the cleanup. At times these onlookers broke into a spontaneous cheer when a particularly bloody bundle was carted out to the biohazard containers by the Aftermath crew.
That was okay. It was just another step of the long, strange trip that Tim Reifsteck and Chris Wilson had embarked upon when they formed their company. Aftermath was fast becoming the leader in the new field of “bioremediation,” which involved taking care of the possibly contagious messes left behind when human beings shuffled off this mortal coil, in circumstances violent or otherwise.
Reifsteck and Wilson had learned the hard way to do their job well. No buildings needed to be torn down because a crime scene was too gory to clean. Three weeks after they finished with the apartment where Nick Mazilli had gunned down Tommy Johnson and mutilated his body, the place was rented to a state office worker and his wife, commuters who worked in Chicago. Because of the apartment’s gory history, they got a break on the rent.
Except in photographs, I never saw Johnson’s apartment. But when I began working for Tim Reifsteck and Chris Wilson at Aftermath, I encountered many scenes just as bloody, and a few that were bloodier.
CHAPTER TWO
Wisconsin Death Drive
The Mercedes G55 AMG “morgue mobile”
He do the police in different voices.
—Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend
Lady, the whole world is full of trouble.
—Steve McQueen, Hell Is for Heroes
Until I met up with the gents from Aftermath, I was a crime writer who had never actually been to a fresh crime scene. I wrote primarily for magazines, and for one magazine in particular, an oft-reviled but absurdly popular “lad” magazine called Maxim.
Here’s how one of my true crime stories for Maxim kicked off:
By the time Roberto “Kiko” Rodriguez drove past his partner Johnny Boy’s house, the yellow crime scene ribbon already fluttered around the yard. A police photographer’s flash went off as he passed and Kiko saw Johnny Boy sprawled dead on the front lawn, a dark scarlet stain all over his head and back.
That kind of stuff.
All my stories for Maxim had the same theme: Young men(i.e., Maxim readers) behaving badly. Dealing dope, committing felonies, creating mayhem. Most prominently, dying. Publisher Felix Dennis labeled the kind of Maxim story I did “gritty reads.” There was always one (and only one) per issue. They were, in fact, the only straight-faced articles in the magazine.
The main thing to realize here is that I never actually saw Johnny Boy lying in his yard with the back of his head blown off. Bertrand Russell talks about the crucial difference between knowledge by description and knowledge by acquaintance. I got all mine by description. I spoke to homicide detectives in a suburb of Detroit who described the bloody tableau to me, and I read accounts in the Free Press and Detroit News. I also interviewed Kiko Rodriguez in an Alabama jail, and he told me about what he’d seen too. The fluttering of the crime scene ribbon and the darkness of the bloodstain I got not from the detectives but from Kiko, Cuban coke distributors usually being more poetic than cops.
If I thought about it at all, I didn’t think my crime scene virginity really mattered. Kafka never visited America to write Amerika. The Beach Boys didn’t surf. Jean Racine wrote about the sea all his life without ever actually setting his eyes on it. Imagination. That was the stuff writing was made of. I could sit in courtroom libraries sifting through trial transcripts, and as long as what I came up with was vivid and packed with bite-in-the-ass details, the secondhand nature of my experience mattered not a whit. Forget knowledge by acquaintance.
Then I encountered Tim Reifsteck and Chris Wilson and, in an unguarded moment, asked them if they would permit me to job-shadow their crews. As soon as they said they would, I began to have second thoughts.
“What if I puke my guts out?” I asked my wife.
A squeamish crime writer. It sounded like a joke, but there it was. Among my family I was known for embarrassing episodes of queasiness, including an occasion when I upchucked on a county fair kiddie ride (revolving teacups) on which I was accompanying my then-toddler daughter.
In the 1980s a twelve-year-old girl, Pendharkar Chandana of Andhra Pradesh, India, retched and vomited for twenty-eight straight days, eventually bringing up pieces of her own stomach. She was later found to have a tumor pressing against the floor of her brain’s fourth ventricle, the binding site where vomiting is triggered.
“There are pills for nausea,” my wife said, the soul of reason.
I nodded. “Cannabis,” I said. She rolled her eyes.
“Rolling your eyes after your partner makes a statement is a marker for divorce,” I said. She rolled her eyes again.
My wife is my moral compass. In fact, I sometimes think of her that uppercase way, as the Moral Compass. Since I haven’t got much of one myself, she is handy to have around.
Of course, she wasn’t the one headed, not to put too dramatic a point on it, into the jaws of death. The Moral Compass was a writer also. But she didn’t write about crime. She found the whole subject matter of Aftermath pretty unsavory. But she was perfectly happy to see me go out and scrape brain matter off walls in service of our mortgage.
“It’s a great idea, and I think you’d have a good time doing it,” the Moral Compass said.
A good time? She didn’t mean it that way. She meant that any crime writer worth his or her salt should, by decree of the crime writers’ guild, jump at the chance to experience crime scenes firsthand. I had no choice. I either had to move forward or forfeit membership in the guild.
We were about to meet Tim Reifsteck and Chris Wilson for the first time that afternoon at our home in suburban Westchester. My wife informed me that she felt a shade uneasy about shaking hands with the owners of Aftermath.
“All I can think about is where those hands must have been,” she said.
I spoke to Chris and Tim on the phone at their hotel in New York. I told them they could catch a train at Grand Central, and that I would pick them up at the station in our home village. We’d have lunch, talk a little, try to see if we could work together.
Something was wrong. I kept giving them Metro-North timetables, suggesting trains, trying to arrange for a schedule.
“We’ll take a car up,” Tim said.
“Well, the train is very simple,” I said, trying to be helpful. “There’s one that leaves Grand Central at one twenty-three, gets up here at two.”
“That’s okay,” Tim said.
When they showed, I instantly realized that I hadn’t quite understood what they were about. They were two Chicago guys on a trip to New York City, and they didn’t want to ride a fucking commuter train. Their stretch limo was white and longer than my driveway. They made the driver wait while we talked.
Three months after I spoke to Chris and Tim that first time, I flew to Chicago’s Midway Airport, rented a car, and drove west toward the suburb of Naperville. Naperville was next door to Plainfield, home of the corporate headquarters of Aftermath, Inc. I got lost on the way there and found myself on Ogden Avenue.
For crime enthusiasts (a weird, faintly moronic phrase, I realize, like “death enthusiast”), Chicago was hallowed ground. Ogden Avenue I knew as Al Capone’s M
ain Stem, along which money, guns, alcohol, gamblers, and sexually enslaved women flowed back and forth from Cicero to Chicago. Ogden Avenue! It was like a Civil War aficionado suddenly stumbling across the Bloody Lane at Antietam.
I finally got my bearings and found my hotel, the Naperville franchise of the Extended Stay America chain. A boom in what the industry termed “long-stay lodging” had occurred in the last decade, with the number of rooms doubling. Average stay was forty-two days, so the hotels started offering home-away-from-home fringe services, like Easter egg hunts, cooking classes, and Crock-Pots in every room.
The Naperville Extended Stay was just one example of the trend. The desk clerks were trained to give the guests a big smile and a thumbs-up whenever they passed. It was supposed to make you feel more at home. When I checked in, the clerk asked me when my birthday was.
“Why?” I asked.
“We give a cake,” he said. He was kidding. I think.
The place should have been called Deracination Central. I could have been anywhere in America. The four-story hotel was located just off Illinois Route 59, behind yet another chain hotel, Red Roof Inn, and in front of a Steak ’n Shake fast-food outlet. I found my room, unpacked, and called Chris Wilson.
“I’m here,” I said.
“We’ve got a three-week decomp up in a suburb of Milwaukee,” Chris said. “Two of our technicians are going up there early tomorrow morning.”
“A decomp?”
“A decomposed body,” Chris said. “An unattended death. Eighty-four-year-old guy, heart attack, was lying there for three weeks before anyone found him.”
I knew the Midwest had been in the grip of a horrible midsummer heat wave. A dead body three weeks in a closed house in August. Snakes on a plane.
“Fuck me,” I muttered. “That’s right, Chris, give the newbie writer from New York the worst, grossest, most filth-filled first job imaginable. Is this some sort of initiation rite?”
“I thought you came out here to go on jobs,” Chris said.
“Homicides, massacres, four on the floor on Wonderland Avenue, six dead in the Nite Owl Coffee Shop, that sort of thing.”
“Do you want to go or not?”
I spent an evil night. The hallway of the Extended Stay smelled nauseatingly of curry, and the stink seeped into the rooms. I tried to calm myself down.
Nothing human is foreign to me, I told myself, quoting the Latin playwright Terence. My erstwhile motto. Lots of people dealt with death and dying every day, and they managed to come through okay. Cops. The medical professions. EMTs. Morticians. It was actually not that rare a thing. Add them all up, and it was probably, what? Maybe a fifth of the population?*
In a fitful sleep that night, I was tormented by eidetic images of the leering, scabbed-over face of Regan Teresa MacNeil, Linda Blair’s character in The Exorcist. “Your mother sucks cocks in hell,” she hissed.
The next morning I dressed in what I thought might be appropriate trauma-scene clothing: a loose-fitting work shirt, jeans, and old sneakers. I drove thirty minutes through early-morning traffic to the small industrial park where Aftermath, Inc., was headquartered.
Chicago. The City of the Big Shoulders turned a little flabby in its western suburban reaches. Here was the commonplace modern landscape: housing subdivisions, one after another, with more on the way. Every fifth vehicle on Route 59 was a cement mixer, heading out to pave over paradise. Naperville boomed. The city consistently topped lists of the best places to live in the country.
That morning it appeared hellish to me. Route 59 was a clogged commercial-strip artery, a ten-mile traffic jam. Discount superstores like Target, Wal-Mart, and Best Buy enthroned themselves along the road behind their vast, chessboard parking lots, with a row of chain restaurants ranked like pawns in front of them. Who ordained this specific arrangement? Was there some planning entity we could blame? Gaps amid the rampant housing developments still revealed the occasional cornfield, flat Great Plains farmland, already studded with placards announcing the zoning hearings that would allow it to be placed under the bulldozer instead of the plow.
Tucked away down the small, horseshoe-shaped Arrowhead Industrial Park (“Amenity Movers,” “Ken’s Beverage,” “Razzmatazz Lazy Daisy”), I found the two-story brick-and-sheet-metal warehouse and office suite that housed Aftermath, Inc.
Living in New York, one of the few places in America (other than San Francisco, maybe, along with odd pockets such as Catalina or Fire Island) where the automobile is optional, I had fallen out of touch with how much car culture dominated this country. It was real important to people what they drove. They also wanted to know, and to comment upon, what you drove. I found Tim and Chris standing outside their headquarters that morning, admiring Chris’s new purchase, a black Mercedes G55 AMG, an outlandish $92,000 vehicle that resembled nothing more than a morgue wagon.
“It sounds really cool, really loud,” Wilson told me cheerfully.
Reifsteck nodded. “Pull up next to someone, they’d think it was a Harley beside them.”
I’d seen strange, boxmobile SUVs on the road before: the Hummer, the Honda Element, the Scion XB. The G55 was the grand-daddy of them all. We stood and stared at the top-of-the-line SUV some more.
“Wow,” I managed. “That is a fantastic car.” I meant fantastic in the sense of “like something unbelievable straight out of crazy film director Tim Burton’s imagination,” but Chris accepted it as “excellent,” or “extraordinarily good.” I visualized a child in an Edward Gorey drawing walking somberly in front of the thing, a black tulle scarf of mourning wrapped around his top hat.
“You ready to go?” Chris asked.
“Sure,” I said. The image of The Exorcist’s demon-girl had vanished with the morning.
“Ryan and Dave are about to roll,” Tim said, meaning Ryan O’Shea and Dave Creager, the two techs (Aftermath calls its crew members “technicians”) assigned to the Milwaukee cleanup.
“You want to ride up with them or follow in your own car?” Chris asked. “What are you driving, a Buick?”
“It’s what they gave me,” I said lamely. I was afraid he was going to ask what size engine the rental had in it.
“It ought to get you there,” Chris said.
“I guess I’ll follow them,” I said. I still held halfheartedly to the idea that on the way to Milwaukee, I could always bail out entirely, abandon the project and fly back home.
Ryan and Dave rolled around the corner of the Aftermath building in a white box-truck with a blue 2003 GMC cab. No identifying markings on the side. Aftermath used to trumpet its logos and services on its trucks, until Chris and Tim realized relatives of the deceased didn’t always want “specialists in crime scene and tragedy cleanup” advertising on the street outside their homes. So, no more twelve-inch DayGlo orange lettering.
Dave and Ryan, the techs, didn’t get out to greet me. Dave was driving, and we gave each other a wordless chin-rise greeting. Then they took off. I jumped in my rental, shouted good-byes over my shoulder to Chris and Tim, and tried to catch up.
They drove like bats out of hell. “This business is all about response time,” Tim Reifsteck told me later. “Once a scene gets released by the police, once people realize what they’ve got in their house, they want it cleaned up now. We can get a crew to a site anywhere in the country in twenty-four hours or less.”
“Not Alaska or Hawaii,” Chris added.
“At least not yet” Tim said.
I followed Ryan and Dave as they hurtled east toward downtown Chicago on Interstate 88 (the Ronald Reagan Memorial Tollway), then headed north toward Milwaukee on I-294. They sped through electronic toll plazas, barely slowing down, and I tailed behind them, even though my rental wasn’t equipped with an automated I-Pass, which meant it was an eighteen-dollar fine every time I did.
Repeating a jittery “normalcy” mantra to myself (“death is the most normal thing in the world,” “no big deal,” “X percent of the U.S. population deals
with it every day,” “melodramatic to think otherwise”), I kept my eyes pinned to the small orange “biohazard” sticker on the back of the Aftermath truck. I tried to calm myself down, but I couldn’t.
We bounced north out of the maze of Chicago.
Wisconsin, I said to myself. It had to be Wisconsin. My native land. I was born in Wausau, in the dead center of the state. J. P. Donleavy has a line: “Under the sheep-gray skies of the land where I was born.” Or Dylan:
My name it is nothing, my age it means less
The country I come from is called the Midwest
The country I come from. I did feel comfortable there, slipping into the Chicago landscape as though it were an old sweater. Where a lot of people saw flyover country I saw a familiar home. “A place of wide lawns and narrow minds” was what Hemingway called his native Chicago suburb of Oak Park, but I didn’t find midwesterners narrow at all, in girth or sensibility. A genial, dogged, community-minded people.
In the present context, though, Wisconsin had turned into the state in which I first saw a dead body.
Chucky Sipple. A kid on my Little League team who I barely knew. When I was seven years old, he slipped from the piling of a Milwaukee Road railroad bridge that I could see from the bedroom window of my childhood home, fell into the ice-choked Wisconsin River, and drowned.
I remember the shock all us neighborhood kids felt, instinctively gathering the next morning at the death piling on the black-painted bridge, when Chucky’s not-at-all-grief-stricken aunt steamed up. “I just want to see the place that dumb fuck went and drowned himself,” she said.
You always remember your first dead body. The following afternoon at the funeral home, Chucky was a waxen figure arrayed in a coffin of polished mahogany, somehow more elegant in death than he had been in life, at least on the baseball diamond, where his fielding skills left something to be desired. W. C. Fields used to call death “the Fellow in the Bright Nightgown.” For me, he was always a Little League shortstop.