The Dead Janitors Club (20 page)

    There weren't a lot of fights at Heroes, which suited me fine, but the other bouncers were frothing for trouble. Anyone who'd get too drunk and need to be escorted out would frequently get the five-man rush, bouncers grabbing him from all angles and forcing him violently out the door. It was silly and bad for business. Most clients could be talked out, even at their drunkest, saving everyone from a scene, but that wouldn't help any of the bouncers score pussy at the end of the night. If it weren't for the bouncers, there would probably never have been a fight at Heroes.

    Though I was sick of bouncing, it was my only source of income and saved my life for several months. All my money was made on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, leaving me four other nights hanging out at the frat house and getting the drunkest I'd ever been. We'd finally discovered beer pong, which was making its way around the frat circuit long before it ever branched out into regular parties.

    Night after night we played merciless games, with everyone chipping in money for quantity beer over quality beer. The girls didn't like it, but that just left more for us. When we ran out of beer, we'd venture upstairs to drink cheap liquor, belt out Journey songs, and tell dick jokes. And my wild side and I were right in the midst of it, leading the late-night streaking runs.

    Sometimes we'd go "taping," which involved laying a strip of duct tape sticky side up in the street. A car would run over it, and the tape would stick to the wheels and get tangled up in the wheel hub, flapping around and making the unaware driver think he had a flat tire.

    We'd first learned of the game from a fellow frat bro, Phil. When he was several years younger, he'd played the game with his friends until a Domino's Pizza delivery driver ran over the tape. The driver stopped, and seeing the kids laughing at him, pulled out a knife and stabbed Phil in the arm. Domino's nicely compensated Phil's family as a result, and many years later we had a great way to alleviate boredom.

    We were also fond of stealing things as a prank, be it a giant pretzel machine, bike racks from the school, street signs, or the letters off of sorority houses. For all our differences from the other fraternities on Frat Row, when it came to drinking, we led the pack.

    It was the easily the best summer of my life, and for the time being, I didn't care if I ever saw a crime scene again. Then one night, one of my frat brothers got drunk and punched out a window (one of our few remaining non-Plexiglas ones), slicing open the vein in his wrist. The blood expelled from him in comical spurts like some bad horror-movie prop, and it went quickly enough that he began to feel faint.

    I put a compress on his wrist to stop the bleeding and ordered someone to call an ambulance. Apparently my time spent with the Boy Scouts in my youth had counted for something. After they took him away, I looked down resignedly at the large red puddle pooled on the concrete at the bottom of the broken window and went to get my crates. Drunken summer blues or not, I was a man with a calling.

By September, the entire summer had yielded us one call from a Jack in the Box restaurant, which I had missed because I was out of town at a family reunion. In the grand scope of things, I was glad I missed it, because it was a call for service at midnight from a location in San Diego, an hour-and-a-half drive that Dirk had to make alone.

    It was his first solo crime scene, which was nice, but it also established a precedent between us. If I went alone, our half was split into thirds (the other half of course going to Schmitty); if he went alone, I didn't make any money at all. That revelation stung, considering all his talk that we were in it together. But, as he didn't have to tell me, it was his company.

    I also didn't know that Orange PD had called for service until I was heading back from my trip. There was a series of increasingly agitated phone messages from a sergeant questioning the quality of our work and if we were, in fact, still in business. I called Dirk in disbelief, asking why the police department hadn't contacted him in my absence.

    He casually informed me that he was also on vacation, having left a few days after me. Since Misty was temporarily unavailable for work, that left no one running the business. Dirk didn't seem to have a problem with that. In the meantime, I called the livid sergeant and apologized profusely.

    When I got back into town, Dirk told me that he'd handled the Orange PD problem. His method of handling it was to call another crime scene company and have them do the work. Dirk said our competition seemed nice about it, and he refused to believe that they would try to steal our client. All I could do was shrug.

* * *

A call finally came in one day from an apartment complex in North County, breaking our long dry spell. We had a murder on our hands. I picked up the truck and drove over to the address, which was part of a row of dingy-looking tenements. I would have missed the apartment entirely if not for the horde of news crews reporting from the front gates of the complex.

    I slowed the truck to a crawl, but with no signs on the truck proclaiming our business, I looked just like any other curious dickhead. The curb in front of the apartment was a mess of news vans and battered old cars, and the street wasn't wide enough for me to double-park, so I ended up having to drive several blocks down and park in a tow-away zone just to reach the complex.

    I hoofed it past the news teams, now pissed that they were hogging up the parking, and refused to offer them any "expert analysis," not that any of the bastards asked.

    I stormed into the office feeling irritated and bossy, not realizing that the office was also the superintendent's home. He was seated at a small desk by the front door, the TV in his living room blaring some Vietnamese infomercial. The super was talking to one of the complex's renters, a Mexican family, assuring them that it appeared to be an isolated and, therefore, personal murder. I tuned him out and watched the infomercial instead.

    Finally he broke from his negotiations with the family and offered me a seat on his couch. The wife had been afraid that because she lived nearby, she would be next. The poor superintendent had probably been dealing with similar complaints from other tenants all day long.

    "I'm sorry about that," the super said, and I turned, not realizing the family had gone. I'd been absorbed with the thought of buying a set of commemorative gold-plated dragon coins that the infomercial was selling.

    The super was a burly white guy, kind of like old-time wrestler Captain Lou Albano, and he had big eyes that sparkled with compassion for the victim. "Poor kid," he kept saying throughout our conversation. She was a Vietnamese girl in her early twenties and living on her own. Sometime during the previous couple evenings, someone had entered her apartment and stabbed her to death in her bed. Her older sister had been the one to discover her.

    Out of respect for the victim and her family, the super wanted to wait for the sister, Candy Tran, to authorize my entering of the apartment. Desperate to work, I obliged him. In the meantime, though, I was going to move my truck closer. Several of the news organizations had finally given up in the heat of the day and packed it in, so I was able to pull the truck up right in front of the large steel compound doors. The doors had an auto-lock feature, so I realized that whoever had killed her hadn't just been wandering by.

    As I climbed from the truck, a whirling dervish in pink passed by me in the undeniable form of Candy Tran. She was a slender Vietnamese woman in her late thirties, with long black hair. I could imagine the theme music for the Wicked Witch of the West accompanying her, except that she was wearing a hot-pink tracksuit that made a whishing sound when she walked. I jogged up behind her as she confronted the super.

    "Yooouu saaaiiiidd heeee wasss heeerree!" she drawled.

    "He is, behind you," the super indicated. She turned and abruptly stuck a hand out for me to shake.

    "I amm Caaannddy Traaaannn," she said with a nod. Then she softened to give me a look that showcased her heartbreak. "Howww doo youuuu dooo whhhattt youuu dooo?"

    I looked at the super for a moment as if she was putting me on. I'd interacted with Vietnamese people before, and even the ones with pronounced accents had never talked like this. He didn't seem affected by it, so I took her small hand and shook it delicately.

"I'm Jeff. I guess someone has to do it, huh?"

    The super led us over to the apartment and unlocked the door, choosing to stay outside. "Poor girl," he muttered once more as he left.

    Candy and I entered, and I caught the smell of decomp right away. She'd been in there for a few days all right. The living room set looked brand-new, with the exception of a TV set off to the side. It was a sixty-inch plasma, one of the boxy ones, and it looked great except for the giant hole that had been violently kicked through the center of the screen. Another TV, one that was smaller and much less expensive but still nice, sat in its place between two tower speakers on the entertainment center. With the exception of the rotting smell from the bedroom and the wrecked TV, the place was immaculate.

    Candy Tran shook her head, choosing to stay in the living room while I headed into the single bedroom. "Soooo saaaad. Shhheeee a gooood giiirrlll, aaaannndd eyyyyeeee juuust booouuuggghhht herrr aallll thhheeesssseee stttuuuuffff."

    The bedroom, like the living room, was beautifully attired, with a large dresser matched to the two nightstands beside the bed. Candy's sister had evidently been sleeping on the right side of the bed when she'd bought it, as the mattress and its linens on that side were a mass of crimson. It was a shame, too, because the queen-size bed frame itself was a beautiful wooden job with a plush velour-covered headboard. My bed didn't have a frame, only a box spring and mattress set on the floor in the frat house.

    Clearly the blood had saturated the mattress because the liquid puddled on top could find no place else to go. It was like the formation of a lake—once the soil below is sufficiently hydrated, the moisture begins to accumulate above it. I was seeing that very same effect on the mattress, which meant it had to go. It would also give me good reason to tack on some more cash to the bill.

    I lifted the thick mattress and was further impressed to see that the blood had gone through the box spring as well. The victim had done a good job of bleeding. Finally I dropped to my knees, using my flashlight to check beneath the bed. The blood had soaked through there as well and was pooled neatly on the carpeting below, where curious flies were investigating its outer edges.

    Whoever had done it had stabbed the hell out of her. That kind of violence was typical of something personal. Someone had either wanted to send a message or was very angry with the young Vietnamese girl.

    I returned to the living room, where Candy was perched on the edge of an ornate golden couch, part of a matched set with a loveseat. "Whhhaaaat yoooouuuu thiiinnnnkkk, Jeeeeeeepppphh?"

    "Well," I said, still befuddled by the way she was talking, thinking that maybe she had had a stroke or something. "It isn't going to be cheap. I have to cut the mattress apart and then the box spring, take the bed apart, and cut out all the affected carpeting…"

    "Howww muccchhh, Jeeeeephhh?"

    "Twenty-three hundred dollars." The number almost made me gasp when I said it. I could buy a used car for that much, but the company needed money. This was our first job in months. I didn't think she'd go for it, but desperate times had called for desperate measures.

    "Jeeeepppphhhh, thhhaaaatttt eeeessss fiiinnneee. Whhhhennn caaannn yyyoooouuuu start?"

    I nodded, smiling. "I'll get my stuff."

    While Candy cleaned out the fridge in the front of the apartment, I set to work slicing into the bed. I used a normal box cutter for the work, a miserable tool because it kept getting stuck in the heavy threading that bound the outside of the mattress. I cut the inner coils with a pair of metal snips I had brought knowing there was a bed involved. It was dangerous work because the snipped coil springs with blood-covered jagged edges had the propensity to go flying off. Any one of them could have sliced through my gloves or pierced my skin with ease. The bedding and springs and linens all went into two types of bags, saturated and unsaturated.

    The wooden bed frame indeed had suffered some of the assault. Part of the right side had sloppy splashes of blood trailing down the inside edge, and two of the slats supporting the mattress had been hit, one of them soaked. I removed the saturated slat and cleaned the other one, along with the side of the brown frame. It was still a nice piece of furniture, though, and I disassembled it carefully, figuring that someone somewhere could make use of it. It would be a shame to toss something so elegant.

    The carpeting came up quickly, and with the concrete base floor in the cheap apartment, I was able to lay some enzyme on that and call it a day. By the time I dragged the mattress, now missing a large, square chunk out of the right side, out to the truck, the last of the reporters were long gone.

    I threw the black bags in the back of the trunk. I hadn't designated which was which, because really it didn't matter. Rather than paying a biohazard disposal company to take the oozy bags away, Dirk would typically throw them all in whichever local landfill was closest. Or if it was still early enough in the day and he was still at work, I would do it. It was a big no-no to do that, so we had to be discreet.