The Dead Janitors Club (24 page)

    June had outfitted herself with a respiratory mask to stave off the noxious fumes of the rotting dead. Part of my making a good impression on her and her office was forgoing the mask. Jeff Klima and the company he represented didn't have a problem with bad smells.

    The little old lady had died in her bedroom, beside a large bed with a simple frame. Since my own bed-frame acquisition, I noticed other people's bed frames and rated theirs against mine. In this case, mine won.

    It was an awkward scene because the lady had clearly been in the bed shortly before she had kicked the bucket, and at some point in her sweet-old-lady death spasms had tumbled to her right, dropping down onto her thick, green carpeting. The carpet material wasn't quite shag, but it was dense and plush and plenty ripe.

    "She was in here for three months," June said from her position in the doorway. She didn't want to come any closer. "She just rotted away with her cat in here. The cat lived. It ran out when the police finally busted open the door."

    "Three months?" I said, looking down at the amazingly in-depth outline of her body, crystallized perfectly in the fibers of the carpeting. Something looked off inside the outline, though, and I put on my black latex gloves to check it out.

    Using the corner of the bed, I slowly lowered myself down onto the floor, keeping my back as stiff as possible and leaving nothing to chance. I was used to the greasy residue from a decomposing person leaving a haloed effect in their final resting place, as if the dead had attempted snow angels on their respective floors. But this was more filled in, more viscous than I had seen in a decomposition case.

    June watched with an eerie sort of eagerness, and I knew that I had to act like a true professional and show no fear. I planted my hand down into the thick of the carpet, where her heart would have been, just to feel the difference. Imagine my repulsion when my fingers sank through the saturated carpeting and a chunky brown stew of melted guts slimed over the top of my hand, encasing it in a foul liquid nightmare.

    Three months or not, the old woman was still very much a part of the room. I retracted my hand too quickly and felt compelled to man up in front of June. "Yeah, she's ripe," I confirmed from my crouched position. I could feel the coldness of her innards clinging fiercely to the glove with a Vaseline-like viscosity. Unable to escape the feeling of clammy corpse mulch through my skin, I ripped the glove off and stood as quickly as my back would allow.

    "It's saturated," I nodded, as if there had been any doubt. "We'll definitely have to cut the carpeting out."

    I spent the rest of the time helping June search for a will, which, given the sparseness and size of the tiny house, shouldn't have been a problem. Searching through her house, we discovered many more dolls, each porcelain and perfect, frozen for eternity with a penetrating gaze.

    They actually freaked me out a bit, and I didn't know what had possessed her to start collecting the little devils in the first place. I had seen too many horror films at too young an age to even comprehend putting one of the creepy fuckers where I lived. We still hadn't found a will, though.

    There was one door directly opposite the bedroom, which, unlike the rest of the house, was locked. The will hadn't been in any other room of the house, so June made an executive decision. "We need to break that door down."

    I'd also seen enough adventure movies to jump at the chance to do some legal breaking and entering. Bad back and walking cane or not, I was determined to push through that door and into the room on the other side. Perhaps I'd even discover some long-chained-up offspring, so grotesquely deformed that the woman had made the ultimate choice to seal them up rather than let the cruel world put them on display. Or maybe it would be a manufacturing room for crystal meth. I was determined to find out.

    I lowered my shoulder as I'd seen done in many a movie and ran forward, feeling surprisingly pain-free. I hit the door once and bounced back but kept the momentum going and hit it again. I was hoping that the door would burst inward, fragmenting into a thousand tiny shards as if it had been decimated by a barrel of dynamite, but the simple lock on the jamb gave long before the rest of it did. The entranceway extended inward, and my trajectory carried me into the darkness. June was quick to follow, reaching for a light switch.

    I found myself surrounded by hundreds of perfectly angelic-looking monstrosities. Dolls, too many to count, lined five rows of glass shelves on every wall of the room, row upon row of them, like some macabre miniature army. Each one in the collection wore tailored clothes that represented an aspect of the thing's personality. The giant closet of hand-painted dolls had been locked away from view, too valuable to the old woman to leave accessible. If she had any children during her lifetime, they could've never hoped to live up to their mother's ambitions.

    I retreated from the room quickly, expecting unnatural movement from the hordes, and yanked the door closed as best I could, but I knew that it would be too late. The overpowering stench of the woman's remains had invaded the inner sanctum; the fetid particles would attach themselves to the dolls' whimsical costumes, and for the better part of their eternity, the dolls would wear their mother's dead essence like hideous cologne.

    Without a will, June would have to make do with taking the impressive stack of small bills she had found in the old woman's makeshift office. When we had finally exited the house, I thought my job was done for the day and I wished her the best, promising to fax her office a copy of our invoices.

    "Not so fast," June stopped me. "I'm not allowed to just take things from the house undocumented. I need you to be my witness while I note all this money."

    For the next hour and a half I stood, shifting uncomfortably, watching her write the serial numbers of each dollar bill she had taken on a long ledger sheet. She didn't have a problem with how long it took; she was billing the estate at ninety dollars an hour. On the other hand, I would receive a flat fee from Dirk of twenty-five dollars for going out and making the assessment. It was only help to offset my gas costs. And I would receive that only if we didn't get the job.

    Getting in touch with the Florida brother was an equally large pain in the ass, but Dirk wouldn't do the work without his signature on the invoice. Though the brother hemmed and hawed about it, he eventually agreed to let us proceed for nineteen hundred dollars, which included removing all decomp and doing our best to deodorize the place. Wisely, I once again included my clause about "residual staining occurring on the porous surfaces."

    Since Dirk was too wrapped up in work to concentrate on the daytime crime scene business himself, he turned to the next most logical source for a specialist in biohazard remediation to help me with the project: craigslist.

    Of course, instead of contracting for a service technician with experience in handling hazardous material, Dirk, to save money, put out the call for a general-purpose handyman who would be paid twelve dollars an hour for his time. I couldn't wait to see what that would dredge up.

* * *

The day of the cleanup, my "handyman," Doug, was late. Of course, June was really late, as usual, so I had time to brief the guy before she arrived. I was less than relieved to find that Dirk had given him only the rawest details of the impending workday and that Doug, a broken-down, scummy-looking drifter sort with ugly yellow teeth, wasn't too comfortable with the idea of a "decomp smell." He also couldn't stand Mexicans, which he proudly informed me within two minutes of us meeting.

    Since June was Mexican, I begged him to be a little sensitive on the issue and pleaded with him to act somewhat professional, as if he'd been with the company a long time and didn't have a problem with decomp.

    "Okay, but no promises. I gotta real strong gag reflex, and if I hurl, I can't help that."

    "That's fair," I reasoned. "It's a pretty strong smell…even she wears a mask…if you puke, she'll understand."

    "Hey, what do Mexican firemen name their kids?"

    "What?"

    "José and Hose B!" He laughed as if it were hilarious. June pulled up in her Beamer, and I gave Doug a withering glance.

    When she walked up, I stepped in front of Doug and said, "June, this is Doug. He's been with the company for a while now."

    Doug reached around me to shake her hand and said in a pleasant voice, "Pleased to meet you, June." I relaxed only slightly.

    When Doug stepped into the house, he scoffed. "Is this what it smells like? Hell, I could deal with this…I've smelled way worse in my day."

    I quietly reminded him that of course he'd smelled worse; he'd been with the company for a while.

    With the carpeting cut into sections and removed, I could fully appreciate the horror that the wooden floorboards beneath had become. Slick with creamy brown unidentifiable guts, the wood had actually puckered from the absorption of the house's owner. It was something that one would expect out of
The Amityville Horror
. Freaky dolls + owner being sucked into floorboards = creepy, talking house. With a crowbar and gloves, Doug pried out the affected boards, sending sharp, dry splinters across the room.

    Almost as bad were the flies. Maggots had been lunching on the doll collector, but most of them had long since turned into flies and died, littering the floor, bed, and all furniture with a thick mat of insect husks. (Later, when Dirk opened the filter on the shop vacuum I took to the job site, the smell of dripping, soggy decomp and the thousands of dead flies overwhelmed him, and he elected to throw the vacuum away instead of dealing with it.)

    As Doug worked, though, removing floor layer after floor layer, it became evident that he'd forgotten our talk outside.

    "Yeah, the goddamned Mexicans, stealing everyone's jobs and sneaking into the country. You give me a flamethrower and an hour alone at the border, and I'll get some borders enforced."

    I didn't know if he was talking about burning down the chaparral or actual Mexicans, but once he got going on the subject, it was impossible to quiet him. He quoted numerous statistics and conspiracy theories about Mexicans that all sounded made up to me. Doug was certain that he had an inside line on a Mexican plot to cede control of California back to Mexico via Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

    I shushed him when his racist ramblings became too blatant, but mostly I just let him go. It seemed that anti-Mexican babble kept him focused on his work, and I just wanted him to get through with it. Plus, June was off in some other room, still searching for the elusive will.

    When we'd finished and Dirk's truck was overly full of hunks of wood flooring and bags of carpeting, June came in to survey our work. We had to cut down through all the levels of the house until we'd reached the dirt. Even then, there was still a layer of slime atop the moist, cool, dark soil under the house. I didn't have an answer for what to do about that, so I used a long strip of floorboard to scoop the obvious pieces out of view.

    "Is it finished?" June asked, clearly wanting to be done for the day.

    "It sure is," I confirmed, not knowing what else I could cut out or remove. I deployed several cans of deodorizer, which I left spraying as I sealed the room up. For good measure, I also dropped one into the darkness of the evil doll chamber.

    June was intent on taking another small stack of money with her when she left, but I let Doug handle that as I went to sit in the truck. I'd overdone it once again on the amount of punishment I'd inflicted on my back and knew that it would just add to the amount of bed rest I'd need.

    It wasn't until June's Beamer had turned the corner off the street that I reached into an envelope of cash Dirk had given me for the payroll. Doug had worked intensely for four hours, spewing slurs the whole way, but he had worked hard nonetheless, doing work that I could not.

    Inside the envelope, Dirk had left me four twenties. Doug, having worked for four hours at twelve dollars an hour, was owed forty-eight dollars. My back spasms were sharp and jarring, and seeing no easy, quick way out of it, I rounded up and paid Doug sixty. He had done good work, and not only had he not pissed off June, but he hadn't puked.

    Later, when Dirk found out that I'd given Doug extra cash, he did his damnedest not to rage at me over the twelve bucks, but he firmly reminded me I could have driven to a store to make change. I reminded him that he could have, too, and not left me with only big bills. We both walked away, and I had to remind myself repeatedly that no matter what, the job was still better than retail.

The Public Guardian's office must have been somewhat pleased with our work, because it got us invited to participate in the other side of their business: hoarder sanitation.

    Dirk called one day asking if I would pick up a key from him and bring a camera. I figured it was finally the awkward moment where he was going to suggest that I get to know him better, a lot better (in the gay biblical sense, if you know what I'm hinting at). Fortunately, instead he sent me over to document one of these so-called hoarder houses so that he could formulate a bid for the county. If we got the gig, he said, it would be a nice little addition to our revenue stream. I didn't know exactly what a "hoarder house" was, but my understanding was that it would be a dirty house.