The shower curtain had been pushed aside, and I had an unfettered view of the man's mashed dark stool lying down by the drain. It was small and hard-looking, with divots forced into one side where his fingers had gripped the thing. I was fascinated to see that he had wielded the scat not like a pencil, resting it on his middle finger and the webbing between his thumb and index finger (I'm a lefty, apparently we hold the pencil differently), but rather like a knife, using his whole hand.
It was a blunt instrument to him rather than a tool of finesse; one could appreciate the evident fury in his motions. Anger had caused him to revert back to a primitive level where his mind couldn't formulate the necessary words to express what he felt about abandoning life. We, the living, were left only with a bizarre set of symbols that even Robert Langdon would have been clueless to decipher.
The departed had been the homeowner's uncle. He had lived there with his sister, the homeowner's mother, for some time, but his sister had wanted him out. It was her home, and he was crashing the place, cramping her old-lady style. Finally he had pissed his sister off so badly that she'd gone away to stay with a friend, refusing to come back until he'd moved out. Sometime during the week between when she'd left home and the daughter had come by to check on the situation, the man had slashed his wrists in the bathtub.
Apparently, though, the length of time it took him to die was not what he'd expected, and he'd left the relatively easy cleaning environment of the bathroom to wander across the off-white carpet of the living room before sitting for a spell in a light-colored chair there. Then he'd moved into a second bathroom, where he spent some time checking himself out in the large mirror over the sink.
After that he just went fucking nuts. I tracked his bloodstains into the sister's bedroom, where he'd violently torn through her clothes hanging in a closet before running into the kitchen to wreak havoc on the aforementioned bistro set. Probably feeling faint due to blood loss, he finally managed to find his way back into the original bathroom, lie back in the tub, crap into his hand, and got busy with the wall.
Figuring out what to charge the homeowner was a nerve-wracking experience. I was determined to try my dad's strategy, but I was terrified of the word "no." If she said no, I knew I wouldn't be able to back down and suggest a cheaper price. I'd never been a haggler; I didn't understand the delicate art of ripping people off back then. If a salesperson told me the price of something and I declined it, and then he tried to reel me in by quoting a cheaper price, I would have been tempted to shit in my pants with anger (and then possibly throw them at the guy). It just didn't seem to be good business to me if a salesman could offer me a lower price initially and didn't.
So I resolved to charge the woman $1,535, take it or leave it. The $1,535 was double what I thought the job was worth, and it also seemed like a real number. I figured if I quoted her $1,500, she probably would be suspicious. As if that was some number I just tossed out…Then she might start trying to haggle and lowball me, and I would end up doing the job for peanuts. But $1,535, that was mysterious. That made it seem like there was some complicated pricing system, the details of which would be unpleasant to hear.
As soon as I dropped the number like a bomb into the midst of the conversation, not at all as confident in saying it as I would have liked, we both froze. In the silence that followed, I was ready to apologize, to cry out that I wasn't some huckster, some charlatan, some demon out to fleece her dry. I was thinking about quoting her a cheaper price, something many hundred dollars cheaper than the number I had found the audacity to utter aloud, but she spoke first.
"I'll get my checkbook."
I started in the bathroom. Grimacing, I gripped the poop, my gloved fingers slipping just above the grooves. My fingers are bigger than his, I thought, as I chucked the thing into the depths of my trash bag. I hit the walls next, using plenty of industrial paper towels and several furniture-stripping brushes to massage the ample brown smears from the grout lines.
When I was finished, the bathroom was immaculate, a glowing white testament to the power of Simple Green, paper towels, and elbow grease. While the homeowner made phone calls from the kitchen about how horrible the whole affair was, I moved on to the living room.
"All finished in the bathroom?" the lady asked me, walking out of the kitchen.
"Oh yeah," I beamed. "That place is glowing."
Whether she didn't believe me or was simply curious to see what my definition of "glowing" meant, she marched into the bathroom.
The tub beamed her reflection back at her from the scrubbed fiberglass and porcelain shell. I wanted her to drop to her knees and weep at the majesty that was my cleaning job. I wasn't a neat and tidy person in regular life, but crime scenes brought out the Mop & Glo in me. All business, however, the woman pulled the shower curtain across the length of the tub with none of the gusto or showmanship of a magician. Suddenly, it was my turn to weep.
The accordion-like folds of the white plastic sheet revealed a Rorschach test of unimaginable horror and carnage. Whatever the man hadn't done to himself in the rest of the house, he had saved for himself here. An exuberant thrust of blood sprayed viciously outward and then collected in the folds of the curtain like raindrops in a spider's web.
A squeak eked from my throat as the woman turned to me, one eyebrow thrust violently upward. I grinned the grin of he who eats shit for a living and splayed my hands outward, suggesting that ole Jeff Klima knew it was there the whole time.
"I planned on taking that last," I said, along with a silent prayer that those words alone might be enough.
She let me slide on the shower curtain, though we both knew she knew that I was lying. Her arched eyebrow had told me as much. The rest of my time there was spent in a frenetic silence with an emphasis on being thorough.
I had shown up in my dirty Cavalier with its faded Hawaiian-print seat covers, the antithesis to a logical crime scene vehicle. I called my ride the "Red Rocket," not because she was fast or sleek, but because my little red car certainly resembled a dog's penis. And if nothing else, I was sure I looked like a dick driving it.
As I loaded the last of the biohazard bags into the front seat of the Rocket, which bore no placards or other evidence of a legit cleaning operation, the homeowner came outside, checkbook in hand, and scribbled the payment out for me with the attitude of someone who knew she had just been taken for a ride.
I was grateful for the check but ashamed for not having charged her less. The heat lamp that was her merciless stare had long since wilted the confidence in me. I drove home, bags full of blood and shit brimming next to me, wondering how not to be such a pussy.
* * *
Because crime scenes seem to happen in patterns, we soon had a call for another gig. This one came courtesy of a lesbian whose mother had killed herself in a bathtub. It was an evening job, so Dirk didn't have a good excuse not to tag along.
The job hailed from Panorama City, a north Los Angeles County locale that was anything but panoramic. I'd made the mistake of going there once while shopping for a hat. Panorama City is to Skid Row as phlegm is to smoker's cough. It was our third job in Los Angeles, and this one had come our way as a result of some girl's finger randomly poking down on "The Trauma List."
The Trauma List is a leaflet police officers carry with them that lists all of the property remediation companies in California. Considering that there are a lot of property remediation companies in California and that the list rarely gets renewed, there was a good chance of someone choosing a company that was no longer in business.
We, Orange County Crime Scene Cleaners, were located at miserable spot number 252 on the list. That put us somewhere far down on page 4. Not a great place for a company to be when random choice dictated much of your client base. More difficult was that the list also contained companies that didn't clean up crime scenes at all but instead specialized in such facets of property remediation as mold removal and water-damage repair. The odds of us being found amid the likes of such noncompetition competition were terrible.
The list had been generated on a "first come, first served" basis, and Schmitty, with all his years in the industry, had a much more desirable listing at number 4. But since we were his guys for all of Southern California, when that chick's finger popped down at the number 4 slot, it might as well have found us all the way at the end.
We arrived in the early evening on a street full of dead trees. The houses were all ancient bungalows, small places built out of wood that had been more or less scraped together by the winner of some early twentieth-century bidding war. I knew the insides of the homes wouldn't look much better.
We pulled into the driveway to find a deep-green Volvo station wagon waiting for us; a rainbow lightning bolt decal was emblazoned across its back window.
The butch half of the lesbian couple (her mother being the one who had checked out) nodded to us gruffly. I nodded back, and Dirk gave me the go-ahead to negotiate—probably not because he'd been impressed by my acumen in screwing over our last customer, but because he was intimidated by dealing with hard-looking lesbians.
The more masculine lesbian was a tough one, the kind of person who would punch a tree when she was angry. It took her awhile to get calmed down enough to talk with us, apparently because there was some guilt over the fact that the body had sat stewing in its bathwater for over a week, unnoticed.
The couple had just driven from San Francisco (natch) to deal with the situation, and their emotions were still quite fresh. And here I was trying to affix a price tag to her mother's death. The "he" stalked off to deal with her hang-ups, pursued by her partner, and I was left with the goofy Dirk, who wore a cow's expression of placidity. After all, he wasn't the one who had angered the lesbians.
Finding the front door unlocked, we entered the house to an immediately obvious smell. A fly smacked against my cheek and I spat, swinging my hands anxiously. I had no urge to repeat the horror of my first job.
The bungalow was steeped in inky blackness. The day had been a warm one, and dry air hung heavy with a stench that I will forever recognize as the breakdown of unattended human flesh. It was musty and ripe, as if someone had opened a cellar door at the same moment they farted. Oh, and did I mention that this person seemed to have been living off meat sandwiches for about a year when they did it?
It's an odor unlike anything else you will ever smell. Even the stench of a rotting animal doesn't quite have the same noxious thickness to it. The scent of decomposing flesh sticks to you, clinging to your clothes and filling in the open spots in your pores. Even in the heat, I regretted not wearing my bunny suit to investigate.
We moved toward the bathroom, and the buzzing of flies intensified. Our flashlights, seeking out obstacles in the dark, occasionally captured the blur of a passing housefly instead. Out of my peripheral vision, I could just discern the outline of an overloaded hanging sticky trap. Dirk was ahead of me and fumbled around for the bathroom light fixture.
A streak of blood, the width of a wooden ruler, had dried to the back of the porcelain bath, extending down the outside rim. It was easy to recognize as the position her arm had lain in as it bled out. The flies were clogged three deep on the screen of the small window high above the tub, and they looked more eager to leave the scene than I was.
Insect carcasses littered the floor, extending out into the hallway. Far larger and far more ominous than those were the presence of several odd shapes on the bathroom floor. Tan patches, not at all matching the rest of the tile pattern and about the size of a two-dimensional flank steak, were sealed to the smooth squares of the tiled floor.
I got down on my hands and knees to inspect them. I had cleaned up some crime scenes in my day, and yet for the life of me, I couldn't recognize what I was seeing. I thrust my face down low, my nose almost connecting with one of the odd shapes.
"Fuck," I gasped, straightening up quickly, suddenly understanding.
A person, for all the different smells we give off, is really no different when dead than the average piece of meat. If you soak a dead person long enough, say in a bathtub full of once hot water, he or she, too, will fall off the bone.
The thin patches plastered to the ground were wide strips of the dead woman's skin that, saturated with water, had fallen off her corpse when the paramedics removed her from the bathtub. On the floor, under the heat of day in a house resembling a pressure cooker, the water had evaporated and the flesh had sealed, airtight, to the old tile. It looked as if someone had skinned a basketball and each piece had come off in large, smooth hunks.
It got worse. Paramedics had evidently done the work of pulling the drain plug for us, as it was hanging from its chain off the far ledge of the tub. The water had largely dissipated, taking most of the small parts of what spilled from the woman down the narrow drain. A too-big wad of waterlogged flesh had stopped the process cold, though, and a good couple inches of fetid, murky liquid remained in the bottom of the tub.