We'd scraped up a little old grandma out of her apartment where she'd collapsed and rotted away in the span of carpeting between her recliner and her TV. The landlord didn't feel like paying up, so Schmitty threatened to dump the old woman's guts back on the landlord's porch and smack a mechanic's lien against the property.
The tightwad paid. But that little scenario was an exception to the rule. Realistically, once the guts were gone, all we could do was continually harangue property owners with nagging phone calls. Russ, the soulless ex-mortgage guy, eventually took care of those.
To make the cops feel like sissies and assholes, I descended into the catacombs of the mansion without a mask on. Dirk was of the opinion that we should side with professionalism when dealing with a new police squad, but I wanted to show off.
I was impressed with the elegance of the house. Expensive painted portraits of the family grimly observed me from their ornately framed place on the walls. At my parent's house, unflattering photographs taken at Sears were hung in plain frames. (Of course, we're also still alive, so score one for us!)
Rugs that looked to be out of some movie about Turkish royalty covered the floors, and the overall house had an impressive state-ofthe-art look to it, highlighted by decorative ethnic accents.
Down sharp-angled tiled stairs, curved hairpin-style, were all the bedrooms. It would have been a bitch if we had had to haul a bed out of there. The girls' bedrooms were simple, decorated as if still occupied by small children instead of the twenty-year-olds who had inhabited them. A mess of long, green straw led from one of the bedrooms and up onto the stairs. Small mobile patches of it were scattered along the house's white marble floors. Curious, I picked up a small clump of it.
"There were six bodies found in here." A policeman answered my quizzical glance. "The family had a pet bunny that died a few days after they did."
I grimaced slightly and dropped the hay; a human's dying didn't do much for me, but it hurt my heart when an animal bit the dust.
Once the last of the cops had exited the master bedroom, I poked my head inside cautiously. What was left of the bodies had already been removed by the coroner's office; the detectives had concluded their cursory examination of the scene, and all that was left for us jack-offs was to scoop up the remainder—and do what we could about the smell.
By that point in the game, I was no stranger to the rank odor of rotting people, but this was something entirely new. Whether it was because fluids had been sealed into the bedroom since they weren't able to leach down through the marble or the collective mass of humans rotting together, the smell was devastating. I could feel it seeping into me when I sweated, and I knew that a simple shower wouldn't be enough to shake the musk. I actually had to swallow repeatedly and force myself not think of Phil's mom's turkey soup to keep my fourburrito lunch down.
I was excited to see the new guy walk into the room. If I was used to the smell of a dead body and this got to me, I was betting Russ would fall to his knees, the sound of exiting vomit echoing through his chest cavity as if it were from a high-pitched cannon. Big, stinging tears would drop from his eyes, and he would gasp frantically for nonexistent fresh air. Or better yet, maybe, just maybe, his face would fucking melt right off, like the Nazis at the end of
Raiders of the Lost
Ark
. Whatever the reaction, it was certain to be a beautiful sight to behold.
At this stage in my career, I shouldn't have been so affected by disappointment, but I was when Russ walked in carrying a milk crate full of his brand-new supplies and went "Phew!"
That was fucking it. From having kids, he was probably no stranger to bad smells, but come fucking on. I had waited eagerly in the funk of the master bedroom, simmering in the noxious fumes for ten minutes only to get a generic "Phew"? Dirk was in the next room, and cousins or not, I could tell that he, too, was a little sad that Russ hadn't puked his guts out. So much for hazing the new guy.
The scene itself definitely contained all the grandeur and spectacle one would hope to witness in a mass suicide. Aside from the nasal abuse, the assault on the eyes was equally marvelous. That cop out front had been right—it was a bad one.
The twins had died on the parents' Cal King bed, which was far larger than any Cal King I'd previously seen; it took up half of the enormous bedroom. A perfect outline of the dead girls would have been preserved in the thick down comforter spanning the bed, but the maggots and other larval insects had picked away at the remains, scattering thick trails of grease outward from the bodies and distorting their image. The level of decomposition was so great in the insulated bedroom that the coroner had once again taken only skeletons and left us the remainder.
Most surprising to me was the grandmother, who'd died sprawled out on a chaise lounge, copping a pose from the Scarlett O'Hara School of Dramatics. The stifling air of the bedroom had coupled with time to create a most unpleasant effect on her ancient, saggy body, which had turned to slime and forced itself through the layers of the lounge chair.
She was evidently a big woman as well, because surrounding the legs of the chair and pooling outward into a corner of the room was a congealed lake of salty, mustard-yellow fat, a puddinglike skin thick across its surface. I'd never seen anything like it. Getting down on my hands and knees to simply be closer to it, I surmised that it was about two inches deep at its thickest point.
I wish I could say that seeing that woman's ass, thighs, and midsection reduced to a stinky, quivering lake made me rethink my life and the fast food I was sure to imbibe over the remainder of it. But alas, I felt certain that many more cheap burritos were in my future.
We saw the parents last, as they'd isolated themselves in their huge walk-in closet, which was separated from the main bedroom by a private bathroom with a large two-person Jacuzzi tub and a separate shower, also built for two. Maybe that's not a big deal to you big-city folks with your washboard abs and your remote-controlled cars, but when I saw that, I nearly dropped my testicles out my asshole.
While the rest of the group had opted for poisoning themselves (with what, I don't know…but if I had to guess, I'd say tacky jewelry), Ma and Pa had taken the bullet ride to Brain Island. They muffled the sound of the shots with enormous comforters, but the reality was that the sheer amount of clothing and accessories in the closet would've been enough. The two of them were equal in their affinity for fashion, and the closet was split down the middle—expensive fur coats and designer dresses for her, custom-made suits and Missoni sweaters for him.
When we began the work, I called dibs on Grandma, eager to tackle a problem I'd never encountered before. Dirk and Russ went to work on the parents, which was no easy task, surrounded as they were by the regal couture that had absorbed the stench of three weeks' decay.
All the clothing, handbags, shoes, and accessories had to go…but not by us. We had strictly defined ourselves as crime scene cleaners and couldn't be bothered to deal with stinky garments, so all apparel went into the bathtubs to be discarded by someone else.
The comforters that the parents had draped about themselves added a degree of difficulty as well, since they'd essentially been transformed into humongous Brawny paper towels with super absorbency. I don't know what a heavy down comforter weighs normally…maybe twenty pounds? With all the good stuff that used to be people soaked into them, each one now weighed in excess of a hundred pounds. I had to abandon my Granny escapades to help the others load the two comforters into Hefty bags, which then had to be carried up the narrow stairs.
The potency of the offensive smell increased with the removal of the soggy blankets, and the gagging began. Finally, all three of us had to resort to wearing our industrial gas masks to stay in the room. Much of what had been in the comforters had splashed out onto the ground, leaving a mulchy brown, bilious glop across the closet tile.
Worse still, the mom's innards were particularly corrosive and had melted away the sealant coating of the marble flooring. In some manner of unholy osmosis, the fluid had sucked its way into the white tiles, rendering them a garish color that might best be classified as vermillion. I wanted no part of that and wandered back to my salty sea.
I began my attempt meekly, first tapping one of my small hand towels into the fat at its shallowest point. I might as well have been trying to clean up the goo with a stick of butter for all the good that my cloth towel did. No, with Grandma's fat, my thinking needed to be done outside the box.
I grabbed all the parents' bath towels that I could find. They were monogrammed Egyptian cotton with a ridiculously high thread count, so I figured the absorbency would be ample. Throwing them into the midst of the lake, I stood back to watch. Lo and behold, the yellowed mass with a top like crème brûlée held firm against the lightness of the towels.
What the scene needed was three hundred pounds of human to push the towels through the crust. In my white bunny suit, I took the leap, soaring thoughtlessly into the thickness, not realizing that a huge portion of the fat was really just slippery, slippery grease. I hit the towel and went down hard, my hands and knees saved from the unyielding marble by the years of breakfast treats the lady had indulged in.
Landing largely past the safety of the Egyptian cotton, my gloved hands and knees were yellow with the sticky, waxy fat surrounding them. I scooted back, disgusted, onto the crumpled safety of a towel that, like an island in the sea, was sinking into the abyss. Standing slowly, I chose what I hoped was the lesser of two evils and stepped back into the grandma, my size 13s carving footprints into her lard, which left untouched, would've been an important fossil find many thousands of years in the future.
Back on the safety of clean marble, I stripped out of my bunny suit and changed into a fresh one. All the towels were marooned in the midst of the mess, and the eye of the storm was yielding little effect. I had to try something else.
The largest of the woman's fur coats was next. I formed a mink bridge between the clean tile and the bath towels and, from there, crouched down and gathered up the towels, scooping up layers of fat with them. At that point I learned one of the tenets of life that should be passed on to one's children and their children:
mink does not soak
up human remains.
No, human remains just make a ruined coat more ruined. (Remember that rule, and you're three-quarters of the way toward being a crime scene cleaner yourself.)
Once the towels, the mink, and the comforters were all safely in Hefty bags, along with the rest of Grandma (who finally came up with a snow shovel and a shit ton of degreaser), we tore apart the bed and the chaise lounge, which was filled with sharp tacks.
Attracted to the bed frame, I seriously considered taking it home and swapping it for the Murder Bed. The frame was mostly clean and constructed out of a rich, heavy, light-colored wood hand-carved into a contemporary and pleasing design. I nixed the idea when I realized that I would never be able to find a mattress that could fit such a massive frame. We'd sawed the original into stained pieces, and since Tampax didn't make a panty liner for Paul Bunyan's wife, I was shit out of luck. Anyways, Dirk and Russ didn't want to help lug the headboard up those impossible stairs, so I dropped the idea.
We'd gotten a fair shake from the property association and the police in regards to the paparazzi, because none were allowed past the front gates of the neighborhood. Instead, they had had to set their cameras on the land far below, in a shopping center across from the rugged hillside. From the balcony where I copped fresh air and stared enviously out at the span of the Pacific, the reporters down on the public land looked like the squirming, crawling maggots we were paid to vacuum up.
One or two reporters tried to get the scoop and managed to get past the old codger guarding the front entrance (an impressive feat, considering that he gave us, in our giant fucking truck adorned with crime scene cleaner decals, a bitch of a time before he let us in).
As we were setting bulging Hefty bags of human flesh out in front of the garage door, a cameraman came running up, filming, and attempting to outmaneuver and out-guff the police. Finally, under the threat of arrest and without being able to film anything more than my fat ass carrying out generic trash bags, he scampered back into his car and left.
We gave up the ghost shortly thereafter with Dirk bitching about how tired he was. He wasn't used to working on actual crime scenes (ooh!), and I had urged him to push on, knowing what the eventual outcome would be if we didn't finish the job in one day. Sure enough, though, I would be returning the next day sans Dirk to finish what we had started. To his credit, Dirk talked an unenthusiastic Russ into returning with me.
At dawn the next morning, while the early birds were still at home dreaming about the worms they would catch, Russ and I made our way south in Dirk's truck to finish the job. The mansion was just as we'd left it, with plywood nailed over the hole smashed in the front window by the initial police responders. Using a key one of the cops had found in the dead wife's purse, we opened all the doors and windows to once again blast the neighborhood with the scent of unchecked privacy.