The Dead Janitors Club (39 page)

    When I was finished with the car, I extended my hands outward as if I were a model on The Price Is Right, showing the investigator what he'd won.

    "What about the seatbelts?" The investigator sliced through my daydream with a question he'd probably been waiting several hours to ask. In typical idiot fashion, I hadn't even considered the seatbelts, especially not the one the detective had been wearing when he blasted a hole through his noggin.

    Looking like the goofy fucking amateur that I was, I pulled the seatbelt out of the retractable holder, revealing dark stains already leached into the mechanics of the thing. I grinned my usual shiteating grin, felt like crying, and got back to fucking work.

    Finally, and with a considerable amount of disgust at my ineptitude, the investigator suggested that we should just cut the seatbelts out and forget my attempts to scrub them, as I'd been getting nowhere for the last half an hour. I'd already tossed both of the surgical blades away, and my standard carpet razor still had that same dull blade, which was of no use to me on the seatbelts. So, with one last pathetic, pitiful appeal, I asked him, "Can I borrow your knife?" I assured him that I would clean it off before I gave it back to him.

    Last, but not least, the dead man's service effects, namely his radio and his badge, were resting on the hood of the police cruiser. The radio had been attached to his belt at his death and thus had been spared the brunt of the mess. The badge, though, had been clipped to the pocket of his polo shirt, and streams of blood had curled through the ridged contours of the gold shield that was supposed to stand for law and order.

    I got the radio cleaned easily enough and put it in a bag with the items from the sheriff's trunk. The badge, though, had been sitting awhile, and not all of the blood came off. I'd never held a policeman's badge before, and that one, streaked in blood, seemed like a bad one to start with.

    All the while, the homicide investigator watched me silently scrub at his dead coworker's effects, judging me. When I was finished, he thanked me for coming on such short notice, and I couldn't tell if his abruptness with me was due to my barely capable performance or if it was merely in regards to the situation. He never called us for work again, so I figured I had my answer.

* * *

I'd cleaned up enough criminals, so it was inevitable that somewhere in the mix I'd eventually come across a dead cop. I suppose he was a criminal himself and largely no different from the others, but I couldn't help wondering, standing there with that tainted symbol of justice in my hand, if I stayed with the crime scene business long enough, would anything else ever shock me?

    I didn't have the intelligence to recognize it then, but a seed had been planted.

My family has a beach house in Aptos, a sleepy little community of rich beach bums and retirees at the north end of Monterey County. It's a beautiful two-story house midway up Monterey Bay, on a private beach that keeps the "townies" out. One of the big shots at Yahoo is our closest neighbor. My family has gone there every summer since before my birth to relax, sit on the sun-warmed patio, swim in the ocean, and forget life's cares. It is absolutely my favorite place to be; every time I'm there, I'm convinced that there is no better place on earth to savor a cigar and imbibe a glass of port than on the deck of your own beach house.

    Now, I'm not telling you about the beach house to brag, but rather to illustrate what I contend is a valid point. To have your own little slice of paradise and then to just throw it away—to me, you deserve worse than death.

    I wasn't born rich. My family isn't "from money," and most of my life has not been spent in the lap of luxury. My great-grandfather, who was evidently a very smart man, bought a sizable chunk of the coastline of Monterey Bay when no one else was out there.

    He built a large three-story home with views on the top floor of the entire bay, from Carmel to Santa Cruz. The house had an indoor pool and an elevator. (When I was young, we took a tour through the house, and I remember seeing the indoor pool…it was amazing. I can think of few things cooler than to be a kid in a house with an indoor pool and an elevator.) Years later, my great-grandfather built another home next door that he lived in while the kids and nieces and nephews had the other home as a sort of playhouse.

    When my great-grandfather died (years before I was born), the next generation was riddled with debt and ended up parceling off the rest of the land. Then they sold the three-story mansion, which went through several owners, one of whom had the elevator and the indoor pool removed. The Yahoo guy lives in that house now, and I can only wonder about how it looks.

    My family managed to keep our house though a collective of aunts, uncles, cousins, my mom, and many, many other relatives I've never met. Each family uses the house for one week a year, renting it out when it's not being used, almost like a time-share.

    If it's not rented, it's fair game for the family. I've used that house many times for parties and weeklong bacchanalian retreats with friends and strangers alike. (Some "townies" have even found their way in there, much to my chagrin. Poor or not,
nobody
likes "townies.")

    My family doesn't exactly fit in with the rest of the neighborhood. We're dirty, we're poor, we're loud and silly, and we arrive in caravans of dirt-stained minivans and cheaper-end sedans. The rest of the neighbors and other renters enjoy their SUVs, their Cadillacs, and their sports coupes.

    We used to get challenged on the beach to games of touch football by handsome, fit families of fathers and sons with strong Ivy League jawlines and mothers and daughters who filled out bikinis without overfilling them like my family does. Those games of touch football or beach volleyball would usually start with the other family racking up huge points on us and end with us fist-fighting among ourselves while the other family looked on in disgust and shame.

    We were rough-and-tumble, from areas where people would literally kill to have beach homes. Yet the house was such a part of my existence that I was honestly surprised in fourth or fifth grade to find out that not every family had their own beach house somewhere.

    We were very, very lucky, and I now fully appreciate what a blessing it has been for us to get that taste, even if for only one week a year, of what privilege is like. And to think, some people have the opportunity to live in a luxurious, multimillion-dollar beach house fifty-two weeks a year, basking in the sight of the ocean.

    I know people live like this, because I cleaned some of them up.

* * *

The Targus family, three generations of Turkish immigrants, lived in a hillside mansion in palatial San Clemente, in the exclusive southern tip of South County. San Clemente was part of a world I couldn't relate to. Down in South County, potholes were filled before they had a chance to become potholes, everything was clean and green, and most cars were sleek and European-made.

    Dirk and I rolled down the broad stretch of the five-lane freeway with our newest employee sitting in the crew cab. Dirk had hired his cousin Russ, a mortgage guy who, like the rest of the nation's mortgage guys, was feeling the sharp chop of his own ax. So while his job destroying ignorant people's credit scores was circling the toilet, Russ decided to hop on board and see what our little train ride was all about.

    Dirk had sworn up and down the block that he was going to retire in a few years and the whole company would be mine. Now, with his cousin as a partner, my slice of the pie got that much smaller. I was courteous but aloof to Russ and spent most of the trip down staring pensively out the window.

    The police department in San Clemente had called us out—how they got our info, I'll never know. I wanted to believe that Dirk had done his part to scare up business, but like our first several jobs, it was more than likely just some big mistake. Doubtlessly, we'd do our damnedest to make sure they regretted choosing us.

    I didn't know anything about the Targus family when we pulled off the freeway and down into the thick of the beachside city, but then I typically never knew anything about the victims ahead of time. If they lived in South County, though, the odds were good that we'd be able to charge whichever one was still alive decent money to clean up the one who wasn't.

    It was still early morning for me when we reached the gate to the private community. A guard checked in visitors, which ensured that there was money to be made. I was a realist, though, and knew that the kind of money we might make wasn't anything like the money these people made on a daily basis. Still, any cash we earned we'd spend just fine back in dirty Fullerton.

    The Targuses were a family of five living together in a small white mansion that had a gorgeous, raised view of the entire South County chunk of the Pacific Ocean. While the spread wasn't as vast as some adjoining it, spreads that were worth many millions, it definitely was still very valuable property. From the short driveway, which boasted standard European automobiles, I could see the angular side of the house sloping downward as if it had been constructed onto the face of the hillside.

    The busted glass panels on the French-style front doors indicated that we were indeed in the right place…that and the swarms of police officers buzzing in and out of the house in protective face masks.

    Stepping out of the truck accompanied by Dirk and Russ, I could easily discern the reason for the face masks. The air, rich with salty sea freshness, had a rancid undercurrent of spoiled flesh. For us to catch wind of it out on the driveway, I knew that either whoever was dead was close by, or the scene was going to be a bad one.

    "They're all down in the bedroom…" a local cop filled us in from behind his breathing filter. "It's a bad one," he confirmed.

    The news reports that emerged in the wake of the deaths all focused on how tight-knit and private the family was. The twin girls, just graduated from college, dressed alike, acted alike, and preferred to hang out with each other rather than anyone outside their family. Their grandmother, from the Republic of Turkey, was living there on an expired visa and apparently mostly stayed inside the home.

    The mother dabbled in real estate and ran a jewelry store at the mall. The father of the twins was a PhD who experimented with thermal energy and was an expert witness for the state of California on car-crash statistics. He worked out of his home as a consultant, which seemed like sweet work if you could get it.

    Neighbors were quick to offer their own accounts of how incredibly closed off the family was, even in the midst of a community that seemed to pride itself on being closed off. Of course, neighbors will say any fucking thing that might get them in the newspaper.

    Every crime scene I've ever worked had some neighbor coming around with that wide-eyed, cautious demeanor, as if he or she were a squirrel contemplating granola in an outstretched hand. They were always eager to give me their version of the dead person's hang-ups and peccadillos, as if I were hiding a journalist in my pants.

    Usually I was polite, offering up the occasional "No, kidding?" every time there seemed to be an unnaturally long pause in their speech. Most would finally run out of blather on their own accord and mosey off to find some new idiot to unleash their version of the story on. I'm convinced that the need to tell bullshit stories and borrow cups of sugar was the catalyst for the first neighborhood.

    What actually happened to the Targuses varies, depending on which account of their death you believe. When we first arrived, the police were chattering about how the entire family had been murdered in retaliation for some shady mob shit the father's relatives had been involved in back home.

    Even the contract entomologist whom the detectives sent in found it odd that so many differing species of maggots (six, to be specific) were present at the crime scene. That, of course, led to the speculation that some of the bugs had been "trafficked" into the scene as a message.

    But the coroner officially ruled cause of death as suicide. I personally agreed with that assessment, since I'd already cleaned up a mass murder and I'd never before cleaned up a mass suicide. Media speculation differed, of course, but it helped the coroner's case that each member of the family was dressed head to toe in matching black outfits when they were found.

    While the reasoning for the group suicide was never publicized, the inner-circle theory alleged that the family was financially fucked by the mortgage fiasco. Coupled with the fact that they felt an immense amount of shame over the twins' inability to get into the medical school of their choice, the financial problems drove them over the edge. It seemed like an extreme end to such a temporary disappointment, but death means different things to different people.

    Bidding the job was easy. The brother of the dead man absolutely did not want to be on scene for any part of what we were going to do. I told Dirk to charge at least ten thousand, maybe twelve…cleaning up mansions should never be a lowball gig. He went seventy-five hundred for five bodies, though, and the guy gobbled that price tag right down.

    "You shoulda gone for fourteen," I chided Dirk.

    It also killed me that we had settled for an oral contract instead of a written one. The rotted-guts removal business isn't exactly a service that can be undone with failure to pay. Though one time Schmitty, our silent company owner to the north, actually threatened a nonpaying customer with exactly that.