Free The Dead Janitors Club by Jeff Klima Page A

didn't know the law himself. He concluded our introduction by telling me sternly that he could impound my vehicle and arrest me if he wanted, but this time he was letting me go with "just a warning."
        Over the years, he also handcuffed Chris and drove him home for skateboarding outside a bank, and then stopped my mother for driving at dusk without her headlights on and accused her of drinking. My mother is a lovely Mormon lady who absolutely does not drink—and he hassled her.
        You might side with the policeman, saying he was just doing his job, but later Officer Butler shot and killed an unarmed man outside a grocery store. That tells you the type of policeman he was. So after he harassed my mom, who truly is the sweetest person on earth, I decided that forever after I hated policemen.
        As I've matured, my opinion on policemen has changed somewhat. I recognize the good, even heroic, and other thankless things that they do. Now there are several whom I work with on a regular basis and some I wouldn't hesitate to call friends. But then, even though my new boss was a cop, I didn't want to call other cops and beg them to send us business.
        Dirk, not noticing the reluctance in my voice (or more likely, choosing to ignore it), said he'd email the list of law enforcement agencies right over. Being the forthright person that I was, I printed the list and set it in my "Fuck That" pile, right under my subscription renewal for dick-enlargement pills.
    * * *
    In the meantime, the horror story I told people about my one and only crime scene was rapidly growing in detail and intensity. At this point perhaps I should mention that I have a tad of dissociative identity disorder, also known as multiple personalities. While I'm not as bad as my mother, who reverts to a childlike state of innocence every so often, for all my shyness there's another aspect of my personality where I turn into a complete chatterbox.
        That aspect of my personality got me elected senior-class president in high school, nearly got me sued four times as a writer on the school newspaper, and had me give a hilarious speech at graduation while wearing a huge sombrero. The dichotomy of my two personalities is unsettling, to say the least. Basically, whenever I feel vulnerable, the shy guy takes over; when I have something to offer, I am untouchable.
        So when I was before a crowd of peers telling my crime scene story, it grew to include my talking the old man out of killing himself and finding the dead lady's cache of Nazi paraphernalia. An attractive girl in the group would then ask for another story, and I had to awkwardly inform her that there weren't any more. I was a one-trick pony.
        But that was about to change.
        Dirk called me up out of the blue one day and told me to pack up my crates. We were off to Claremont. Claremont is a small city along a major highway about twenty minutes north of Fullerton, but more importantly, it's in Los Angeles County. That was the big time for us.
        We had started a crime scene company in Orange County not only because my boss lived and worked there, but also because Los Angeles was teeming with crime scene cleaning companies. Mongol hordes in the form of rival companies virtually had the metropolis on lockdown. And now we were on our way into their outskirts to do their work and see what sort of crime scenes they had to offer.
        We pulled up in the middle of a pleasant suburb, parking on a tree-lined and well-lit street that was the polar opposite of Riverside with its sewer breath. A small off-white home that might have housed Ward Cleaver and his brood sat proudly among other homes equally as proud. The police car out front was the only indication that something was askew in this charming little neighborhood.
        At the front door, not knowing what else to do, we rang the bell, hoping that this was the right address. It would be very awkward if we'd