L.A. Rotten (2 page)

“I'm good.”

“Very well, sir, their front desk called in, they've had a homicide.” I've long since ceased to be shocked by the unwavering polish with which the service operators dispense these pronouncements.

“Room 236?” I venture, uncharacteristically.

“How did you know that?” he sputters after a lapse that lasts a beat too long.
I finally broke one,
I think, privately pleased. Looking back, I can see that the flies of summer have found the baking guts and begun their
Fantasia
-like whorls amidst the scattering of meat and sauce. It's gonna be a long day.

“Lucky, I guess.”

The wheezing fatso who leads me up the stairs of the Offramp Inn on the Hollywood side of Cahuenga can't seem to walk, breathe, and talk at the same time, so he takes these sharp gasps that both punctuate and eviscerate his sentences. “Her name…Annie…homeless woman…she stayed…time to time…” He pauses at the top step to compose himself, leaving me hanging in half ascension, and he silently debates the direction of the room before turning with an abrupt sharpness that will one day doubtlessly collapse his knee in on itself. Mexican and bespectacled, he is the nighttime front desk clerk of this particular motel, and he treats me like some arrived dignitary of note. Because of the particularly gruesome nature of the crime, Eduardo, my corpulent host, has taken it upon himself to squire me to the room personally, though I am not a complete dumbass and can likely find 236 on my own. Each of the 120 or so Offramp Inns that speckle Southern California, seemingly at every freeway off-ramp, is laid out very much the same—same bluish neutral paint tones, same room layout, same class of denizens populating the parking lot and concrete walkways of the budget-conscious oasis. Each Offramp Inn has a towering and fixed sign, visible to motorists near and far, that announces beneath its masthead,
A GREAT NIGHT AWAITS YOU AT EVERY OFFRAMP
! And below that, less fixed in permanence, a glaring white marquee; this one currently suggests,
ASK ABOUT OUR HOURLY RATES
.

Such is the familiarity of this particular Offramp, though, that I'd asked Eduardo, upon arriving at the motel office, if he'd ever called our company out before. “No, it is usually very quiet around here. We've never had trouble like this before. Not since I've been here at least, and I've been here…one…two…three and a half years this September. I mean, we've had people die here, but nothing, you know, that would require us to call out a crime scene company to take care of the mess. I haven't seen it yet myself, but I hear that it is bad—really bad, in fact.”

I'd attempted to shut him down early on, but he'd already grabbed an electronic keycard out of a drawer that his enormous gut smashed up against whenever he stood at the counter. “Marta,” he'd yelled into the darkness of a back room. “The man is here for cleaning. I'm going to take him upstairs.” When there was no reply, his voice had shot up a half octave. “Marta!” Finally Eduardo had clipped the keycard onto a lanyard hanging down beneath the brown, pillow-like rounds of his neck and led me out the door, disregarding whether Marta ever heard him or not.

Now stopped, standing before the tan door marked with a glued-on “236” in descending black font and a yellow coroner's sticker about the size of a credit card connecting the hollow door to its jamb, Eduardo musters the reserve to finish what is, apparently, a mostly completed tale. “She always demands a room on the second floor…she thought they were safer.”

I snap off a picture of the front door with the intact coroner's sticker showing that no one has disturbed the room since the coroner's departure. “For your files, huh?” Eduardo guesses, happy to pick up on a trick of the trade. “I bet you got to cover your ass a lot in this business, huh?”

“Something like that,” I agree, and step back to allow the big man the breadth of space necessary for him to access the electronic card slot. He is correct—we are one of those industries that get sued a lot.

Eduardo's labored gasp gives me little indication of how bad the scene is: people not typically exposed to the vicious atrocities humans are capable of think Kotex stains are gruesome. I force the door open wider so I can peer into the room over Eduardo's shoulder. The gasp is earned, though—it's a bad one.

Eduardo steps back out of the room as eagerly as he'd stepped in, his blood curiosity now overly satiated. Bad movies do a good job of capturing the overall aesthetic of crime scenes, but they always fail to convey the grippy realness of it all—that potent sense of dread currently swarming over Eduardo, the stone-sober realization that these pieces and parts strewn pell-mell before him could so easily have been his pieces, his parts scattered throughout the motel room. That and the smell—obviously movies have not yet perfected the means of injecting into their theaters that iron-rich, vinegar tang that is the smell of fresh blood. Nine times out of nine, it's the smell of the scene that drives the reality home. I flash back momentarily to the first dead body I ever saw in person—a child molester—he'd been thrown from the fifth floor of the Norco Correctional Facility. The demented fuck had landed right next to me. Up until that point, he'd merely occupied a cell across from mine.

Eduardo, considerably paler, attempts to wordlessly depart my company, but I snap my fingers, gesturing for the keycard. Weakened, and regretting his curiosity, he slips the entirety of the lanyard off his jowl-layered neck and bequeaths it to my extended hand. “I'm sorry,” he mutters as if I knew the woman, and then he is gone, back to the safety of his night desk.

I resume my picture routine; my flash blitzes the poorly lit room with the regularity of a dying strobe. Every angle will be repeated once the job is done. I have cleaned so many motel rooms in the last year and a half, though, that where to stand and how to shoot have become second nature. “Fuck you,” I say with each snap of the bulb, more out of a need to hear a voice inside my head that doesn't sound like Eduardo's than anything else. The exhaustion of the day is getting to me.

Her death is so easy to telegraph that I form the footage of it in my mind. I don't know a single detail about how she looked, but it is the loose composite of every homeless woman I've ever encountered, suddenly strung together to create the image of her.
Little Homeless Annie was set upon by a much larger person wielding a short, fat knife.
Thin swaths of blood, four of them, mark the ceiling to cast no illusions about the violent way the perpetrator had thrust the blade, business side up, into the vagrant woman's tummy and then forcibly yanked upward, probably retracting the knife when it hit the rib cage. It would have been worth seeing the body just to confirm the four individual slashes nicked into the base of her costal cartilage. The second swath of blood is the thickest and most pronounced, so it had actually been first—an imprecise initial strike, not unlike that of a brand new butcher going to work on a hog. The generous splotches of red covering the night table, telephone, and carpeting give credence to the notion that Annie's killer was one aggressive asshole. He'd continued to hack, forcing her back onto the bed, into the nightstand, and then down to the floor. Likely she was still being diced when she'd breathed her last. “Who'd you piss off, Annie?” I mutter aloud as I finish my photo session and go for my crate.

Like most of their competitively priced contemporaries, the Offramp Inn chain makes it fantastically easy to completely field-strip their rooms. Everything is cheap, threadbare, and mass-manufactured out of as few parts as possible, therefore allowing for the total excavation of all components in a relatively short amount of time. All walls are coated with a thick, probably exterior-style, paint that seals tight and doesn't allow for blood or viscous fluids to penetrate—which makes for easy scrubbing. I imagine they did this initially to combat tobacco, spit, seminal fluid, and the malignant antics of ill-bred children.

After stepping into my third Tyvek suit of the day, I snap on a fresh pair of gloves and shake open four industrial Hefty trash bags, two of which I affix biohazard stickers to, just to keep things organized. Everything fluid is put in a marked bag, everything clean goes unmarked. I can wash the telephone and salvage it, but it's too late in the evening, and so it goes into a marked bag with the comforter, pillowcases, and a tattered flannel shirt removed from Annie's corpse by ambitious paramedics some hours ago. The shirt, slick with blood and filleted open across the front, confirms my speculations about how she went. Fortunately for me, she did most of her dying on the floor, and the mattress itself is unstained (in the “Annie's blood” sense only). It is the good and rare motel job that I don't have to schlep a mattress in whole or in parts out to the bed of my truck.

I put on a face shield and blast Energy 2, my deactivating enzyme, liberally from a Hudson sprayer, up onto the ceiling and walls. I don't know if Annie has anything disease-wise, and I don't want to find out the hard way. AIDS doesn't last all that long off of the body, but hep C sure does. When all traces of red are satisfyingly coated with the soapy fluid, which kills off any living organisms, I pull out my trusty bottle of Simple Green and a fresh scrub brush and get down to business.

“Holy shit,” a voice behind me mumbles.

I curse silently for having left the motel room door open and turn to look. A black man, frail and crooked, stands slight in the doorway. He appears to be in his fifties (but could go twenty years either way), wears a knit cap, and is gnawing on a grape Popsicle. His wide-eyed, soft-focus gaze assures me that he is a garbage head well into the effects of his evening. “Nasty, huh?” I say, nodding at him, confident that the only memories he'll have of this event will come as discombobulated nightmares in some future trip. I doubt he can even see me through the forest of colors beaming off the back wall. Gritting the Popsicle between his teeth, he puts up both hands as if to show he didn't do it, then unevenly backs out the doorway and into the night. Unlike with Eduardo, I am genuinely sad to see this man go—it's been a while since my last interesting conversation. Against better judgment, I leave the door open and resume my work.

The bathroom, mercifully, is untouched save for the presence of a compact shopping cart poached from a CVS drugstore, in which little dead Annie has housed her entire world. The cart's contents, a miasma of bagged clothing, “found art,” and crumpled soda cans, look to have a street value of zero, so I tug it out onto the upstairs walkway and drop the mess, shopping cart and all, down into the empty parking space below. It lands with a sharp, wretched bang that will bring curious dwellers out for a closer look at the pile of debris. Regardless of my assessment, I am certain that the cart and the clothes will be claimed and whisked away before I am gone tonight.

Finally, I deal with the carpeting. Much of it and the thin, brick-colored rubber insulation beneath it will go into the unmarked bags. There are only a few pockmarked areas in the flat, blue carpeting that are saturated, but Harold's service contract with the Offramp Inn Corporation explicitly states that if we take some carpet, we will take all carpet. Harold has a plan for everything and a deal for everyone. The Offramp's deal, in part, is that he charges a low flat rate for everything, from the tiniest mishap to the bloodiest stabbing. And so, of course, this carpeting has to go. To make the job easier, I first slide the mattress out the door, and lift the simple steel bed frame with its joke of a box spring. It is here I find the Bible.

It is just a simple, worn Gideon Bible with a stiff maroon cover, but an inadvertent eerie chill flows within my plastic bodysuit as I flip the book open to find the condom I know will be there. Indeed, a Love Sock brand condom, still in its silver wrapper, has been placed inside, just a little ways into the book of Genesis. Just like the last room and the one before that. Unlike the previous two encounters, though, this time I sit, taking a comfortable place against the wall of the little motel room, and read the verses found on the condom-marked pages. Only one, Genesis 9:19, seems to have anything to do with prophylactics, in that it reads, “These (are) the three sons of Noah; and of them was the whole earth overspread.” How this possibly ties into anything in the room, I don't care to guess, but I know it isn't an accident that the two items have been packaged together. None of it makes any goddamn sense and I want to believe it is only an odd coincidence. I'm too pragmatic for that kind of bullshit, though. I seriously doubt the Gideons or the Offramp Inn chain has anything to do with this unique promotion, but it is late, and there is still carpet with which I must deal.

Decisively, I pick up both the Bible and condom and drop them into an unmarked trash bag. As far as I am willing to be concerned, they are just part and parcel of the oddity that is room 236.
How long will it be, though, until I am in another 236, finding a similar setup?

When my work is all but done, and the carpet is bagged and in the bed of the truck with the rest of the trash and biohazard, I pull out my worn Minolta and retrace my steps, clicking as I go.

The mattress and box spring are back in the room, along with a scrubbed nightstand I don't feel like taking. A glance over the balustrade tells me that, sure enough, down below, the shopping cart and clothes are gone. Last, I pull the door to room 236 shut, taking special care to document the tacked-on door numbers, and the fact that the lock on the door is undamaged. I wonder if this means that ol' street urchin Annie knew her attacker.

I park the truck, biohazard materials and all, in as close a street space to my apartment as I can find. It isn't exactly legal to leave biohazard out unattended in public like this, but I can only pray that some hophead or dickhead teenager will steal one of the bags and jam his fist inside without considering what the orange warning stickers might mean. Lugging only my milk crate inside, and doing that only because it contains the Minolta, I quietly key my way in and push the button for the elevator. It is a loud, chugging beast of a lift that will reveal my late-night entrance to the landlord, Ms. Park-Hallsley. The result of this will be a typed note, slid underneath my door tomorrow, reminding me that other people live in the building too. I don't even have to look at the door to her apartment to know a shadow has passed across the peephole and that she's registered my presence. She's a wacked old bitch with no greater calling than to give her tenants grief; just another true Angeleno.

The dirty mustard inner walls of the elevator are blank, save for a posted notice just above the handrail that reads no posting. I rest the milk crate on the rail, deliberately blocking the sign, and endure the slow, jerking ascent to the fifth floor, one down from the roof.

I don't want to, but I can't not think about 236 and its riddles. Christ, it sounds like a twisted Hardy Boys novel or something. “The Mystery of the Condom in the Bible.” It is dangerous to overanalyze this puzzle—I don't want to begin a path of thinking that prejudices me against considering other angles. Like maybe it is a religious man who is proselytizing through murder? Maybe he kills these people for sins against the Bible? See, that seems likely to me…why would it be anything but that? Probably, if I were so inclined, I could research all the victims and find some deep connection among them—like they had all taken part in some shady government study and this was the terrifying result…
Jesus, I'm more tired than I realized
…It annoys me that whatever this whole burgeoning enigma is, the cops haven't caught on to it. I'm not going to go out of my way to help them—already today I got a little too close with that cop damn near figuring me out. I'm already baiting the trap by working in such close proximity to the police, so I'm not going to stick my foot in by getting involved. Many of those guys would happily leave me dead in some Skid Row alley. I've got a good thing going and it's for the best—for me at least—that I just keep my head down. I can't save everyone on Planet Earth…No, my best bet at the moment is to hope that whatever the fuck is happening in the 236s across Southern California currently, well, that shit better sort itself out organically. But I don't hold out much hope for that.

My apartment, with its single bedroom and absence of living room furniture, isn't much better than a room at an Offramp Inn, but at least it's uncluttered. I drop the milk crate beside the door, grateful there's no pet to feed or walk or to which attention must otherwise be paid. I know I should think about food myself, but suddenly unable to compete with the itch, I head straight for my bedroom and grab the wooden XAVA cigar box off the top of my dresser. Dropping down onto my full-sized bed, I mash a pillow between the small of my back and the wall and dig into my stash. That Popsicle gobbler at the motel, he was sick, a slave to the crack, poor bastard. Heroin is my drug of choice. It's infinitely more expensive, so I'm just happy its hold on me is minor—more than I'd like, sure, but far more tolerable than the alternative. Aggressive, I kick off my work boot, just the one, and grab the tip of my sweat-wet sock to yank it free.

Flipping the cedar cigar box lid open reveals the mechanicals of my bad habit: spoon, syringe, lighter, and baggie of eight pill capsules, each filled with clumpy brown dust. All told, two grams of Afghani powder. This probably means I've helped fund terrorism. I accept this only because, with not a single note of exaggeration or hyperbole, I can honestly say that heroin is the most delightful thing I have ever done in my life. If I could function on it, I would stay in its milky clutch all of my days. There is absolutely no finer way to forget your shit than with a needle-sized burst of injected H. Besides, heroin is all about equality—it comes in all the colors of people: yellow, brown, white, black. I've only ever done brown, but brown is all I need. Let the aristocrats experiment; I'm strictly blue collar.

Casting my sock into the abyss beyond the horizon line of my bed, I wriggle my toes, stimulating blood flow, and take an alcohol swab from my nightstand. Needle drugs should only be done by tidy people, and even then, only by those with a firm understanding of the circulatory system. Going subcutaneous can result in a “heroin blister,” which is an ugly, painful lump that swells up on your body for an unpleasant few hours. Besides, missing a vein dilutes good skag. Pretty much the worst place on the body to inject heroin, aside from your cock, is between your toes. This is the reason I keep alcohol swabs beside my bed. The risk of infection is high due to the natural buildup of sweat and bacterial fungus, so cleanliness is paramount. Also, you've got to worry about the veins—they're tiny and easy to collapse, which can result in necrosis. No, if you've got any choice in the matter, stick that motherfucker in your arm or behind your thumb, where the veins are fat and easy to tap. Me, I don't have a choice in the matter. If Duane, my parole officer, sees another “mosquito bite” on my arm, I'll be right back in lockup. And I'm not going back to jail—it's where I picked up this damned beautiful obsession in the first place.

The one drawback to brown heroin is that it's coarser than its refined China white sister, so much so that distilled water doesn't make it soluble enough. This is why I also keep a bottle of lemon juice next to my bed: citric acid works wonders on my beloved brown. Crush open one of the pill capsules into the pit of my well-worn metal spoon, add a quick squirt of the lemon juice, and apply heat. Once you've got the beginnings of a boil, you're ready. Early on, I would overcook my mix and waste a lot of good H in the process. My cellmate used to stir the pot with the plunger of the syringe, but on the outside you've got to stop and clean the tip of the plunger, or else you're defeating the purpose of the cotton balls. Sticking a cotton ball into the thick of the spoon collects the liquid and keeps your veins from inheriting impurities that can lead to blocked veins and necrosis. Really, with a jones for intravenous heroin, overdosing is one of your smaller problems—hence the need for tidiness and biological know-how. I expertly draw the liquid up into the syringe and tip the needle to relocate air bubbles to the back of the chamber. Strictly speaking, a little bit of air isn't going to hurt your veins, but erring on the side of caution keeps the threat of an embolism from fucking with your high. What isn't needed materials-wise now gets put back in the box and slid out of my immediate area.
Good fucking riddance
. On the wall above my bed, the sun-worn lines of a crucifix are etched into the paint. Evidently, the former tenant was a God-fearing person, but as for me, this here ceremony is the only religion I've got anymore.

Repetition has taught me where a vein is buried in the webbing between my big toe and his neighbor, and, also, where I've drilled before. Avoid hitting the same spots again and again, or you'll get, yup, necrosis. I depress the plunger slightly once the nerves in my feet have tasted the needle's presence, and then draw back upward, collecting my own blood into the chamber, integrating it with the skag. This tells me I've hit pay dirt (not that I worry). Next stop: morning. I depress the plunger fully, the second hand on some clock somewhere skips a tick, and I set the exhausted syringe on my nightstand. I will not use this syringe again. The horrors of dull, well-used, well-shared jailhouse needles stay with me always.

At noon, I stumble out of bed to begin my day, none the worse for the wear. My cell phone has been mercifully unharassed by Harold, and my daily shit is a good one. My dealer on the outside, Tony, complains that heroin constipates him, but I've never had this problem. Showered, I don't have to check my refrigerator to tell me that there is no breakfast—there seldom is. Not that I get hungry often; a day will often pass without me eating anything at all. Come to think of it, I don't remember eating anything yesterday. It makes me curious about that shit I took. I stop on my way out the door to toss the parchment-colored envelope containing an angry missive from my landlord into the trash. The bin in my kitchen, empty except for two other unopened parchment envelopes, reminds me that I don't need to buy new trash bags anytime soon.

Unfortunately, the bags of biohazard are just where I've left them, their orange biohazard stickers practically neon in the scorch of the midday sun. Shading my momentarily sensitive eyes beneath a pair of Wayfarers, I toss my milk crate on the seat beside me and blast the air conditioner. A construction crew jackhammers the asphalt across the street into fist-sized clumps of black rubble. The sound may explain the intermittent pulses of gunfire that populated my nightmares toward the end of my slumber. Nightmares always seem to come after I dose myself; these have so far been the most unpleasant aspect of my using experience. I head to the industrial park that is the physical home to Trauma-Gone; mercifully it is devoid of people when I arrive, and I park my work truck in front of the roll-up door to our warehouse space. Admittedly, my unexpected presence on the news has me wondering who has seen what of my existence. I know nothing good can come of it.

Inside the tiny box that is our office, I immediately turn on the air conditioner as well. I don't know how Harold can stand the roasting air that accumulates inside the office on hot days; you'd think he was part African instead of dumpy and Korean. It is far more his frugality than his tolerance of wicked temperatures that has our makeshift office storing heat like a convection oven, though. I won't be on-site long enough to bask in the cooler climate, but something is better than nothing in this summer swelter. I bring the Minolta over to the one computer we have, sit down, and plug a USB cable into the side port of the digital camera. Harold, for his great many faults, has the redeeming feature of computer know-how. Our computer is ready to go from the moment I start it up, and it can process almost instantly all the files I upload. Harold even built an electronic database for all things crime-scene-related, which includes detailed logs of the “before and after” photos I take at each job site. Everything Harold or I have ever worked on is stored in this computer and backed up on at least a dozen different flash drives and an external hard drive.

My “office work” consists of uploading all the photos, then tagging them for potential future reference by anything memorable in the scene. Additionally, I scan the contracts into the computer so we have an electronic copy of them—the City Hall suicide goes in as Job J112, while the Offramp Inn homicide is Job J113. The actual contracts then get filed according to payment status. Both are considered “corporate status,” meaning Trauma-Gone will be just about out of business before we see a payment on either of these gigs.

The office door connecting to the warehouse opens and Harold clumps in, chewing on his umpteenth toothpick of the day. Wordlessly, he walks over to where the wall controls for the AC are, next to a huge wall map of Los Angeles County, and flicks the switch to “off.” There is no aggression in the movement and no recognition of my comfort, only a one-track mind focused entirely on the bottom line. I am not surprised by the gesture, and am not inclined to glance up from the computer screen. Harold next clumps over to join me, leaning his head invasively over my shoulder to check out the photos I am tagging. “Go to others,” he insists, his accented English making this a rushed jumble of mouth mush. I do as he says, flicking over to the “before” pictures on the City Hall job. The Offramp pics, though technically more gruesome, don't have the star wattage to command his attention. He snorts deep, next to my ear, unaware, loudly culling the snot from his nose and throat into the cavern of his mouth, and then, taking the toothpick from his mouth only momentarily, spits a gob of phlegm into the trashcan beside us. Without checking, I'm certain it is the color of the elevator walls in my apartment. “Maybe you don't run AC so much, I wouldn't get colds,” he explains, looking away, embarrassed. He has no cold, and he does this often. Our attention returns to the computer screen and Harold likes what he sees. “They got that fucker.” His slime-soaked toothpick goes into the trashcan next and he stands, presiding over me, his casual demeanor now replaced by one of authority.

“I notice you didn't turn to cameras,” he scolds. It is the chiding that I have been expecting. “This high-profile job exposure for us, you got be poster boy for the company. We need work always.”

“I didn't want to be on TV.”

“You need get over that. We need work.”

“We've been doing fine without the news filming me so far…”

He clucks. “Always good for more work. Lucky for you they got shot of work truck. Good shot. I still saw you on TV, though. So, no point trying to hide from cameras, huh?”

“We'll see, I guess.”
Goddamnit
.

“Here,” Harold reaches into his pocket and pulls out the folded slip that is my paycheck. It does not include the previous two jobs, but there has been enough work over the past two weeks to warrant paying me something. “It is little bit short,” he admits, once again averting his eyes from me. “Needed money pay for paper towels.” This is a lie of sorts. Every paycheck I get is a little bit short for one reason or another, and though each time he is ashamed of himself for doing it, he creates an excuse to justify it away. This time it is paper towels. The company makes more than enough money to cover all expenses, me included, but Harold, in his own, cheap way, knows that the ex-con in me isn't going to raise a fuss about it.