L.A. Rotten (5 page)

“Tom! You said on the phone that was your name, right? I was wrong earlier when I called you an asshole. You're not like Royal—so don't try to be. Just take the goddamn ride and shut up about it.”

I grit my teeth. “It's across the valley.”

“You can give me gas money.”

“So what do you do?” She turns off the radio in her Tercel to hear the answer, so I know she's serious.

“I clean up crime scenes.”

“Shut the front door! Porno? I'm such an idiot. Of course it would be something with death. Like murders and shit?”

“Murders and shit.”

“Is that where we're headed? To a murder?”

“No, you're taking me to my work truck. After that, I don't know what it is.”

“I heard the lady on the phone say it was an Offramp Inn. Are there lots of murders at those places?”

“It's not just murders—it could be anything…an overdose, an accident, some old man maybe had a heart attack and shit himself…”

A sudden pothole causes the tiny sedan to lurch, but with it comes a sudden sharp bang—metal slapping violently off metal.

“What the hell was that?” I ask, looking toward the back of her car as if I might see a tire go rolling off into the darkness. All I see in her backseat is junk, though—a mound of clothes, wrappers, trash and random odds and ends, piled up nearly to eye level.

“Sorry…” She grins. “I don't have a backseat…and my trunk doesn't stay closed. I hold it down with a wire coat hanger that I twisted into a sort of knot. It always bangs together on bumps—it's like I don't even hear it anymore.”

“Have you ever heard the term ‘slob'?” I ask.

She shrugs, completely unoffended. “A girl never knows when she needs to escape—I've got clothes and stuff back there in case I need to leave town suddenly or something.”

“ ‘Or something' is right. This car is a death trap.”

“That's a funny term for someone in the murder business to use.”

I shake my head. “It doesn't make it any less true.”

“Can I go with you?” Ivy asks out of nowhere.

“What?”

“To the crime scene. I'll be, like, your assistant on this one.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“No. That's why not.”

“Please? Pretty please?”

“This is horrible work. You'll be better off not seeing it.”

“I'll be okay, I've seen a dead body before.”

“Now it's just weird. You have, like, a fascination with it, so definitely not.”

“I do have a fascination, but so what? Maybe going with you will cure me?”

“The answer's no. And it's a firm one.”

“Do I bug you that much?”

“I just don't need any help.”

“If you let me go with you, I will never bother you ever again. If I see you on the street, I will walk the other way. If you call my name even, I'll pretend it's not mine. Just let me go this one time.”

“Why are you so interested in me all of a sudden?”

“I don't know yet,” she admits, impish. “But when I figure it out, you'll be the first one I tell.”

“Turn here.” I point, and she wheels into the industrial park.

“Trauma-Gone,” she says, seeing the sign in the glow of an overhead light, and grinds the Tercel to a stop. “That's a sad name.”

“Look, you're in heels and a skirt—I don't think there's a worse outfit to clean in. How 'bout I call you on the next one?”

“Nope. Let me worry about what I'm wearing—if French maids can get away with heels, I can.”

“Looking at this car, I don't even know if you're capable of cleaning—you might make the crime scene dirtier.”

“Stop it,” she chides, still waiting, expectant.

I drum my knuckles against the window as she stares quietly at me, waiting. Again, I know the right answer to this, and I want to say it, but it just won't form in my throat. “Just don't make me regret this.”

I already know where we're going as soon as the clerk takes me to the stairwell. In the dark of the parking lot somewhere, Ivy sits with the supplies in the truck, waiting for me to come retrieve her. When I'd directed her to wait, I'd anticipated a sullen, pouting protest, but she'd folded her hands in her lap and sat obediently, merely happy to be there.

The clerk, an older white lady with makeup that appears to be one step shy of “clown,” leads me straight to 236, and having seen my camera, pauses smartly for me to take a photo of the door.

“Good luck with this one,” she warns, her voice a whiskey growl. “Trucker suicide. Guy poisoned himself. Spent the last few minutes of his life puking his guts out in the bathroom, God rest his soul.” She looks to gauge my reaction, but finds none. “He missed the toilet with most of it.” I'm still unimpressed. “Jeez, nothing fazes you, does it?”

“Not anymore.”

“I'm sorry, I gotta tell you—I'd hate to be like that.”

“Probably good you don't have my job then.”

She can't tell if I'm being a wiseass, as I say this with a straight face and no tonal inflections; it makes her uncomfortable. “The man's family called. They're hoping to save his possessions, so if you could bag them up, I told his wife we'd leave them in the room until she could drive out and get them.”

“Not a problem.”

She smiles warmly, staring straight into my eyes, as if we've made a connection; I have to look away.

Ivy gags initially at the smell, and to be fair, the stink of it is wretched. Puke is one of those things I've never gotten used to in my line of work. Blood has few mysteries, and guts are all the same, but puke is different. It can be runny or thick, chunky or smooth, multihued or a single, pungent sludge sometimes identifiable as the food it was. Sometimes it's all pink, sometimes green, or black, or yellow, or brown, or…well, any color, natural or otherwise, found in food or liquor.

The bathroom is rampant with internal bile, and somehow the motel clerk's assessment feels like it underwhelmed the situation. While the room itself is not huge, its white tile floor is almost invisible beneath the brown vomit rich with the hot, sour stink of stomach acid. Only twin orbs—where the paramedics' clean shoes dipped into the thick, drying mush—hint at the true color of the bathroom's floor surface. Ivy, knowing she is on thin ice already, gets a grip on her situation and calms down, forcing herself to take slow, labored breaths, and only through her mouth.

I'm placid because the room this time is unspoiled except for a soaked patch of carpet near the bathroom door where the puke leeched in. I can scrub this out. This time, the carpet can stay.

“How do we begin?” Ivy asks, trying hard to be good.

“I've gotta do a photo roll first, but then we're gonna grab a dustpan and start shoveling.”

“Shouldn't we use sawdust or kitty litter or something on it?”

“Too chunky—would just add to the mess.”

“I see.” She does not look enthused. “Should we wear protective stuff?”

“Gloves,” I say. “Past that—nah. It's just puke, it won't kill you.”

“Oh.”

After I snap my photos in the bathroom, I begin to prod the man's stuff into separate groups with the edge of my shoe. I want to more or less document everything the man has brought into the room with him, just as a cover-my-ass maneuver for when his wife comes. His canvas duffel bag, his BVDs, his jeans, his cigarettes, his rig keys, everything is captured in its own digital image. With Ivy put to work in the bathroom scooping up belly chutney from the safety of the shower stall, I move about the room, collecting. Everything I have photographed goes into a heavy black garbage bag where it will be tied, tagged, and left for Mrs. Dead Trucker.

“So what was the dead body?” I ask, momentarily curious.

“Huh?” comes the reply.

“Never mind.”

She appears at the door of the bathroom, shucking off her stained gloves. “No, no…you actually spoke to me. Please? Just ask it again.”

“I said, what was the dead body you saw?”

“Oh! It was my dad.” She says this with a sort of chipper acceptance that makes me speculate. “He passed out, drunk. In his car. In the garage. With the motor running. I found him in the morning.”

“How did that make you feel?” I persist, intrigued about how she can be so unaffected.

“At the time it didn't faze me. My dad raised me like a boy. He took me hunting, taught me to throw a punch…Boys don't cry, you know? I think if I had cried, his ghost would have come and put a cigarette out on me.” Ivy rubs at her tattooed forearm subconsciously after she says this.

“I see.”

“I had bad dreams about it afterwards, though. I used to dream every night that I was burning to death. Like I was paralyzed and on fire, just watching the flames come over me and I couldn't move or anything. It was terrifying. Even in my dreams I could smell my skin burning off—it always smelled like my dad's cigarettes to me. Burning to death is the absolute worst way to die.”

“I wouldn't know,” I say.

“Trust me, it's horrible.” She doesn't get the sarcasm.

“How did you finally overcome your dreams?” My mind flashes to my own twisted nightmares.

“I don't really remember; they just sort of stopped.”

I've been having my nightmares for ten years now, with no signs of stopping. “Oh.”

Ivy continues to watch as I busy myself retrieving a sock from beneath the corner of the bedspring; as I bend, the sudden urge to check comes over me.
Don't do it
, I think, attempting to will myself away from shining my flashlight beneath the bed and becoming further entrenched in the enigma. In the end, my willpower serves me no better than when I try and resist heroin.
I know I'm going to end up doing it anyway, so I might as well get it over with
. Grabbing my light, I drop to my knees and scan the beam across the spread of carpeting, finally coming to rest on the dull, boxy shape in the middle of the floor: the Gideon Bible.

“Motherfucker,” I say, grimacing, now annoyed with myself for seeking it out.

“What?”

“I'm not sure.”

“Try and explain.”

Straining, I reach under the bed and retrieve the book, flipping it open to reveal the condom among the verses—the same verses as the last one. And, likely, the same verses as the other Bibles too.

“What?” she asks again when I don't answer immediately.

“The Bible…with the condom tucked into this exact page. I've found it at other crime scenes. Different Offramp Inns, but all the same room number.”

“This same Bible?”

“No—different Bibles, but all with the same brand of condom, all placed beneath the bed.”

“So what are you saying?”

“I'm not saying anything,” I try.

“Yeah, you are.”

“Okay, I'm pretty certain that whatever happened here was related to what happened there.”

“What happened there?”

“At the last one, a homeless woman was pretty much torn apart with a knife.”

“Well, what should we do about this?”

“Nothing.” I quickly pitch the Bible into the plastic bag. “Not a damn thing.”

“Do you think it's a coincidence then?”

“No.”

“So…then why do nothing?”

“What's to do?”

“Call the police?”

“Nope.”

“Why?”

“Look, telling you anything, bringing you here, I regret it.”

“Fine. Jesus, no cops; pull your tampon out already. I'm just saying we can't do nothing.”

“We
can
do nothing. Easily.”

“We
shouldn't
do nothing then.”

“Why? What would we do anyway? I mean, honestly, outside the cops, there isn't anything we can do.”

“You said it was the same room number on all those jobs, right?”

“Yep.”

“How do you know that for sure? Why would you even remember a room number?”

“This room number…236…it comes up a lot. Lots of bad things happen in lots of different Offramps all over SoCal. Recently, a lot of them have been happening in 236.”

“How come the police don't notice that?”

“Why would they? I'm talking suicides, homicides, robberies gone wrong, overdoses, accidental deaths…there's no pattern to it.”

“But the room numbers?”

“Different cities and areas mean different cops responding. And each homicide doesn't look like the others. The cops don't recognize any sort of pattern, because they can't.”

“And you've just been keeping this to yourself?”

“I tried not to really think too much of it…”

“I don't know. Are you sure you aren't just making a mountain out of…nothing?”

“Why would I do that?”

“I had a roommate who one day decided that she could get coke through the airport if she hid it in a jar of peanut butter. Like the peanut butter would make it impossible to detect. It was just something she dreamed up one day, but she was certain it would work. She's still in jail.”

“This Bible thing…it's happened now at the last four jobs I've done.”

“Maybe it's a new policy and they do it in all the rooms—maybe it's a safe sex thing?”

“It isn't new policy—and I don't know why I'm trying to prove anything to you; I don't care if you don't believe me.” Annoyed, I begin stripping off my gloves.

“What are you doing now?” she asks.

“I don't care if you believe me, but I care if
I
believe me. I'm going to check one of the other rooms to make certain I'm not crazy. Wait here.”

I jog down the stairwell and over to the office. The clown-faced woman is absently reading a travel-zine while attempting to appear like she isn't doing just that.

“Oop—hello,” I interject, causing her to panic with overstated emotion.

“Jesus Christ—you scared me.”

“Hey—do you have the key to 235 available? I've got to check for…cross-contamination.”

“What the hell's that?”

“Technical stuff. I'll bring the key down when I'm done with the other room.”

“Oh…okay,” she agrees, going to pull a keycard from her drawer, which she hands over. It is thin, bone-colored, and chipped at one of the corners. Also, someone has written “Glendale” on the card in looping black ink.

“Are you sure this is right?” I ask, holding the card up to show off the marking.

“Oh yeah, that happens from time to time. We musta caught someone using a card from the Glendale Offramp…See, all the keycards are electronically coded to work for their particular room—but the cards don't know which Offramp Inn, so every so often we get some wiseass who finds out about it on the Internet from some other wiseass and thinks that they can get a free night stay if they hang on to their card. We mostly catch them and send 'em packing, but still, you'd think the company would spend the money to update the system.”

Looking around at the overall starkness of the lobby, I am not surprised that the company is too cheap to take such a corrective measure.

With Ivy at my side, I slide the keycard into 235 and wait until the door clicks. I hit the light and drop down prone, clicking on my flashlight to check beneath the bed. Ivy follows suit. “No Bible,” she announces.

“No shit,” I agree.

I check the bedside drawer where I expect to find the Bible now, and it is there, untouched. Picking it up by the pressboard cover, I give it a healthy shake, knowing that nothing will come of the action.

“No condom,” Ivy admits, now on board. “What are we gonna do about this?”

“Nothing. Not a thing. It is one glimpse of something…into something…and now that we know, we should also know that we don't want to know.”

“You could save someone's life.”

“I don't feel the need to.”

“That's sad too.”

“Fuck off.”

“There you go, trying to be like Royal again.”

“What would you do?”

“You took a shit ton of pictures tonight. Do you take pictures at all your crime scenes?”

“Absolutely.”

“So there you go. We'll look over all the photos from all the Offramp jobs you've done—we'll see if anything sticks out.”

“And then?”

“I don't know, I've never played detective before. We'll figure it out when the time comes.”

“I don't want to do this.”

“Well, I can't do it without your help. And if I don't have your help, I'll just go right to the cops with it. They'll probably want to talk with you, though.”

“I'm still on parole.”

“Wouldn't that suck if you've somehow violated and not helping me ends up being the thing that gets you sent right back to prison?”

I grimace. “Fine. We'll look through the pictures. Just no police—at all.”

“Deal.”

We meet up at the Trauma-Gone headquarters early the next morning before Harold is there. Ivy sits comfortably across the desk as I boot the computer and open the database. She's an interesting girl, seeming totally without guile or social awkwardness from what little I've seen of her in action. While she stares at the computer screen, I sneak a quick glance at her sheath of tattoos. It takes me a moment to realize that among all the color and foliage of her arm ink—all the long tendrils of vines that snake and curl off into tight spirals, some sprouting flowers and lush, green leaves—there are spiders. Inked up and down her arm, several of them, all realistic, all deadly looking. I glance up to see she is staring down at me, and I shift back to the computer.