THE DEAD COOK IN THE DUCT
Morose Landscapers, break-time philosophers, and finding a pair of legs where they really shouldn't have been.
Except for landscaping, I haven’t worked many jobs in which one could realistically expect to find a dead body. A wine retail store? That lady has collapsed, somebody call an ambulance! Any number of office jobs? Bob’s so hung over he fell asleep in the production meeting—Bob? Oh my God, Bob?! These lack the vocational oompf that needs to accompany discovering an ex-human.
As landscapers, we were privy to all sorts of personal situations. Heated domestic discussions, intoxicated clients, frisky clients, depressed and anxious and accident-prone clients, so why wouldn’t a natural extension of any of these windows into other people’s lives include the stiffened meat-pockets generated by murder, suicide, or death-by-misadventure?
One particularly hot summer, for a period of a couple of weeks, we hadn’t seen one of our regular residential landscape clients for a while and a strange smell met us as we unloaded at their house and started our mowers. When you notice a particular smell in spite of your two-stroke engine farting out gas fumes in your face, it’s a smell of note.
Lunchtime conjecture turned to gallows humour and we were entirely convinced our client, Client X, had shuffled off their mortal coil somewhere in their house. You would think that would beget a call to someone with a badge of some sort to investigate, but instead our morbid guesses turned into a real-life game of Clue. Client X slipped in the shower on their $25 bar of lemongrass rainforest soap, hit their head, and the dog, Mrs. Muffincakes, ate their face before itself succumbing to starvation. Morbid and funny and irreverent and hello, landscapers.
One day shortly thereafter, Client X made an unexpected, plot-twisting appearance and our lunchtime chat shifted and adapted and now over McDonald’s food we were discussing whether Client X was killing post delivery people, couriers, or just hapless randos from the neighbourhood. Had Client X started with cats and other grabbables or had they simply pirouetted straight into offing humans? Was the first time planned or an act of pure, spontaneous bloodlust? Thank you for coming to my house for dinner, Bertrand, I have something interesting for you for dessert—stab stabstabstabslice and fuck you, Bertrand, and fuck you again and I’m making a man doll out of all of you men! You’ll be the left arm, Bertrand…you’ll be sooo good as the left arm…
Would Client X eventually go dormant like a sociopathic cicada and then re-emerge ten years later, possibly in a new neighbourhood, and whose neighbours would soon start to complain about the ghastly—and telling—odours on their block?
We prided ourselves on how in-depth and utterly professional our psychological profile of Client X was and quashed any notion that the smell was likely a clogged sump pump or its like. When you’re pushing a lawnmower twelve hours a day in baking summer heat, you take refuge in any worthwhile mind-movie, regardless of, you know, reality. Lunchtime conjecture is the bomb.
Despite the various ruminations of a motley crew of grotty, sun-stroked landscaper types, I was surprised when the job that presented its first rigid biped was a restaurant job in a well-to-do neighbourhood.
The Body
I have no idea what year the cook’s body was found, but it was when I was a hustling teenager working in a popular, local restaurant. I could certainly do the chronological math, but that would just depress everyone and by everyone I mean me.
The restaurant was an extremely well-oiled machine and even as a rudderless teenager, I could marvel at the sheer amount of money moving through the place, the volume of drinks being poured, and the extensive array of humanity that was on show each and every night. It was a microcosm of libations and temptations, it was a place you could find a date or bank, on a good night, on five hundred to a thousand in tips—and not in today’s dollars.
I was a cook at the restaurant—and no, I’m not naming it, I don’t know if it even still exists or has lawyers who still exist, but rambling on about finding a dead body on one’s food-production premises might put said rambler into a suit and tie and court.
We had a rigorous cleaning schedule in the kitchen, emptying the oil out of the fryers, washing down all surfaces, scraping, de-sludging, and the like. At the end of the day, long after the managers and waitstaff had cashed out, had a few drinks (or other things), and stumbled listlessly out into the night, a kindly couple would come in and give the place a one-over. They would vacuum, wipe down the bars and windows and toilets, and basically get the place as ship-shape as possible before the day staff came in after sunrise and started chopping veggies and cooking meaty things for the lunch and dinner rushes.
One fateful morning, the woman part of this couple—let’s call her Isobel—was mopping down the kitchen and saw something that may well have taken a few years off her life: hanging out of the large duct above the flat grill was a pair of legs. A man’s legs, lifeless and dangling and surreal and certainly problematic.
After working at the restaurant for three years, I could draw you a fairly accurate floor map of the place—here’s the walk-in fridge with the case of chickens that went real bad, the freezer I accidentally locked the dishwasher in, the public washroom and the periphery of which a guest had an almost gravity-defying diarrhea attack, and even the back office with its ever-present piles of cash—but in terms of the rooftop access and how it all funnelled into the space above the flat grill and salamander oven, I was at a loss.
Never needing to be on the roof for any reason, I couldn’t understand what would drive someone up there other than malfeasance or maybe a subconscious desire to Darwin oneself out of the gene pool.
Hey Michael, Whose Fucking Legs Were They?
I got into work that morning—likely a weekend as I worked at the restaurant on weekends until I would work full-time in the summers—when I was told about the legs. I was advised that Isobel and her husband, just hours before, had found a pair of limbs hanging out of the duct and had promptly called the police—landscapers, take note!—and the fire department and maybe an ambulance had also shown up, as it their methodology when you dial just three numbers on your phone.
I am most definitely going to change the name of the human the legs belonged to, so let’s call him Cilian. When the emergency team arrived, they assessed, quite astutely, that Cilian had crawled into the large vent on the roof and managed to shimmy his way down towards the very kitchen he worked in during the day. I would have thought any sort of roof vent that allows access to an industrial kitchen of a very popular restaurant and its safe full of cash would have a grate over it to prevent things like raccoons, mice, or thieving bastards from getting in.
But that didn’t seem to be the case and Cilian took it upon himself to successfully circumnavigate what must have been a grease-laden, aromatic vent and then promptly get stuck just as he was about to reach his coveted objective.
Normally, as we finished our shifts, most of us might imbibe in our one, free after-work drink, but unless there was a staff function of some sort, our impulse was to get the fuck away from work because it’s work and not a patio at the beach. How many more hours would a rational person want to spend on the premises of where they toiled? I quickly understood that the late hours of the restaurant/ bar crowd meant their daily wind-down usually happened in another restaurant/ bar—but not their restaurant/bar, for fuck’s sake. Restaurant workers will tell you that is borderline gauche and the sign of someone who was inherently lonely or, in this case, someone who was maybe imbibing a bit too regularly and with a bit too much gusto.
I remember speaking to Cilian after the incident, and yes, spoiler alert, he hadn’t perished in the duct. I remember standing in the kitchen and Cilian walked in, decked out in his civilian clothes (a leather jacket rings a bell), to get his last cheque. I remember he told me that he had got quite drunk and thought it would be a good idea to ascend to the roof and see if he could actually get into the restaurant and maybe drink a lot more.
Had he not had the wherewithal to enter the vent feet-first, we may have never had that conversation, because people who hang upside down for extended periods of time can have any number of life-ending physiological events occur. You’ll note your local clothing bins have added feeder drawers to prevent people stealing their contents and to help stop people not fucking killing themselves while trying to crawl into them. If events had transpired differently, if Cilian had put down his bottle and reached into the vent head-first, Isobel might have come face-to-face with Cilian’s blue and bloated head instead of the dangling feet of an unconscious, asshat drinker.
As he was stoutly pickled and had passed out mid-descent, Cilian’s seemingly lifeless legs still convinced Isobel that he was dead as a doornail, but as Cilian told me he really had no intention to burgle the place, or vandalize it, he just wanted to get in to say he did it and maybe in the process have a celebratory drink or a dozen.
Maybe it was Cilian’s constant observations on the banal aspects of his existence in this microcosm of a life that was quietly building up pressure. Maybe his inner dialogue was quietly stacking bricks upon mental bricks and Cilian was en route to some kind of explosive release. Cilian’s character spoke to the accuracy of his statement, at least on paper. He was cerebral, far more intellectual than most of the folks we worked with, if one can assess others by superficial conversations about food and booze and who’s shagging whom, of course. But, Cilian never struck me as a person who was capable of doing harm to anyone but himself. He appeared to be a man bored senseless by his lot in life, drudgingly stepping one foot in front of the other toward what he perceived as a thankless oblivion.
On his breaks, Cilian would sit outside the back door of the restaurant and smoke cigarettes and digest books rife with philosophers and their like. Was it during one of these breaks, as he digested observations about the absurdities of our species while filling his lungs with carcinogens, that he noticed the ladder to the roof? Did he file its presence away until his subconscious could bubble it up as a possible option for frivolity during a night of drinking?
Either way, I felt great empathy for Cilian as he picked up his final cheque and stood in the kitchen one last time, looking small and sheepish and trying to explain away his actions. Even being younger than him, I could comprehend his inner turmoil, his frustration at living an at-times rudderless life, at smiling at the fucking stupid jokes in the room when he was maybe inwardly debating what his life had amounted to and where he currently stood on his personal trajectory.
From my limited interactions with him, I could say unequivocally that I liked Cilian a lot. Whenever I give him a thought, and that’s not often, I truly hope he landed well after the incident. I can see him as a teacher, or a writer, or a pundit of some sort, commenting productively on how we can better ourselves on this planet. He was eloquent, he was liked by all of us at the restaurant, he was personable, he was funny and quick with a quip, even if said quips usually soared over a lot of heads, and he was a good guy with whom to have a few drinks.
Cilian would probably laugh at this insultingly-simplistic assessment, but at the end of the day, I think he crawled feet-first into that vent not because he wanted to boast that he had conquered, nor for a laugh, or even to have a drink in an empty kitchen because every fucking philosopher seems to have had something to say about an empty room or rooms with chairs or whatever.
At the end of the day, I think Cilian crawled into that vent because he truly wanted to be heard.