6/6/66

by JN Lenz

  The date Clyde had murdered the bitch child abuser, had coincided with the date we sold the original location for the Avery Funeral Home. I would realize this as I was stuffing file number twenty six back into its file box. Remembering back to that day like it was just last week, the pair of executives from Ralcan Property Holdings Corporation showed up in Largo. The unexpected visit made to offer Clyde and I significantly more money to buy the place than we had paid years earlier.

  We paid one million six hundred thousand dollars for the place through that very favorable arrangement with the Avery’s. There wasn’t a property that we had purchased that was not somehow connected to the number six, business or pleasure, six made the decision for us.

  For some of the properties we purchased the number was in the address.

  There was a number we purchased with a six in the asking or purchase price.

  One gentleman was sixty when he decided to sell to us.

  Three had a six in their phone number.

  Two owner’s birthdays had been on the twenty sixth, one on the sixteenth.

  Several Funeral Homes registered their previous years services at a total which

  included the number six, from 263 to 886.

  One we purchased had six cars.

  There was the one in Montreal that displayed six caskets in the display room.

  Five locations each employed a total of six employees.

  Four of our acquisitions had six car garages.

  There were those that sold in their twenty sixth and forty sixth year in business.

  The number always made its presence known to both or either of us, if it didn’t, we wouldn’t buy.

  After the pair from Ralcan Properties introduced themselves, I closed the office door. Clyde was in Toronto, and rarely involved himself in this side of our business. When it came to acquisitions, he did little beyond signing his name, after the Lawyers had completed their work.

  The pair got straight to the point on the desire to purchase our property, which along with several neighboring lots would form the perimeter of a sixty story office tower. Sitting directly across from the pair I attempted to not look shocked at the single sheet they handed across to me with a total offer of nine million six hundred thousand dollars.

  In an attempt to conceal my excitement I calmly pulled a calculator from one of the desk drawers and began punching a series of numbers, I knew right then I was taking that deal with not so much as trying a counter offer. The calculator would tell me the offer price was exactly six times our original investment, I pushed my chair back as I stood and extended my hand.

  “Gentlemen I believe we have ourselves a deal.”

  I would shake on the agreement with the Ralcan representatives

  “On the condition my partner Clyde Drexler is on board, which I have no doubt he will be we can move forward. The time required for the relocation of the business should be the only condition from our end”

  “That will not be an issue, legal and engineering will take close to two years which should provide you ample time to locate a suitable new location for the funeral home.”

  “Two years, fantastic. At that I can see nothing to stand in the way of our deal.”

  I would say with my hand still extended shaking both the executives hands from behind the old oak desk. I had to control the urge to jump up and down and give them a big hug instead, it felt like I just won the lottery.

  The construction would not begin on the tower for over two years and we had evacuated the soon to be demolished turn of the century building in the heart of the city months before its demise. There was no question the property’s value had far outstripped its structures net business worth, this deal would open my eyes on the value in the property underneath the funeral home we owned and would purchase in the future.

  With the drop in property values in early nineteen nineties it would only be the location of Avery’s in the core of the city that allowed us to do so well with its nineteen ninety four. For the next several years I would take this money to purchase any funeral home that came on the market which was located in an urban setting, banking on an increase of property value to match the revenue from the business.

  Selling the Avery Funeral Home would mean moving the location of the funeral business further to the northern boundary of the city, away from the downtown core. That same afternoon when I had called Clyde to tell him about the offer for nine point six million dollars for the Avery Funeral Home he first responded with a cheer, followed immediately by

  “We need to build the new place; nothing existing I want the place to be from the ground up. I’m gonna take the lead on this one Jack; I know exactly how I want the place laid out. All new embalming facilities, a state of the art crematorium, a chapel with fixed seating that does not have to double for visiting, those will all be done in dedicated rooms, a large car port at the front and side when the weather is bad.”

  “Holly shit Clyde chill, we got two years to get this place built, and you’re gonna give yourself a fucking heart attack. So I take it I can tell Ralcan we have a deal?”

  “Have a deal; of course we have a fucking deal. Are you kidding me you did not already say yes?”

  “No I told them it was almost a sure thing but that I needed to talk to you first.”

  “Christ man, get on the phone and sign us up, this is going to be amazing, I can’t wait to get started on the plans. First we have to get out and find some property, but once we find that I know exactly how the facility needed to be laid out and what I want included.”

  “It’s all yours Clyde, you know what you want, make the place our show piece of the business.”

  Sitting here in Clyde’s secret basement enclave of that very building that he would oversee from the first sketch to the last coat of paint, I realized now why he had been so ecstatic at the time. The new facility would be close enough to continue our service for the old neighborhood, but sat in an area with drastically cheaper property values.

  The new Funeral Home became our flag ship facility, the quality touches of the interior rooms would result in a doubling of the services at the New Avery Funeral Home compared to the old location. In the back section of the building and next to Clyde’s underground chamber the concrete walls divided this area and the crematorium blast furnaces. The furnaces would be used as part of the cover for his hidden chamber. The new efficient blast furnaces utilized heat exchangers to also heat the entire funeral home, its use primary still for the welfare and low margin disposals. The front sections of the funeral home had been reserved for the high end family services.

  Clyde must have been on top of the world back then designing and having this section of the place built in secret, I could see him for the very first time like a kid in a candy shop. How he had managed to deliver these stainless cabinets and table, along with the countless supplies without ever being noticed, he always was good at not been noticed. All the times Clyde must have spent down here over the past thirty years, the entire structure had been completed at the beginning of nineteen ninety six, the same year Sid was born.

  While I was elbow deep in diapers, it was apparent to me now that he had locked himself away down here planning his murders when he had told me he was off hunting, fishing, or planning an expedition to somewhere. Not that I really paid attention back then, I was too busy dividing my time between expanding our business and holidaying around the world with Lilly and Sid in our spare time.

  The new structure, land and all would cost less than four million. We mortgaged a couple million of the total and used the other seven and a half million towards the purchase of additional homes.

  I had always known how much Clyde loved to spend time alone in the woods or on a lake far up north fishing, back then I had no reason not to believe Clyde would inform me he was taking off for a couple of weeks to head into the back country. That was just the kind of guy he was, so unlike most single men with that kind of money who would be more interested
in chasing skirts and displaying their wealth. Not Clyde, he drove rugged off road trucks and four wheelers deep into the bush and purchased a variety of small boats to spend his time fishing on one of the hundreds of small lakes scattered around the province.

  No flashy car or clothes for him, at time I guess he was spending some of that time back then alone in the bush or on some remote lakes in the North, using the time to plan all these murders over the last thirty years. The man was a predator in a sea of kelp. It would appear that everywhere Clyde turned the opportunity to kill presented itself, and he seized so many of those chances. There would be few boundaries limiting his administration of death.

  The morning that the Police tactical squad would baton their way into the front door of the grow house we all referred to as number three, Fitch would be standing dumbfounded in the room directly beside the front entrance. The heavily armored cops burst into the hallway so quickly and surrounded Jessie before he could even drop the bucket of fertilizer he held in his right hand.

  The cops would slam him face down into the table of three week old plants he would explain to all three of us days later. After close to a decade of working in the four grows houses, the twins had surrounded their work environment with not only closed circuit TV but audio as well.

  There was a camera and a monitor in each room of all four houses, the shot displayed on the screen would randomly scan through each room of the four houses including the front door of each home. A remote control Oliver and Fitch each carried could change to a specific camera as well. The remote also controlled the sound system and intercom which piped music through every room of the house simultaneously.

  Having the ability to see each other meant they knew which rooms and plants had already been tended to, and it was easier to find each other in one of the forty six grow rooms which made up the four houses. The music prevented Fitch from hearing any of the cops as they assembled outside the door of house number three readying themselves to blast their way into the house.

  The dozen or so cops may have shown up on one of the houses monitors as the screen scrolled automatically but neither Fitch nor Oliver had noticed. As the cops readied themselves at the front door of house number three, Fitch and Oliver carried on about their business. It would not be for a number of minutes after the cop’s rammed open the front door that Oliver, who was working on the top floor of house number one, would catch the dark objects moving around in the monitor out of the corner of his eye. Snapping his head around to stare at the monitor, he would grab the remote to lock in the camera from the living room in house number three.

  Oliver watched in fear as a pair of gun wielding officers scanned the room, he could see the back of Fitch as he laid face down on the floor, his hands cuffed behind his back. Dropping everything in his hands to the floor, Oliver raced for the entrance to the garage on the main floor of house number one.

  The number one and two houses sat side by side with the number three house sitting kitty corner to number one, as Oliver rounded the bottom of the staircase he would look up at one of the main floor monitors which was now displaying the outside door to house number four. Several Police cars and one larger van could be seen parked along the street and on the front yard of house number three.

  Oliver threw open the man door into the garage and jumping into the BMW he had parked in the garage not more than an hour earlier, Oliver would start the engine and hit the garage door opener simultaneously. The view to the street was clear of any Police cars or officers, unlike the street directly behind in front of houses they called numbered three and four.

  Pulling the sedan out of the garage before again hitting the button on the remote to close the garage door behind the fleeing car; he would turn right and go the long back way out of the subdivision. By the time Oliver made it out of the subdivision he would miss the sight of his twin brother being shoved into the back of the Police Paddy wagon. It would be only a matter of time before the cops entered the series of four homes and traced the names of the ownership back to Pierre Bullard and & Norman Pershing, trying his best to subdue the desire to speed like hell across the city streets back towards his apartment.

  Oliver managed to keep the speeds near the speed limit giving him enough time to calm down and convince himself a return to the apartment was out of the question; instead he decided to head straight for his bank. Before parking he circled the entire block in search of any visible Police cruisers or under covers in their brown and dark blue Crown Victoria’s, of which Oliver could see none. The keys would be left in the ignition of the BMW after Oliver parked the car in front of the bank.

  Running up to the front doors of the bank Oliver would calmly walk across the foyer of the large bank to the small lineup of customers waiting for the next open cashier wicket. After a short five minute wait Oliver would calmly provide the identification of Norman Pershing and request access to his safety deposit box which Pierre Bullard also had joint access to.

  Taking Oliver to a small room to the side of the regular wickets, a bank employee would set a long lock box on the desk in front of Oliver before leaving the room and closing the door behind him. Opening the lock box Oliver would remove the copy of both his and Jessie’s true identification, including passports along with the sixty thousand dollars in cash which was also in the lock box.

  Leaving the bank, Oliver would walk directly past the BMW that he had left parked on the city street with the keys still in the ignition and the doors unlocked. Oliver was hoping someone might steal the car and lead the cops on some wild chase with the cops thinking they were pursuing some kind of drug baron. There would be no returning to the apartment where he had lived for close to the past ten years. Oliver instead would leave everything that he had purchased in the name of Norman Pershing behind that day, exiting the front door of the bank his old self, never to look back.

  Walking for a good half dozen city blocks, Oliver would check himself into a Hotel using his own identity for the first time in a decade. Once he made it into the room he would give me a call, I was sitting in my office at home at the time when he explained everything that had just happened.

  The pair of us would find out later from our lawyer that Fitch had not provided the cops with a shred of information. Turned out they rough handled him around the grow house before bringing loading him into the Police van in an attempt to extract info, all to no avail. Once in custody Pierre Bullard was booked on cultivation and trafficking charges, he would refuse to provide anything but his name until his lawyer arrived. Fitch hoped his stalling would ensure his twin brother Oliver had enough time to get to the bank and retrieve their true identifications, in the case of an emergency I also had a second copy of both Fitch and Oliver’s real identification in one of my safety deposit boxes.

  Once the lawyer arrived at the Police station, Fitch would provide the confession that he was Pierre Bullard, his name he explained was listed as the owner on the four deeds for the grow houses. Each one of the houses had contained hundreds of marijuana plants in various stages of growth, this along with twenty pounds that the pair had clipped the day before the Police broke down the door. This was the extent of the information Pierre would provide to the questioning investigators, they would soon raid his apartment. Within hours they had discovered Pierre had lied, the name of Norman Pershing was jointly listed on the land registry at city hall. The police would raid both their apartments; Norman was nowhere to be found.

  After being held for six days in jail, Pierre Bullard who had not a single past infraction against him in the Police records, was presented in court where his lawyer requested bail. Due to the size of the grow operation and Pierre’s lack of cooperation with the authorities, he was placed on a two hundred and fifty thousand dollar bail. A return to court was ordered for Pierre Bullard to stand trial on cultivation and trafficking charges.

  The three of us each provided one of our hundred thousand dollar tubes from the bush to the Lawyer, the funds to bail Fitch out of j
ail and cover the legal fees.

  The jail would release Pierre late on a Tuesday morning in early April, by six that evening the plane with both Oliver and Jessie touched down in the Grand Cayman Islands.

  They both live there to this day.

  After picking Fitch up at the jail when he posted bail, the pair drove back to the hotel Oliver had been staying at for most of the last three weeks. Fitch would shave off his thick beard and use a set of clippers to clip the long shoulder length hair down to a uniform length of about a half an inch in length. The twins would return the rental car Oliver had been renting for the past few weeks at the airport before boarding the Air Canada jet to George Town, Grand Cayman.

  The following day after Fitch was released from jail and they were both safely out of the country, Oliver had planned a celebration so both Clyde and I flew down to the Grand Caymans to join them in our mutual retirement party and to thank Jessie for taking one for the team. Even though Fitch had also lost all the possessions in the apartment and the BMW in the Police raid, the majority of their funds had been safely stashed away in a series of off shore accounts and legal investments. Both would decide to sell all the businesses the pair had invested in and liquidated all their assets shortly after arriving in the Caribbean.

  Taking all of these funds I would help Oliver in getting the majority of the funds transferred to various banks and institutions in the Grand Cayman Islands, they would keep the close to million in cash the pair had stashed in remote locations across Northern Ontario buried for the future. The celebration with the four of us in the Caymans would be a celebration in real style; we all felt such a weight off our shoulders. Mostly we all wanted to thank Fitch for having had to spend the last three weeks in jail. Oliver had purchased both himself and Fitch similar condos on the opposite end of a beach side complex which also over looked a marina that the pair would purchase win that first year of living in the Grand Caymans.