6/6/66

by JN Lenz

  When he was finished with the bodies he could just bring them into here and burn them. Had Clyde burned his victims late at night or had he used the rogue oven when the stoves fires raged on the floor above during the scheduled cremations that ran six days a week at this location? Stepping to the black cast iron door directly in front of me I pulled first the top then the bottom latch towards me, they were stiff enough to require two hands to open each of the latches.

  Swinging the door open, I realized it was exactly what I had anticipated, the pungent smell of scorched flesh stung at my senses immediately. I could almost taste its acrid bitterness, as I searched the heat resistant bricks of its interior blackened from prior use. Resting directly on the bottom of the oven there was a heavy gauge steel pull out rack. The rack would be for the placement of the body on the bottom of the oven.

  I was about to close the door to stop the stench’s presence when I noticed a series of switches and a touch pad on the opposite wall that housed the fat door. Flicking the one labeled exhaust fan up and within a few minutes the fan motor that had been activated somewhere up above, removed the smell from the room. The touch pad was a timer and heat setting for the oven and an emergency extinguisher system, the last dial was listed as fan had a timer instead of a simple on off switch.

  The switch between the touch pad and the fan timer switch had no label, when I flicked the switch up the table began to move slowly from inside the oven and directly towards me. Releasing the switch the table stopped immediately and now sat half protruded into the space between the entrance into the furnace room and the red clay brick wall. This whole place was adding up to Clyde’s miniature little death chamber, down here Clyde could not only plan murders but facilitated them as well; the final step would be to vaporize the evidence.

  Pushing the switch to the down position the table retreated into its original resting place inside the blast furnace. Once again requiring the strength of two hands I closed each of the thick solid handles of the cast iron blast furnace. As I turned after closing the pair of fat doors which concealed the blast furnace I made note of the elevator on the opposing wall thinking I can’t remember seeing an elevator upstairs when I entered the garage in the Three Fifty Six..

  Walking over to the elevator I began to realize it was slightly shorter than a normal elevator would be, pushing the green button on the wall beside the elevator I could hear a faint murr above my head in the ceiling. After a muted thud sound from behind the doors they began to disappear into each side of the wall revealing the floor of a short service elevator.

  Each of the two buttons inside the elevator had an arrow, the top facing up and the bottom facing down, as I reached over pushing the bottom button the floor of the elevator moved down from its present height of about four feet from the floor. The switches allowed the body to be placed on any height of table here in the basement; no doubt the floor height could be adjusted similarly above in the garage. I would have to go upstairs and have another look in the garage before carrying on with a few more of the files, although I had been at it for hours I could not stop now, not yet.

  Before heading back up the stairs that led to the above garage in search of the elevator I had missed hours earlier, I went in search of a something to drink. I could do without food but I was thirsty as hell. Looking across the stainless cabinets that lined much of the main room I spotted one of the stainless doors with a thick black rubber stripping between the door and the cabinet. Ah ha, must be a fridge. It was in fact a fridge with a shelf of Clyde’s favorite soda, Dr. Pepper. There were a few bottles of beer and even a bag of pepperetes.

  I grabbed a can of Dr. Pepper and a couple pepperetes and headed back to the steel door that opened into the stair well. Climbing the stairs and opening the door to the garage I could instantly see where the elevator must be residing, following the wall across in the same direction to where the elevator sat below I could see a series of four doors. Two pairs of doors each swung away from each other, checking the first pair of doors closest to the stairwell door they opened into a utility room with a handful of shovels and brooms along with some various cleaners and containers.

  Moving to the next set of doors I noticed they sat directly across from the large overhead door. I swung the doors open to reveal the elevator doors to the bunker. Why Clyde had decided the elevator doors should be hidden escaped me, unless there were times when other people other than Clyde might see this area. But no locks resided on this set of doors I had just pulled open; the covered elevator doors would remain a mystery to me. What was not a mystery was why the elevator was located here in the garage, a service car could back right up to the elevator doors and the slide out table of the service car meant the body could be slid directly into the elevator on a wheeled dolly.

  Chewing on the beef pepperetes and sipping the Dr. Pepper, I was again drawn back to the office to resume my station at the large desk now littered with Clyde’s files. Returning to the desk I compared the messy pile of the files I had already read to the right and the remaining boxes which housed the unread files.

  How many poor bastards had Clyde killed after that year when we both celebrated our fortieth birthday? Seemed even the birth of Sid that year had not changed Clyde’s killing ways, that year had represented such a year of change in all of our lives, for Clyde it appeared some things had not changed at all. Had Clyde somehow changed the manner in which he chose the targets and murder victims after that year, my memory was clear that this was the year Clyde stopped killing wild game. Who had Clyde decided would die in the same year when the world around us was enjoying the last year of borrowed wealth and rising housing prices, all of which would soon collapse, plunging the world into the worst recession in a century.

  Our combined wealth had continued to grow beyond anything Clyde and I could have hoped for by that point in our lives, money never seemed to be a prime driver in Clyde’s life. So what was it that continued to drive Clyde to murder year after year? Risking his freedom to spend the remainder of his life behind bars, what was Clyde’s driving force behind these continued killings?

  I needed to read on, perhaps there would be some answers. A hint to why he had continued to kill so long after the financial requirements had been met at Shackle’s may still reside among the remaining boxes of files.

  The six files which would detail the murders Clyde had committed during the year of two thousand and six, sat spread across the top of a file box on the right hand side of the desk. Earlier in the morning I had carried several of the boxes over from the large drawers in the cabinet beside the desk, only the year was listed on each of the boxes edge which were stacked neatly inside the large drawers in chronological order. The six files sat there removed from the box that housed them, I set the almost empty can of Dr. Pepper down on the desk and picked the first of the files from the top of the pile. The fortieth murder Clyde had committed and the first of the year two thousand and six.

  Agency Two Eighty Six had been a long time favorite of Clyde’s prior to that year, for the past ten years it had become Clyde’s primary resource for the escorts he would use. The Agency catered to an upscale clientele, I remember Clyde mentioning the place a handful of times over the years. By Escorts the agency of course offered the services of these women for the purpose of prostitution, Clyde had a few favorite employees at Agency Two Eighty Six which he spent a considerable amount of time with. On the rare opportunity when I felt I could question Clyde as to why he felt comfortable in front of prostitutes with his scared and deformed penis end , yet could not bridge that same gap with a regular girlfriend. The response from Clyde was very matter of fact and blunt.

  “They are professional so there are no feelings for them involved, they have no reason to comment or react to me over it, the girls are smart enough to know it would not be a financially wise move to critique my grotesque pecker end” was the response I would receive from him.

  The file marked forty would center on the very Agency that Cl
yde frequently utilized, the murder the result of abuse against one of his favorite girls by the hand of the Agency’s enforcer. Along with our increase in wealth thru the nineties, Clyde’s use of the cities escort services increased substantially. He would patronize the firms with the prettiest women and those businesses that could offer the highest standards, there was little chance he would seek the services from the disgusting street level pimp controlled drug addict prostitutes.

  In the eyes of Clyde, the higher end agencies employed decent relatively normal women who would work here in these establishments in relative safety while being paid exceptionally well for the sexual acts they were required to perform. Surely none was being forced into the sex trade with the income levels of many of the ladies of the agency well into a six figure yearly income. This illusion Clyde had created around his continued use of these agencies would be changed after an evening with one of his regular ladies.

  Clyde had requested Chloe when he contacted the agency in the middle of the week on that third week of January, in the year two thousand and six. Initially Clyde had been told by the agency that Chloe would be unavailable for a Friday meeting. Using his persistence and the offer of an additional two hundred dollars to the female on the opposite end of the phone who handled the bookings for the agency, Clyde was able to secure a reservation with Chloe for coming Friday evening.

  Clyde made no mention in the file as to why he required Chloe’s presence that week more so that one of the other ladies who he repeatedly visited with. Instead of a diner and a night out on the town which normally proceeded bringing his escorts back home, Clyde had planned an evening at his house for himself and Chloe on that Friday night in January. There would be a meal close to completion in Clyde’s kitchen by the time the cab would drop Chloe off at his front door at just before seven. Clyde enjoyed cooking for others on occasion but normally found little reason to cook for just one, so Clyde normally at in restaurants when he was alone.

  By the time Chloe arrived at Clyde’s house that night, the skies above had turned completely black, there was not a star in the sky he would note in the file. Clyde had prepared the living room and dining areas of the house with lighting by candle light, a bottle of wine sat chilling in a small decanter willed with ice on the large square coffee table in the center of the living room. Clyde’s home at that time had a large open layout with the dining area and kitchen all open to the center living room.

  A tall field stone fireplace reaching from the floor to the ceiling centered on the wall opposite the kitchen. It was done in a craftsman style with an oversized covered porch with gently sloping roof line which helped define and give the bungalow its unique look and identity. The home was not large, aside from the good sized open area a pair of bedrooms and a single four piece bath and one two piece washroom made up the house. The basement housed the laundry area, furnace and electrical area all of which remained in its original unfinished cinder block walls and concrete floors.

  Clyde had decided on a simple meal of tossed green salad with goat cheese feta and olives followed by lobster tails and extra-large scallops wrapped in bacon, fresh bread and scalloped potatoes.

  “The smells of the meal I had prepared wafted through the entire small home as I opened the door. Pulling the door to Chloe, she had rung the original old front door brass ringer; she as always blew me away with her beauty and poise. How this amazing girl could be spending her life as a prostitute seems a little surreal to be sure, the money no question being the primary driving forces.”

  Clyde would write glowingly about this lady of the evening, seemed he now looked at her as a more of a friend than a paid escort. I could tell in how Clyde wrote about Chloe that he cared about her a great deal.

  There would be no one other than Clyde who completely knew why he could not give his heart to any woman; I certainly never got a straight answer out of him in all the years I had known him. The most I could ever pull from him was a

  “Don’t want to be married, I can’t be held to account like that. I hunt and fish and fuck when I want”.

  Clyde retorted, or something to that effect. I always knew it was just bravado to mask his loneliness. Reading the details of his encounters with Chloe, verified to me that Clyde was not as thick skinned as he would like everybody to believe. It was clear to me that Clyde was a romantic at heart, but refused to allow himself to fall in love. Perhaps after his murderous streak had begun it was not simply the deformity of his penis that prevented him from seeking out permanent female companionship. Perhaps the fear that Clyde would destroy that very person he loved should they ever discover his murderous past that he banned himself from love.

  For my entire life I had continued to believe that Clyde’s lack of commitment to a woman had solely to do with his scared penis inflicted by that piece of shit fucker dad of his. I had witnessed Clyde’s humiliation first hand in our youth; the disgust dispensed by of one our High Schools prettiest girls. The girls nick name was Finley Faruga, but the name of Finny is what everyone that knew her back then called her, Finny had taken a real liking to Clyde, the rugged bush man who always dressed in plaid back in those teenage years.

  By dressing in cheap plaids was Clyde’s attempt to disguise how poor he was, plus at the time it realistically displayed the true person he was at heart. Clyde wore that style of clothing back in his youth like a damn uniform, a true woodsman, I don’t think I saw him not wear plaid more than a dozen times from the age of eleven to nineteen. In all my sixty years I never would meet another individual that had to find the money to cloth themselves at the age of eleven, like Clyde was forced to do back then.

  That pair of looser degenerate parents of his, it’s a wonder after Clyde got a taste of murder so many years ago that he never returned to Parsons and butchered them both for all the abuse they had bestowed on him. Instead Clyde would never return to the family shack on the edge of town, although I know he had mentioned a couple times to me years ago the hidden trailer. Clyde had wondered out loud to me if his asshole father had ever discovered it buried beneath the junk. There would be no revenge visit by Clyde, leaving them to rot in their own miserable lives would be revenge enough for the pair.

  During the years while we were growing up I would try to hand him the odd shirt or some socks, but my Gestapo mother did inventory on my clothes or some fucking thing. Every time I gave him more than a pair of socks, she would bitch at me for weeks about the missing article of clothes. If I told her I lost the article of clothes in question (and told Clyde not to wear anything I had given him around my house) the old bitch would harp on me for a week and force me to make up the value of the article in hard labor around the house. Other than the few freebies of clothes that Clyde gathered along the way, his resulting fashion statement would be muted to plain tees under his plaid shirts and no name jeans which looked as close to Levi’s as Clyde could find. The guy would be at home in any of the surrounding lumber mills in the heavily wooded North Country.

  The attraction Finny had for Clyde would not be swayed because he came from a poor family with looser drug addicted and alcoholic parents. Finny was quickly developing a reputation as a bit of a shit disturber and the black sheep of her religious family. Her good looks and the large breasts that Finny had been naturally bestowed with over shadowed her stern Christian upbringing which was not enough to prevent her from becoming a party girl with a particular penchant for alcohol and boys. Finny loved to party and had past history of liking the bad boys of the crowd, albeit the good looking ones. It would be Finny who would be the one to approach Clyde while at a large bush party, with the majority of the high school’s students in attendance.

  That night at the party Chloe would push a slip of paper with her phone number along with a little skanky note deep into Clyde’s front pocket before leaving the bush party that night. At the same time she whispered warmly in his ear that he needed to take her on a date in the real near future, it would be well worth his time she assured him. Bot
h Clyde and Finny would agree on a date two nights later and became a real number for a short while, this until they progressed to the point of Finny offering to provide Clyde with a blow job.

  Finny was a little drunk that night, when a pile of us where at a party drinking for several hours. A grade twelve classmate and mutual friend‘s parents were gone for the weekend and the guy was stupid enough to throw a party and preceded to tell everyone he knew about it. There was a good sized crowd in the house at the point that Finny pulled Clyde away from the drinking game he had been winning against a handful of us. I was just as happy because I was getting way to pissed (something I remember paying for the next day); Finny coaxed Clyde into spending some time alone with her in one of the upstairs bedrooms of the house. Considering I was fully drunk at the time I still remember to this day it did take much coaxing on her part to get Clyde to follow her up those stairs that night. I also remember the screams that bellowed down the hallways and thru the entire noise filled house minutes later.

  Finny would continue in the loudest possible voice calling Clyde a freak and continuing on yelling what is that on the end of your dick like a disease of some kind or something or are you just like grossly deformed. Finny continued on in her loud drunken rant making her way to a group of her friends to continue the loud insults, by the time I had made it over to where Finny was now standing beside her friends, almost the entire crowd of drunken partiers laughed loudly adding their own jeers at Clyde’s apparently disgusting penis.