6/6/66

by JN Lenz

  I remember the day he told me about Hope’s decision. The two of us had decided to go fishing and for once managed to get an early start in the morning, we hit the water early returning to a favorite small inland lake. As always Clyde and I had the place to ourselves, this was one of the lakes we fished and never talked about to anyone else. This was our fishing honey hole which always gave us our limit on Pickerel, including a ridiculously great shore lunch every time.

  The little lake would take some time to get back to, requiring the use of a small four wheeler pulling the twelve foot aluminum through small trails to access our lake. That place would never let us down, even though we would see less of the lake as the years passed by. That morning we launched the little aluminum boat with the electric motor and trolled away from the bank and over to the far side of the small lake, it was where all the reeds and grass grew in greater abundance beside a deeper open bowl, a hole that always delivered.

  It was one of those warm summer mornings when that low lying mist dances just above the water line, the lake is completely surrounded by trees growing tight to the shore, interrupted only by the rock and granite of the Canadian Shield jutting out in various locations around the perimeter of the lake. The mist that only rose a couple feet from above the water was accompanied by the harmony of birds and insects springing back to life along with the morning sun.

  Clyde and I had both been enjoying a morning tug of Brandy from the wine skin and had just enjoyed the morning’s first joint. In short it was one of those picture perfect mornings, the kind there were not enough of. It was then that Clyde announced very casually that he would longer be seeing Hope. I had already known that she was dating someone from on line; Clyde had already mentioned that to me some time ago along with his speculation that Hope would most likely move out to Alberta. I still see him at the back of the twelve foot aluminum boat, fishing pole hanging lightly on the end of his fingertips casting out a lazy lob out into the water as he spoke about Hope and her leaving.

  Clyde was typically casual about the big change happening in his life, he joked that he was somewhat relieved

  “The last couple of years have been a hell of a lot of fun but I’m running on empty my friend, I’m not used to having so much female company. Just having Chloe to contend with will be enough for me.”

  “Why don’t you have her move in with you?”

  “That’s not the agreement. I don’t want to live with anyone, and I’m sure she has no interest in being with me.”

  “Don’t know until you ask”

  “I already know, trust me ours is a business agreement, it’s less messy that way”

  “Messy like what, what the hell would you know about the mess of a relationship anyway?”

  “Don’t want to know, that’s the whole point”

  “Just you and a fishing pole”

  “No a fishing pole with another fish on the end, get the net and shut the hell up about my fuck buddies. I like things just the way they are.”

  Thinking back to days like that made realizing Clyde was a serial murderer that much more unimaginable. How he could he always have been so normal when he was around me, like he never had a care in the world. All the while, he would be planning and carrying out murders year after year. Laughing and joking around with me or Lilly one minute when only hours earlier he had just killed someone, or disposed of one of his victims into the incinerator before showing up for Sunday dinner with Lilly and I. Showing up at the door with flowers for Lilly and a smile on his face, never bitter or distant just the same old Clyde.

  On the odd occasion when Clyde would be bitchy about something, it wasn’t like he would go ballistic or lose his temper; he always kept his temper under control. Should there not have been some visible manic tendencies that I should have noticed? There were never any irrational acts that he had ever displayed to even hint he was a mass murderer. I watched as much Colombo’s and Rockford Files as the next guy, surely all that detective knowledge would have allowed me to pick up on something.

  I mean the cops have this shit down to a science, with their predictability patterns and whatever the fuck computer algorithms they have developed. Where had they been all these years? After all these years with not so much as a ticket against Clyde, they must not know a thing. Clyde was still alive and as free a man as any of us, climbing the side of a mountain with my only son.

  Fuck I am going to drive myself crazy, the thoughts raced across my brain. All these memories from the past I thought I had known, replaced now with the facts. Looking down at the pile of murder files I wondered what other parts of my life had been a complete lie? My whole life almost unrecognizable now, was this the legacy of my life as well? Being the best friend and accomplice to a mass murderer, who would believe anything but my own involvement and guilt in these killings?

  Fuck Clyde, I should have known that fucker was bad news back when I was six, calling me by the wrong name. Convincing me I should change it, even as a kid could be such a manipulative prick. What would Lilly ever think if she knew any of this, let alone all of it? I think her bubbly little heart would just explode and die if any of these stories made their way back to her.

  Christ my head hurt; there was just too much shit to process all at once. As these murders and Clyde’s deception continued to race through my head, something continued to push me to read on. Once again I looked up towards the shiny stainless table before dropping my head back down to the pile of papers to my left. Maybe the reading will stop my head from spinning and hurting, I thought as I scanned the remainder of file number forty.

  There was little left to say regarding Benny that I had not already figured out. Chloe would stay employed by Clyde for a year and four months after Hope had decided to quit. For Chloe, who had been working a full time job in a upscale clothing boutique during this same time her ream of opening her own shop would come true. Wanting a fresh start, Chloe had decided to start this new venture in Vancouver and not Toronto. She felt that by moving a year before the two thousand and twelve Olympics, her store would be established before the tourist boom from the games.

  Chloe would be the last “exclusive employee” Clyde would have; she offered to move in with Clyde for a couple of weeks before she departed for Vancouver, which he accepted. It was another of Chloe’s smart business decisions (although after all that time she had to have cared for Clyde a great deal), as Clyde handed her one of the last tubes of cash he had remaining in the bush of the Crown Land. This was a smaller tube which held over fifty thousand dollars in cash. I remember Lilly being so upset when Chloe moved to Vancouver, she felt terrible for Clyde. I think she insisted he eat dinner at our house for two months straight after her move to the west coast.

  This became a time when Clyde truly began to bond with Sid, who had just turned five. Before Chloe’s departure uncle Clyde showered our son with toys, but had spent very little time with him. I think he was scared he’d hurt him by accident or something when he was just a baby, then as a toddler Clyde traveled and spent his time between Hope and Chloe. Now after reading the files I realized his travel was in reality the time required to murder someone. The times he would tell me he was busy keeping on top of our multiple locations he was killing, over and over again. The true foundation for the relationship between Clyde and Sid all began after Chloe moved to Vancouver, Lilly had simply insisted Clyde spend more time with the family.

  Sid instantly became galvanized by Clyde, with his fishing and hiking stories that the kid could not get enough of. In time Clyde would have him alongside him almost every other weekend, off in the bush or fishing somewhere. The two of them became inseparable, there would be times I felt jealous and left out by their closeness. Those feelings had only occurred on a couple of occasions and were usually my fault, the result of not wanting to pull myself away from work and join the two of them. The three of us would still manage to get out fishing together frequently, when Sid was still a boy. Since guns were never my thing, they
always went to the gun range together without me. Sid, with Clyde’s mentoring would become an excellent shot and adapted the same love for guns that Clyde always maintained.

  I returned the file numbered forty to the right side of the desk, the files I had already read sat alongside in a messy pile. Looking to my left I began to thumb through the pile of unread files, do I read number forty one or do I skip ahead a few files?

  Deciding to move closer to the present time, I began to scan across some of the twenty five murders that Clyde had committed since we both turned forty. I pushed aside the top few files and pulled a file from the pile, folding over the cover page of the file I quickly searched for a name of the victim of Clyde’s forty fourth murder. The name seemed familiar to me as soon as I read it, but I just could not place a face or person to the name.

  Stanley Curtis it turned out was the president of the country’s largest Telecom Corporation, during his tenure as president the company experienced one of the largest telecom implosions in the history of the world. The large conglomerate had plunged from a hundred billion dollars in market capitalization in the late nineties, to bankruptcy following the tech bubble burst in the year two thousand. The exploits and company direction of Yotel by Mr. Curtis had been well publicized by the media during the bankruptcy. The corporation had become a monster of an enterprise both in value and creative book keeping, the face of deception for the public and business world became the egocentric Stanley Curtis. Scores of newspaper articles before and after the great collapse of Yotel had been written, most of which pointed to Stanley Curtis as the primary factor in the Corporations demise.

  In the years leading up to its failure, Stanley would insist to the company’s pensioners that their investments were safe and would always provide a high level of not only stock growth but yearly dividend income as well. During the bankruptcy the former employees would discover their pension money had been stolen, they would not receive a penny from the terminated assets of the company.

  This was a company almost everyone owned in some way or another, if you owned a mutual fund you owned a piece of Yotel. I had long forgotten the name of Stanley Curtis, but I remembered very well the spectacular collapse of the industrial giant and the financial hardship it bestowed on thousands of people. Hundreds if not thousands had lost the equivalent to their life savings, only to have the companies executives walk away with millions in pension and performance pay settlements. There would be no charges of falsification of documents or misrepresentation of revenue for Stanley Curtis, or his executive team from the massive failure of Yootel. The sole punishment he would receive was the result of a civil case which ordered Stanley Curtis to pay a total of three million dollars to a group who had sued him.

  The outrage in the papers and the editorials over the Yotel affair died down after a couple of months, the media only stay interested for so long. There would be the odd article about a pending class action law suit against Curtis and others for their gross incompetence and misappropriation of funds but the man never spent a day behind bars.

  Once it was clear to Clyde that the authorities would be taking no legal action against Mr. Curtis for his fraud, nor would he see a jail cell for this theft on a massive scale from the backs of regular people from coast to coast , Clyde would target him for elimination.

  I found myself scanning quickly through the initial details of the file on Stanley Curtis, Clyde by this point in time could utilize the web to provide his profile and history of any individual he wanted to track and murder. Technology was such an aid in committing murder, from GPS and night vision goggles to the endless possibilities of the internet, it was a good era to be a murderer.

  Turned out Stanley only lived a little more than an hour’s drive from Clyde’s house, this allowed him to travel back and forth to Stanley’s home for surveillance. The Curtis residence was of course located in a very affluent area, Clyde would use a white service panel van to observe Stanley’s routine. Service vans such as this would be common in the day light hours in a neighborhood such as this, a pair of magnetic Flake Plumbing Company logos were placed on each side of the van.

  Another item Clyde had picked up on Google was Stanley’s love of jogging; he had entered several marathons and was reported to devote six days a week to his passion. The hunch that brought Clyde to the streets of Stanley’s neighborhood would not disappoint him, early each morning Stanley would jog out past the gate of his estate.

  Over the course of the three weeks, Clyde would track the jogging times along with the route he would see Stanley Curtis take. Driving the white van behind Stanley as he jogged would for obvious reasons never work so Clyde would park in various areas of the neighborhood on different days. There was park land displayed within blocks of Stanley’s house on Clyde’s GPS, he would do a quick jog through a couple of the trails late one afternoon.

  The day after his first jog through the bush, Clyde arrived in the van early parking on the street with the entrance to the forested area. Wanting to be in place before the time Stanley normally began his morning run, Clyde would follow the trail for a short distance before trekking off the trail. Finding a large Maple tree, he would climb high enough for a clear view to the trail and a passing Stanley Curtis. It had been fortunate Clyde had decided to arrive early; by six fifteen Stanley could be seen jogging past. Clyde would remain there in the bush for thirty minutes after Stanley had run past, he would return a further half dozen times to the same maple before deciding to kill Stanley.

  The day Clyde chose to kill Stanley Curtis; he would arrive at the trail early to enjoy a brilliant morning sunrise sitting on a large limb half way up the maple tree. The same rented white van would be used; on the morning of the murder he parked it down the road of another entrance to the same bush. This side road against the far side of the bush was gravel; this kept the BMW’s and Mercedes from the nearby neighborhood off the road. Clyde would hike the distance from the bush at the edge of the gravel road to the trail used by Stanley each morning, pulling a tall two wheeled hand cart with oversized pneumatic tires behind him. Before positioning himself up the tree Clyde had stashed the hand cart behind the large tree.

  The wait for Stanley would be a short one as soon after climbing the tree, he watched as Stanley rounded the corner of the trail. Quickly descending the tree, Clyde would pull the hood of the track suit hoody he was wearing up over his head. Immediately after Stanley Curtis disappeared from view around the next corner Clyde jumped out onto the trail.

  Quickly picking up a fast jog, Clyde approached the still running Stanley from the rear. Making enough noise as he approached Stanley to cause him to look back at the approaching noise, Clyde at this point was still more than a dozen feet behind him. Making noise worked as Stanley glanced back at Clyde with a slightly surprised look, not being used to seeing anyone in the bush on his morning run. Clyde had been sure to wear a Ralph Loren hoody and track pants, the bright red polo player against the grey of the cloth relaying to Stanley that Clyde instantly belonged here as well.

  Stanley Curtis gave a slight nod before turning his head back around as he continued to jog, instantly Clyde sprinted up behind him pulling a length of piano wire from one of the hoody pockets. Each end of the piano wire had been wrapped around a one inch oak dowel, grabbing an oak handle in each hand Clyde would throw his outstretched hands out when within a couple feet of Stanley. After sweeping the wire over the top of Curtis’s head and down around his soft pampered neck, Clyde would stop dead in his tracks.

  With his arms locked in place, Clyde would pull back with all his strength feeling the strain on the wires against the wood he held relentlessly with his black leather gloves. The force of the fine wire sliced clean back past the vocal cords and larynx as the blood sprayed out from Stanley’s neck, only the bone from his spine stopping the wires progress through his entire neck.

  As the tension of the wire stopped Stanley in his tracks, causing his legs to buckle out from beneath him, his neck and
head stopped dead. The greedy pricks attempts at screaming coming out in blurbs of air and blood spitting out in front of him, helping to project even more streams of blood down his chest.

  Stanley would be pulled by the wire still around his neck towards the cover of the bush, by the time he had pulled the body down into the small hollow behind a stand of ten foot pines; the wire by now had sliced Stanley clear up to his ears. What began as a violent struggle on the trail had been reduced to a lifeless body by the time Clyde had dragged him to the small hollow behind the pines. Now in the hollow the pair could not be seen from the trail should anyone would pass along the trail, that is providing they did not have an off leash dog.

  Leaving the dead body in the gully, Clyde quickly returned to the trail and erased the evidence of the struggling feet and the blood that had made it onto the dirt path. This would be accomplished by using a severed limb from a near by pine tree as a rake to eliminate any sign of the struggle. Returning to the cover of the forest and the maple tree, Clyde would grab the two wheeled dolly and return to the lifeless body in the ditch. The blood soaked body would be rolled into a camouflage tarp before being strapped to the cart using three small ratchet straps. Having memorized the back side of the bush by trekking through it numerous times over the past thirty days, he would pull the dead cadaver of Stanley Curtis through the bush towards the parked van.

  The tarp was an extra precaution in case someone saw him from a distance, a bird watcher with a set of binoculars or some shit. He would write how the run with the cart through the bush went as expected; Clyde followed the same path he had been creating during his time in the bush planning the attack. The trail had been partially cleared of debris making the run back to the van quicker and free of drama. As he breached the gravel road, the white van was sitting close by in the long grass by the side of the gravel road. Having parked on the east side of the bush the van still sat in the early morning shade.