“Gordon Andrew Oliver,” Coonan answered, handing a wallet to Mac. “Patrol cop ran the plate on this truck and it belongs to Oliver. Bartender also confirmed it was his truck.”
“Cause of death?” Lich asked.
“Preliminary is blunt force trauma to the right temple area,” Coonan pointed with his pen to the temple area and a large hematoma. Then Coonan pointed to the back right of the victim’s head. “He might have been hit first in the back of his head. See the bruising and blood here at the base of his skull?” The coroner pointed with his pen at the right side of the back of the victim’s skull. Mac nodded.
Coonan continued: “He might have been hit from behind, falls and hits the bumper with the front right of his head and then falls to the ground.”
Mac leaned down to look at the back of the skull, “He was hit more than once?”
“That indeed appears to be the case,” Coonan answered. “I’ll have to see for sure when I examine him but it looks like he was hit back here twice, maybe three times. I can confirm once I get the body on the slab. But it’s the blow to the temple on the bumper that probably killed him. This is very preliminary, of course, but I bet I’ll find temporal bleeding and without immediate medical attention, the blow to the front of the head from the bumper was fatal.” The coroner was an old pro who didn’t idly speculate. Mac suspected much of what Coonan was surmising would turn out to be the case.
Lich was standing to the left of the truck. “So our guy was hit from behind, hits the bumper and falls over here to the left of the truck.”
Mac walked over to the left side of the car. He looked at the corner of the metal bumper on the left side of the truck and the smudges of blood on the bumper. In addition to that blood, Crime Scene had also marked the blood pool on the ground, just to the left of the back left side of the truck. There was also a small amount of splatter on the truck’s back left quarter panel.
“You think robbery, Mac?” Lich asked, testing.
Mac shook his head, “If it were, why not take the wallet? Jack, was any money in the wallet?”
“Yeah, Mac, couple of hundred bucks, American Express and Discover cards too, plus the guy has an Omega watch, pretty nice, still on his wrist.”
Mac looked to Lich, “If you were robbing the guy…”
“…You’d take the wallet, the money and credit cards.”
“And you wouldn’t stuff the guy in the rear bed of the truck. You’d take the wallet, watch, maybe even the truck, and get out of Dodge.”
“So probably not a robbery then. I’m with you so far Mac,” Lich said.
“Jack, can you give me a time of death?” Mac asked.
“I’d say somewhere between midnight and two a.m.” Mac nodded and jotted down some notes.
“Who found the vic?” Lich asked.
“Bartender from The Mahogany,” Coonan answered. “He’s talking to the uniform cop back there.” Coonan was pointing to the back entrance to The Mahogany thirty feet behind them.
Mac and Lich walked back to the uniform cop who was standing next to a tall, thin, disheveled man with a goatee. They introduced themselves to the clearly shaken bartender named Chet Remer. “You know our victim?” Mac asked.
Remer nodded then said, “Gordy was a regular with us. He was in two or three nights a week, occasionally on a weekend.”
“When did you see him last?”
“Last night. He was in like usual after work.”
“Where does he work?” Lich asked.
“At a law firm. Krueger, Ballantine, Montague and Preston.”
Lich looked to Mac, the lawyer turned cop. “Do you know the firm?”
Mac nodded. “Sure. KBMP is a well-known firm with forty, maybe forty-five attorneys, I think. Their offices are here downtown, over in the old Lowry Lewis Building.” Then to the bartender: “Mr. Remer, was Gordon Oliver an attorney there?”
“An associate I think.”
“So he was in last night?” Mac asked.
The bartender nodded.
“What time did he arrive?”
“Maybe nine-thirty, give or take. That was kind of a usual time for him. He’d been working some longer hours as of late he said. He said he was gearing up for trial.”
“What time did he leave the bar last night?”
“He left around midnight, I think. I remembered he gave me a wave on the way out the back and it was no big deal. He’s done it a hundred times I bet.”
“Did he always park out back like that?”
“Yeah,” Remer answered. “We let a few regulars like Gordy do that. A little perk.”
“How was it you found Mr. Oliver this morning then?” Lich asked.
“I went to a little after bar party with some friends last night after we closed at one. My friends dropped me back off at the end of the alley here this morning a little before five. My Jeep is parked back here. I noticed Gordy’s truck was still here which I thought was odd since I saw him leave, and leave alone. I walked over and saw the blood on the driver’s side. I looked inside the truck’s cab, didn’t see him and then got a sick feeling in my stomach. So I called 911. The police got here a few minutes later, popped the truck’s rear bed gate and flip cover and,” Remer’s lip started to tremble, “there he was.”
“I know this is difficult,” Mac said, “but can you think of anyone that would want to hurt Mr. Oliver?”
“No I can’t,” Remer answered. “He was a good guy, especially for a lawyer.”
Mac and Lich both snorted, which Remer noted.
“I know, I know,” Remer said. “Lawyers can be a little full of themselves.”
“Tell me about it,” Lich retorted, looking right at Mac with a toothless smile.
“Whatever,” Mac shot back, shaking his head.
Remer picked up on it, “You a lawyer or something?” he asked Mac. “Or maybe you’re married to one.”
“Good pick-up,” Mac answered, remembering that bartenders spend significant amounts of time observing and evaluating people. “I was going to be, but then I didn’t. Wife is a lawyer.”
Remer nodded. “Then you know this is a lawyer bar, right?”
Mac nodded. He’d been in a half-dozen times over the years with his wife and law school classmates.
“Well, we obviously see lots of them in here and, I don’t care how much they spend, some of them are real assholes, arrogant and full of self-importance. But Gordy wasn’t. He was plenty confident for sure, but he was friendly and not a bad looking guy at all. He dressed well and looked the lawyer part, pinstripe suits, nice ties, fancy watch, spent some money on the haircut, all that. He cut a good look and from what I observed, he had an effective line of bullshit for the ladies.”
“Get himself a fair amount of tail, did he?” Lich asked, his mind drifting to one of the few topics he liked to discuss in detail and, as Mac had learned, with great frequency.
Remer smiled. “Gordy left with company plenty of nights. I asked him his secret and he’d just say ‘you gotta use all the tools in the toolbox, Chet.’”
“He was killed outside your bar,” Mac said, getting back on track. “Did anyone in here give him trouble last night?”
“Not last night.”
“How about other nights then?” Mac followed, catching the bartender’s drift.
“Maybe a month ago he got into it pretty good with a guy in the bar. It was heated. We had a couple of off duty cops in here that night and they broke it up before it got physical, but it looked like it could have easily escalated to that level.”
“Do you know why?”
Remer smiled. “Like I said, Gordy was good with the ladies and from what I saw he didn’t really let a diamond ring stand in his way. He almost viewed it as a challenge. I think that night we might have had an angry husband or boyfriend.”
“Do you have a name?” Mac asked, jotting down notes.
“I don’t. I can check but I don’t think we wrote anything up on it.”
“Did you recognize the guy?”
“Not at the time. I probably would if I saw him again because of what happened that night. But he wasn’t a regular, that’s for sure, but whether that was the only time he was in here I don’t know. I know he hasn’t been back and Gordy never mentioned it again. I think he was here with some people from his law firm that night so they might know more about it.”