Roger Stelljes - First Case

At the time of his death, Harris was just starting his own law practice, running it out of a run-down job share office with four other young lawyers. Harris was an only child and both his parents were dead. He appeared to be a loner and few people seemed to notice that he passed. When he died and nobody seemed to be missing him, Jordan Paris made a calculation.

Jordan Paris became Michael Harris, proving the Committee of Bar Examiners for the State of California correct about Paris’s lack of moral character.

Paris assumed his friend’s identity, moved to Florida and was admitted to the bar. After three years practicing in Florida, he moved to Illinois for two years and then had been at KBMP for the last two years. At KBMP he became the model senior associate, working almost exclusively for Stan Busch, trying cases and putting himself on a potential path to partnership.

Harris impressed Oliver. So much so that Gordon Oliver called a friend of his named Jane Phipp, who worked the career center at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law. Oliver raved to Phipp about Harris, how personable he was and what a good lawyer and mentor he was. Phipp related to Mac that she said to Oliver that she didn’t remember Michael Harris in that way and the two of them did a little more talking and corresponding and they realized they were not talking about the same person.

Oliver did what good young lawyers do, research. Mac had to hand it to him. Gordon Oliver pretty much had it all and was dead on based on what Mac and Lich had dug up in the last three hours.

Mac laid it all out on the table for Paris.

“This is not what you think, detective,” Paris pleaded. “I did not kill Gordon Oliver.”

“I don’t know, Jordan,” Mac replied casually. “It seems to me like you’ve got huge motive to have done so. Oliver figures out you’re not who you say you are, that you’ve assumed Michael Harris’s identity and that you’ve been practicing law under his name. He confronts you about it a day or two ago, threatening to expose you to the firm, the authorities and anyone else who would be interested. I mean, you’re finished but good. Before he does that, before he reports you, maybe he offers you some sort of alternative. Maybe he’s worried about the damage it will do to the firm, so he gives you the chance to come clean or maybe just leave town, a little get out of jail free card. Whatever it was, it doesn’t work for you. So you went to The Mahogany to confront him.”

“You might not have even wanted to kill him,” Lich added.

“That’s right,” McRyan stated, sitting back in his chair, folding his arms across his chest, his right leg over his left, “You just wanted to talk again, but he rebuffs you. He’ll have none of it. Everything is falling apart. So you lose it. You hit him in the back of the head. Gordon stumbles, falls and hits his head on the bumper. Then he isn’t moving. He’s dead. You killed him.”

“So you panic,” Dick followed. “You put his body in the back of the truck and you get the heck out of there. It might have helped if you’d grabbed his wallet, watch, etcetera… so that it looked like a robbery. I’m a little surprised you didn’t think of that. It certainly caused us to look in other directions, such as the law firm where we found you.”

“I didn’t kill him, detectives,” Paris exclaimed. “I didn’t even know Gordon knew about me. If he did, he didn’t let on at all. I had no idea.”

“Come on,” Lich replied exasperated. “You can’t expect us to believe that.”

“It’s true, you have to believe me.”

“Why?” McRyan retorted. “There’s nothing about you that is true, that is real. Your whole life is a lie.”

“That’s true. What you say is true, everything, except the part where I killed him,” Paris exclaimed and then slumped back in his chair, rubbed his face and exhaled. “Look, I’ve been pretending to be Michael Harris for eight years. I’ve grown eyes in the back of my head. I could sense a couple of people might have been on to me in Florida so I moved on. Same thing when I worked in Chicago, there was a lawyer in the office who started asking some questions that told me it was time to get out while I could. So I could smell it coming in Miami and Chicago. But I got nary a whiff here. I had no clue.”

It was Mac’s turn to sit back. His gut was telling him Paris might be on the level. He looked over to Lich who was unimpressed with Paris’ performance.

Mac flipped back through some pages from his notebook. “You said to me the other day that you left your office on the night Oliver was murdered around 11:15 p.m., correct?”

“Yes.”

“That’s plenty of time for you to get to The Mahogany and to the back alley and wait for Oliver to leave.”

“I went right home that night. I left the office at 11:15, I got to my apartment at 11:25 and I was asleep ten minutes later. I was exhausted from preparing for trial.”

“Can anyone verify that?”

Paris’s head went down and his shoulders slumped. He shook his head. “I live alone. I drove to my apartment along Grand Avenue, parked and went into my place.”

“Any security in your building?”

Paris shook his head.

“Any cameras that could verify your arrival?” Mac followed.

Paris shook his head.

“Any neighbors you saw on the way in?” Mac asked.

“No.”

“That’s not exactly what we would call airtight there, Jordan.”

“I don’t know what else to say, detective,” Paris uttered. “It’s the truth.”

McRyan and Lich stepped out of the interrogation room and into the hallway. It was after midnight. “So what do you think?” Mac asked.

“I think he’s guilty as the day is long,” Dick answered. “You actually have doubts?”

“I don’t know.”

Lich rolled his eyes. He was tired. It was late. “What? Something is bothering you, Mac, so frickin’ spit it out.”

Mac plopped himself down into his desk chair, pinched the bridge of his nose and exhaled. “The part where he says he’d grown eyes in the back of his head. Something about that rang true to me.”

Lich grabbed his own desk chair and rolled it over to Mac’s desk. He sat down, leaned forward in his chair, his elbows on his knees, ready to impart a little wisdom on his smart but young partner. “Mac, the guy has been lying to people for eight years. He’s gotten really good at it. Now I hate admitting this, especially to you, but in my experience lawyers tend to be pretty bright people, Mac. They’re smart. Paris adds to that, a well-developed ability to lie. Put those two things together and you have yourself a lethal weapon-which is capable of doing who knows what. In this case, the lethal weapon was willing to kill. Mac, he killed Oliver two nights ago. Since then he’s had plenty of time to think about what he would say if we got onto him, which we did. He’s playing us, he’s playing you. Don’t let him.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Mac answered as he sat back up to his desk. A forensics report was sitting on the desk. The forensics reports identified where the blood covered brass plate from the crime scene came from. “Or maybe I am right.”

“Huh?” Lich said.

Mac handed him the forensics report. “Take a look at what that blood covered brass plate is from.”

Dick read the report, and looked up to Mac.

“Do you remember where we saw one of those?”

Lich nodded.

“We got the wrong guy.”

“I can prove it all.”

Stan Busch sat awaiting Mac and Lich in the interrogation room. Busch, as usual, was smartly attired in a black pin stripe suit, white monogrammed dress shirt and red silk tie, looking like a million bucks. In the last eight hours Mac and Lich managed to reveal that looking like a million dollars and living a million dollar lifestyle was why Stan Busch was their man.