The Squeeze

by Paul Schueller

  Outdated fluorescent lights created a strobe effect on the open case files strewn about his desk. The pit, as the detectives called it, wasn’t a great place to concentrate, but Doug did his best to comb through the materials. He thought if he could just close a case or two more his boss would get off his back. Tommy had been right about that part of Doug’s situation and his relationship with his boss; he was in trouble.

  Doug pretty much just had work in his life which allowed time for a growing obsession with Tommy that started when Doug first investigated Paul Smith’s death. Doug had tracked Tommy’s career and knew that he had sold his business just a few months after Paul’s death. Even at that point, he didn’t know how much it sold for and didn’t have anything else to go on. However, when he heard and read about the implosion of Tommy’s second business he called in some favors. He got himself invited to the Friday meeting where all the attorneys went after Tommy.

  Doug used the connection to Paul’s death as justification to represent the city to ensure their jurisdiction in any local crimes wasn’t compromised. He enjoyed watching Tommy squirm all day and then gained significant credibility with the city and county when George died just days later.

  That put Doug into full conspiracy mode and it certainly helped make his case that Tommy might tie back to Paul Smith’s death. It was enough for the ADA to seek and attain a subpoena for Tommy’s phone records.

  He looked down again trying to focus; an after-bar shooting with no witnesses didn’t hold much promise, nor did the jewelry store murder of a security guard. Doug came right back to two files, one with the name George Shannon and the other Paul Smith. Ironically, they weren’t even murder investigation files, but obviously for Doug, Tommy Gardner was the suspect who tied these two deaths together. There was nothing simple about these cases. Only the Paul Smith file was really his case, and it was still classified as an accidental drowning death. George’s death was still Montana’s jurisdiction, but Doug liked Tommy for both.

  Doug found Tommy totally unlikeable, even from a distance, and an arrogant ass who looked capable of murder, along with circumstances that surely indicated the same. This was all assessed just by being in the room with Tommy a couple of times, but never having spoken to him directly until the previous day’s interrogation. After that conversation he was even more convinced Tommy was capable of murder.

  Doug periodically glanced up to see the pitying looks from passing detectives and officers. He had the worst murder case close rate of all active homicide detectives in the city, but he vowed, again, to make something out of this mess. His other cases were stone cold anyway, and solving two murders this complicated might give him enough breathing room to get all the way to retirement. It appeared to Doug and his colleagues that his boss was letting him run with his intuition about Tommy, knowing it might lead to either a big win or Doug’s termination.

  His boss saw an upside either way. No matter how you looked at it, Doug had been persistent, clever, and manipulative enough to at least have a shot at turning two accidental deaths into murder cases, and ultimately convictions.

  Even though it had been a couple of years, Doug remembered talking to George when he briefly investigated Paul’s death. Although George and Paul worked together, Doug had been more interested in the main owner of the business, Tommy Gardner. The only motive Doug could find at the time was the fact that Paul’s stock options reverted back to Tommy upon Paul’s death. At the time, all of the company stock was held by Tommy, the business wasn’t for sale, and Doug viewed it as a small PR firm that couldn’t have been worth much. Since the value of the options was pure speculation, it made a motive pretty difficult to prove. The only slightly incriminating evidence was a cell call from Tommy to Paul minutes before he drowned.

  Paul had been walking along the Chicago River when he received the call. However, there were several witnesses who confirmed that Paul was very drunk when he left a downtown bar, and based on where they found his body, he likely had fallen in the river and drowned walking home. Doug had agreed at the time with the decision to list it as an accidental death. He didn’t mind avoiding another open murder case on his record, but he never let go of his suspicions.

  For Doug, George’s death just a couple of days after the plea had changed everything. Two accidental deaths were way more than Doug could chalk up to coincidence, so he spent the days after seeing George’s obituary digging back into his old Paul Smith case file and researching everything he could on Tommy. Paul’s stock options were for ten percent of Tommy’s business, and it turned out that if he had lived he would have made about two million when Tommy sold his company.

  Doug continued to fidget in his chair and page through the file, thinking through the information he had collected and where he could go with it next. His boss’s glare unnerved Doug slightly before replaying in his mind what he had learned when he contacted the Whitefish Police Department the previous week. The local Whitefish police, led by Officer Murphy, hadn’t seen any reason to view a fifty-something-year-old guy hitting a tree while skiing as anything other than an accident. Doug remembered exaggerating the extent of the tie to the Paul Smith case to soften Officer Murphy into sharing more information. The officer sent over the autopsy report and pictures from the scene. The Whitefish Police Department view was that this was clearly an accidental death and would stay that way unless Doug found enough evidence to make them think otherwise. They would be happy to help, but were not planning to drive an investigation. Doug had even gone as far as to contact George’s widow, Deb, just a few days after his death to ask if George’s personal belongings could be sent to him, for administrative reasons. To his surprise, Deb had agreed.

  Doug was happy to at least have an autopsy report, some pictures from the scene, and George’s personal effects and computer to go on. An autopsy due to any death at a ski resort was standard procedure because there was plenty of lawsuit potential with such situations. Doug noted that the death resulted from blunt force trauma to the brain. He had passed the report on to the Chicago Coroner’s Office for their review.

  The warrant that Doug received was only for cell and office phone records, not Tommy’s home. That turned out to be enough to further fuel Doug’s interest. There was a message from George on Tommy’s work phone from the day he died informing Tommy that he had “fixed the problem” they had discussed earlier. If that wasn’t incriminating enough, there were also three short calls from a payphone in Whitefish to Tommy’s cell. The first was only ten seconds, the second a bit longer, and the third nearly a minute. Those calls were the day before George’s death.

  Doug didn’t want to share too much of this information with Tommy too soon, and planned to dole it out slowly to keep Tommy talking. That added up to a lot of coincidence . . . but very little proof. Doug knew that without a weapon, a crime scene that was never treated like one, and little, if any, admissible evidence, he would never get an arrest warrant, much less a conviction. Doug’s only hope was to go after Tommy and get him to confess. He didn’t have any other choice. It had clearly backfired the first time, but it wouldn't stop Doug from trying again.

  19

  By morning, the sunny spring weather had given way to a blanket of fog so dense that water accumulated on anything that tried to cut through it. The dreariness matched Tommy’s mood as he willed himself up the police station steps for the second day in a row. He was ushered to the same room as the previous day. Doug was already waiting.

  “Thanks for coming back,” Doug said.

  “Well, since I haven’t done anything, I figured why not? You already know I hate attorneys,” Tommy said, “and I need to get you guys pointed in a different direction.”

  “A different direction or the right direction?”

  “You know what I mean. Or do you really still think I did this?” Tommy asked.

  “I still know you did this,” Doug offered. “Only reason we’re here again today is because my bosses think maybe I was a bit p
remature in wanting to arrest you.”

  “You were going to arrest me yesterday?”

  “Still thinking about doing it today,” Doug shot back.

  “That’s bullshit. A Chicago cop arresting me for a Montana case. If you’re that delusional, then I should get an attorney. You mind if I make a call?” Tommy asked.

  “Go ahead, but if you wait a couple of minutes here you might get some more information by cooperating,” Doug said.

  Tommy paused, still believing he couldn’t say anything incriminating, then said, “Fine. Five minutes, tops.”

  “Kind of a coincidence, don’t you think, the timing of George’s death?”

  “Yeah, a fuck’n terrible coincidence for me. He was my only hope to get my name cleared.” Tommy was feeling picked on again, and he sounded like it. He was whiny.

  “You already made a deal on all of the trading related charges. You were banned from any commodity business for life. Remember, I was there.”

  “If you were sober enough to have read all the documents, you would also know the ban only holds if I can’t prove it was someone else,” Tommy said.

  “Seems like getting rid of someone who could prove you did it would be half the battle.”

  “That’s your motive?” Tommy asked.

  “Yeah. You get rid of George and try to point all the shit you did back to him. A dead man don’t defend himself,” Doug said.

  “Weak,” Tommy muttered.

  “You made it better yesterday, pointing out that it was in John’s backyard. That way, if it ever did come out that it wasn’t an accident, we would look at John.”

  “Yeah, see how that worked out for me?” Tommy said.

  “Don’t you get it? You were the reason I was there in the negotiations.

  Cook County and the City of Chicago didn’t want some white collar criminal getting away with another blue collar crime.”

  “So the city of Chicago put their best detective on a crime that hadn’t happened yet? Sounds to me like they were just trying to keep you busy.”

  Tommy was under Doug’s skin again.

  “Listen, you son of a bitch. I knew you were scum from the moment I got this case.”

  “Yes, the case that hadn’t happened yet.”

  “No, the reason I got assigned to this is that I investigated a suspicious death of one of your employees at your first company. Turns out that Paul Smith would have gotten at least a couple of million dollars in the sale of your first business if he had lived a little longer.”

  Tommy started to get a little scared and confused again. Had McClellan been watching him on and off for more than two years? Paul had fallen in the river and drowned.

  Doug continued. “Over two million dollars sounds like a good motive to me.”

  “How come I never heard anything about the investigation?” Tommy asked.

  “Wasn’t enough evidence at the time that it was you. This whole thing with the stock options reverting back to you . . . I discounted it at the time because it was only ten percent of some PR business. I thought, “what could that be worth?” But with George's death, I took another look and realized it was big money, and now it looks like we have a pattern.”

  “I’m starting to get it. You got yourself assigned to my settlement because you spent the last couple of years looking to pin something on me. No wonder you didn’t look at John; I’m your pet project.”

  “Sure, I kept my eye on you and wanted to make sure the settlement was only on the financial stuff, but now that looks pretty smart given another accidental death and all.”

  “Not smart, just obsessive,” Tommy said. “So, you got right on a plane to Montana to prove an accident was my fault.”

  “Well, yeah, the local guys thought it was an accident. No reason, without a motive to think it was anything other than a guy running into a tree.”

  “So, big Chicago cop comes to save the day,” Tommy said.

  “They were happy to share information with me,” Doug reasoned.

  “Sure they were. What kind of evidence did you make up for that exchange?”

  “Didn’t have to make any up. Just needed to get the autopsy report back to Chicago and start piecing this together.”

  “What did you find out?” Tommy asked.

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?” Doug snorted.

  “Listen. I’m back here because your bosses think you’re as overzealous and vindictive as I do. You've had this case for maybe a week and already honed in just on me. Did you ever give a serious look at any other suspects? I need to know what you have on me and what the hell is in that phone message.”

  Doug paused, looked at the camera, and then said, “The whole thing looked like an accident if that’s what you wanted to see on the mountain, but the body said something else.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Well, first of all, it looks like a tree hit him not that he hit a tree.”

  “What?”

  “Smacked in the side of the head, we think, with some type of bark-covered tree club. Had to be standing up because the other side of his head wasn’t caved in.”

  “So that sounds like he ran into a tree to me.”

  “Except when you look at his body, his ribs and pelvis were crushed in the front and the back, like he was hit lying down,” Doug explained.

  “That’s it? Somehow that points at me?”

  “Well, it points at murder.”

  “Yeah, and I know a ton of criminal types to help with this in Montana,” Tommy said.

  “Listen. George is the second guy you’ve known to have a deadly accident with so much at stake. Seems like too much of a coincidence,” Doug said.

  Tommy could see his point and wanted to shift gears. “So, what’s in this phone message?”

  “First, you need to tell me about John or anyone else who might want George dead.” The list of George’s enemies was pretty short, actually near non-existent, so Tommy started with John.

  “Well, maybe John put George up to the fraud. He knew he needed someone on my side of the business to pull this off. Then, once the business imploded, he would need to get rid of George, or risk losing millions. Or, maybe it was someone at McKinstry. They’re going to make a lot of money, hundreds of millions, probably even billions over time.”

  “Tell me more about the forty million John made,” McClellan asked.

  “He basically bet against his own business, our business. Kind of a massive hedge strategy. He shorted carbon credits, which means he agreed to borrow them for a fee. If the price of carbon tanked, he was protected because he could buy them at a much lower price to cover the credits that he borrowed. If they didn’t go down, he was out a couple million for the fees for the short sales, but then our business would have been a big success. The guys at McKinstry can get you more details.”

  “Anything illegal about what John did with the hedging, assuming he didn’t commit fraud within the business?”

  “Well, I don’t know. Maybe not, but it’s sure unethical.”

  “So, he killed George to hide his unethical behavior?” Doug asked.

  “Maybe George was John’s partner because someone else made forty million, too. I think the name of the other business was RD Partners.

  Figure it out. Follow the money for God’s sake! Who knows, maybe George figured out it was John messing with our business and he killed George to avoid being exposed.” Tommy explained.

  “But there’s no evidence that George did anything, right?”

  “Not that I know of,” admitted Tommy. “But someone did, and they had to have access. It had to be someone inside the company.”

  “Could John have simply been covering his ass financially with his hedging positions and not have been involved in fraud at the company or any murder?” Doug asked.

  “I guess, but not likely from where I sit.” Tommy said.

  “I think where you sit is messed up. Looks like his strategy wouldn’t have paid off if the
company was successful, so he wasn’t going to win twice,” Doug said.

  “Maybe not win twice, but it sure stopped him from losing,” Tommy said. “So, that’s it?” McClellan asked.

  “Uhh, yeah.”

  “Anyone else come to mind?”

  “Well, no.”

  Doug got up and offered Tommy a handshake. “So, thanks for your time.”

  “What about the voice message?” Tommy asked.

  “I don’t think I want to share that today,” Doug said. “Maybe if you have some more tangible information later. This is an ongoing investigation.”

  “You promised,” Tommy said.

  “You asked. I didn’t promise. And by the way, you are still a person of interest in the death of George Shannon. Please don’t try to leave the country.” In a matter of seconds, Tommy found himself on the precinct steps for the second time in less than twenty-four hours wondering what had happened.

  20

  Doug knew that he needed to find more evidence tying Tommy to the murder. He needed this case, and he needed it soon. His job was probably in jeopardy. He headed back to meet with the coroner who had received the autopsy report.

  The coroner assigned to work with Doug on the case was Shirley Callahan, a bright doctor with a promising career married to another bright doctor with a promising career. Given that she wanted kids and had the right equipment, along with a more realistic ego than her husband, Shirley had settled into a less glamorous career, but one with manageable hours.

  During his previous visits, he observed that scrubs and tennis shoes weren’t enough to hide an appealing figure. Natural red hair and fingernails to match had Doug enamored. Doug was doughy, had a face marred by alcohol and was only mildly interesting in conversation, none of which got in the way of believing that he was a sought-after commodity. “So, what new information do you have for me?” Doug said as he walked in on Shirley’s autopsy work.

  Shirley recognized him, but it took her a moment since they had only worked together on this single case. “I didn’t call you, and I’m a bit busy,” Shirley said as she pulled a bullet from the rather large ass of a heavily tattooed Caucasian corpse.