Page 20 of The Alibi

The man nodded. “Said Pettijohn asked for the deluxe massage, a full ninety minutes. Pettijohn showered in the locker room, that’s why the bathroom in the suite was dry.”

“Was this guy suspicious?”

“Not that I could see,” the detective mumbled around another bite. “Hired from a spa in California. New to Charleston. Met Pettijohn for the first time today.”

Smilow studied the hastily compiled breakdown of registered guests. All appeared above suspicion. All claimed never to have met Lute Pettijohn, although a few knew of him through the media blitz given the opening of Charles Towne Plaza a few months earlier.

Most were just plain folks on vacation with their families. Three couples were honeymooning. Several others pretended to be, when it was obvious that they were secret lovers on an illicit weekend getaway to a romantic city. These answered the detectives’ questions nervously, but not because they were guilty of murder, only adultery.

All but three rooms on the fourth floor were occupied by a group of lady schoolteachers from Florida. Two suites were overfilled with a boys’ basketball team who had graduated high school in the spring and were having one last fling together before scattering to their respective universities. Their only crime was underage drinking. To the consternation of his buddies, one voluntarily turned over a nickel bag of marijuana to the interrogating officer.

; The consensus was that if Lute Pettijohn hadn’t been murdered the previous afternoon, it would have been a routine summer Saturday.

“Long, hot, and sticky,” remarked one of the detectives, yawning hugely.

“You talking about the day, or my dick?” another joked.

“You wish.”

“What about the security video?” Smilow asked, bringing the banter to a halt. The detectives smirked at what was obviously an inside joke. “What?” Smilow demanded.

“You want to see it?” Collins asked.

“Is there something to see?”

After another round of snickers, Collins suggested that Smilow take a look, and even invited Steffi to watch the video with them. “You might learn something,” he said to her.

Smilow and Steffi followed the detectives across the wide mezzanine lobby and into one of the smaller conference rooms, where a VCR machine was cued up and ready to play on a color monitor.

With unnecessary fanfare, Collins introduced the video. “At first the guy monitoring the security cameras yesterday afternoon told me that the video from the camera on that floor had been misplaced.”

Smilow knew from experience that surveillance cameras were usually attached to time-lapse recorders that exposed one frame of video every five to ten seconds, depending on the user’s discretion. That’s why they appeared jumpy when replayed. Typically they recorded for days before automatically rewinding.

“What was the tape doing out of the machine? Aren’t the tapes generally left in the recorders and recycled unless there’s a need to view them?”

“That was my first tip-off that he was lying,” Collins said. “So I kept after him. Finally he coughed up this video. Ready?”

Getting a nod from Smilow, he pushed the play button on the VCR. Even if there had been no accompanying video, the sound track was unmistakably that of a triple-X-rated film. The sighs and moans were background for a grainy moving picture of a couple engaged in a sexual act.

“This scene runs for about fifteen minutes,” Collins explained. “After the come shot, it switches to two broads in a bathtub getting each other off. Then it’s got your basic domination scene with—”

“I get it,” Smilow snapped. “Turn it off.” He ignored the boos and hisses from the other men in the room. “Sorry, Steffi.”

“Don’t be. Detective Collins’s little joke at my expense merely supports my theory that the phrase ‘adult male’ is a contradiction in terms.”

The other men laughed, but Collins harrumphed, unfazed by the put-down. “Here’s the kicker,” he told them. “Pettijohn’s boast about state-of-the-art security was so much hot air. The cameras on the guest room floors are bogus. Dummies.”

“What?” Steffi exclaimed.

“The only working camera in the entire complex is in the accounting department. Pettijohn didn’t want anybody stealing from him, but I guess he didn’t care if his guests got robbed or bumped off. The joke’s on him, huh?”

Smilow asked, “Why did the kid lie?”

“That’s what he’d been told to do. By big bad Pettijohn himself. We’re not talking about a rocket scientist here, so he held tough even after we assured him that Pettijohn was dead and that the only thing he had to fear was lying to us. He finally cracked. We checked it out. The cameras are shills.”

“How many people know that?”