The Alibi Read online

  “That was a very meaningful ‘hmm,’ Steffi. What are you thinking?”

  “How furious the perp must’ve been.”

  “One of my detectives commented on that. It was a cold-blooded killing. The M.E. thinks Lute might have been unconscious when he was shot. In any case, he was posing no threat. The killer merely wanted him dead.”

  “If you made up a list of all the people who wanted Lute Pettijohn dead—”

  “We don’t have that much paper and ink.”

  She met his eyes in the mirror and smiled. “Right. So, any guesses?”

  “Not now.”

  “Or you just aren’t saying?”

  “Steffi, you know I don’t bring anything to your office before I’m ready.”

  “Just promise me—”

  “No promises.”

  “Promise no one else will get first shot.”

  “No pun intended.”

  “You know what I mean,” she said crossly.

  “Mason will assign the case,” he said, referring to Monroe Mason, Charleston County solicitor. “It’ll be up to you to see that you get it.”

  But looking at her in the mirror and seeing the fire in her eyes, he had no doubt that she would make that a priority. He brought the car to a halt at the curb. “Here we are.”

  They alighted in front of Lute Pettijohn’s mansion. Its grandiose exterior, befitting its prestigious South Battery address, was a layering of architecture. The original Georgian had given way to Federal touches following the Revolutionary War. There followed the addition of Greek Revival columns when they were the antebellum rage. The imposing structure was later updated with splashes of Victorian gingerbread. This patchwork of architecture was typical of the Historic District, and, ironically, made Charleston all the more picturesque.

  The three-story house had deep double balconies lined with stately pillars and graceful arches. A cupola crowned its gabled roof. For two centuries it had withstood wars, crippling economic lulls, and hurricane winds, before sustaining the latest assault on it—Lute Pettijohn.

  His well-documented restoration had taken years. The first architect overseeing the project had resigned to have a nervous breakdown. The second had suffered a heart attack; his cardiologist had forced him to retire from the project. The third had seen the restoration to completion, but it had cost him his marriage.

  From the elaborate ironwork front gate with its historically registered lantern standards, down to the reproduction hinges on the back doors, Lute had spared no expense to make his house the most talked about in Charleston.

  That he had achieved. It wasn’t necessarily the most admired restoration, but it was certainly the most talked about.

  He had battled with the Preservation Society of Charleston, the Historic Charleston Foundation, and the Board of Architectural Review over his proposal to convert the ancient and crumbling warehouse into what was now the Charles Towne Plaza. These organizations, whose purpose was to zealously preserve Charleston’s uniqueness, control zoning, and limit commercial expansion, initially had vetoed his proposal. He didn’t receive permits until all were assured that the integrity of the building’s original brick exterior would not be drastically altered or compromised, that its well-earned scars would not be camouflaged, and that it would never be defaced with marquees or other contemporary signposts that designated it for what it was.

  The preservation societies had harbored similar reservations about his house renovation, although they were pleased that the property, which had fallen into a sad state of disrepair, had been purchased by someone with the means to refurbish it in a fashion it deserved.

  Pettijohn had abided by the rigid guidelines because he had no choice. But the general consensus was that his redo of the house, particularly the interior, was a prime example of how vulgar one can be when he has more money than taste. It was unanimously agreed, however, that the gardens were not to be rivaled anywhere in the city.

  Smilow noticed how lush and well groomed the front garden was as he depressed the button on the intercom panel at the front gate.

  Steffi looked over at him. “What are you going to say to her?”

  Waiting for the bell to be answered from inside the house, he thoughtfully replied, “Congratulations.”

  Chapter 4

  But even Rory Smilow wasn’t that heartless and cynical.

  When Davee Pettijohn gazed down the curving staircase to the foyer below, the detective was standing with his hands clasped behind his back, staring either at his highly polished shoes or at the imported Italian tile flooring beneath them. In any case, he appeared totally focused on the area surrounding his feet.

  The last time Davee had seen her husband’s former brother-in-law, they were attending a social function honoring the police department. Smilow had been presented an award that night. Following the ceremony, Lute had sought him out to congratulate him. Smilow had shaken Lute’s hand, but only because Lute had forced it. He had been civil to them, but Davee surmised that the detective would rather rip out Lute’s throat with his teeth than shake his hand.

  Rory Smilow appeared as rigidly controlled tonight as he had been on that last occasion. His bearing and appearance were military crisp. His hair was thinning on the crown of his head, but that was noticeable only because of her bird’s-eye view.

  The woman with him was a stranger to her. Davee had a lifetime habit of sizing up any other woman with whom she came into contact, so she would have remembered if she had met Smilow’s companion.

  While Smilow never looked up, the woman seemed avidly curious. Her head was in constant motion, swiveling about, taking in all the appointments of the entryway. She didn’t miss a single European import. Her eyes were quick and predatory. Davee disliked her on sight.

  Nothing short of a catastrophe would have brought Smilow into Lute’s house, but Davee chose to deny that as long as possible. She drained her highball glass and, making certain not to rattle the ice cubes, set it on a console table. Only then did she make her presence known.

  “Y’all wanted to see me?”

  Following the sound of her voice, they turned in unison and spotted her up above on the gallery. She waited until their eyes were fixed on her before starting her descent. She was barefoot and slightly disheveled, but she came down the staircase, her hand trailing along the railing, as though she were dressed in a ball gown, the princess of the evening, with humble subjects adoring her and paying homage. She had been born into a family at the epicenter of Charleston society. From both sides, she was of the noblesse oblige. She never forgot it, and she made certain no one else did, either.

  “Hello, Mrs. Pettijohn.”

  “We don’t have to stand on ceremony, do we, Rory?” She came to stand within touching distance and, tilting her head to one side, smiled up at him. “After all, we’re practically kinfolk.”

  She extended him her hand. His was dry and warm. Hers was slightly damp and very cold, and she wondered if he guessed that came from holding a tumbler of vodka.

  He released her hand and indicated the woman with him. “This is Stefanie Mundell.”

  “Steffi,” the woman said, aggressively thrusting her hand at Davee.

  She was petite, with short dark hair and dark eyes. Eager eyes. Hungry eyes. She wasn’t wearing stockings even though she had on high-heeled pumps. To Davee that was a breach of etiquette more offensive than her own bare feet.

  “How do you do?” Davee shook Steffi Mundell’s hand but released it quickly. “Are y’all selling tickets to the Policemen’s Ball, or what?”

  “Is there someplace we can talk?”

  Concealing her uneasiness with a bright smile, she said, “Sure,” and led them into the formal living room. The housekeeper, who had admitted the two before notifying Davee that she had guests, was moving about the room switching on lamps. “Thank you, Sarah.” The woman, who was as large and dark as a mahogany armoire, acknowledged Davee’s thanks, then left through a side door. “Can
I fix y’all a drink?”

  “No, thank you,” Smilow replied.

  Steffi Mundell also declined. “What a beautiful room,” she said. “Such a wonderful color.”

  “You think so?” Davee looked around as though assessing the room for the first time. “Actually, this is my least favorite room in the whole house, even though it does offer a lovely view of the Battery, and that’s nice. My husband insisted on painting the walls this color. It’s called terra-cotta and is supposed to be reminiscent of the villas on the Italian Riviera. Instead, it makes me think of football jerseys.” Looking directly at Steffi and smiling sweetly, she added, “My mama always said that orange was a color for the common and coarse.”

  Steffi’s cheeks flamed with anger. “Where were you this afternoon, Mrs. Pettijohn?”

  “None of your goddamn business,” Davee retorted without a blink.

  “Ladies.” Smilow shot Steffi a stern look with a silent command behind it for her to shut up.

  “What’s going on, Rory?” Davee demanded. “What are ya’ll doing here?”

  Coolly, calmly, and deferentially, he said, “I suggest we all sit down.”

  Davee held his gaze for several seconds, gave the woman a withering glance, then with a brusque gesture indicated the sofa nearest them. She sat down in an adjacent armchair.

  He began by telling her that this wasn’t a casual call. “I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

  She stared at him, waiting him out.

  “Lute was found dead late this afternoon. In the penthouse suite at the Charles Towne Plaza. It appears he was murdered.”

  Davee kept her features carefully schooled.

  One never displayed too much emotion in public.

  It simply wasn’t done.

  Holding emotions intact was a skill one naturally acquired when Daddy was a womanizer, and Mama was a drunk, and everybody knew the reason she drank, but everybody also pretended that there wasn’t a problem. Not in their family.

  Maxine and Clive Burton had been a perfect couple. Both descended from elite Charleston families. Both were utterly gorgeous to look at. Both attended exclusive schools. Their wedding was a standard by which all others were compared, even to this day. They were a sublime match.

  Their three adorable daughters had been given boys’ names, either because Maxine was drunk when she went into labor each time, or because she was so far gone she was confused about the gender of her newborn, or because she wanted to spite the wayward Clive, who yearned for male offspring and blamed her for producing only females. Never mind the absence of Y chromosomes.

  So little Clancy, Jerri, and Davee grew up in a household where serious domestic problems were swept beneath priceless Persian rugs. The girls learned at an early age to keep their reactions to any situation, no matter how upsetting, to themselves. It was safer that way. The atmosphere at home was unreliable and tricky to gauge when both parents were volatile and given to temper tantrums, resulting in fights that shattered any semblance of peace and tranquillity.

  Consequently the sisters bore emotional scars.

  Clancy had healed hers by dying in her early thirties of cervical cancer, which the most vicious gossips claimed had been brought on by too many bouts of venereal disease.

  Jerri had gone in the opposite direction, becoming a convert to a fundamentalist Christian group her freshman year in college. She had dedicated herself to a life of hardship and abstinence from anything pleasurable, particularly alcohol and sex. She grew root vegetables and preached the gospel on an Indian reservation in South Dakota.

  Davee, the youngest, was the only one who remained in Charleston, defying shame and gossip, even after Clive died of cardiac arrest in his current mistress’s bed between his board meeting in the morning and his tee time that afternoon, and following Maxine’s being committed to a nursing home with “Alzheimer’s” when everybody knew the truth was that her brain had been pickled by vodka.

  Davee, who looked as soft and malleable as warm taffy, was actually tough as nails. Tough enough to stick it out. She could survive anything. She had proved it.

  “Well,” she said, coming to her feet, “even if y’all declined a drink, I believe I’ll have one.”

  At the liquor cart, she dropped a few ice cubes into a crystal tumbler and poured vodka over them. She drank almost half of it in one swallow, then refilled the glass before turning back to them. “Who was she?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Come on, Rory. I’m not going to have vapors. If Lute was shot in his fancy new hotel suite, he must’ve been entertaining a lady friend. I figure that either she or her jealous husband killed him.”

  “Who said he was shot?” Steffi Mundell asked.

  “What?”

  “Smilow didn’t say your husband had been shot. He said he’d been murdered.”

  Davee took another drink. “I assumed he was shot. Isn’t that a safe guess?”

  “Was it a guess?”

  Davee flung her arms wide, sloshing some of her drink onto the rug. “Who the hell are you, anyway?”

  Steffi stood. “I represent the D.A.’s office. Or, as it’s known in South Carolina, the county solicitor.”

  “I know what it’s known as in South Carolina,” Davee returned drolly.

  “I’ll be prosecuting your husband’s murder case. That’s why I insisted on coming along with Smilow.”

  “Ahh, I get it. To gauge my reaction to the news.”

  “Precisely. I must say you didn’t seem very surprised by it. So back to my original question: Where were you this afternoon? And don’t say that it isn’t any of my goddamn business because, you see, Mrs. Pettijohn, it very much is.”

  Davee, curbing her anger, calmly raised her glass to her lips once again and took her time answering. “You want to know if I can establish an alibi, is that it?”

  “We didn’t come here to interrogate you, Davee,” Smilow said.

  “It’s okay, Rory. I’ve got nothing to hide. I just think it’s insensitive of her”—she gave Steffi a scathing once-over—“to come into my house and start firing insulting and insinuating questions at me seconds after I’ve been informed that my husband was murdered.”

  “That’s my job, Mrs. Pettijohn, whether you like it or not.”

  “Well, I don’t like it.” Then, dismissing her as no one of significance, she turned to Smilow. “I’m happy to answer your questions. What do you want to know?”

  “Where were you this afternoon between five and six o’clock?”

  “Here.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can anyone vouch for that?”

  She moved to an end table and depressed a single button on a desk telephone. The housekeeper’s voice came through the speaker. “Yes, Miss Davee?”

  “Sarah, will you come in here, please? Thank you.”

  The three waited in silence. Fixing the prosecutor with a cool, contemptuous gaze, Davee fiddled with the single strand of perfectly matched pearls that she wore around her neck. They had been a coming-out gift from her father, whom she both loved and hated. Her therapist had suggested that they were a symbol of her mistrust of people, due to her father’s unfaithfulness to his wife and daughters. Davee didn’t know if that was true or if she just liked the pearls. Whatever the case, she wore them with everything, including the short shorts and oversize white cotton shirt she had on this evening.

  Davee had inherited her live-in housekeeper from her mother. Sarah had been working for the family before Clancy was born and had seen them through all their tribulations. When she came into the room, she shot Smilow and Steffi Mundell a hostile glance.

  Davee formally introduced her. “Ms. Sarah Birch, this is Detective Smilow and a person from the County Solicitor’s Office. They came to tell me that Mr. Pettijohn was found murdered this afternoon.”

  Sarah’s reaction was no more visible than Davee’s had been.

  Davee continued, “I told them that I was
here in the house between five and six o’clock and that you would back me up. Isn’t that right?”

  Steffi Mundell nearly blew a gasket. “You can’t—”

  “Steffi.”

  “But she’s just compromised the interrogation,” she shouted at Smilow.

  Davee looked at him innocently. “I thought you said I wasn’t being interrogated, Rory.”

  His eyes were frosty, but he turned to the housekeeper and said politely, “Ms. Birch, to your knowledge was Mrs. Pettijohn at home at that time?”

  “Yes, sir. She’s been in her room resting nearly all day.”

  “Oh, brother,” Steffi muttered beneath her breath.

  Ignoring her, Smilow thanked the housekeeper. Sarah Birch moved to Davee and enveloped her hands between her own. “I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you, Sarah.”

  “You all right, baby?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Anything I can get you?”

  “Not now.”

  “You need anything, you just let me know.”

  Davee smiled up at her, and Sarah ran her hand affectionately over Davee’s tousled blond hair, then turned and left the room. Davee finished her drink, smugly eyeing Steffi over the rim of her glass. When she lowered it, she said, “Satisfied?”

  Steffi was seething and didn’t deign to respond.

  Crossing to the liquor cart again, Davee asked, “Where is the… where was he taken?”

  “The medical examiner will perform an autopsy.”

  “So funeral arrangements will have to wait—”

  “Until the body is released,” Smilow said, finishing for her.

  She poured herself another drink, then when she came back around asked, “How did he die?”

  “He was shot in the back. Two bullets. We think he died instantly, and may even have been unconscious when the shots were fired.”

  “Was he in bed?”

  Of course Smilow knew the circumstances of her father’s death. Everybody in Charleston was well apprised of the scandalous details. She appreciated Smilow for looking a little pained and embarrassed as he answered her question. “Lute was found on the floor in the sitting room, fully dressed. The bed hadn’t been used. There was no sign of a romantic rendezvous.”