Joseph Finder - Guilty Minds

“That’s where I’m headed right now.”

“If Claflin never stayed there, that cuts the legs out from under this bogus story.”

“It should,” I said. “This shouldn’t be too complicated.”

For some reason, though, I wasn’t feeling particularly optimistic.

I had no idea what was coming.

The security director of the Hotel Monroe was a fussy little man named Kevin Chung. He wore a slim gray suit and a white shirt with short little collar points and a skinny black tie. The sides of his head were shaven so close you could see the white of his scalp, and on top of his head the black hair stood up in serried ranks of bristles. If the hair on top were longer, it would have been a Mohawk.

The walls of his small windowless office were covered with cheaply framed certificates for various security courses he’d completed and professional security organizations he belonged to. The surface of his desk was uncluttered, though: nothing more than a computer monitor and a desk set and a plaque with his name on it that faced the visitor’s chair, just in case you’d forgotten who you were talking to. The plaque was unnecessarily big: He obviously considered himself an important man.

“I wish I could help you, Mr....”

“Heller.”

“Mr. Heller. But it’s a question of privacy. If I were to confirm whether this person was a guest in our hotel, I would be legally liable. I’m sure you understand. Anything else?”

His response didn’t surprise me. Most hotel security directors won’t cooperate with private investigators. You have to know the guy, or know somebody who knows the guy, so they’ll do it as a favor. But I was here cold. Some security directors you can slip a hundred to and buy cooperation. Sometimes it takes a more sizable bribe.

But Kevin Chung was an officious jerk, and I knew at once that a bribe wasn’t likely to work. I needed a different approach.

“That’s too bad,” I said. “I was hoping we could settle this case quietly, without dragging the hotel’s name into it.”

I caught a spark of concern in his eyes before he masked it with a studied neutrality. “I don’t follow,” he said.

“You remember when the Mayflower got caught up in that whole Eliot Spitzer thing. It was ugly.”

His cheeks flushed, and he sat up a little straighter in his chair. He knew immediately what I was talking about. Everyone in Washington remembered when the governor of New York had hired a call girl on several occasions. It was a huge scandal. One time he saw the prostitute at his room at the Mayflower Hotel. Room 871 at the Mayflower was briefly famous. As a result, the Mayflower’s reputation was tarnished a bit. Not a lot. But enough. Even today, if you Google “Mayflower Hotel Washington, DC,” one of the top auto-suggestions is “scandal.”

In reality, of course, call girls frequent the best hotels all the time. They just tend to be discreet about it. The management knows but says nothing. As long as it’s not blatant, there’s no need to interfere. But fine hotels don’t want news stories about call girls on their premises. It looks bad. Tacky, even. It damages the brand.

“What does the Mayflower have to do with us?”

I sighed. “Simple. Slander Sheet is working on a story claiming that Chief Justice Jeremiah Claflin met a prostitute here at the Monroe on three separate occasions.”

“Slander Sheet?” He looked appalled.

I nodded.

“Right, and of course it’s a hoax. Someone must have gotten hold of one of his credit card numbers and a fake ID and checked into the hotel under his name.”

“But... why?”

“He’s being set up. Extortion, maybe. I don’t know. But you can look in your property management system and prove he never stayed here. Which will kill the story. And which will keep the Monroe’s name out of Slander Sheet. That’s all it takes.”

Chung pulled out a keyboard tray and stared fiercely at his monitor. His fingers flew over the keys. “But... it does look like Mr. Claflin stayed here, let’s see, three different times in the past year.”

I nodded again. That didn’t surprise me. If I only wanted to establish whether Claflin had been a guest of the hotel on those dates, I could have slipped a fifty to Barb at the front desk. That was probably all the reporter from Slander Sheet had done.

I’d taken a walk through the hotel before coming to see Kevin Chung. I’d familiarized myself with the property. I’d noticed the security cameras behind the front desk and in the lobby and in the elevators and the hallways.

“Can you pull up video from the front desk camera and get an image of the guy when he checked in?”

He hesitated. “Depends on how long ago that was.”

“How long do you keep recorded video?”

“Our policy is seven days.”

“But in reality?”

“It varies. They’re all on motion sensors. Depends how much activity is recorded.”

It took me a moment to understand what he meant. Then I got it. Security cameras now record not on tape but on hard drives. It’s all digital, not analog. The more activity a camera senses, the longer it records and the more disk space it takes up. When the hard disk gets full, it starts recording over the old stuff.

“Well, these three dates were, let’s see, a lot more than seven days ago,” I said. “The most recent was a little over a month.”

“We’re not going to have video that old.”

I nodded. That was a bummer.

Then I remembered something. The hotel, like most hotels these days, used proximity keycards. You held the keycard against an electronic reader mounted on the room door, and it beeped and flashed green and unlocked the door.

“Can you tell whether room keys were issued?”

Clackety-clack . Then: “Yes. Two keys each time.”

If the Monroe was like any other hotel I’d ever stayed in, it used a piece of software called a property management system, which kept track of every time a guest room door was opened from the outside using a keycard. So there was always what’s called an audit trail.

“Okay. Now look at the first date. Can you tell whether anyone used that key to enter the assigned room?”

“Of course,” he said, sounding offended. He tapped and clacked some more. “He — strange... That key was never used.”

“Right. Check the next date.”

More clackety-clacking. “Wasn’t used then either.”

“Probably the same for the other date. So someone came by the hotel on three different days and checked into the hotel, but never actually went upstairs to the room.” The guy was impersonating a Supreme Court justice, and the less time he spent in the hotel, the better. The less chance of his image being captured on video.

Granted, without video of the impostor who was pretending to be Justice Claflin, all I had was a negative: the fact that no one had checked into his room. But that wasn’t nothing — it proved that Claflin couldn’t have seen a call girl here.

Not in a room he never entered.

Whether this was enough to kill the Slander Sheet story, I was about to find out.

Sitting in a cab that smelled powerfully of curry, I reached Gideon Parnell at dinner. In the background I could hear the clinking of silverware against china, and crowd hubbub, and someone’s raucous laugh.

“I talked to the call girl.”

“You what ? How?”

“A little research and a little footwork.” The less I told him about what we’d done, the better. We’d broken any number of laws, and he was a lawyer. “The bad news is that she’s well prepared and well rehearsed. I couldn’t shake her story, and I tried.”

“I didn’t think you’d be able to get to her. I’m impressed.”