The Alibi

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.”