"I see. Six years altogether."
"Yes, sir."
"You must like it."
"Well, I tell you, it's a secure job. That's something in America. I know they don't think much of black folks, but they always treated me okay. And hell, before this I worked for GM in Van Nuys, and that's . . . you know, that's gone."
"Yes," Connor said sympathetically.
"That place," Phillips said, shaking his head at the memory. "Christ. The management assholes they used to send down to the floor. You couldn't believe it. M.B. fucking A., out of Detroit, little weenies didn't know shit. They didn't know how the line worked. They didn't know a tool from a die. But they'd still order the foremen around. They're all pulling in two hundred fucking thousand a year and they didn't know shit. And nothing ever worked right. The cars were all a piece of shit. But here," he said, tapping the counter. "Here, I got a problem, or something doesn't work, I tell somebody. And they come right down, and they know the system – how it works – and we go over the problem together, and it gets fixed. Right away. Problems get fixed here. That's the difference. I tell you: these people pay attention."
"So you like it here."
"They always treated me okay," Phillips said, nodding.
That didn't exactly strike me as a glowing endorsement. I had the feeling this guy wasn't committed to his employers and a few questions could drive the wedge. All we had to do was encourage the break.
"Loyalty is important," Connor said, nodding sympathetically.
"It is to them," he said. "They expect you to show all this enthusiasm for the company. So you know, I always come in fifteen or twenty minutes early, and stay fifteen or twenty minutes after the shift is over. They like you to put in the extra time. I did the same at Van Nuys, but nobody ever noticed."
"And when is your shift?"
"I work nine to seven."
"And tonight? What time did you come on duty?"
"Quarter to nine. Like I said, I come in fifteen minutes early."
The original call had been recorded about eight-thirty. So if this man came at a quarter to nine, he would have arrived almost fifteen minutes too late to see the murder. "Who was on duty before you?"
"Well, usually it's Ted Cole. But I don't know if he worked tonight."
"Why is that?"
The guard wiped his forehead with his sleeve, and looked away.
"Why is that, Mr. Phillips?" I said, with a little more force.
The guard blinked and frowned, saying nothing.
Connor said quietly, "Because Ted Cole wasn't here when Mr. Phillips arrived tonight, was he, Mr. Phillips?"
The guard shook his head. "No, he wasn't,"
I started to ask another question, but Connor raised his hand. "I imagine, Mr. Phillips, you must have been pretty surprised when you came in this room, at a quarter to nine."
"You damn right I was," Phillips said.
"What did you do when you saw the situation?"
"Well. Right away, I said to the guy, 'Can I help you?' Very polite but still firm. I mean, this isthe security room. And I don't know who this guy is, I've never seen him before. And the guy is tense. Verytense. He says to me, 'Get out of my way.' Real pushy, like he owns the world. And he shoves past me, taking his briefcase with him.
"I say, 'Excuse me, sir, I'll have to see some identification.' He don't answer me, he just keeps going. Out the lobby and down the stairs."
"You didn't try and stop him?"
"No, sir. I didn't."
"Because he was Japanese?"
"You got that right. But I called up to central security – it's up on the ninth floor – to say I found a man in the room. And they say, 'Don't worry, everything is fine.' But I can hear they're tense, too. Everybody is tense. And then I see on the monitor . . . the dead girl. So that's the first I knew what it was about."
Connor said, "The man you saw. Can you describe him?"
The guard shrugged. "Thirty, thirty-five. Medium height. Dark blue suit like they all wear. Actually he was more hip than most of them. He had this tie with triangles on it. Oh – and a scar on his hand, like a burn or something."
"Which hand?"
"The left hand. I noticed it when he was closing the briefcase."
"Could you see inside the briefcase?"
"No."
"But he was closing it when you came in the room?"
"Yes."
"Was it your impression he took something from this room?"
"I really couldn't say, sir."
Phillips's evasiveness began to annoy me. I said, "What do you think he took?"
Connor shot me a look.
The guard went bland: "I really don't know, sir."
Connor said, "Of course you don't. There's no way you could know what was in somebody else's briefcase. By the way, do you make recordings from the security cameras here?"
"Yes, we do."
"Could you show me how you do that?"
"Sure thing." The guard got up from the desk and opened a door at the far end of the room. We followed him into a second small room, almost a closet, stacked floor to ceiling with small metal boxes, each with stenciled notations in Japanese kanjiscript, and numbers in English. Each with a glowing red light, and an LED counter, with numbers running forward.
Phillips said, "These are our recorders. They lay down signals from all the cameras in the building. They're eight-millimeter, high-definition video." He held up a small cassette, like an audio cassette. "Each one of these records eight hours. We change over at nine p.m., so that's the first thing I do when I come on duty. I pop out the old ones, and switch over to the fresh ones."
"And did you change cassettes tonight, at nine o'clock?"
"Yes, sir. Just like always."
"And what do you do with the tapes you remove?"
"Keep 'em in the trays down here," he said, bending to show us several long, thin drawers. "We keep everything off the cameras for seventy-two hours. That's three days. So we keep nine sets of tapes all together. And we just rotate each set through, once every three days. Get me?"
Connor hesitated. "Perhaps I'd better write this down." He produced a small pad and a pen. "Now, each tape lasts eight hours, so you have nine different sets . . . ."
"Right, right."
Connor wrote for a moment, then shook his pen irritably. "This damn pen. It's out of ink. You have a wastebasket?"
Phillips pointed to the corner. "Over there."
"Thank you."
Connor threw the pen away. I gave him mine. He resumed his notes. "You were saying, Mr. Phillips, that you have nine sets . . ."
"Right. Each set is numbered with letters, from A to I. Now when I come in at nine, I eject the tapes and see whatever letter is already in there, and put in the next one. Like tonight, I took out set C, so I put in set D, which is what's recording now."
"I see," Connor said. "And then you put tape set C in one of the drawers here?"
"Right." He pulled open a drawer. "This one here."
Connor said. "May I?" He glanced at the neatly labeled row of tapes. Then he quickly opened the other drawers, and looked at the other stacks of tapes. Except for the different letters, all the drawers looked identical.
"I think I understand now," Connor said. "What you actually do is use nine sets in rotation."