“From what time do you need the footage?” said the hotel’s stocky Asian security head, Albert Yoon, a couple of minutes later as I stood in his tiny basement office.
“We’ll start at around four o’clock last evening,” I said, as I stood watching his computer screen. “You have two bars, right? Any trouble last night?”
“Not really,” Yoon said in a Long Island accent. He had been a Suffolk County cop. “Someone upchucked in the men’s restroom in the lobby. No precedent set there.”
“Wait. Stop it there,” I said. I saw a tall black-haired guy in a dark suit on the screen checking in. “That might be him. Can you match the check-in time to the name?”
“We sure can,” Yoon said, clicking open a new screen. “Let’s see. Your guy is one Pete Mitchell. He’s still checked in. He’s in 717.”
“Any charges on his credit card?” I said as I wrote it down.
“No. It says there’s no credit card. He pre-paid for the room in cash.”
“Did he show ID?”
“Yeah. The desk clerk should have a photocopy of it upstairs. Anyone who pays in cash has to show valid ID in case a room gets trashed or what have you.”
Yoon was standing but suddenly sat back down.
“Wait a second,” he said. He clicked the security video again and hit Fast-forward. “I think this guy, Mitchell, might be the guy who yakked in the men’s room. Look at this.”
Yoon brought up the shot of the lobby hall, and I watched as Mitchell headed into what I assumed to be the men’s room. A moment later, two other men appeared in the hall, one of them entering while the other waited. Some time passed, and the other guy in the hall went into the restroom and then Mitchell reappeared.
“See the kind of nervous look on his face and how he hurries away?”
I nodded. “Where does he go? Can you see?” I asked.
Yoon clicked on another screen, and we watched as Mitchell pulled open another door at the end of the hall.
“That leads to the B stairwell. There are no cameras in there. Maybe he went back to his room? I’ll look at the camera on seven.”
Yoon changed screens and clicked the mouse several times.
“That’s funny,” he said. “The camera on seven is broken or something. It’s not showing anything.”
I looked at Yoon.
“Does the stairwell go all the way up to the roof?” I said.
Yoon looked back at me.
“It does go all the way,” he said.
“That’s when he did it,” I said. “He went all the way up the stairs and jumped off.”