The Perfect Impression by Blake Pierce

CHAPTER SIX

“My name’s Maura,” said the bartender, who was indeed sober. A tall, lissome woman in her mid-twenties, Maura led Jessie to a small cocktail table in the corner of the now closed, empty bar and tied her long, black hair into a ponytail.

While she settled in, Jessie hoped Peters was having success up in the Crewe guest suite with the crime scene team from Long Beach.

“Doesn’t the hair get in the way when you’re mixing drinks?” she asked as they sat down.

“A little,” Maura said. “But you get used to it. And the extra tips I collect from flipping it around while I pretend to laugh at customer jokes are well worth the hassle.”

Jessie liked her almost immediately.

“So I’m trying to nail down some timeline details,” she said. “Unfortunately, everyone I’ve talked to so far has been too drunk to confidently give quality information. I was hoping that technology might come to my rescue but I understand you don’t have cameras in here either, correct?”

“Right,” Maura said. “That’s by design. The hotel markets itself as prizing guest privacy so the only places that have cameras are just outside the hotel and in the main lobby.”

“What about receipts?” Jessie asked.

“What do you mean?” Maura asked, not getting it.

“If I don’t have video as a way to reconstruct who was where when, maybe I can use drink receipts to identify when people were in the bar. Then I can eliminate them as suspects if they were in here during the window of the murder.”

She could tell from the apologetic frown on the bartender’s face that that was going to be a dead end too.

“For hotel guests, we don’t record transactions in real time,” she said. “Any time a guest orders a drink, we put it on their room tab. But we don’t tally the charges until the end of business that night. The bar usually closes at two a.m. so every receipt would read that time: two a.m. We closed early tonight, around midnight, because of the incident, so every receipt for tonight will have that time, regardless of when the drink was ordered.”

Jessie groaned involuntarily. It increasingly seemed like it would be impossible to get an accurate account of the evening’s events from non-human sources.

“It gets worse,” Maura said hesitantly.

“Go ahead,” Jessie told her, closing her eyes in pained anticipation.

“Because the drink is charged to the room, not the guest, there’s no way to know who ordered it. A couple staying here might hang out for a few hours while the husband orders six drinks and the wife orders four. But all we see is ten drinks for room twenty-four. Unless the bartender specifically remembers that, say for example, the husband wasn’t in that night and the wife ordered all ten, there’s no record of who ordered what.”

“You’re killing me here, Maura,” Jessie said, though not too harshly.

“There is some good news,” she offered hopefully.

“What’s that?”

“I’ve got a pretty decent memory for this sort of thing. If you tell me what you’re looking for, I might be able to narrow that timeline down for you a little.”

Jessie decided that an incomplete picture was better than none at all and agreed.

“Okay,” she said. “Before I get into specifics, how many people do you think were in the bar last night between nine and eleven?”

“Saturday nights are always packed,” Maura said, “and this one wasn’t any different. The numbers went up and down but we probably never got under thirty patrons. It might have been double that at the peak.”

“Do you remember either Steve and Gabrielle Crewe or Richard and Melissa Ferro being there?”

“Sure,” Maura said. “They come here a couple of times a year, along with their friends, so I know them by name and sight. They were all in here last night at one point or another.”

“Can you nail down those ‘points’ a little more specifically?”

“I remember they came in as a group around nine twenty-five. They wanted a table but the only one available was being reserved for a party at nine thirty. I remember looking at the clock and deciding there wasn’t enough time left to justify giving it to them if they’d have to give it up in a few minutes.”

“That’s actually incredibly helpful,” Jessie said, writing down notes in her pad. “What then?”

“After that, it gets hazy. The rest of their group was only there a little while. I remember the Landers and Mr. Aldridge all being gone by about ten. I don’t recall seeing Mrs. Aldridge at all, now that I think about it. The Crewes and Ferros stuck around longer than that, though I couldn’t give you exact times. Folks tend to drift back and forth from the bar to the adjoining courtyard, to be near the fire pit. People disappear for bathroom breaks or go back to their room for a quickie before coming back down again. I know that both Gabby Crewe and Melissa Ferro left before their husbands. The guys were bellied up to the bar in ‘close down the joint’ mode when things went off the rails.”

“You mean when the security guard yelled out for someone to call the police,” Jessie confirmed. “What time was that?”

“I couldn’t say exactly,” Maura said. “But after that happened, everyone piled out to get whatever gossip they could. The bar was basically empty by eleven thirty-five, so all the madness happened maybe five or ten minutes before then.”

Sensing that the woman had provided all the time-specific detail she knew, Jessie went in a different direction.

“What did you think of them?” she asked.

“Who?”

“The Crewes and the Ferros,” Jessie said. “Give me a sense of them.”

Maura sighed heavily at the request as if it was a daunting challenge.

“I’m a bartender, Jessie, not a psychiatrist,” she said, seeming to get great pleasure out of calling her by her first name. “Besides, I don’t know these people very well and I usually only see them in various stages of drunkenness. Anything I could tell you would only be surface stuff.”

Jessie smiled at the attempt to deflect.

“In my experience, bartenders are often just as insightful as psychiatrists. And that’s coming from someone who’s seen a lot of the latter. I’ll give your analysis the proper weight.”

Maura shrugged, as if she’d met her ethical obligation, and dived in.

“The Ferros are okay. The wife, Melissa, is a bit of a drama queen. When I heard she claimed she had discovered a body, I was a little skeptical. Some part of me wondered if she had just overreacted to someone who passed out; you know, for attention. She likes attention.”

“There you go,” Jessie said encouragingly. “That wasn’t so hard. What about her husband?”

“They’re a good match. Mrs. Ferro likes attention and Mr. Ferro likes to give attention.”

“To her or others?”

“Both,” Maura said. “He’ll give her long, deep, meaningful stares. But he also gets a little flirty when he’s had a few. Both he and Steve have gone a little over the top from time to time.”

“What does that mean?”

Maura gave an exhausted half smile that Jessie knew well.

“After their wives have left and they’ve had a few drinks, they each tend to get a little handsy with the waitresses, even with me; never to ‘toss them out’ levels but enough that I once had to elbow Ferro in the gut to get my point across.”

“You didn’t tell management?”

Maura gave another smile, this time one Jessie couldn’t identify.

“The management here is, what’s the word I’m looking for—relaxed—when it comes to guest-staff interaction. There’s an openness to intermingling which guests sometimes try to take advantage of. I made it clear that I wasn’t into doing any mingling, at least not with folks of their particular persuasion. Now maybe if you wanted to mingle, I might reconsider.”

She smiled slyly. Jessie could feel her neck start to burn.

“I’m flattered,” she said, “but I think my boyfriend might object.”

Maura shrugged.

“Can’t blame a girl for trying.”

Jessie didn’t but she did feel an obligation to bring the conversation back to the professional level.

“And yet,” she noted, “despite your lack of interest in their advances, you still have the hair flip in your arsenal.”

“Just because they can’t touch, doesn’t mean they can’t dream,” Maura said with impressive confidence. “The dream of touching is what generates those big tips. The hair flip is a big part of the dream.”

Jessie couldn’t argue with the woman’s logic. Besides, she got the sense that Maura could handle herself if someone tried too hard to make his dream into a reality.

“So Steve Crewe got gropey too?” she asked, moving on.

“Yeah, but he a little clumsier about it than his friend,” Maura said. “Rich Ferro always managed to seem like he was playing a game. Steve was a little more furtive about it, and a little more hangdog if he was shot down. Unlike Rich, I got the sense that he would have felt bad if his wife caught him.”

“Speaking of his wife, what was your impression of her?”

“You’re asking me to give a cold, hard take on a woman who was apparently just stabbed to death?” Maura asked incredulously.

“That’s exactly what I’m asking.”

The bartender sighed heavily for the second time in as many minutes and rubbed her scalp with her hand as she thought how best to answer.

“She was nice, I guess,” she began, before adding, “I mean, she was always nice to me. I even saw her shame some guy once in the bar that was being a bit too crude with a waitress. She started asking what his daughter would think if she saw him in that moment. He backed right off. It was actually pretty impressive.”

“Then why do I hear what sounds like a ‘but’ in there?” Jessie asked.

“She just had an air about her, like she knew she was hot shit and didn’t mind flaunting it. Don’t get me wrong. I do the same thing sometimes. But there was a dismissiveness that I found off-putting. And she was less nice to her husband. To be honest, I thought she treated him like a cuckold.”

“How so?” Jessie pressed.

“Nothing overt, just a general vibe. I can’t really explain it.”

Jessie wanted to pursue the issue more but Colby Peters dashed in, breathing heavily and looking agitated.

“Is something wrong with the crime scene investigation?” Jessie asked anxiously.

“No, that’s going fine. They’re working away,” he said. “The problem is with the guests. We’ve got a mutiny on our hands.”