CHAPTER SIX
“My name’s Maura,” said the bartender, who was indeed sober. A tall, lissomewoman in her mid-twenties, Maura led Jessie to a small cocktail table in thecorner of the now closed, empty bar and tied her long, black hair into aponytail.
While she settled in, Jessie hoped Peters was having success up in theCrewe guest suite with the crime scene team from Long Beach.
“Doesn’t the hair get in the way when you’re mixing drinks?” she askedas they sat down.
“A little,” Maura said. “But you get used to it. And the extra tips I collectfrom flipping it around while I pretend to laugh at customer jokes are wellworth 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 qualityinformation. I was hoping that technology might come to my rescue but I understandyou don’t have cameras in here either, correct?”
“Right,” Maura said. “That’s by design. The hotel markets itself as prizingguest privacy so the only places that have cameras are just outside the hoteland 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 Ican eliminate them as suspects if they were in here during the window of themurder.”
She could tell from the apologetic frown on the bartender’s face thatthat was going to be a dead end too.
“For hotel guests, we don’t record transactions in real time,” shesaid. “Any time a guest orders a drink, we put it on their room tab. But we don’ttally the charges until the end of business that night. The bar usually closesat two a.m. so every receipt would read that time: two a.m. We closed earlytonight, around midnight, because of the incident, so every receipt for tonightwill have that time, regardless of when the drink was ordered.”
Jessie groaned involuntarily. It increasingly seemed like it would beimpossible to get an accurate account of the evening’s events from non-humansources.
“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 noway to know who ordered it. A couple staying here might hang out for a fewhours while the husband orders six drinks and the wife orders four. But all wesee is ten drinks for room twenty-four. Unless the bartender specificallyremembers that, say for example, the husband wasn’t in that night and the wifeordered 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 mewhat you’re looking for, I might be able to narrow that timeline down for you alittle.”
Jessie decided that an incomplete picture was better than none at alland agreed.
“Okay,” she said. “Before I get into specifics, how many people do youthink were in the bar last night between nine and eleven?”
“Saturday nights are always packed,” Maura said, “and this one wasn’tany different. The numbers went up and down but we probably never got under thirtypatrons. It might have been double that at the peak.”
“Do you remember either Steve and Gabrielle Crewe or Richard andMelissa Ferro being there?”
“Sure,” Maura said. “They come here a couple of times a year, alongwith their friends, so I know them by name and sight. They were all in herelast 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. Theywanted a table but the only one available was being reserved for a party at ninethirty. I remember looking at the clock and deciding there wasn’t enough timeleft to justify giving it to them if they’d have to give it up in a fewminutes.”
“That’s actually incredibly helpful,” Jessie said, writing down notesin her pad. “What then?”
“After that, it gets hazy. The rest of their group was only there alittle 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. TheCrewes and Ferros stuck around longer than that, though I couldn’t give youexact times. Folks tend to drift back and forth from the bar to the adjoiningcourtyard, to be near the fire pit. People disappear for bathroom breaks or goback to their room for a quickie before coming back down again. I know thatboth Gabby Crewe and Melissa Ferro left before their husbands. The guys werebellied up to the bar in ‘close down the joint’ mode when things went off therails.”
“You mean when the security guard yelled out for someone to call thepolice,” Jessie confirmed. “What time was that?”
“I couldn’t say exactly,” Maura said. “But after that happened, everyonepiled out to get whatever gossip they could. The bar was basically empty by eleventhirty-five, so all the madness happened maybe five or ten minutes before then.”
Sensing that the woman had provided all the time-specific detail sheknew, 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 getgreat pleasure out of calling her by her first name. “Besides, I don’t knowthese people very well and I usually only see them in various stages ofdrunkenness. Anything I could tell you would only be surface stuff.”
Jessie smiled at
