had a clean, pretty face. Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota came to mind. She was bringing my change back when Richards came through the door. Determined.
She was wearing jeans and a collared blouse and her hair was pulled back and twisted into a severe bun. I turned away once she spotted me and looked down the length of the bar and my eye caught movement. A man at the opposite end got up faster than most comfortable drinkers would and started for the dim hallway. Guy just recognized a cop walk in the room, I thought, a grin pulling at my mouth. I marked him at about six feet tall, lean, clean trimmed dark hair from the back, and I would have let his image slip right through my head but for the look that the young bartender had on her face when she did a double take. First on the man, then back on Richards as she made it to my elbow and then back to the man disappearing into the hallway. There was a touch of confusion in her eyes that had melted into suspicion when she turned back to us. Richards said something to me but I was watching the girl as she walked down to the vacated place at the other end, picked up the money the man had left and the half-drunk bottle of beer. It was my brand.
“Max?”
Richards was repeating my name.
“Sorry,” I said, turning to her. Her eye color was a definite gray and the eyes themselves were tightened down from lack of sleep.
“This is the manager?” she asked, nodding at Laurie.
“Yeah.”
Laurie looked up from her receipts and Richards bobbed her chin up in a beckoning motion. Laurie raised an index finger, one minute please, calculating something in her head before coming over. Richards didn’t like the finger, I could see it in the flex of her jaw muscle. But she let it ride.
“Sherry Richards, we talked on the phone?” she said when Laurie made it over.
“Oh, hi, yeah. Just let me get my things. We can sit back there if that’s OK?”
The three of us took a table in the far corner. I brought my bottle with me.
“You two obviously know each other,” Laurie said, and I apologized.
“Max Freeman,” I said, reaching across the table to shake her hand.
“Rolling Rock,” she said, smiling.
“You’re very good at that. Remembering, I mean.”
She shrugged.
“Part of the business. Half the people who come in here I know by their drinks. Half I know by their first names.”
“Any full names?” Richards said.
“A handful,” she said, looking Richards in the eye. “You know, it’s informal. It’s just the way it is.”
“You ever see this guy in here?” Richards asked, taking out a shot of O’Shea and handing it across the table. She wasn’t wasting any time worrying about tainting an eyewitness with a single suspect photo.
“Yeah. Not a real regular and not recently, but yeah, he’s been in here. Uh, bottle of Bud and Irish whiskey, I think.”
“Do you know if he knew Suzy? Dated her? Took her home some night?”
Laurie brought out a manila file folder and opened it on the table. Now she was all business, too.
“Like I told you on the phone, Detective, Suzy only worked here four months, till the end of the year. September eight, to, uh, just after New Year’s, the third,” she said, looking at the dates on the top sheet in the file. “Biggest paydays of the year, then she splits.”
She looked over at me like I’d be sympathetic.
“I never had a complaint, but she mostly worked the later shifts when I wasn’t around. She worked that last weekend and left.”
“Disappeared,” Richards said. “No forwarding address. No calls back to you for references. Didn’t pick up her last check.”
Laurie was answering each question with a shake of her head.
“I hadn’t even heard her name mentioned until last week when her mom called all upset and then I reported it like she asked.
“I wish I had more for her mom, and you, but I don’t,” she said and pushed the folder an inch closer to Richards and crossed her arms. The manager was getting defensive.
“Laurie,” I jumped in, pulling her eyes to me. “How unusual is that? I mean for an employee to just walk away?”
“It happens a lot. Not as much in a place like this, but in the big, high-traffic clubs, a lot. The girls can make good money, but they move around from place to place. Sometimes they’ll work in