Thanksgiving used to be Bryan’s favorite holiday. He’d get up early, put on a pot of coffee, and clean out the turkey while he watched the Today show and lead-up to the parade. Then he’d fry a slab of bacon and start sautéing the celery, onions and mushrooms for the stuffing, while he popped the pumpkin pie – that he always added his secret shot of Baileys to – into the oven. The house would fill with the best smells. Audrey always vowed to sleep late on Thanksgiving, but the aroma of everything that was The Holidays would waft upstairs and get under her nose and lead her to the kitchen. He’d already have her cup of coffee waiting and the parade on the TV. Everyone was happy: the whole gang at Today, Fudge the beagle, Audrey, and the girls – who would both start shrieking as their favorite balloons crossed the screen. And then Santa … well, he was The Bomb. He’d finish it up in front of Macy’s and it was official: Christmas was coming. The family and friends would start to arrive around three, the bird was devoured to the bone by eight, Christmas carols on the piano started at nine and no one left before midnight. When the twins turned twelve, the four of them had even gotten into the Black Friday madness – leaving the huge mess for the morning and hitting the malls when the last guest left.
This year Audrey had the girls, Fudge, and a boyfriend the girls referred to as ‘John Something’. Bryan had made a small turkey, but it was only to get the smell in the apartment. He’d watched half the parade before putting on a Batman movie. Tatiana had asked him to her aunt’s house, and his brother had asked him to come up to Jersey. But he’d said no to both, thinking the day wouldn’t be so bad. He was wrong.
So he went for a two-hour walk that nearly killed him, ate his turkey with a salad and watched another Batman movie. Then he’d dragged out the old photo albums that Audrey used to keep – before pictures were on SD cards and cellphones and computers. She didn’t want any of them when they split. After defiling a few of them with a Sharpie and scissors, he’d taken out his anger on a boring white wall in his boring, rented apartment with his fist. That hurt. When the joy of blacking out Audrey’s eyes in vacation photos fizzled like a dying firecracker and the excruciating pain in his hand subsided to an annoying throb, he decided steps had to be taken before he found himself sitting on the floor in the dark flicking a light switch on and off, fantasizing about boiling Fudge on the stove. He was that close to the edge of going crazy. He wanted his life back – the life he and Audrey used to have – and short of barging into his old living room and plopping himself down at that Thanksgiving table that he’d fucking paid for, grabbing a knife and going at that turkey and Audrey’s new boyfriend, he couldn’t make it happen. Of course, forcefully reclaiming his seat at the dinner table wasn’t going to give him back his life – it was going to land him in the slammer. He’d been trying to get a grip on his feelings since Audrey had asked him to get out, trying to figure out – like the detective he was – a solution to their problems, trying to figure out why things went wrong and a way he could get back into his house. And he just had to come to terms with the fact that wasn’t gonna happen. In fact, with a new boyfriend at the holiday table, the idea of reconciliation was looking more and more remote. It was time to stop crying in the shower and blaming the water for why he was all wet. He had to face what was happening, accept that he couldn’t stop it and plot his revenge.
So he took out all the old photos of himself from those photo albums, back from years ago when he looked good – tan and muscular and somehow taller. Then he cut Audrey out of all of them and covered the fridge in pictures of the self he wanted to be again, and vowed to make a comeback. It was an early New Year’s resolution, and it might take him a year to lose that hundred pounds, but by the time Audrey called to tell him that she was going to be the next ‘Mrs John Something’ he’d be back and she’d be sorry she ever told him to leave. And he would be happy to tell her to go fuck herself, snidely commenting as he closed the door on her once-pretty face that she needed a booster shot of Botox and some rejuvenation down south because both her mug and her vagina were starting to sag.
The lonely house stunk of turkey and the pumpkin pie that he’d actually chucked in the garbage so he wouldn’t break his new resolution. Since he would no longer allow himself to find comfort in the company of a meatball hero or a six-pack of Heineken, he decided to get out and do something constructive.
Strip clubs were like hospitals and 7-Elevens – they never closed. Not on Christmas and not on Thanksgiving. Animal Instincts had opened at noon and wouldn’t shut its doors till four in the morning. They even served free turkey dinners and pumpkin pie with a paid admission. Bryan still wasn’t expecting to see fifteen cars in the parking lot, though – it was Thanksgiving, after all. And it was … well, the Animal. While he was no connoisseur of strip joints, the Animal could best be compared to a Rodeway Inn: convenient, cheap, and sometimes clean – adjectives that also applied to its dancers.
Bryan was confident that the pickups and SUVs in the parking lot were all locals. No one was throwing bachelor parties on a major holiday, and at nine at night the tourists should all still be sitting around their in-laws’ tables, finishing pie and coffee with the family, maybe even planning out their strategy for how to attack the malls come midnight. He knew that’s where he’d’ve been if it was up to him. On that annoying thought, he pulled his taped hand, which was probably fractured, out of the gallon-sized Ziploc bag of ice. Argh. Not only was he probably gonna have to sit in the ER on a major holiday weekend with all the food-poisoning victims and morons who almost blew themselves up when they attempted to deep-fry a frozen bird, but he was probably gonna have to pay some outrageous amount in co-pay fees, and probably spend six weeks in a cast. And he was definitely gonna have to fix the fucking hole in the wall. He popped two more Advil, dried off his hand and thought of the line from the movie Animal House: ‘Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.’ And he wasn’t even drunk when he’d challenged his apartment to a duel.
The hope was to show off Poole’s picture and maybe find someone who was at the club the night Angelina disappeared. Or someone who might remember he was hanging around for a few days looking creepy before her last show. Maybe someone saw something, heard something. Like his pop, who was a detective in the Bronx for twenty years, had taught him: Retrace your steps from the beginning if you want to figure out where it was you tripped up. It was worth a shot – he didn’t have anything to lose and no place he had to be. And he didn’t sleep much any more, anyway.
He recognized the same bouncers working the door, the manager, the waitresses, dancers. He’d interviewed them all before, and when he spoke with them again, they all told the same story. He was about to get to work on the thirty or so guys sitting around the stage ogling a dancer who was twisted like a pretzel around a metal pole when he spotted a bartender he hadn’t seen before. She was topless and top heavy, her arms and chest covered in tattoos. While Bryan knew no one on the squad was gonna feel bad for him interviewing topless waitresses and strippers, he still wished the girls had their clothes on. He didn’t want them thinking he was getting a free peek, so he strictly focused on their eyes, which looked all the more awkward since he was overweight, the AC wasn’t working, and he was sweating like a pig at a barbeque while he asked his questions.
‘What can I get you?’ the bartender asked, sighing when she saw his badge and folding her arms across her ample chest.
‘It’s not like that,’ he started. He couldn’t help but notice that the tattoos were all of dead musicians and actors: Jimi Hendrix, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis. ‘I’m not a Narc and I don’t care what’s going on in the back room. I’m working the homicide of Angelina Santri; she was a dancer here.’
‘I knew Angie,’ she answered, nodding. The defiant body stance relaxed and she started to wipe out bar glasses with enviable biceps the size of most women’s thighs. ‘Nice kid. Real nice. I think she had a baby. Damn shame.’
‘When was the last time you saw her?’
‘The last night she worked – the night she disappeared. I made her a sour-apple martini when she got off.’
‘Really? The manager gave me the time sheets of everyone working that night; I thought I’d talked to them all. What’s your name?’ he asked.
‘Amber Kurtz. I wasn’t working; I popped behind the bar to help out when it got crazy. I was waiting for Elvira – another bartender – to get off work, ’cause she was crashing at my house and we were going out after she was done.’
Bryan pulled out the picture of Poole. ‘Do remember if you saw this guy that night?’
She took the photo and stared at it under one of the bar’s backlights. ‘Yeah. I saw this asshole. He was sitting at the bar. He was definitely here when Angie danced. He was watching her like a time clock.’
Bryan felt his heart speed up. This would not only definitively place Poole at Animal Instincts the night Angie disappeared, but it would have him watching her. ‘Did he say anything?’ he asked excitedly. ‘You said he was an asshole. Why’s that? Did you see him with Angelina later?’
‘No, no, no, he didn’t say nothing. And I never saw him with Angie. Actually, now that I’m thinking about it, it was his friend who was the asshole. He made a comment about my tits. Just a dickhead comment. This guy,’ she said, pointing at Poole’s picture, ‘told him to shut up.’
Bryan frowned. ‘Friend? How do you know they were together?’
‘’Cause they was laughing together, and, well, they were together. You just know.’
‘Crown Royal, splash of ginger,’ said a customer on the stool over. Amber stepped away to make the drink.
‘Did you get his name?’ Bryan asked when she came back. ‘Of the friend. Did you get his name?’
She shook her head. ‘Nope. Didn’t get a name on either of them. Ten,’ she said to the guy, who handed her a crumpled cluster of bills. She made a face and shook her head as she counted out the cash.
‘How’d they pay?’ Bryan asked. ‘This guy and his asshole friend?’
‘Cash. Like most everybody in this place, but they left me a lot more than two bucks,’ she barked at the back of Crown Royal’s head. She rolled her eyes. ‘They were pretty generous. I think the nicer one, the guy in the picture, was dressed in black. He paid with a fifty and left me a twenty for just a couple of beers. That was a surprise.’
‘You still got it? The fifty?’
She made a face.
‘Some people keep high bills.’
She shook her head. ‘Not me. They go to pay the rent.’ She tapped on the bar. ‘Oh yeah. And then I saw the two of them outside when me and Elvira was leaving. They were in the back lot, standing there, just hanging out talking, like they was waiting for someone to come out. That someone was probably Angie, now that I think about it, you know, after all that happened. And here’s some fucked-up thinking, Detective. I remember thinking to myself, “If I got twenty for a beer, he’s probably gonna drop a few presidents for some pussy. Too bad I’m gay and don’t like dick, ’cause that’s one lucky bitch.”’