The Good News Is You Get To Sit In A Bar All Night And Interview People . . . The Bad News Is It’s The Place They Last Saw Her Alive

Reporters hang out in bar all night gawking at gawkers and unsettling the unaware:

Night was a shadow of itself at the Pioneer bar on the Bowery. It was mostly the morbidly curious or the unaware who turned up on Friday to toss back drinks in the next-to-last place a 24-year-old woman was seen alive exactly one week earlier.

. . .

It was 10:40 p.m. The bar, at 218 Bowery, had the atmosphere of a sparsely attended school mixer. Shadows outnumbered people. Stools wore layers of coats and wraps, like summer furniture covered for winter. Mick Jagger sang on the sound system.

People celebrating their birthday in such a place hopefully fell into the “unaware” category:

A woman with a gray sweater tied around her waist celebrated her birthday with a smattering of friends and friends of friends. A sallow-faced man who said he worked for the government said two women from the group had already left, fearful of not getting home safely.

Was this night like the night Imette St. Guillen disappeared? It was hard to say. A week earlier, when Ms. St. Guillen crossed this room, it was so crowded that people needed to walk sideways. Now it was empty enough that a quarter on the floor lay in plain view.

Still, though fewer in number, the players performed the usual barroom scenes. Near the mirrored wall, where newspaper and television reporters were staked out at tables, a tall woman with her blond hair in a ponytail leaned into a stocky man dressed in black. They kissed. He rested his hand on her backside. The reporters talked among themselves.

More in the unaware camp:

The birthday party dwindled, and a wedding party fresh from a rehearsal dinner arrived. They were young and well dressed and strolled in with authority. A woman in cream pants slipped off her red wool coat, revealing a halter top and the glow of skin, and heads swiveled. An Ohioan named Brian Blitz, 25, stole two glances at her shoulders.

“This is the bar?” a woman visiting from Chicago asked, eyes wide. She had heard of Ms. St. Guillen’s slaying.

It had been too late to change the site of the post-rehearsal gathering.