‘I – ah – yes,’ said Sissy. ‘Why don’t you call your brother now? He’s an hour behind us, isn’t he, so maybe you’ll catch him before he goes for lunch.’
T-Yon looked down at the card in Sissy’s hand. ‘Aren’t you going to turn it over? I think I’d like to know what tomorrow’s going to bring.’
‘Same old, same old, I shouldn’t wonder.’
T-Yon waited for a moment, and then she said, ‘You don’t want to show me, do you? You know what it is and you don’t want to show me.’
‘All right. You’re right. I don’t want to show you. Why don’t you go call your brother?’
‘Is it that bad?’
‘It depends on your interpretation. Like I said, you can turn up the same card for two different people and it will have two totally different meanings.’
‘So what does this one mean for me? Come on, you just told me I had to face up to my future. “Better to be scared than caught unawares”, that’s what you said.’
‘It could be a mistake,’ said Sissy. ‘Let’s wait until I do a second reading.’
But T-Yon reached across and picked up the card herself. It was the one card that Sissy had feared would come up: La Cuisine De Nuit, the Night Kitchen.
T-Yon studied it for a few long moments, and then she said, ‘Oh my God. Oh God! This is worse than my nightmare.’
The card showed a woman standing in front of a stove in a huge, gloomy kitchen. High up behind her there was a small, circular window, through which a full moon was shining, and apart from a single candle on the table beside her, this was the only illumination. The walls of the kitchen were hung with copper saucepans and colanders and ladles, and the table was crowded with bowls and jugs and sauce boats, as well as vegetables – cabbages and cauliflowers and carrots.
The woman looked about twenty-five years old, with a pale, almond-shaped face and very large sad eyes. She was wearing a white bonnet with wings, rather like a nun’s wimple.
At first, in the gloom, it was difficult to make out what she was doing. She was holding the handle of a large iron skillet in one hand, and a fork in the other, and she was prodding what looked like heaps of sausages. It was only on closer inspection that it became clear that her dress was unbuttoned all the way down the front, and that her stomach had been split open, all the way up to her breastbone. She was standing in front of the stove, frying her own intestines.
T-Yon stared at Sissy in total shock.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Sissy. ‘Now you can understand why I didn’t want you to see it.’
‘But you said that the DeVane cards always tell the truth.’
‘They do, T-Yon, they do. But like you’ve seen with most of these other cards, they’re symbolic rather than literal. The Night Kitchen card means that you might be tempted to make a sacrifice on somebody else’s behalf, and it’s advising you that it might not be the right thing to do.’
‘You’re sure of that? I’m not going to be cut open and have my insides fried?’
‘Of course not. Of course not. I’m sorry.’
T-Yon stood up and went to the window. Her blonde hair shone in the sunlight. Sissy sat and waited and said nothing. She was sure that T-Yon wasn’t in any danger of meeting the same fate as the girl in the Night Kitchen, but she also couldn’t be certain that something equally grisly might not happen to her. At the same time, she could sense the cards’ disapproval that she wasn’t being honest. It was like a chilly draft up the back of her neck, as if Billy had left the back door open.
After a few moments, however, T-Yon turned around and said, ‘No, Sissy, you shouldn’t be sorry. I asked you to tell my fortune and you did. It’s not your fault that it turned out so scary. At least you’ve warned me about it. My God.’
‘Let’s do another reading later on,’ Sissy suggested. ‘There’s still so much that the cards haven’t explained. I think you’ll find that your future isn’t going to be quite so terrible after all.’
‘Do you know what I asked them?’ said T-Yon.
‘You don’t have to tell me. It’s between you and the cards.’
‘I asked them if my brother was in trouble. I asked them if he needed me.’ She paused, and then she said, ‘He does, doesn’t he? And I think he needs you, too.’
The Whistler
When Everett came back from his lunch with Theresa Overby, Luther was waiting for him in his office, with one vast buttock perched on the edge of his desk. Luther’s expression was unusually somber.
‘Well?’ asked Everett. ‘You look like you lost a ten spot and found a nickel.’
‘What we found was more blood,’ said Luther. ‘Or what looks like blood.’
‘Shit. Where?’
‘Seventh story stairwell.’
‘Shit. Why didn’t you call me?’
‘Didn’t see the point. I knew you’d want to check it out for yourself, before we called in the cops.’
‘All right. Let’s go take a look at it. Jesus. What the hell is going on in this goddamn hotel?’
Bella slid back the window between their offices and said, ‘Hi, boss! Enjoy your lunch? Mr Tierney says he can meet you at seven at the Kingfish Lounge, OK? And Olivia’s bringing round those media releases around five thirty. She said that Frank Thibodeaux hadn’t finalized all the dinner menus, that’s what held her up.’
‘OK, Bella. Thanks. I’ll catch up with you in a minute.’
Everett and Luther took the elevator back up to the seventh floor. This time they turned right when they left the elevator car and walked along to the door which led to the emergency staircase. Everett pushed it open and they stepped inside.
The staircase was all concrete, with red-painted tubular handrails. It was hot and humid in here, because it wasn’t air-conditioned, and they could hear banging and clattering from the third floor down below them, where an ice-making machine was being installed.
Luther said, ‘There,’ and pointed across to the opposite side of the landing.
On the bottom two steps that led up to the roof, Everett saw two broad smears of reddish-brown, and another smear on the floor just below them, in an elongated S-shape. There was also a random pattern of reddish-brown marks on the wall, like squashed moths, as if somebody with bloody hands had repeatedly lost their balance and had reached out seven or eight times to steady themselves.
Everett went across and examined the stains more closely. ‘If this is blood, and not paint, or rust remover, I’d say that something pretty nasty happened here.’ He leaned to one side and peered upward. ‘You check out the roof?’
‘Of course. We checked the en-tire building, roof to parking garage. Every guest room, every storeroom, every closet, but this is all we found.’
‘OK. Looks like it’s time to call in the law. But I hope that won’t be a serious error of judgment.’
Luther said, ‘Think about it this way, Mr Everett, sir. If it ain’t blood, then we don’t have nothing to worry about. At least we’ll know for sure.’
‘What do you think it is? I mean, seriously?’
‘I think it’s blood.’
‘Yeah. Me too, damn it.’
Detective Slim Garrity stood and stared at the crimson-stained rug for over a minute without saying anything, although his jaws kept working on a large wad of Big Red chewing gum. He was a thin, angular man with black slicked-back hair, and the impression he gave of a Southern card sharp was accentuated by his bolo necktie and his shiny, black narrow-shouldered suit.
Beside him, his partner Detective Kevin Mullard was hefty and disheveled. He had sandy hair and sandy eyebrows and freckles and his red rubbery lips seemed to be permanently smirking at some private joke. His green linen three-piece suit looked as if he had bought it from a thrift store and got change out of a twenty, and never pressed it.
‘So . . . your cleaner was the first one to see it?’ asked Detective Garrity. He spoke with an unmistakable Baton Rouge accent, but without any expression in his voice at all, a
s if he were reading from a teleprompt. ‘And there was nobody else here in the suite when she came in to clean? No guests, no hotel staff? No unauthorized visitors?’
‘Nobody, so far as I know,’ said Everett. ‘You can talk to her in a minute, if you want to.’
‘Very well. OK. But the first thing we have to decide is what this stain is really constituated of. The crime-scene boys’ll be here in a few minutes, and they’ll be doing a presumptive test, which will tell us for certain if it isn’t blood.’
‘They can tell if it isn’t, but they can’t tell if it is? How does that work?’
‘The presumptive test can only tell us if it’s probable. It’s not one hundred percent foolproof, because there’s other factors which can give you a similar reaction to human blood. Interferences, we call them. Some plant and animal materials, they can affect a test for human blood, and so can some metals, like copper and iron. That’s why we have to be careful when we’re testing for blood outdoors, where there’s a whole lot of vegetative life, or in any kind of vehicle.’
‘I see. What if it probably is blood?’
‘Then they’ll take the rug back to the CSI laboratory and put it through some further tests for human-specific enzymes or human-specific DNA.’
‘My guess is it’s blood,’ put in Detective Mullard, still smirking. ‘It sure looks like blood, don’t it? And what else could it be? Red-eye gravy?’
‘Let’s not go leaping to any premature conclusions, Kevin,’ Detective Garrity admonished him, out of the side of his mouth. ‘Quite apart from that, we don’t want to upset these good people here more than we necessarily have to, do we.’
Everett said, ‘I’m not squeamish, Detective. I just want to know for sure that nobody’s been murdered here.’
‘Of course you do, sir, and believe me we’ll be expediting our investigation as quick as conceivably possible.’
Everett led the two detectives to the stairwell, so that they could look at the stains on the steps, and the floor, and the patterns on the wall.
‘Again, it’s hard to tell for sure if that’s blood or not,’ said Detective Garrity. ‘You’d be surprised the number of times we’ve come across suspicious-looking stains at some crime location or another, and they’ve turned out to be totally innocent. Look at these here. My partner here mentioned red-eye gravy, and it’s perfectly possible that these here stains in this stairwell are just that. Red-eye gravy is made with ham grease and coffee, isn’t it, and that could give you this reddish-brown coloration.’
Everett said, ‘You don’t seriously believe that this is gravy, do you?’
Detective Garrity’s jaws continued to chew gum. He looked at Everett with eyes as black and hooded as a turtle. ‘No, sir. To be truthful to you, I don’t seriously believe that this is gravy.’
Two crime-scene specialists arrived, one tall African-American woman and one short, bullish-looking white man with rimless spectacles and a blue shaven head. They unpacked their kits, taking out Sangur strips for the rug and BlueStar Forensic liquid for the polished wooden floor that surrounded it, to see if there were any blood spatters that might have been washed or wiped away.
The African-American woman moistened a Sangur strip, which was like a large cotton bud, so that it turned pale yellow. She wiped it against the stain on the rug, and almost immediately it turned a bright greenish-blue. She held it up without a word, so the two detectives could see it.
‘Probable for blood,’ said Detective Garrity, flatly.
The bullish-looking CSI turned to Everett and said, ‘Maybe you can give us some elbow room now, sir, so that we can check out the rest of the room.’ The way he said it, it didn’t sound like a request.
‘Sure,’ said Everett. He had plenty of work to be catching up with downstairs, even though he hardly felt like carrying on as if it was business as usual. Luther was waiting for him outside in the corridor.
‘Well?’
‘Worst case scenario. They believe that it’s blood.’
‘We need to work out how we’re going to present this, Mr Everett, sir. I mean, like, media-wise.’
‘I don’t have any idea. “Copious bloodstains have been discovered on the seventh story – but don’t panic! We haven’t found any corpses yet! So far as we know, nobody has actually been murdered at The Red Hotel, so we trust that you all enjoy your stay with us – sweet dreams!”’
They went back down to the ground floor. In the elevator, a pretty young brunette in a tight turquoise T-shirt kept smiling at Everett and batting her eyelashes, but Everett found it impossible to give her anything in return but a quick, sick grin. Jesus, if somebody had been killed, right here in The Red Hotel, he could be ruined.
He returned to his office and slid back the glass partition. ‘Bella, how about a very strong cup of coffee?’ In fact, he could have used a double Jack Daniel’s, straight up, but he wanted to try and stay clear-headed.
‘Oh, boss – you’re back!’ said Bella, brightly. ‘Your sister just called you! I told her you were tied up. She gave me her number . . . someplace in Connecticut, she said. She didn’t leave a message but she asked if you could call her back asap.’
‘OK, fine. Thanks. Do you want to get back to her for me?’
He sat down at his desk. His press officer, Olivia Melancon, had left him her latest media release, with a color photograph of himself and his partner, Stanley Tierney, and the mayor of Baton Rouge, George Dolan, all standing in front of The Red Hotel beaming with pride and holding up their thumbs. Her headline proclaimed: THE FUTURE IS RED – New Lease Of Life For BR’s Bijou Hotel.
The future is red, he thought. Well done, Olivia. You don’t know just how red. Red bloodstains and red balance sheet, both.
His phone warbled. He picked it up and it was T-Yon.
T-Yon said, ‘Thanks, Bella,’ and then, ‘Everett? It’s me. Everett – is everything OK?’
‘Where are you? Bella said you were someplace in Connecticut.’
‘Allen’s Corners, it’s just outside of New Milford. We came here to see Billy’s aunt Sissy.’
‘OK. What are you calling me for? You sound kind of upset.’
‘It’s a really long story but we came to see Billy’s aunt because she can tell fortunes, and tell you what your dreams mean, stuff like that.’
‘Oh, yeah?’
‘She’s fantastically good at it. She uses these special cards like nothing you ever saw in your life. They all have these really strange pictures on them, like witches and peculiar children and people getting baked into pies.’
‘Really? Jeez.’ Everett was trying to read Olivia’s media release at the same time as talking to T-Yon.
‘She told me my fortune.’
‘And, like, what? She told you that some horrible fate is going to befall you? You know I don’t believe in any of that hooey.’
‘Everett, she said that you were worried. In fact she said you were very worried. She said that it’s something to do with The Red Hotel, and it’s red.’
Everett abruptly leaned back in his chair. ‘Say that again? It’s something do with The Red Hotel, and it’s red?’
‘That’s right. The color red. She didn’t exactly know what, but it all seems to be connected to a woman who used to run The Red Hotel way back whenever.’
Everett paused for a moment, and then he said, ‘That would be . . . what was her name? Vanessa something. I know – Vanessa Slider. I remember the name because it’s like slider turtles. So far as I know she was the only woman who ever ran this hotel.’
‘When was that?’
‘Oh, who knows – way back in the late nineteen eighties, I think. Luther told me all about it. She and her husband used to manage it together but then her husband died and she took over. She ran it for a while – maybe three or four years – but then she was found guilty of assaulting a call girl who had come to the hotel to service one of the guests. Tried to strangle her, that’s what Luther said.’
‘It�
��s her,’ said T-Yon. ‘Whatever you’re worried about now, it’s all to do with her. What did you say her name was?’
‘Vanessa Slider. But I haven’t told you that I am worried.’
‘You are, though, aren’t you? Sissy said that these cards know everything, and they never lie.’
‘T-Yon, it’s all baloney. They’re cards, that’s all.’
‘It’s not just the cards, Ev. I didn’t want to tell you, but I’ve been having nightmares, too. Nightmares about us – you and me. That’s why I came here to see Sissy in the first place.’
‘Nightmares? What kind of nightmares?’
‘They’re just terrible. I mean like really, really horrific. I’ll tell you all about them when I see you. I can’t describe them over the phone. But they started when you opened The Red Hotel, and Sissy is sure that there’s some link between my nightmares and this woman who used to run it – this woman and her young son.’
Everett said nothing. He didn’t know if he ought to tell T-Yon about the bloodstains or not. Even though Detective Garrity had said that they were probably human, he was still holding out hope that they had come from some animal; or that they were paint, or dye, or even red-eye gravy, goddamnit.
T-Yon said, ‘Sissy thinks that this woman is looking for revenge. She doesn’t know all of the details yet. We’re going to do another reading this evening. But she says that we could be in real danger – both of us, you and me.’
‘How can she be looking for revenge? If she was running The Red Hotel in the nineteen eighties she must be getting on for eighty by now – that’s if she’s still alive.’
‘Sissy believes that people can still come looking for revenge, even after they’ve passed over.’
‘Oh, spare me! Come on, T-Yon, when people are dead, they’re dead. We never hear from Momma, do we, and she had plenty to be vengeful about, the way Poppa left her to bring us up all on her ownsome.’
‘That’s different. And anyhow, Momma never bore a grudge against anyone. She wasn’t that kind of a person. She was sweetness and light, God bless her.’
The Red Hotel (Sissy Sawyer Mysteries) Page 5