The Red Hotel (Sissy Sawyer Mysteries)

by Masterton, Graham

  Detective Garrity nodded his head toward the open restroom door.

  ‘Blood,’ he said. ‘That’s where we’re at.’

  Everett had only just returned to his office when his phone rang. He picked it up and Bella said, ‘Your sister again.’

  ‘T-Yon? Hi, T-Yon. What is it now?’

  ‘I’m coming down to BR. In fact we’re both coming down to BR. Me and Billy’s Aunt Sissy.’

  ‘T-Yon, it’s always great to see you, but why? You’re right in the middle of your cookery course. And why are you bringing this old lady with you?’

  ‘You’re in danger, Ev. I know it. You’re in danger and only Aunt Sissy knows what kind of danger.’

  ‘T-Yon, I don’t have any problems that I can’t deal with by myself. I’m opening up a hotel, for Christ’s sake. You always get teething troubles.’

  ‘The red, Ev. It’s blood.’

  ‘What? What did you say?’

  ‘You know that Aunt Sissy said that you were worried, and that it was all to do with The Red Hotel, and that it was red?’

  ‘Oh, come on, T-Yon. I’m having a hard time finding the exact right shade of red velvet for the cushion covers for the lobby, that’s all. You have no idea how many different kinds of red there are. Crimson, cerise, candy apple, magenta.’

  ‘You’re lying to me, Ev. Aunt Sissy is absolutely sure that it’s blood.’

  Everett sat up straight. ‘T-Yon, the distance between wherever you are in Connecticut and Baton Rouge has got to be more than a thousand miles. Be serious. How the hell can this Aunt Sissy or whatever the old biddy’s name is tell from over a thousand miles away that it’s blood?’

  ‘Because she’s sensitive to things like that. Because she can.’

  ‘T-Yon, forget it. There is no need for you to come down here and there is definitely no need for you to come down here and bring some elderly whackjob with you. I’m sorry.’

  ‘She heard that. I have my speaker switched on.’

  ‘All right then, sorry. Tell her I apologize. I don’t even know her.’

  There was a few seconds’ pause, during which Everett could hear nothing but clicking and scratching sounds, as if T-Yon had her hand held over the phone, with all of her rings on.

  Then she said, ‘Grover.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Wait up a second. Aunt Sissy says, does the name “Grover” mean anything to you?’

  ‘No,’ said Everett. ‘The only Grover I know is that screechy blue monster from Sesame Street. Please, T-Yon, I’m real busy right now. I do have problems but they’re practical problems. You know, like down-to-earth problems. I can’t get my head around all of this psychic gibberish.’

  ‘We’re still coming. We’re booked on the thirteen-fifteen Continental flight from La Guardia, tomorrow afternoon. We have to connect at Houston but we should be with you for six thirty.’

  ‘What about Hurricane Debby?’

  ‘I checked with the airline. It’s pretty much blown itself out.’

  ‘T-Yon—’

  ‘There’s nothing you can do to stop me, Ev. I’ll see you tomorrow, OK?’

  With that, she switched off her phone. Everett was tempted to call back but then he said, ‘Shit,’ and dropped his phone on to his desk. He knew T-Yon better than that. Once she had made up her mind to do something, she always did it big, no matter what it was.

  He was about to call Bella about his scheduled breakfast tomorrow morning with Bobby Lamb from The Baton Rouge Advocate when Detective Mullard knocked and stepped into his office before he could say, ‘Come on in.’

  Detective Mullard sniffed loudly and said, ‘Just to let you know that we’ve checked through all of the hotel staff on your duty roster today and Ella-mae is the only one not accounted for.’

  ‘I see. Do your CSIs have any idea what happened in that restroom?’

  ‘They’re leaning toward the opinion that somebody got themselves pretty comprehensively killed.’

  ‘But you’re still not one hundred percent sure who it was? Or where their body disappeared to?’

  ‘Not yet, sir, no. We’ve already sent two officers to Ella-mae’s home address in order to check that she simply didn’t get bored with waiting around here. And if she’s not there, alive and well, or if her folks don’t know for certain where she is, then those officers have been instructed to bring back a hairbrush so that the CSIs can check for DNA.’

  ‘All right,’ said Everett. ‘What else?’

  ‘We’re going to have to tape off the door from your main lobby to the staff annex.’

  ‘Tape off? What do you mean – “crime scene do not cross”? Jesus, that’s going to be great for business, not. Can’t you just lock the door so nobody can get in?’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir. Has to be done. Procedure.’

  Everett closed his eyes for a moment. Please God let this all be a nightmare. Please God let me open up my eyes and discover that none of it ever happened. No blood-soaked rug. No eerie whistling in the corridors. No restroom turned into a human abattoir.

  Detective Mullard’s cellphone played Hey, Fighting Tigers, the theme tune of the LSU Tigers. ‘Pardon me,’ he said, and answered it.

  Everett waited impatiently while Detective Mullard said, ‘Sure thing,’ and ‘sure thing,’ and ‘gotcha’, and ‘great.’ In the end he slid his cell shut and said, ‘Nobody knows where Ella-mae could possibly be right now. She didn’t go home, and she hasn’t been in touch with any of her friends. As a rule, she’s texting and tweeting every five minutes or so.’

  ‘So what now?’ asked Everett.

  ‘We start searching for her. Mr and Mrs Grover have given us some recent pictures of her, and what we’ll do is circulate them, here inside the hotel if we can count on you to cooperate with that, and anyplace else she might have gone to. Or been taken to.’

  ‘Mr and Mrs Grover?’

  ‘That’s right. That’s her parents. That’s her name, Ella-mae Grover.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Everett.

  Detective Mullard frowned at him and said, ‘Sir? Is there anything wrong?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Everett told him. ‘I truly don’t know. Suddenly I don’t even know the difference between wrong and right.’

  Flight to Red Stick

  Hurricane Debby had almost blown itself out, but the first two hours of the flight from New York to Houston were still wildly turbulent. Sissy and T-Yon had to keep their seat belts fastened as the 737 jolted and bumped through thick cloud cover, and Sissy had to hold her glass of wine tight to stop it from spilling across her tray. She was tempted to ask the flight attendant if they could make an unauthorized stopover at Washington, DC, so that she could smoke two or three cigarettes to steady her nerves.

  ‘I just hope that Everett isn’t too mad about my taking you down to meet him,’ said T-Yon. She was wearing a gray silk headscarf and absolutely no make-up, but she still looked striking. ‘He has a very short fuse, but I guess that’s what makes him a really good manager.’

  ‘Don’t you worry,’ said Sissy, patting her hand. ‘I believe that he’s going to be extremely relieved to see us. He didn’t want to upset you, that’s all, but I can tell you for sure that he’s deeply worried.’

  ‘Do you still think that what you saw was blood?’

  Sissy nodded. ‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘No doubt about it whatsoever.’

  She had read her own cards, and she had been overwhelmed with red: drowned in it, almost. Red skies, red flags, red ribbons, cardinals dressed in red and cups overflowing with human blood. After she had done that, she had turned to her Alphabet Cards, which had the same latent force as a ouija board, except that the answers they gave were always proper names. She had learned long ago that finding out who you were going to meet in the future was equally valuable as knowing what was going to happen to you – if not more so, in many cases.

  When she had dealt out the cards, two names had come up: SLIDER and GROVER. The name SLIDER she alre
ady knew, so she shuffled the cards and put them back in the pack. But the name GROVER meant nothing to her, so she dealt out the cards again. The letters G – R – O – V – E – R had come out in sequence, but sometimes the Alphabet Cards made deliberate mistakes, and a name would be spelled wrongly, like PERSONA instead of PEARSON; or they would give her a clue to a name rather than the name itself, like TENOR for the name SINGER. The cards weren’t simply being mischievous; they were subtly giving her more information about the people she would soon encounter, and how to deal with them.

  But GROVER had come out again, and then again, spelled exactly the same way. That told her nothing, except a name. Eventually, she had tried collating all six cards together, still in the same order, and picking out different cards at random. Now at last the cards had started to speak to her – or rather, to whisper in her ear. Card number three had been V, when it should have been O. Card number five had been R, when it should have been E.

  The cards had been telling her something critical. Whoever GROVER was, he or she was no longer in one piece. GROVER, like the six cards that made up GROVER’s name, was all cut up, disassembled, either metaphorically or literally. That was why she had told T-Yon to mention GROVER when she was talking on the phone to Everett, to see how he had reacted.

  The flight attendant brought Sissy another miniature bottle of wine, and an orange soda for T-Yon.

  ‘Don’t you miss the South?’ Sissy asked T-Yon. ‘I’ve visited Savannah a few times, to stay with my old school friend Ruth, and every time I’ve been there I’ve never wanted to leave.’

  T-Yon shrugged. ‘I do miss it, but then again I don’t. When I’m in BR, I always feel like the days are sliding past and the next thing I know I’m going to look in the mirror one morning and I’ll be old and I won’t have done anything. At least in New York I feel awake all the time, and that I’m getting on with my life. You know – like actually doing something, instead of dreaming my life away.’

  ‘You were born in Lafayette, though?’

  ‘Even dreamier, Lafayette.’

  ‘When did you move to Baton Rouge?’

  ‘My parents split up. Well, my Poppa walked out on my Momma. He was a teacher at Lafayette High. He left her for some older woman, I never really found out why. My Momma was beautiful. I mean she was really, really beautiful. But she was left to bring up me and Everett by herself, and she had to struggle so hard.

  ‘She had plenty of men wanting to court her, especially one of her cousins, who was called Sam Boudreaux. He was disgusting. It would be an insult to pigs to call him a pig. All greasy hair parted in the middle and red face and white suits with sweaty patches under his arms. He kept coming around almost every day and one evening I think he raped Momma or at least he tried to rape her. She would never talk about it. Whichever it was we packed up the very next day and left Lafayette and moved to BR.’

  The plane was flying more steadily now, and suddenly the sun broke through the windows. Sissy’s wild gray hair shone silver, and all of her necklaces and bangles sparkled.

  ‘You lost your Momma, though, didn’t you?’ she asked T-Yon. ‘When was that?’

  ‘Everett was twelve and I was five. First of all Momma got a job at a grocery store and we lived in back of the grocery store and we liked that even though the rooms were so shabby. But then something happened, I don’t know what, and the manager accused Momma of stealing groceries and she lost that job. Maybe he came on to her and she said no.

  ‘She managed to get another job for a cleaning company and we lived in this one room, but the worst thing was that she was out for most of the night and she was sleeping for most of the day and we hardly ever got to see her. Then she got really sick and they took her into hospital and me and Everett had to stay at this children’s home. Then one afternoon when we came home from school they told us that Momma had died. We never even got to say goodbye.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Sissy. ‘I know it was a long time ago but it must still hurt.’

  T-Yon looked across at her and smiled but there were tears in her eyes. ‘Yes, it does. I have pictures of her and it wasn’t just my imagination that she was beautiful.’

  She paused for a few moments, wiping her tears with the back of her hand. Sissy could have offered to get in touch with her late mother’s resonance, but she didn’t think that now was the time. They had other, more immediate problems to deal with first. Like blood.

  T-Yon said, ‘About six months after Momma passed, we were taken into foster care by George and Renée Savoie. They were the couple who started the Red Bean Restaurant chain, and they had never had the time to have children of their own. Great people. Great, great people. Warm, loving, very hard-working but always cheerful. After a year they adopted us; and that’s how we became Everett and Lilian Savoie.’

  ‘That’s wonderful,’ said Sissy. ‘I always like a happy ending.’

  ‘Oh God,’ said T-Yon. ‘Let’s hope this all turns out happy.’

  Luther was waiting for them as they came out of the baggage claim area. He was wearing mirror sunglasses and a very white short-sleeved shirt. The air conditioning inside the airport was ferocious but outside Sissy could see the glare of a hot Louisiana afternoon.

  ‘Where you at, Ms T-Yon? And you Ms Sawyer, correct?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Sissy. ‘But why don’t you call me Sissy? I’ve never been one for formality. By the way, I’m sorry about your loss.’

  Luther had taken the luggage cart from T-Yon and had started pushing it toward the entrance. It had one squeaky wheel. ‘My loss, ma’am?’ he asked.

  ‘You lost a pet quite recently. A dog, wasn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right. My old bloodhound, Hooker. Named him for John Lee Hooker. But how’d you know that?’

  ‘Because you still miss him, that’s why, and if there’s one thing that nobody can ever hide, it’s grieving. Of course it’s always more pronounced if it’s a person that you’ve lost, rather than a pet, but it’s grieving all the same.’

  ‘Well, brush my feet,’ said Luther. ‘You and my Aunt Epiphany ought to get together. She’s all into this mind-reading and fortune-telling and spellificating. She even perdicted the exact day and the exact hour when my grandpa was going to breathe his last, and he did. Five after eleven in the morning on the twenty-first of February, nineteen ninety-seven. I’ll never forget it.’

  They walked out into thirty-three degree heat and eighty-percent humidity. There was only one cloud in the sky, a long thin wisp of cirrus that looked as if an angel in tattered robes were sailing past, high above them, heading for someplace far to the north. Luther led them across to the curb, where a white Ford S-Max was parked, with The Red Hotel logo on the side of it in sloping red italics.

  Luther stowed their luggage, and then they climbed in and drove south on Veterans Memorial Boulevard to join Interstate 110, which would take them into the center of Baton Rouge.

  ‘This mind-reading stuff,’ said Luther, his eyes floating in his rear-view mirror. ‘Is that something you naturally born with, or can you learn it?’

  ‘Bit of both, I think,’ Sissy told him. ‘Some people have the facility but never use it because they don’t understand what they’ve got, and some people never use it because they’re scared to. I have to admit, it can be pretty scary at times.’

  Luther twisted himself around in the driver’s seat. ‘Scary? Let me tell you, Ms Sissy, when you find out what’s been happening at The Red Hotel, scary don’t even get anywheres close.’

  ‘Give me a for-instance,’ said Sissy.

  ‘Well, I’m not sure that I should. I gave my solemn promise to Mister Everett that I wouldn’t discuss with you none of what’s been going on, not till he has the chance to talk to you himself.’

  ‘All right, please yourself.’

  Luther frowned at her for a moment, but then he said, ‘Still and all – I guess it wouldn’t hurt. Like, even the poh-lice are involved right now, so it’s more or le
ss out in the public domain.’

  ‘OK,’ Sissy told him. ‘But I really would prefer it if you kept your eyes on the road ahead of you while you’re driving. You don’t have to be psychic to predict a fatal rear-end collision.’

  Luther turned back round so that he was looking where he was going. ‘I’m sorry. The thing is that I believe that something seriously weird is going on, but Mr Everett is trying his darndest to play it down because we’re all ready for the grand opening tomorrow and he’s worried we might have to postpone it, or even scrub it altogether.’

  ‘The blood,’ said Sissy.

  ‘The blood? You know about that, too? How the heck you know about that?’

  ‘I’ve seen it in the cards, Luther. Red, red and more red. When the cards come up with that much red, that means blood. Plain and unequivocal.’

  As they circled around the on-ramp to join the interstate, Luther started to tell them all about the bloodstained bedside rug and the smears of blood on the walls of the staircase, and the inexplicable whistling noise, and the disappearance of Ella-mae Grover, with all the blood in the ladies’ restroom.

  ‘Ella-mae Grover?’ said T-Yon, looking at Sissy with her eyes wide.

  ‘That’s right. Ella-mae Grover. Why you sound so surprised?’

  ‘Because Sissy saw that name in her Alphabet Cards. And she predicted that somebody called Grover would be all chopped up.’

  Luther stared at Sissy in his rear-view mirror. He was still staring at her when a huge red semi thundered past them in the inside lane, blaring its air-horns. Luther swerved, and then straightened up, and said, ‘Sorry – sorry! Jesus. I’m real glad that you’ve taken the trouble to come down here, Ms Sissy. I mean that. I think we sorely need the services of somebody like you, and we need them urgent.’

  ‘Let’s just get to The Red Hotel in one piece, shall we?’ said Sissy. ‘I might be able to contact the spirit world, but I’m not quite ready to go there. Not yet awhile.’

  The Presence of Terror

  When they arrived outside The Red Hotel, they saw that half of Convention Street along the 200 block was cordoned off by yellow police tapes. Five squad cars were parked facing the curb, as well as a dark blue panel van from the forensic unit, and assorted cars and vans from WAFB 9 and WBRZ television stations and WJBO radio. The sidewalks were crowded with onlookers.