The Red Hotel (Sissy Sawyer Mysteries)

by Masterton, Graham

  ‘T-Yon,’ said Everett, ‘thanks for your call but I really have to go now. I’m up to my ears.’

  ‘So you’re telling me that you’re not worried about anything at all?’

  ‘Right now – apart from finding myself three qualified sous-chefs before tomorrow lunchtime – no.’

  ‘Cross your heart?’

  Everett was just about to answer when he was almost deafened by a piercing whistle. Immediately, he took the phone away from his ear, but the whistling continued, rising and falling like a high wind whistling through a gap in a window. T-Yon was still talking, but he could barely make out what she was saying.

  ‘T-Yon?’ he shouted. ‘T-Yon? There’s some kind of interference on the line, I’ll have to call you back!’

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘I said there’s some kind of interference on the line! Can’t you hear it? Like somebody whistling!’

  ‘Can’t . . . hear . . . anyth—’

  ‘I’ll call you back, OK?’

  He switched off his phone and went over to the sliding glass window. ‘Bella, can you get me that number again, please? T-Yon’s number in Connecticut?’ He stuck his finger in his ear and screwed it around. ‘The phone started making this really loud screeching sound. Damn near deafened me.’

  She had started to punch out the number again when Luther knocked at the door.

  ‘Just had a complaint from five-one-two.’

  ‘What was it? For Christ’s sake, Luther, can’t you deal with it?’

  ‘I been up there already, Mr Everett, sir, and I sure don’t know what to make of it. Thought you’d want to come hear it for yourself.’

  ‘Hear it? What do you mean by that?’

  ‘It’s a whistling noise. Like somebody whistling, only real loud. I can’t work out where it’s coming from, or what’s causing it.’

  Everett turned back to Bella and said, ‘Bella – forget that call for now. I’ll be upstairs on five if anybody needs me.’

  He could hear it as soon as they stepped out of the elevator. Only three of the rooms on the fifth floor were occupied, out of twenty, but five guests were standing in the corridor with their fingers in their ears, looking distinctly unhappy. The whistling sound was overwhelming – the same hurricane-force whistle that Everett had heard on the phone. It rose and fell in both volume and pitch, and at its highest it made it almost impossible to think, let alone hear anything.

  ‘What is it?’ a young man shouted. Although it was only mid-afternoon, he was wearing only a hotel bathrobe, white with The Red Hotel embroidered in red on the pocket. Everett recognized him and his pretty blonde partner as a honeymoon couple who had booked in only about three hours ago. ‘It’s even making the TV go on the fritz!’

  Everett walked down to the end of the corridor and looked out of the window. There was nothing outside the hotel that could be making a whistling noise as loud as this. There was no wind blowing, no helicopters hovering, no emergency vehicles parked in the street, no construction sites with klaxons or hooters.

  Luther yelled, ‘Could be the plumbing, what do you think? You know – air that’s gotten trapped in the pipes, something like that? My Aunt Epiphany’s house used to rumble something terrible when she got air trapped in her pipes.’

  ‘I don’t have any idea!’ Everett yelled back at him. ‘Just get Charlie Bowdre up here with his maintenance crew!’

  The honeymooner came up to them. ‘We can’t stay here with this noise going on! Like, if you can’t fix it, you’re going to have to find us another room!’

  An older man quavered, ‘It’s playing all hell with my hearing appliance! Like somebody screaming, right inside my head! If I suffer a perforated eardrum, because of this, I tell you, I’m going to sue your ass!’

  ‘OK, OK, everybody please calm down!’ Everett shouted. ‘I’m going to call for our maintenance guys to come up here as quick as they can. Like my deputy manager says, it’s probably nothing more serious than some air in the water pipes, or maybe it’s an a/c problem. Whatever it is, we’ll get it sorted asap. Meanwhile, if you’d all like to come down to the Showboat Saloon, we’ll give you complimentary cocktails and snacks until you can return to your rooms.’

  Even though the whistling was now even higher – so high that it was right at the upper edge of human hearing – the guests appeared to be satisfied with Everett’s offer, and they returned to their rooms to change into clothes that would suit the Showboat Saloon.

  Luther meanwhile called Charlie Bowdre, their maintenance engineer, on his headset and told him to get up to five as fast as humanly possible.

  Luther paused, and then he said to Everett, ‘Charlie says he’s all tied up.’

  ‘What the hell does he mean he’s all tied up? This is a goddamned crisis!’

  Luther talked to Charlie Bowdre again. When Charlie Bowdre answered him he raised his eyebrows and said, ‘Damn.’ That was about the coarsest expletive that Luther ever used, so Everett knew that it had to be serious.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked. The whistling had subsided a little, but it had changed to a low, plaintive, quavering sound, like a chorus of desolate ghosts.

  ‘Charlie says that there’s a loud whistling noise down in the basement and he’s real concerned that the boiler may blow.’

  ‘Jesus. I don’t believe this. I’m going down there myself. You wait here, OK, until all of these people are ready, and escort them down to the Showboat.’

  The whistling rose and fell, rose and fell. Luther looked up at the ceiling, and then all around him.

  ‘Sure sounds spooky, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Bloodstained rugs and spooky whistling, I seriously don’t need stuff like this.’

  He left Luther and went to the elevator. As he pressed the button to go down to the basement, the whistling abruptly stopped. He turned back and looked at Luther in bewilderment. The total silence was almost as unsettling as the whistling that had come before it.

  They waited and waited, but the whistling didn’t resume.

  ‘What shall I do, Mr Everett, sir?’ asked Luther.

  ‘Give them their free drinks anyhow. Don’t want them to think we’re cheapskates, do we? I’ll meet you in my office, OK?’

  The elevator arrived and its chime made him jump. As the doors opened, he saw the reflection of a young woman in the mirrors; a young brunette woman in a cream-colored dress with her back turned to him. When he stepped into the elevator car it was empty.

  He turned around and around. There was nobody else in the car but him, and his own reflections. The young woman must have been an optical illusion, a trick of the lights, and the mirrors. He must have seen nothing more than an image of himself, in his own cream linen coat.

  He held the doors open and looked back outside. There was no girl walking away from him in the corridor, only Luther patiently waiting with his hands clasped in front of his crotch.

  Shit, he thought. I’m losing it. I must have been working too hard.

  But then he thought about his telephone conversation with T-Yon.

  ‘Sissy believes that people can still come looking for revenge, even after they’ve passed over.’

  Ghost Dance

  Sissy went into the kitchen to make her potato and mushroom bake, while Billy and T-Yon took Mr Boots for a walk up the road. The sky had cleared now, and even though it was cool for an August evening, Sissy could leave the kitchen door open.

  She could hear the repetitive whistling of a whippoorwill from somewhere in the woods. She always thought whippoorwills sounded as if they had lost their mate, like she had, and were hopelessly whistling for them to come back, over and over.

  She sliced parboiled potatoes and laid them in a buttered dish. Then she covered them with sliced mushrooms, rosemary, chives and garlic, followed by another layer of potatoes. She poured cream over the top of the potatoes and seasoned them lavishly with ground black pepper; and then slid the dish into the preheated oven.

  Fra
nk had always complained when she made potato and mushroom bake. ‘A man needs his meat,’ he used to say. ‘You want to see me wasting away in front of your eyes?’

  But Frank had never had the chance to waste away: he had been shot by a nineteen-year-old drug addict called Laurence Stepney, when he had tried to stop him from breaking into a station wagon outside the Big Bear Supermarket, near Norfolk. That was nearly twenty-five years ago now, and Laurence Stepney was now a free man. Frank, of course, was still in his casket.

  ‘Pretty woman, walking down the street,’ Sissy sang, under her breath, as she took off her apron. Frank had often sung that for her, even though it had usually come out in a low, off-key growl. He had never been good at paying her compliments, so he had recruited Roy Orbison to do it for him. And in spite of his complaints, he had always finished his potato and mushroom bake, and scraped the plate.

  She poured herself another glass of Zinfandel and went back into the living room. She knew that she needed to give T-Yon a second reading if she was going to answer all of the puzzles and uncertainties that her first reading had raised. But the final cards that she had turned up had given her such a strong sense of danger that she wondered if it was a good idea to take the readings any further.

  If T-Yon was convinced by her card readings that her brother, Everett, was at risk in any way, then she would obviously consider flying to Baton Rouge to try and protect him. The cards had predicted that she would. But Sissy was having second thoughts about the wisdom of T-Yon doing that. It was strange that T-Yon was the one who was having the nightmares, not Everett – not as far as she knew, anyhow. It was possible that T-Yon could make matters worse. Maybe Vanessa Slider was using her nightmares as way of getting herself back into The Red Hotel, as if T-Yon were carrying her in, like an infection. Or maybe she had some other reason for wanting T-Yon back there.

  Shit and a bit, thought Sissy. And here I was looking forward to a quiet feet-up weekend, and maybe a few glasses of wine and a game of gin rummy with my old friend, Sam.

  She had Googled Vanessa Slider on her laptop, but she had found only two, sparse entries, neither of which had given her very much more background than Everett had told T-Yon on the phone.

  Wikipedia said that Vanessa and her husband Gerard had jointly managed what was then called the Hotel Rouge until 1985, when Gerard had died and Vanessa had taken over. In 1988, Vanessa had been arrested for the attempted homicide of a prostitute called Evangeline Doucet, for reasons which she refused to explain in court. She had been jailed for a minimum of fifteen years at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women, while her son, Shem, had been sent to the East Baton Rouge Juvenile Detention Facility.

  There was no information on Vanessa’s release date, or whether she was still alive. But as Sissy had told T-Yon, she had an intuitive feeling that Vanessa was dead, and that maybe her son Shem was, too, although she couldn’t be one hundred percent sure.

  It wasn’t always so easy, telling the difference between the dead and the living. Some people who visited Sissy to have their fortunes read gave her a chill like a winter wind blowing across a graveyard, even though they were still alive. Abominable snowpersons, Sissy called them. On the other hand, she had been to funerals where her natural sensitivity had shown her that an aura still lingered around the person lying in the casket – usually blue, or gold, or pink – even though their hearts had long stopped beating.

  She took out a cigarette and flicked her Zippo alight, but then she snapped the Zippo shut and tucked the cigarette back into the box. She had tempted death quite enough for one day, she thought to herself. Sometimes you have to turn around and look him in the eye and say, no, you can wait.

  Billy and T-Yon came back into the house, and brought Mr Boots in, too. ‘He had a swim in the pond, didn’t you, boy? But he’s dried off now, and he doesn’t smell quite so bad.’

  ‘I sometimes wonder why I don’t have him put down,’ said Sissy. ‘He costs me a fortune in food, and he’s such an unresponsive mutt these days.’

  Mr Boots lay down on the floor and looked up at Sissy with sad, appealing eyes.

  ‘You won’t have him put down because you love him,’ said Billy. ‘And you know that he’d come back to haunt you. That’s the trouble with being so psychic. Your friends die, your pets die, but you can never get rid of them. What was the name of that cat you used to have? The one you saw sitting on the window sill looking in at you, about three years after he had died?’

  ‘Oh, Smokey,’ said Sissy, with a flap of her hand. ‘I saw him two or three times after that. At least those goddamned goldfish never came back.’

  ‘Something smells good,’ said T-Yon. ‘Is that your potato and mushroom bake?’

  ‘It’ll be ready in a half-hour,’ Sissy told her. ‘Hope you’re ravenous; I made three times too much, as usual.’

  ‘Does that give us time to have a second reading?’

  ‘You’re really sure you want to?’

  ‘Of course, yes. If there’s any kind of problem at The Red Hotel, I really want to know about it. I don’t want anything to happen to Everett.’

  ‘I suppose you want me to kick my heels outside?’ said Billy.

  ‘No, Billy-bob, you can stay here for this. I’d like to see what you think of the cards that come up.’

  ‘OK. But those DeVane cards, they always give me the heebie-jeebies. They always did, even when you used to tell my fortune when I was a kid. I guess they were always right, though. They said that I was going to be working a kitchen, didn’t they, even when I was sure that I was going to be a Navy Seal?’

  Billy went into the kitchen to fetch himself a can of Schlitz and then flopped down in the armchair opposite and popped the top. ‘So – you’ve done one reading. What’s the story so far?’

  Sissy quickly told him all about Vanessa Slider and The Red Hotel, and how the cards had predicted that she and her son, Shem, were trying to get back to the hotel to exact their revenge. She confessed that she wasn’t sure why they wanted revenge, or what for, although she suspected that it was linked in some way to all of the gruesome goings-on depicted in La Châtelaine card – all that chopping up of humans and animals and baking them into pies, as well as the beds heaped up with ravenous rats, and the man with no head.

  She didn’t tell Billy about T-Yon’s nightmares; and neither did she tell him about the Night Kitchen card, with the girl frying her own entrails. She didn’t want to spoil Billy’s relationship with T-Yon by telling him that she had dreamed about sleeping with her brother, and neither did she want him to think that something terrible was going to happen to her, and panic. They had to interpret the cards calmly, and rationally, and analyze what they were really trying to say, even though some of them were so enigmatic and some of them were so gory, and most of them were both.

  Billy listened, and nodded, but when Sissy had finished he shook his head and said, ‘No. No way, José. I can’t see any of this happening for real.’

  ‘But you said yourself that the cards were always right,’ said T-Yon.

  ‘They are. They are. I’m not disputing that. But even if they’re right, they’re not always, like, literal. You can’t take them at face value, can you? Because it’s like they’re hundreds of years old, right, and most of the things they’re predicting about, they didn’t have them in those days. So you have to interpret them. This guy with no head, for example, reading the newspaper. He could be some reporter, giving The Red Hotel a bad write-up, because he’s stupid. No head, see? No head equals no brains. It doesn’t literally mean that some guy’s going to get his head cut off in real life.’

  T-Yon turned to Sissy and said, ‘Is that right? I mean, I hope it’s right.’

  Before Sissy could answer, however, Billy added, ‘Don’t get me wrong. I do believe the cards are giving you the heads up that Everett’s in for some trouble. But it’s not going to be, like, death-and-destruction type trouble. I don’t know. Maybe the Baton Rouge planning authorities a
re going to give him a hard time about his fire doors. Or – look at these rats. Maybe he’s going to have mice running around in some of the bedrooms and he has to call in the rodent exterminator. It could be that his restaurant gets some one-star reviews. You know, maybe some of the guests are going to get food poisoning or something.’

  He picked up some of the cards, and said, ‘Look at these pictures. You don’t seriously think that anybody is going to be baking human fingers into pies anytime soon? It’s symbolic. That fat guy outside the kitchen window, maybe he’s a local cop who wants a kickback for protection. Pie, fingers. You know – getting his fingers into the pie.’

  ‘But what about Vanessa Slider and her son?’ T-Yon asked him. ‘The cards specifically say that they’re looking to get their revenge.’

  ‘Yes, but – again,’ said Billy, ‘you don’t even know if this chatelaine woman is really her. She could represent one of her relations, or some attorney who thinks that Vanessa Slider was done out of her share in the business when she was sent to the pokey, and is trying to claim it back. A writ can do as much damage as a double-headed ax, don’t you think? More, probably.’

  He paused. ‘All I’m trying to say is, this is the twenty-first century, and even if what these cards predict is always spot on, you have to interpret them according to the way life is today, not like it was back in eighteen-oh-when.’

  Sissy collected up all the DeVane cards and slowly shuffled them. ‘There’s a lot in what you say, Billy,’ she admitted. ‘In fact I taught you most of that myself, when I first showed you how to use them.’

  Billy spread his arms wide and said, ‘It’s logical, right? Like, for instance, even if T-Yon does go back to Baton Rouge, there’s no way she’s traveling there in a horse and buggy. Jesus. It would take her the next six months.’

  ‘Well,’ said Sissy, ‘we’ll have to see what the cards tell us next. Here’s your Predictor card, T-Yon. Ask your question. In fact, you can ask more than one question, if you want to. But again – don’t tell me what it is.’