The Red Hotel Read online

  T-Yon was still trying to regain her composure, and at first she couldn’t answer.

  ‘What were they doing? Please, T-Yon, try! You have to tell me!’

  At last T-Yon managed to say, ‘It was horrible. It was so, so horrible!’

  Sissy waited, and then T-Yon said, ‘There was a body. A man’s dead body, lying on a table. It was all cut up and bloody. There was so much blood! It was all the way up the walls, everywhere! And there was this boy.’

  ‘Go on,’ Sissy coaxed her.

  ‘The boy . . . he was all bloody, too. His hands, his clothes. He even had spots of blood on his face. He had . . . he had a really huge knife. He had a really huge knife and he was cutting the body up into pieces. Like, cutting the muscles away from the arms. But he had this angry look on his face, as if he hated what he was doing.’

  She stopped, and took another deep breath.

  ‘You said they,’ said Sissy. ‘Who else was there, apart from the boy?’

  ‘A woman. A woman in a green dress with buttons all down it. She was standing nearby, watching what the boy was doing, but not so near that she had any blood on her.’

  T-Yon turned and looked at the door to Room 511 and saw that Sissy had left her bag on the floor to keep it open.

  ‘What if they come after us?’ she said, in a panicky voice. ‘What if they come out of the mirror and kill us, too?’

  ‘T-Yon, I don’t think that they can,’ said Sissy, trying to calm her down. ‘You saw them but I didn’t, and that tells me that they were giving you a personal message – but only you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s happened to me before. I’ve read people’s fortunes, and when I do they can sometimes hear their loved ones talking to them, even though I can’t hear anything. Once or twice they’ve even seen them, sitting in the room, but I never have. The message is for them and them alone.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ said T-Yon. ‘Why don’t you just close the door? There’s no way I’m ever going back in there.’

  ‘Well, I’m going to take one more look,’ said Sissy. ‘They might have left some evidence that they were there.’

  ‘Don’t be long,’ T-Yon begged her. ‘Please, that was so horrible. It was like my nightmare. All of his insides were hanging out.’

  ‘I won’t be a moment, I promise.’ Sissy pushed her way back into Room 511 and walked across to the bathroom door. Before she opened it, however, she pressed her ear to it and listened. She was sure that she could hear voices, although they may have been the voices of guests in the corridor outside as they were being shown to their rooms.

  ‘—told you I didn’t like it—’

  It was a boy’s voice, shouting, and it sounded like the same boy that Sissy had heard when she was down on the third floor, although she couldn’t be certain.

  Then she heard the woman’s voice, with that sour, distinctive accent, and she was sure of it.

  ‘—I don’t give a two-cent damn whether you like it or not – you make sure you finish up here and don’t you go leaving no mess—’

  Sissy hesitated for a second. Then another second. Then another. Her heart was beating so hard that it hurt. Then she flung open the bathroom door and said, ‘Vanessa?’

  But again, there was nobody there. The bathroom was empty, with its clean white towels neatly arranged on the shelves, and its cluster of complimentary toiletries, and its drinking glasses with cardboard covers.

  Sissy went right up to the washbasins and peered intently into the mirror. Then she reached up and tapped it with her silver rings. What T-Yon had seen had definitely been intended for her eyes only. Either that, or she had been hallucinating. But while Sissy had told her that the woman that she had seen running downstairs from the roof had been wearing a pale green dress, she hadn’t told her that it was button-through, and it would be too much of a coincidence for her to hallucinate a detail like that.

  She was about to leave the bathroom when her eye was caught by a bright red triangle of toweling hanging behind the door. She opened the door wider and saw that it was a bathrobe with The Red Hotel embroidered on the breast pocket.

  Beside it, however, there was an equally bright red handprint, a handprint that was still glistening wet. It was clear, too. She could see the heart line and the head line and the life line – all the lines she usually used for telling fortunes.

  She took off her eyeglasses and peered at it closely. It was high up on the door, even higher than the hook from which the bathrobe was hanging, and it was very broad, with splayed-out fingers, so that it had almost certainly been made by a man.

  She looked around the bathroom again. She even opened the frosted glass shower door, to see if there were any more handprints in there. But the handprint on the door was the only one, and there were no red spots or smears or squiggles anywhere else, not even on the white-tiled floor.

  She closed the bathroom door behind her and went back out into the corridor, where T-Yon was waiting for her, even more agitated than she had been before.

  ‘Did you see them?’ asked T-Yon. ‘It was like that boy was butchering that body, wasn’t it? It was like he was cutting him up for meat.’

  They could faintly hear jazz music from down in the lobby. This time they were playing the old Louis Armstrong song Didn’t He Ramble, which Sissy thought was horribly appropriate, considering the words. ‘Didn’t he ramble . . . didn’t he ramble . . . he rambled in and out of town till the butcher cut him down.’

  Sissy said, ‘I’m sorry, T-Yon. I still didn’t see them. But I do believe that you did. And . . . I found a man’s handprint in back of the bathroom door. It looks as if it could be blood.’

  ‘Oh, no. Oh, God. This is terrible. What are we going to do now? Ev won’t believe what I saw in the mirror, will he? Especially since you didn’t see it. But what about this handprint? We’ll have to tell that detective, won’t we?’

  ‘Yes, T-Yon. We will.’

  ‘Oh, no. Poor Ev. He’s going to go ape. He’s going to think that I’m inventing all of this on purpose, just to spoil his big day.’

  ‘No, he’s not. I mean, why on earth should you?’

  ‘Maybe he thinks that I’m jealous. I don’t know.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Besides – you didn’t invent that handprint. And for now, you don’t have to tell him what you saw in the mirror. In fact, don’t tell anybody. We need to understand what’s happening here first. Who you saw, and why you could see them, when I couldn’t.’

  Sissy rummaged in her bag and produced a pad of Post-it notes. She wrote ROOM NOT CLEANED YET – PLEASE DO NOT ENTER with her mascara pencil, and stuck it on the door of Room 511.

  ‘Who do you think they were?’ asked T-Yon. ‘Do you really think they were spirits?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Kind of. But there’s a whole lot more to it than that. I’m not even sure that I’m capable of finding out what. Even if I can, I’m even less sure that I’m capable of doing anything about it.’

  ‘Sissy—’

  ‘I’m sorry, T-Yon. I’m a fortune-teller, a clairvoyant, and I suppose you could say that I’m something of a medium, too. But I’m not an exorcist. Even if I can find out for sure who a spirit is, and what she wants, I don’t necessarily have the power to make her go away. Especially when that spirit is making a point of showing me how goddamned ineffectual I am.’

  ‘You can’t say that.’

  ‘Are you kidding me? She made a fool of me when she ran downstairs from the roof and then totally disappeared. She’s made a fool of me again, by showing you what she’s doing, but not me. She knows why I’m here, I’m sure of it, and she’s mocking me.’

  T-Yon said, ‘I believe in you. I really do. The way you understood my nightmares . . . I can’t thank you enough for that.’

  Sissy laid a hand on her arm and said, ‘I appreciate that, T-Yon. I’ll do my best. But I don’t want you to have any illusions.’

  ‘Illusions? I think I’ve had enough of
those already.’

  ‘You know what I think? I think a couple of stiff Sazeracs would do us both good.’

  Blood Gala

  By the time they returned to the first floor, the opening gala was almost ready to begin. The Ralph Dickerson Ensemble was furiously playing Muskrat Ramble and the guests were noisily making their way into the Showboat Saloon and taking their places. A stage had been set up at the far end of the saloon, with a red-velvet awning, and all along the right-hand side of the room, red-jacketed waiters and waitresses were setting up a lavish buffet table, heaping it with fruit and salads and hams and cold shrimp and oysters. The hot food would be brought in later, after the speeches, but the blue spirit-lamps were already lit, ready for the Cajun chicken legs and the cedar-roasted redfish and the soft-shelled crabs.

  Sissy looked around for Detective Garrity but she couldn’t see him at first. She sat at the bar with T-Yon and ordered them both a Sazerac – a cocktail of cognac, rye whiskey, absinthe and Peychaud’s Bitters. T-Yon was still so shaky that she could barely pick up her glass. Sissy squeezed her hand tightly to try and reassure her that everything was going to be all right.

  ‘We’ll find a way, T-Yon, I promise you. I don’t know how, sweetheart, but we will.’

  The jazz ensemble played a fanfare, and the assembled guests all applauded as Everett and Luther came into the saloon, accompanied by Mayor Dolan, who was wearing one of his trademark flappy white suits, and his daughter, Lolana, who was wearing a short, tight, sparkly silver dress. They were followed by six or seven other dignitaries from the Baton Rouge Area Convention and Visitors’ Bureau and the Baton Rouge Sports Foundation.

  They mounted the stage and took their seats. When the clapping and whistling had subsided, Everett went up to the microphone and said, ‘Welcome, everybody, to The Red Hotel!’

  There was more applause, and then he announced, ‘This is a great day for Baton Rouge and a momentous day for me. This hotel has a wonderful location, so close to the mighty Mississippi, and so close to all the amenities of the city center, and it has been crying out for so long to have its pride and its reputation restored. What my fellow investors and I have tried to recreate in The Red Hotel is the true spirit of the Red Stick – the hospitality, the warmth, the fun, the flamboyance.

  ‘Our aim is to provide our guests with supreme comfort in every room, as well as every modern facility they could wish for. On top of that, our restaurant will be serving the finest Cajun and Creole food in the parish, as well as top-class nightly entertainment.

  ‘Most of all, we want our guests to feel that they’re being pampered – pampered in the old-fashioned, turn-of-the-century style – from the moment they walk in through the front door until the moment they bid us au revoir.’

  When he had finished speaking, he caught sight of Sissy and T-Yon at the bar, and frantically beckoned them to come up to the front. But T-Yon shook her head.

  ‘I can’t,’ she told Sissy. ‘I would have to tell him what I saw in that mirror, and I don’t want to upset him, not now.’

  Mayor Dolan got to his feet and started to speak in soaring rhetoric about the ‘irrepressible spirit and boundless warm-heartedness of the City of Baton Rouge.’

  ‘BR is the epicenter of tolerance and mutual respect and good-neighborliness, where all are welcome, regardless of who they are or where in the world they come from.’

  They were still listening to Mayor Dolan when Detective Garrity came into the saloon. He perched himself on a bar stool next to them and said, ‘No sign of Mullard, then.’

  ‘No, Detective,’ said Sissy. ‘But I’ve been looking for you.’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’ He lifted his finger to the barman and said, ‘Give me a club soda, would you, with a twist.’

  Sissy said, ‘T-Yon and me, we went back up to Room Five-Eleven which is where I last saw Detective Mullard.’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’ Detective Garrity’s eyes were roaming restlessly around the room.

  ‘I found a handprint in back of the bathroom door, quite high up. I may be wrong, but it looks like it could be blood.’

  Detective Garrity stared at her narrowly. ‘A handprint.’

  ‘That’s right. A man’s hand, by the size of it.’

  ‘This is the same room where you said you’d located some kind of psychic disturbance?’

  Sissy nodded.

  ‘And there’s only one single handprint? Any other blood spatter?’

  ‘That’s all there is, Detective. And I made sure that I didn’t touch it, or anything else for that matter.’

  ‘OK,’ said Detective Garrity. ‘Mr Savoie gave me the use of a master key, so why don’t you show me.’ He drank his club soda in two large gulps and then climbed off his bar stool. ‘I wish to hell I knew where Mullard was hiding himself. I’ve been calling him for damn near on twenty minutes now and still no answer.’

  ‘T-Yon?’ asked Sissy. ‘Are you going to stay here, sweetheart? You don’t want to come back up there, do you?’

  T-Yon mouthed, ‘No, no way,’ and then she said, ‘I’ll wait for Ev to finish.’

  Sissy could understand why she wanted to stay here. The crowd was loud and happy, and everything was real. No sour-faced women in pale green dresses, no hacked-up bodies and no blood-spattered boys. ‘I’ll see you a little later, in that case,’ she told her, and reassuringly touched her shoulder.

  Sissy and Detective Garrity went up in the elevator to the fifth floor. Detective Garrity dry-washed his face with his hands and then he said, ‘So . . . tell me something about yourself, whyn’t you.’

  Sissy shrugged. ‘Not much to tell, Detective. I live in Allen’s Corners, Connecticut, with my dog and my memories. My late husband, Frank, was a Master Sergeant in the State Police.’

  ‘But you claim you have this, uh –’ and here Detective Garrity pointed to his forehead and twirled his finger – ‘psychic sensitivity.’

  ‘That’s right. Yes, I do. I guess it’s something that you’re born with, like a talent for playing the piano, or athletics, or any other kind of a talent. You don’t choose to have it, and a whole lot of people are born with it but never choose to use it, on account of it’s such a great responsibility, telling people’s futures, and letting them know how their gone-beyonders are getting along. And it can be scary at times, believe me. Not every ghost is as friendly as Casper.’

  Detective Garrity stood back while Sissy stepped out of the elevator. ‘I hope you don’t take exception when I tell you that I find this all pretty hard to swallow. My old man was a physics teacher at Magnet High. He didn’t believe in nothing that couldn’t be proven in the science laboratory.’

  ‘Did he believe in God?’

  ‘Oh, yes, ma’am. He believed in God.’

  ‘Well, then,’ said Sissy, as they reached the door of Room 511. ‘Quod erat demonstrandum.’

  Detective Garrity pointed to the Post-it note that Sissy had stuck to the door.

  ‘Good thinking,’ he said. ‘I could use more people like you.’

  He dug into the pocket of his narrow-tailored coat and produced two latex gloves, which he snapped on to his fingers. ‘I have only the one pair of these, so please don’t touch anything, OK.’

  ‘I’ll try not to.’

  Detective Garrity walked into the center of the bedroom and looked around. ‘No obvious sign that anybody’s been here. Nothing’s disturbed, so far as I can see.’

  Sissy was wondering if she ought to produce her witch compass and show Detective Garrity how it worked, but she decided against it. Just for now, a single bloody handprint was enough of a puzzle for him to deal with, without challenging his fundamental disbelief in spirits.

  ‘So where did you say this handprint was? In the bathroom?’

  Detective Garrity approached the bathroom door and was already grasping the handle when the whole room was shaken by a deep, reverberating, grinding noise. It started up suddenly, and it was so loud and caused so much vibration that the bedside clock be
gan to rattle and slowly creep sideways across the nightstand, and the complimentary bottles of body lotion and eau de toilette that stood on the dressing table started frantically clinking together, as if they were panicking. Even the glass in the windows began to buzz.

  ‘What in God’s name is that?’ shouted Detective Garrity, and that was the first time that Sissy had ever heard him use any emphasis in his voice at all. He twisted around and looked up at the ceiling, and then at each of the walls in turn, and then back up at the ceiling again. The noise was so overwhelming that it was impossible to tell where it was coming from.

  To Sissy, it sounded like a concrete mixer and a giant meat mincer, both grinding away together, one of them churning wet cement and the other one liquefying muscle and connective tissue, one of them punctuated by the ping and clatter of shingle and the other by the spasmodic crackling of bones.

  ‘I think it’s a warning!’ she shouted back at Detective Garrity.

  ‘A warning? What the hell of? Feels more like a goddamn earthquake.’

  ‘That presence I’ve been telling you about. She’s trying to show us how angry she is.’

  ‘What does she have to be angry about? Christ on a bicycle I can’t hear myself think.’

  The grinding went on and on, and grew louder with every passing minute. The bedside clock at last dropped on to the floor, and all the bottles of toiletries fell over. Even the floorboards beneath their feet were vibrating. Sissy had to hold on to the carved wooden bedposts to stop herself from losing her balance.

  ‘What can we do?’ Detective Garrity yelled at her. ‘Is there anything that you can do?’

  Sissy wasn’t at all sure if there was, but she clung tightly on to the bedpost with both hands and shouted out, ‘Vanessa! Vanessa Slider! Stop! I promise we’ll go! All of us! I promise we’ll go and leave you alone! You and your boy, both!’

  The grinding continued. The clattering and pinging and crackling had subsided, but this had been replaced by a thick, repetitive shhluggg, shhluggg, shhluggg.

  Suddenly, it stopped, and the room was silent again. Detective Garrity looked around, listening, and then he turned to Sissy and said, ‘Did you do that?’