The Red Hotel (Sissy Sawyer Mysteries) (19 page)

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 The clattering and pinging and crackling had subsided, but this had been replaced by a thick, repetitive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?’

‘I’m sure I don’t know. Maybe.’

‘You shouted out “Vanessa Slider”.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Vanessa Slider is the woman who used to own this hotel, back in the eighties, when it was the Hotel Rouge.’

‘I know. She was jailed, wasn’t she, for attempted murder? I think the presence we’ve been feeling in The Red Hotel is her. In fact, I’ve been pretty sure of it, even before we came here.’

‘Vanessa Slider. You mean that? I would say that Vanessa Slider must be long dead.’

‘That doesn’t make any difference, Detective. What we’re talking about here is Vanessa Slider’s influence. She may be a gone-beyonder, but her vengefulness is still with us. She’s trying to scare the new owners off. All of these disturbances, I believe they’re all down to her. The bloody mat, Ella-mae’s disappearance, that grinding noise we just heard.’

‘You really believe that.’

‘Yes, Detective, I do, and it happens a whole lot more than you think. There was Amityville.’

‘
Amityville
was a movie, ma’am. With James Brolin in it if I remember rightly.’

‘Of course, and because of that the true story was blown way out of all proportion. But what
really
happened at Amityville was a classic example of what we have here. I’ve come across it before. An old friend of mine bought a house in New Canaan and she could hear a woman screaming in the attic almost every single night. I spent the night there once, and heard the woman myself.’

‘Stop,’ said Detective Garrity. ‘You’re not going to convince me. I don’t believe in any of this stuff, not for a second. That noise we just heard, there’s a straightforward technical explanation for it. There has to be. A pocket of air in the water pipes, something like that.’

‘I’m not going to disagree with you, Detective,’ Sissy told him. ‘In fact I would be very much happier if that’s all it was.’

Detective Garrity listened for a moment longer. From the Showboat Saloon they could faintly hear the jazz quartet playing
Alexander’s Ragtime Band.

‘
Come on and hear, come on and hear, it’s the best band in the land
. . .’

For some reason that she couldn’t have explained to anybody, Sissy had always found that song supremely irritating. She looked round at Detective Garrity but all he said was, ‘Hear that? It don’t sound to me like
they
heard any of that noise.’

‘Maybe it was only audible
here
, in this room,’ Sissy suggested. ‘Maybe it was meant for us, and us alone.’

Detective Garrity frowned at her, but he didn’t say anything. He went back to the bathroom door and cautiously opened it.

‘Top left-hand side, next to the bathrobe,’ said Sissy.

Detective Garrity stepped into the bathroom but before he could take a look behind the door, he said, in the quietest of voices, ‘
Jesus
.’

‘What is it?’ asked Sissy. ‘Have you found something else?’

He came back out of the bathroom and his face was gray. Without saying a word he took out his cell and started to jab at the keypad.

‘
What?
What is it?’ Sissy repeated. She tried to look over his shoulder into the bathroom but he stepped to one side to block her view. When she leaned the other way, to look over his other shoulder, he leaned the other way, too.

‘Mike?’ he said, into his cell. ‘It’s Garrity.’ He was out of breath, as if he had been running. ‘I’m up in Room Five-Eleven. That’s it, Five-Eleven. Listen, Mike – we got ourselves a thirty-C up here by the look of it. A thirty-C, man, like no other thirty-C you ever saw. No. You’ll understand what I mean when you come up and see it for yourself, OK. Just send me some backup and a forensic team. And for Christ’s sake don’t say a word to Mr Savoie down there, or any of his staff, and don’t say a word to any of the guests, either. Just for now, let them carry on like they are. Is Hizzoner still there? Get him and his daughter off the premises now. But don’t let anybody else leave the building. No. Nobody. Not even the veeps. If they want to know why, tell them that we have some minor and probably unfounded concerns about security but to keep it to themselves.’

He cut the connection and then he started to punch out another number.

‘A thirty-C?’ asked Sissy. ‘What’s a thirty-C when it’s at home?’

Detective Garrity took a breath, paused, and then said, ‘Homicide by cutting. Only in this case it’s a considerable understatement.’

‘You mean there’s a dead body in there?’

‘You don’t want to look, ma’am. I promise you.’

‘But it’s important that I do. Who is it?’

‘Right now, ma’am, I don’t have any idea.’

‘Is it a man or a woman?’

‘Ma’am, please. I have enough on my plate. And damn it, I still can’t raise Mullard.’

‘Detective, I know how skeptical you are about my psychic facility, but this is really,
really
important.’

Detective Garrity stared at her and took another deep breath, as if he were about to shout at her. But then – in what was little more than a whisper, he said – ‘I don’t
know
if it’s a man or a woman. The truth is, I simply can’t tell. That’s what I meant when I told my sergeant that it’s a thirty-C like he never saw before.’

He raised both eyebrows – as if to say, ‘Satisfied?’ – and then he went back to punching out numbers on his cell.

Sissy stayed where she was, in the center of the room. She closed her eyes for a moment and tried to sense if Vanessa Slider were anywhere near. She could feel that uncomfortable
chilliness
, yes, but she had felt it everywhere inside The Red Hotel since the moment she had first stepped into the lobby. When she opened her eyes again, Detective Garrity was talking to his captain at the second precinct, and pacing around the bedroom as he did so.

She sidled her way nearer to the bathroom door. She knew that what she was going to see would be horrible, but she had to find out what Vanessa Slider was doing, and why, and what she was capable of.

‘Yes, Captain, we’ve searched the whole goddamned building roof to basement twice over,’ Detective Garrity was saying. ‘I don’t know where the hell the perp could be hiding, but we can’t risk any more fatalities. We’ll have to evacuate everybody. Then we’ll have to tear the place apart all over again.’

He paced right over to the closet, and was standing with his back toward her, so Sissy took three quick tiptoes to the bathroom door and opened it.

She had expected a body, and she had expected blood. She had seen dead people before, in the mortuary, almost turquoise some of them. But sitting in the bathtub was a headless figure that was nothing but a glistening red tangle of muscle and bone and stringy connective tissue, with a pale pile of intestines in its lap. Its neck was nothing more than a corrugated pipe, and there was no sign of what might have happened to its head.

Sissy closed the door quietly behind her. Her stomach began to clench and unclench, and she could feel bile rising in her throat. It took several deep breaths to stop herself from retching. When she turned around she found Detective Garrity staring at her.

‘I thought I specifically told you not to look.’

Sissy nodded. She took out her handkerchief and pressed it against her mouth, and after a few moments the bile subsided.

‘I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave now, Ms Sawyer,’ said Detective Garrity. ‘I appreciate your good intentions and all, but this entire hotel is a crime scene now.’

‘My
God
, Detective. Whoever that body is, that isn’t just murder, is it?’

Detective Garrity was silent for a moment, although he didn’t take his eyes off her. At first Sissy didn’t think he was going to answer her, but now that she had seen the body for herself, there was no point in him not telling her what he thought, and she could tell that he was just as shaken as she was.

At length he said, ‘Let me tell you this, ma’am. I’ve seen cadavers cut up for the purposes of easy disposal – you know, packing them in suitcases or flushing them down drains – but I can’t say that I’ve seen anything quite like this before. Looks to me like that cadaver’s been cut up like an animal carcass.’

‘As in
butchered
?’ said Sissy.

This time, Detective Garrity said nothing. They stood side by side for two or three minutes, neither of them speaking, trying to come to terms with the grisly horror that they had witnessed in the bath.

They heard somebody laughing hilariously in the corridor outside; and from downstairs, they could still faintly hear the wheedling clarinet strains of
Alexander’s Ragtime Band
.

After a while, Sissy said, ‘You’re going to evacuate
everybody
?’

‘Of course. We’ll have to. Discreetly, of course. We don’t want a panic.’

Sissy said, ‘OK, then. I’ll go now, Detective. But I’ll stay here in Baton Rouge and I’ll make sure you know how to get in touch with me.’

‘Kind of you to offer, ma’am, but I doubt if that will be necessary.’

‘You’re going to need me, Detective, you mark my words.’

‘You mean, if it really
is
the ghost of Vanessa Slider who’s been doing all of this.’

Sissy slung her bag over her shoulder. ‘You can be as skeptical as you like. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. I promise you that I won’t hold it against you when you decide that you can’t solve this case without me. Because I honestly don’t believe that you can.’

‘T
hat’s it, we’re finished,’ said Everett. ‘We’re finished and we haven’t even started.’

The last of the gala guests were being ushered through the hotel lobby and interviewed by more than twenty uniformed police officers. The music had been silenced, the conversation was muted, and all they could hear was the shuffling of shoes on the marble floor. So far, nobody had been told exactly why The Red Hotel was being evacuated, only that the management had received a ‘low-level security alert.’

The media had gathered outside and Detective Garrity had promised them a statement within the hour. A team of five criminalists had already arrived in their white Tyvek suits and gone rustling up in the elevator to room 511, like the crew of a space shuttle that was going nowhere.

T-Yon was sitting next to Everett, holding his hand to comfort him. Luther was perched on the edge of Everett’s desk, looking glum. Sissy wandered around for a while, and then went through to the Showboat Saloon, which was almost completely deserted now, except for the kitchen staff taking away the remains of the buffet, and the jazz ensemble packing away their instruments. Paper streamers and party poppers littered the carpet.

She sat down at a table in the corner and took out her DeVane Cards. She badly needed guidance and reassurance, and some kind of explanation for the horror that she had witnessed in Room 511.

She dealt out the cards as she always did, in a Cross of Lorraine, but this time she used a different card to represent herself. Instead of The Star-Gazer, she chose
La Menteuse
, The Liar. This card showed a sly, deceitful-looking old woman with a pointed nose and a strange turban-like hat, dealing out playing cards to three innocently laughing men.

What the men couldn’t see was that all the cards that the woman was holding in her hand were the same, the ace of spades. Sissy thought that by using this card as her Predictor, she might be able to outwit Vanessa Slider, and prevent her from tampering with her pack.

The first card she turned up, again, was
La Châtelaine
, so it was clear that Vanessa Slider’s influence was still overwhelming. Then again, she turned up
La Cuisine De Nuit
, the Night Kitchen, with the pale girl frying her own intestines. So it looked as if T-Yon was still in danger.

The third card, however, made Sissy frown in puzzlement. She had often turned up the same card before, when she had been reading people’s fortunes back at home in Allen’s Corners. It was
Un Maison, Deux Maisons
– One House, Two Houses. It showed a grand French country house, with a pillared portico, and red rambling roses growing around its facade. A man and his wife were standing proudly together on the front steps. He was wearing a green frock coat and white breeches and buckled shoes, while she was wearing an extravagant pink dress decorated with ribbons, and a tall powdered wig.