The Red Hotel (Sissy Sawyer Mysteries) (23 page)

‘She’s my friend and I don’t want her hurt. Do you have her hidden someplace?’

‘I want both of them. Both of them together. They took
everything
. My life. My dream. The love of my life.
Everything
.’

‘Please!’ said Sissy. ‘Please tell me where she is! Please! Or if you have her hidden someplace, for whatever reason, please let her go!’

The woman didn’t answer. She stood by the wall for almost half a minute, staring at Sissy with those smudgy eyes. Then, without any hesitation, she turned to her left, crossed the corridor in three steps and walked straight into the wall, and vanished.

The witch compass gradually stopped whirring, and now the corridor was totally silent. Sissy stood staring at the wall in shock. Her DeVane cards had clearly shown her that one Red Hotel was existing inside another, only a heartbeat apart, and she had already accepted that this was the only logical explanation for what had been happening here. But seeing the evidence of it with her own eyes was still stunning. The woman in the pale green dress had simply
gone
, as if there had been a doorway there, instead of a solid wall.

S
issy clicked the switch on the side of her radio and said, ‘Detective Garrity? It’s Sissy Sawyer. Yes. I’m all done up here now. You can tell your officers to stand down.’

‘
Ten-four, Ms Sawyer. I hear you
.’

She walked quickly back to the elevators, glancing behind her two or three times to make sure that the red-haired woman in the pale green dress wasn’t following her. The elevator car seemed to take whole minutes to arrive. When it did she immediately stepped inside and jabbed at the buttons for the lobby and the doors to close. In the mirrors that surrounded her on three sides, she didn’t think that she looked shocked, but she was still trembling from what she had witnessed.

When the doors slid open, Everett was standing right outside, waiting for her.

‘Well?’ he said. ‘Any sign of her?’

‘I think we’d better go back to your office,’ said Sissy. ‘And I think I need a drink.’

‘But where is she? Is she OK?’

‘Let me put it like this: she hasn’t left the hotel. And so far as I can tell, she hasn’t been harmed in any way.’

‘I don’t get it,’ said Everett, looking back toward the elevator as the doors slid shut. ‘If she hasn’t left the hotel, why didn’t she come back down with you?’

Detectives Garrity and Thibodeaux joined them. Detective Garrity said, ‘You didn’t manage to find her, then.’

‘No, I didn’t. Not exactly. But I believe I know what’s happened to her.’

She led the way across to Everett’s office and sat down in a chair beside his desk. Luther came in, too, and said, ‘Everything OK, Ms Sissy?’

Sissy held out her hands and said, ‘Not exactly. See? I’m still shaking.’

Everett opened the bottom drawer of his desk and took out his bottle of Heaven Hill whiskey and a glass. He poured Sissy a large measure and passed it over. She swallowed a little, coughed, and then reached into her bag for her DeVane cards.

‘I read my cards earlier and I explained to Luther what I thought they were telling me. Now, I’m quite aware how skeptical you all are about cards and fortune-telling and the spirit world. But as far as I can make out, this is the only explanation that makes any sense.’

She shuffled the cards until she found
Un Maison, Deux Maisons
, and held it up so that everybody could see it.

Detective Garrity leaned forward so that he could peer at it more closely, but then he leaned back and shrugged and said, ‘I see one house kind of jammed inside of another house. Is that right? If so, I don’t get it.’

‘Well, let me explain it to you,’ said Sissy. As simply as she could, she told him about phasing, and how two buildings could coexist in the same space because essentially they were the same building, only at different times. Then she told them about the woman she had seen on the second floor, and how she had disappeared into the wall.

‘What I’m saying is that T-Yon is still here, in The Red Hotel, but not
this
Red Hotel. It’s my guess that she’s been abducted and now she’s in
another
Red Hotel . . . the Red Hotel that this red-haired woman seems to be in charge of.’

‘Another Red Hotel. But not another Red Hotel someplace else. Another Red Hotel right here.’

‘That’s it exactly. The same thing happened to your partner, Detective Mullard, and to Ella-mae, the maid. And that also explains how that bedside rug got bloody, and all those bloodstains appeared on the staircase, but there was no trace of how they got there. Whoever killed Detective Mullard, and whoever took Ella-mae, and whoever left that rug and those bloodstains, they came through the wall, from one Red Hotel to the other.’

‘And you seriously expect us to believe this? What do you think, Mr Savoie? Can you believe that some woman took your sister through a solid wall?’

‘It’s not necessary for you to
believe
it,’ said Sissy. ‘All you have to do is
act
on it.’

‘Ms Sawyer, ma’am, how do you expect me to justify to my superiors my deployment of officers to enter some hotel that don’t exist no more?’

‘Before you do that, I think it’s essential that we do some research. I’m totally convinced now that the woman I saw was Vanessa Slider. The cards have been telling me that again and again, right from the very beginning. If it
is
her, or her spirit, then we need to understand why she’s feeling so vengeful. She said over and over that Everett and T-Yon had stolen her memories.’

‘I don’t know what she could mean by that,’ said Everett. ‘Before Stanley and I invested in The Red Hotel, I’d never even
heard
of Vanessa Slider.’

Luther said, ‘We still have all of those old papers and photographs and blueprints in the storeroom, Mr Everett. You know, the ones that the hotel’s attorneys handed over after all of the deeds was transferred.’

‘I don’t know what use they could be.’

‘You never know,’ said Sissy. ‘They might give us some clues. And I’ll tell you what else we should do. We should look up Vanessa Slider on the Internet, and in newspaper files, and go through the court records about her trial. We don’t even know for sure if she’s dead or still alive, although judging from that presence I saw up on the second floor, I would say indisputably dead.’

Detective Garrity said, ‘You had a conversation with her and you’re saying that she’s dead.’

‘Indisputably.’

‘Well, for want of any other leads I’ll have Detective Thibodeaux here pull the City Court files of Vanessa Slider’s trial, and also check the public records directory to see if she’s still alive and kicking or not.’

‘Thank you, Detective. I appreciate it.’

‘How are you feeling, Sissy?’ Everett asked her. ‘Care for another shot of whiskey?’

‘No, I’ll pass on that,’ said Sissy. ‘Let’s start looking through those old papers, shall we? I don’t think we have very much time to lose.’

‘You said that this woman wanted to get ahold of both of us. Maybe she won’t do anything to hurt T-Yon until she does.’

‘I’m hoping and praying, Everett. A little hope and a little prayer never did anybody any harm.’

Bella went across to the storeroom in back of the staff quarters to find the papers and the photographs for them. Five minutes later she carried them into Everett’s office and stacked them on his desk – three large cardboard box-files, covered in mottled gray paper, with handwritten labels that said
Hotel Rouge 1979 – 1988
. They smelled strongly of mildew.

Everett untied the stringy black ribbon that fastened the first box and opened it up. It was filled with old newspaper cuttings from the
Baton Rouge Advocate
and faxes that had turned orange with age and faded Polaroid and black-and-white photographs.

Detective Garrity came back into the room, holding up his notebook. ‘I’ve just been talking on the phone to a retired captain of detectives from the East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office, guy called John Deliverer.’

He crossed his fingers tightly together and said, ‘Captain Deliverer says he knew both of the Sliders like
this
, back in the day. Sliders by name, sliders by nature, that’s what he told me. Two people you could never get a grip on.’

Everett lifted seven or eight large photographs out of the box and shuffled through them. They were all taken from different viewpoints, but every one of them showed a stocky, round-faced man with a small moustache and slicked-back hair, wearing a white tuxedo. He had his arm around a skinny girl in a lacy white dress and a tilted white bonnet with a lacy bow. Several other men in tuxedos were standing around in the background, as well as women in dresses with layers of flared petticoats and stiletto-heeled shoes.

He turned the photograph over and read out the caption that was penciled on the back. ‘
Gerard and Vanessa, Wedding Day, Saturday 7/17/65
’.

He passed it over to Sissy and said, ‘Is that her? Is that the woman you saw upstairs?’

Sissy tilted her spectacles on to the end of her nose. ‘She’s a lot younger . . . but yes. Yes, that
was
Vanessa Slider. No question about it.’

‘So this retired captain of detectives knew them pretty good?’ asked Everett.

Detective Garrity nodded. ‘He didn’t admit as much, but it sounded to me like Gerard Slider had him on his payroll, him and quite a few more deputies from the East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office. Apparently Gerard Slider was all tied up with the people who ran the Baton Rouge casinos, on the waterfront. In nineteen eighty-five, though, he pulled off some really tricky betting scam and made himself a shitload of money, excusing my French. He and his wife Vanessa invested it all in buying this hotel.

‘It was called the Hotel Rouge in those days, and it had a pretty racy reputation. Gambling, good-time girls. Gerard Slider apparently was that kind of a guy.
Laissez les bon
temps rouler
and nothing barred, and he was paying off the cops big time to turn a blind eye. Not that John Deliverer admitted to taking anything.’

Detective Garrity checked his notebook. ‘In April of nineteen eighty-nine, Gerard died. He couldn’t have been that old, maybe no more than forty-one or forty-two. Vanessa took over the running of the Hotel Rouge, and, even though John Deliverer said she was a sourpuss, she ran it just the same way that her husband had, with poker and roulette and plenty of girls to keep those lonely businessmen happy.

‘Then, in September of nineteen ninety-one, she got caught trying to strangle one of those girls, for some reason that she would never explain, even to the city court. She was given a seven-year sentence for attempted murder and sent to the slammer. She had a son, Shem, who had helped her in her attempt to strangle this girl, and he was sent to a juvenile facility.’

‘So the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question is, is Vanessa Slider still alive?’

It was then that Detective Thibodeaux came into the office, almost as if he had been prompted in a play. ‘That I can answer you conclusively,’ he said. ‘Vanessa Jane Slider died on August twelfth, nineteen ninety-eight, at Baton Rouge General Medical Center. Cause of death: cervical cancer.’

‘So we’re talking about a ghost,’ said Everett. ‘Or a spirit, or a presence, or a
soul
.’

‘Maybe we’re not,’ put in Detective Garrity. ‘Maybe we’re talking about somebody who’s masquerading as Vanessa Slider. Maybe there’s some member of her family who bears a grudge against you and your sister because you’ve taken over this hotel, when they believe that it’s rightfully theirs.’

‘You should write crime novels, Detective,’ said Sissy.

‘And you should write ghost stories.’

Sissy untied the ribbon that fastened the second box. Inside she found blueprints of the Hotel Rouge, dated March, 1986, one blueprint for each floor. They were covered with scribbles and comments such as ‘
call LaSalle!!
’ and ‘
extend this bathroom??
’ and ‘
new window here??
’

‘Tell me,’ she asked Everett, ‘when you and your partner remodeled this hotel, did you make any structural changes? Like, did you block off doorways, or knock two rooms together, or brick up windows?’

‘Oh, sure. We did a whole lot of alterations like that. We created larger suites on every floor, especially on the fifth and the sixth and the seventh, but some of the existing suites we divided into double rooms and twins. The plan was to give us plenty of luxury accommodation, but more rooms in total.’

‘Do you have any plans of what you did?’

‘A schematic? Absolutely. It’s all on the hotel’s database.’

‘Do you think you could print one off for me? I want to compare what you did with these old blueprints.’

‘Of course. But how do you think that’s going to help?’

‘I don’t know for sure. Not yet. Let me take a look at it first.’

Detective Garrity said, ‘Meantime, Ms Sawyer, although I personally can’t believe that Ms Savoie is still anywheres here inside this hotel, I’m going to initiate one more search. I’ll have them take the dogs again, too.’

‘She’s here, Detective. I’m sure of that. The dogs may even pick up her scent. But I doubt you’ll find her.’

‘If I do, you can tell me my fortune for free.’

‘I’ll do that anyhow, and gladly. But – you know – be careful what you wish for.’

Once Bella had printed out all the schematics, Everett and Luther took them through the Showboat Saloon to the Smoking Parlor and spread them all out on the pool table. There were more than forty sheets of them in all, with details of every alteration that Everett and Stanley Tierney had made to the Hotel Rouge since they had bought it.

‘You can light up in here if you like, Sissy,’ said Everett. ‘Louisiana State Legislature have been trying for years to pass a total smoking ban, but you can still smoke in casinos and bars and dedicated hotel rooms.’

Sissy took out her crumpled pack of Marlboro and shook one out. She flicked her Zippo alight, but then she hesitated, and snapped it shut, and tucked the cigarette back. She was so tired and trembly that she thought that smoking would only make her feel nauseous. It was already 11.25 p.m. and she was usually in bed by now, with a last glass of Zinfandel, finishing off her crossword.