The Red Hotel (Sissy Sawyer Mysteries) (6 page)

Sissy said, ‘It could be. I’m not entirely sure. Let’s take a look at these last three cards. Maybe they’ll fill in some of the gaps.’

She picked up the left-hand card and turned it over. ‘This card tells you
why
you’re facing such trouble.’

The card was almost totally black, with only a pair of yellow eyes glowering in the darkness. It was called
L’Ombre Qui Siffle,
The Shadow Who Whistles.

‘Every time this card comes up, it means that there’s some individual in your life who’s waiting for you,’ said Sissy. ‘For some people, it’s a long-lost friend, or a lover. For other people it’s somebody who means them to do them harm. He’s hiding in the shadows, but he’s very patient, he’ll go on waiting for as long as it takes. That’s why he’s called “the shadow who whistles”, because he’ll amuse himself by whistling until you show up.’

‘How do you know it’s a “he”?’

‘I don’t. It could equally be a “she”. Usually the cards give me quite a definite feeling one way or another, but this time they’re kind of ambivalent about it.’

‘Maybe it’s the two of them,’ T-Yon suggested. ‘The mother
and
the son, both.’

‘You could be right. But let’s see what
this
card has to tell us. This is what is going to happen to you today.’

She turned over the next card. It was
Le Drapeau Rouge
, The Red Flag. The picture showed a young woman in a kitchen, cutting out pastries. Outside the open window, a sunny meadow sloped down toward a river, and beside the river stood a wooden watchtower. A young man was standing on top of the watchtower waving a large scarlet banner, and obviously calling out, because he had one hand raised to his mouth.

Underneath the watchtower, scores of brown pelicans were clustered; and all around the window, white magnolias flowered, so beautifully engraved that Sissy could almost smell them.

‘I believe that young woman in the kitchen is you and that young man on top of that tower is your brother,’ Sissy told T-Yon. ‘See those brown pelicans? The brown pelican is the state bird of Louisiana, and the magnolia is the Louisiana state flower. You’re going to talk to your brother today, and he’s going to tell you something important. It’s something to do with the color red, I imagine. Maybe it’s just about The Red Hotel, but I get the feeling that it’s more than that. I get the
distinct
feeling that he’s worried. In fact I’d say that he’s
very
worried.’

‘Maybe I should call him now,’ said T-Yon. ‘My God, I hope he’s OK.’

‘Let’s just turn this last card over, shall we?’ said Sissy. ‘This will tell you what’s going to happen tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that.’

She took hold of the edge of the card and she was about to turn it over when she hesitated. She could feel which card it was even before she looked at it, and she was reluctant to show it to T-Yon in case it upset her too much. She could turn it over and lie about what it meant, but the DeVane cards were very unforgiving if anybody tried to distort what they were saying. It had happened to her once or twice before, when a really terrifying card had come up, and she had pretended to her client that its message was relatively harmless. The cards had gone cold for weeks on end, and it was only after she had laid them out again and again and kissed each card and expressed her heartfelt contrition that they had gradually come back to life. The DeVane cards were always complicated, and sometimes obscure, but they invariably told the truth, no matter how unpalatable that truth might be; and they expected anybody who used them to do the same.

‘I – ah – yes,’ said Sissy. ‘Why don’t you call your brother now? He’s an hour behind us, isn’t he, so maybe you’ll catch him before he goes for lunch.’

T-Yon looked down at the card in Sissy’s hand. ‘Aren’t you going to turn it over? I think I’d like to know what tomorrow’s going to bring.’

‘Same old, same old, I shouldn’t wonder.’

T-Yon waited for a moment, and then she said, ‘You don’t want to show me, do you? You know what it is and you don’t want to show me.’

‘All right. You’re right. I don’t want to show you. Why don’t you go call your brother?’

‘Is it that bad?’

‘It depends on your interpretation. Like I said, you can turn up the same card for two different people and it will have two totally different meanings.’

‘So what does this one mean for me? Come on, you just told me I had to face up to my future. “Better to be scared than caught unawares”, that’s what you said.’

‘It could be a mistake,’ said Sissy. ‘Let’s wait until I do a second reading.’

But T-Yon reached across and picked up the card herself. It was the one card that Sissy had feared would come up:
La Cuisine De Nuit
, the Night Kitchen.

T-Yon studied it for a few long moments, and then she said, ‘Oh my
God
. Oh God! This is worse than my nightmare.’

The card showed a woman standing in front of a stove in a huge, gloomy kitchen. High up behind her there was a small, circular window, through which a full moon was shining, and apart from a single candle on the table beside her, this was the only illumination. The walls of the kitchen were hung with copper saucepans and colanders and ladles, and the table was crowded with bowls and jugs and sauce boats, as well as vegetables – cabbages and cauliflowers and carrots.

The woman looked about twenty-five years old, with a pale, almond-shaped face and very large sad eyes. She was wearing a white bonnet with wings, rather like a nun’s wimple.

At first, in the gloom, it was difficult to make out what she was doing. She was holding the handle of a large iron skillet in one hand, and a fork in the other, and she was prodding what looked like heaps of sausages. It was only on closer inspection that it became clear that her dress was unbuttoned all the way down the front, and that her stomach had been split open, all the way up to her breastbone. She was standing in front of the stove, frying her own intestines.

T-Yon stared at Sissy in total shock.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Sissy. ‘Now you can understand why I didn’t want you to see it.’

‘But you said that the DeVane cards always tell the truth.’

‘They do, T-Yon, they do. But like you’ve seen with most of these other cards, they’re symbolic rather than literal. The Night Kitchen card means that you might be tempted to make a sacrifice on somebody else’s behalf, and it’s advising you that it might not be the right thing to do.’

‘You’re sure of that? I’m not going to be cut open and have my insides fried?’

‘Of course not. Of
course
not. I’m sorry.’

T-Yon stood up and went to the window. Her blonde hair shone in the sunlight. Sissy sat and waited and said nothing. She was sure that T-Yon wasn’t in any danger of meeting the same fate as the girl in the Night Kitchen, but she also couldn’t be certain that something equally grisly might not happen to her. At the same time, she could sense the cards’ disapproval that she wasn’t being honest. It was like a chilly draft up the back of her neck, as if Billy had left the back door open.

After a few moments, however, T-Yon turned around and said, ‘No, Sissy, you shouldn’t be sorry. I asked you to tell my fortune and you did. It’s not your fault that it turned out so scary. At least you’ve warned me about it. My God.’

‘Let’s do another reading later on,’ Sissy suggested. ‘There’s still so much that the cards haven’t explained. I think you’ll find that your future isn’t going to be quite so terrible after all.’

‘Do you know what I asked them?’ said T-Yon.

‘You don’t have to tell me. It’s between you and the cards.’

‘I asked them if my brother was in trouble. I asked them if he needed me.’ She paused, and then she said, ‘He does, doesn’t he? And I think he needs
you
, too.’

W
hen Everett came back from his lunch with Theresa Overby, Luther was waiting for him in his office, with one vast buttock perched on the edge of his desk. Luther’s expression was unusually somber.

‘Well?’ asked Everett. ‘You look like you lost a ten spot and found a nickel.’

‘What we found was more blood,’ said Luther. ‘Or what looks like blood.’

‘Shit. Where?’

‘Seventh story stairwell.’

‘Shit. Why didn’t you call me?’

‘Didn’t see the point. I knew you’d want to check it out for yourself, before we called in the cops.’

‘All right. Let’s go take a look at it. Jesus. What the
hell
is going on in this goddamn hotel?’

Bella slid back the window between their offices and said, ‘Hi, boss! Enjoy your lunch? Mr Tierney says he can meet you at seven at the Kingfish Lounge, OK? And Olivia’s bringing round those media releases around five thirty. She said that Frank Thibodeaux hadn’t finalized all the dinner menus, that’s what held her up.’

‘OK, Bella. Thanks. I’ll catch up with you in a minute.’

Everett and Luther took the elevator back up to the seventh floor. This time they turned right when they left the elevator car and walked along to the door which led to the emergency staircase. Everett pushed it open and they stepped inside.

The staircase was all concrete, with red-painted tubular handrails. It was hot and humid in here, because it wasn’t air-conditioned, and they could hear banging and clattering from the third floor down below them, where an ice-making machine was being installed.

Luther said, ‘There,’ and pointed across to the opposite side of the landing.

On the bottom two steps that led up to the roof, Everett saw two broad smears of reddish-brown, and another smear on the floor just below them, in an elongated S-shape. There was also a random pattern of reddish-brown marks on the wall, like squashed moths, as if somebody with bloody hands had repeatedly lost their balance and had reached out seven or eight times to steady themselves.

Everett went across and examined the stains more closely. ‘If this
is
blood, and not paint, or rust remover, I’d say that something pretty nasty happened here.’ He leaned to one side and peered upward. ‘You check out the roof?’

‘Of course. We checked the
en-
tire building, roof to parking garage. Every guest room, every storeroom, every closet, but this is all we found.’

‘OK. Looks like it’s time to call in the law. But I hope that won’t be a serious error of judgment.’

Luther said, ‘Think about it this way, Mr Everett, sir. If it
ain’t
blood, then we don’t have nothing to worry about. At least we’ll know for sure.’

‘What do
you
think it is? I mean, seriously?’

‘I think it’s blood.’

‘Yeah. Me too, damn it.’

Detective Slim Garrity stood and stared at the crimson-stained rug for over a minute without saying anything, although his jaws kept working on a large wad of Big Red chewing gum. He was a thin, angular man with black slicked-back hair, and the impression he gave of a Southern card sharp was accentuated by his bolo necktie and his shiny, black narrow-shouldered suit.

Beside him, his partner Detective Kevin Mullard was hefty and disheveled. He had sandy hair and sandy eyebrows and freckles and his red rubbery lips seemed to be permanently smirking at some private joke. His green linen three-piece suit looked as if he had bought it from a thrift store and got change out of a twenty, and never pressed it.

‘So . . . your cleaner was the first one to see it?’ asked Detective Garrity. He spoke with an unmistakable Baton Rouge accent, but without any expression in his voice at all, as if he were reading from a teleprompt. ‘And there was nobody else here in the suite when she came in to clean? No guests, no hotel staff? No unauthorized visitors?’

‘Nobody, so far as I know,’ said Everett. ‘You can talk to her in a minute, if you want to.’

‘Very well. OK. But the first thing we have to decide is what this stain is really constituated of. The crime-scene boys’ll be here in a few minutes, and they’ll be doing a presumptive test, which will tell us for certain if it
isn’t
blood.’

‘They can tell if it isn’t, but they can’t tell if it is? How does that work?’

‘The presumptive test can only tell us if it’s probable. It’s not one hundred percent foolproof, because there’s other factors which can give you a similar reaction to human blood. Interferences, we call them. Some plant and animal materials, they can affect a test for human blood, and so can some metals, like copper and iron. That’s why we have to be careful when we’re testing for blood outdoors, where there’s a whole lot of vegetative life, or in any kind of vehicle.’

‘I see. What if it probably
is
blood?’

‘Then they’ll take the rug back to the CSI laboratory and put it through some further tests for human-specific enzymes or human-specific DNA.’

‘My guess is it’s blood,’ put in Detective Mullard, still smirking. ‘It sure
looks
like blood, don’t it? And what else could it be? Red-eye gravy?’

‘Let’s not go leaping to any premature conclusions, Kevin,’ Detective Garrity admonished him, out of the side of his mouth. ‘Quite apart from that, we don’t want to upset these good people here more than we necessarily have to, do we.’

Everett said, ‘I’m not squeamish, Detective. I just want to know for sure that nobody’s been murdered here.’

‘Of course you do, sir, and believe me we’ll be expediting our investigation as quick as conceivably possible.’

Everett led the two detectives to the stairwell, so that they could look at the stains on the steps, and the floor, and the patterns on the wall.

‘Again, it’s hard to tell for sure if that’s blood or not,’ said Detective Garrity. ‘You’d be surprised the number of times we’ve come across suspicious-looking stains at some crime location or another, and they’ve turned out to be totally innocent. Look at these here. My partner here mentioned red-eye gravy, and it’s perfectly possible that these here stains in this stairwell are just that. Red-eye gravy is made with ham grease and coffee, isn’t it, and that could give you this reddish-brown coloration.’

Everett said, ‘You don’t seriously believe that this
is
gravy, do you?’