The Red Hotel (Sissy Sawyer Mysteries) (21 page)

‘I expect you want to go home,’ said Sissy. ‘I was hoping to have a quick word with T-Yon, but I have her cell number. I can call her later.’

‘Thanks, Ms Sissy. Appreciate it. You’re a lady.’

T-Yon stepped out of the elevator when it reached the second floor and walked quickly along to Room 209. Police officers and security guards were still searching the upper floors, but now that everybody else had been evacuated The Red Hotel was unnaturally quiet. Occasionally she heard a shout or an echo, or the whine of an elevator, but the only other sound was her wedge-heeled sandals on the thick gold carpet.

She reached Room 209 and opened the door. She went directly to the bathroom where she had left her make-up. She wouldn’t have bothered but it was a nearly new bottle of Diorskin Nude foundation which had cost her forty-six dollars.

She dropped the bottle into her gray leather purse, and checked her hair in the bathroom mirror, flicking her fringe with her fingertips. She thought that her eyes looked swollen, which was hardly surprising after last night’s interrupted sleep and the grisly scenario she had witnessed in the mirror of Room 511.

She went back into the bedroom and stopped dead.

The two figures who had materialized at the end of her bed last night were standing between her and the door. One was about as tall as she was, while the other was much shorter, like a child, but both of them were draped in black sheets, so it was impossible to tell who they were or what they looked like.

‘What?’ she said. Her voice came out much higher than she had intended, and it was tight with fright.

The two figures said nothing, but simply stood there, side by side. T-Yon could hear them breathing under their sheets, and the smaller one sounded as if it were suffering from a cold.

‘
What do you want?
’ T-Yon screamed at them. ‘
Get out of my way!
’

She raised her purse over her head and took two steps toward them, but without hesitation the taller one lifted both of its black-sheeted arms and pushed her, hard. She stumbled backward over the large wooden linen chest at the foot of the bed and fell heavily on to the floor, hitting her shoulder against the dressing table.

She tried to climb back up on to her feet, but the figure came up to her and pushed her again, and then again.

‘Get away from me!’ she shouted. ‘What do you want?’

The taller figure reached out an arm from underneath the folds of its sheets, took hold of the sheet that covered its head, and dragged it to one side. As it pulled the sheet clear, it revealed itself to be a man. He looked about thirty-five, very pallid, as if he never went outside in the sunlight. He had sparse, spiky hair, drooping eyes, and a bulbous nose with a cleft in the end of it. His lips were crusted with scabs, and his front teeth were missing. A razor-wire tattoo encircled his neck, and his hands were crawling with tattoos, too.

T-Yon thought that he looked like an ex-convict. Whatever he was, he wasn’t a ghost, but in some ways he was even more frightening than a ghost, because T-Yon suspected that he had come here for the sole purpose of doing her harm. He stood staring down at her, shifting a large wad of gray gum from one side of his mouth to the other. The smaller figure remained under its sheet. T-Yon could hear its phlegm cackling in the back of its nostrils.

‘What do you want?’ T-Yon repeated. ‘The cops know where I am. If I don’t go back downstairs in a couple of minutes, they’ll come up here looking for me.’

‘I ain’t concerned about that, bo,’ the man replied. His voice was high and reedy for a man of his bulk, with a strong local accent. ‘By the time the cops come looking for you, you’ll be someplace where nobody on God’s good earth will be able to find you.’

‘Just let me out of here,’ said T-Yon. Then she screamed out, ‘
Help!
Somebody help me!
I’m in
here!
Help me!
’

The man gave a wheezy laugh, and the smaller figure giggled, too, underneath its sheet, and then gave a thick, viscous sniff.

‘You shouldn’t waste your breath, bo,’ the man told her. ‘There ain’t nobody on this floor excepting you and me and little peeshwank here. Now, let’s get going, shall we? We don’t want to keep the
pauvre defante mom
waiting, now do we?’

‘Get out of here! Get away from me!
Somebody help me!
Anybody!
’

T-Yon seized the edge of the dressing table and managed to pull herself on to her feet. She feinted left, and then right, and then made a rush toward the door. She had hardly taken two steps, however, when the smaller figure wrapped its sheeted arms around her legs, just above the knees, and clung on tight. She staggered, and tried to wade forward, but the man hooked his left arm around her neck and wrenched her head sideways.

‘There ain’t no future in trying to run off,’ he told her. His breath stank of garlic and that sweet, dark brown odor of decaying teeth, which not even his chewing gum had been able to mask. ‘Ain’t nobody can hear you – and like I say, you’ll be long gone before anybody starts asking theirselves what’s become of you.’

‘You’re choking me!’ gasped T-Yon.

‘Oh, I won’t choke you, bo. Not before the
pauvre defante
gets to talk to you.’

T-Yon tried to scream again, but she managed only a muffled blurt before the man clamped his hand over her mouth.

‘Let’s get the fuck out of here, peeshwank,’ he said. The smaller figure opened the door and held it open while he frogmarched T-Yon out into the corridor.

T-Yon was hyperventilating now. She twisted from side to side and kicked her legs up into the air, but the man was much too strong for her. He held her so close and so tight that his stubble rasped against the side of her cheek and she could smell not only the blasts of fetid breath that came out of his mouth but his body odor, too.

The man half pushed her and half swung her along the corridor. As they passed the last bedroom door she felt a rising flood of terror, because there was nothing ahead of them now but the window at the far end. She could see the Hilton Hotel on the opposite side of Lafayette and she could hear the noise of traffic two stories below.

Still the man kept humping and heaving her along, and she was helpless to stop him.
Dear God
, she thought.
He’s going to throw me out.

Strutting beside them, its black sheets rustling, the smaller figure started singing in its catarrhal voice:

‘
Jolie blonde, regardez donc quoi t’as fait!

Tu m’as quitté pour t’en aller,

Pour t’en aller avec un autre, oui, que moi,

Quel espoir et quelle avenir, mais, moi, je vais à voir!
’

T-Yon was blinded by the afternoon sunlight shining in through the window and she squeezed her eyes tight shut.

L
uther said, glumly, ‘How about you, Ms Sissy? You reckon we’ll get over all of this? The way it looks to me now, it wouldn’t surprise me if we have to close our doors for good.’

‘Oh, you’ll get over it somehow,’ said Sissy, looking out of the window of his Jeep as they drove southward through the subdivisions of East Baton Rouge.

‘Is that what your cards tell you?’

‘Right now my cards can’t see beyond any of this mayhem. I just
feel
that you’ll get over it, that’s all – feel it in my water. But I don’t think it’s going to be easy, and it could be highly dangerous.’

‘Why, thank you, Ms Sissy,’ said Luther. ‘You sure know how to cheer a body up, not.’ He licked his lips, and swallowed, and grimaced. ‘Sheesh, I can still taste that goddamn cheeseburger. I think I’m going to be tasting that goddamn cheeseburger for the rest of my life.’

They were passing a cemetery, clustered with hundreds of marble headstones, all of them shining orange in the light from the sinking sun.

‘See that?’ said Luther. ‘That’s the Sweet Olive Cemetery. That’s where my uncle is interred, Aunt Epiphany’s late husband, Elijah. She comes up here just about every Sunday afternoon to talk to him. According to her, he still has plenty to say, even though he’s passed over. Sometimes she says that she can’t get a word in edgewise.’

‘There’s a lot of gone-beyonders like that,’ said Sissy. ‘A few of them don’t even realize that they’ve passed away. Most of them do, sure, but they still haven’t finished speaking their mind, and they don’t see why a minor inconvenience like being dead should shut them up.’

They turned into Drehr Avenue, and continued south. This was a quiet, shady street, lined on either side with live oaks and southern magnolia. Set back behind the trees Sissy could see grand family houses, some with sweeping driveways and pillared porticos. Eventually, however, they reached a more modest house, a 1920s Colonial Revival painted primrose yellow and surrounded by a picket fence. Luther parked his Jeep in front of the garage and opened the passenger door so that Sissy could climb down.

Although the sun was so low, it was still fiercely hot and humid, and the chirruping of insects made it sound as if they were surrounded by thousands of sewing machines. There was a strong fragrance of gardenias in the air.

‘Pretty house,’ said Sissy.

‘Couldn’t afford it if I wanted to buy it now,’ said Luther. ‘Four hundred thousand and upward, some of these properties. But we ain’t thinking of moving. Not till they take
us
up to the Sweet Olive Cemetery, anyhow, to join Uncle Elijah, and I hope that won’t be anytime soon. Never could stand the fellow, to tell you the truth.’

Luther lifted Sissy’s suitcase out of the back of the Jeep and followed her up the steps on to the porch. ‘Shatoya!’ he called out.

Almost at once the screen door opened with a loud squeak and a smiling woman came bustling out, wiping her hands on her frilly pink apron. She was big-bosomed and wide-hipped, and she had a broad, well-boned face, with an immaculate Michelle Obama-style bob that was held in place by plenty of shiny hairspray. She wore huge hoop earrings and a necklace of chunky blue crystal beads.

‘Ms Sissy, this is my wife Shatoya. Shatoya, this is Ms Sissy Sawyer.’

‘I saw you at the gala,’ smiled Shatoya. ‘Welcome to our home, Ms Sissy. I only wish we could have invited you here under happier circumstances.’

‘Well, me too,’ said Sissy. ‘Has Luther told you the latest?’

She nodded, and stopped smiling. ‘Do the police have any idea who did it yet?’

‘Not so far,’ said Luther. ‘If they do, they ain’t telling us. They still don’t know what happened to that chambermaid yet, Ella-mae.’

Shatoya opened the screen door wider and said, ‘Come on in, Ms Sissy. You’ll have to excuse the chaos. I only came home myself not more than twenty minutes ago.’

‘Thank you,’ said Sissy. ‘And, please, Shatoya – just call me Sissy.’

Inside, the Broody home was middle-class comfortable, furnished with oversized armchairs upholstered in gold brocade and feathery pampas grass in big copper pots and glass figurines of unicorns over the fireplace. One wall was taken up with an arrangement of framed family photographs, with the Broody children triumphantly holding up sports trophies and high school diplomas. In the opposite corner stood a bookshelf filled with a thirty-volume
Americana Encyclopedia,
as well as books on hotel management and African-American history. On top of this bookshelf, however, sat a scruffy, tufty-haired doll. It looked out of place, but Sissy immediately recognized it for what it was. It had criss-cross red stitches for eyes, and it was wearing what looked like a white kimono with gray twine wrapped around its waist. A
wanga
doll, commonly used in voodoo rituals, and, in this particular costume, specifically dressed for the removal of curses.

‘You’d like a drink?’ asked Shatoya.

‘A glass of white wine if you have it. If you don’t, a soda would be fine. Anything cold. I haven’t gotten used to this heat yet.’

‘Oh, we have
plenty
of wine,’ said a hoarse female voice. ‘Nobody else drinks in this house except for me.’

A startlingly thin woman in a silky black dress came into the living room from the kitchen. She was very dark-skinned, much darker than Shatoya, and her hair was gray and close-cropped. Her bone structure was just as striking, though. She had high cheekbones and slanting, Egyptian-looking eyes. She was wearing even more jewelry than Shatoya, too: a heavy silver necklet and six or seven clanking silver bangles on each skinny wrist. On her right shoulder she had a tattoo of a serpent swallowing its own tail.

She came over to Sissy with her hand held out in greeting. She seemed to
undulate
rather than walk, as if she were performing some kind of ritual dance.

‘This is my Aunt Epiphany,’ said Luther. ‘Epiphany, this is Ms Sissy Sawyer I was telling you about.’

‘
Ohhhh
,’ said Aunt Epiphany, drawing her lips back over her teeth in a wide, feral smile. ‘You the
visionary
.’

‘I don’t know about visionary,’ said Sissy. ‘I can tell fortunes, yes, and some of the time those fortunes come true, but it doesn’t go a whole lot further than that.’

But Aunt Epiphany leaned toward her and pressed one fingertip to her right nostril and sharply sniffed. ‘You got the vision all right. I can smell the
gunja
on you. That’s why they axe you down to BR, isn’t it? Something ain’t right at that Red Hotel, and nobody can work out what it is, because it’s not of this world.’

‘Oh, hush up, Epiphany,’ said Luther. He turned to Sissy and said, ‘Aunt Epiphany thinks that everything that goes wrong in this life is caused by
loa
.’

‘You mean voodoo spirits?’ Sissy asked her.

Aunt Epiphany vigorously nodded her head. ‘I say to Luther – when he tell me about that cleaning girl going missing like that, in such a mysterious way with no footprint – I say let me talk to Papa Legba. He will communicate with the
loa
for me, and explain where that girl disappear to.’

‘Well, I
have some ideas of my own about that,’ said Sissy, but then she saw Shatoya frowning at Luther as if to say –
please, not
more
superstitious mumbo-jumbo.
So she took hold of Aunt Epiphany’s bony hand and squeezed it. It was surprisingly cold, as if she had been holding a glass full of iced tea. ‘Why don’t we just sit down and enjoy a drink? It’s been such a stressful day for all of us, hasn’t it, especially Luther. Maybe we can talk about The Red Hotel later.’