The Red Hotel (Sissy Sawyer Mysteries) (29 page)

Another cloud of hamburger smoke drifted between them. Sissy tried not to breathe it in. She saw that all of the gurneys were gone, and she made an educated guess that behind that white enamel door there was a cold store, and what was left of the five bodies that had been lying on the gurneys had been wheeled in there, to prevent them from rotting too quickly.

After more than a minute, she heard a sharp shushing sound, the same as the noise she had heard when she passed through the wall upstairs. Vanessa Slider materialized out of the shadows, wearing a pale green evening gown of crumpled satin. The gown was scooped low, but she was flat-chested, and she had hardly any cleavage at all, only a bony freckled ribcage. Everett gripped Sissy’s hand even tighter, and she knew that he had seen what she had seen: resting on Vanessa’s ribcage was T-Yon’s silver pendant of a woman’s face, sleeping. Now that Sissy had seen a photograph of T-Yon’s and Everett’s mother, she recognized the woman for who she was, and she realized that she probably wasn’t sleeping, but dead. It was a miniature death mask, which T-Yon had worn to remember her mother, and which Vanessa Slider was now wearing as a trophy.

Vanessa Slider couldn’t help smiling as she came out of the shadows. Before she came any nearer, however, she turned and called, ‘Come on,
bebette
!’ and from the gloom behind her emerged the small figure covered with a black sheet, snuffling and skipping.

She came up close to Sissy, leaning forward a little as if she were finding it difficult to focus. Her eye sockets were filled with nothing but blurry darkness, as if an artist had sketched her eyes in thick black charcoal and then smudged them with his thumb. Her face was deathly pale, even paler than the last time.

‘So you decided to see sense,’ she said, in that soft, crackly voice of hers.

Sissy said nothing, although she could think of plenty of things she would have liked to have said.
Be meek. Be submissive
. That’s what Aunt Epiphany had warned her.

Vanessa Slider smiled again, and looked up at Everett. ‘There always comes a time when our sins catch up with us, even if we have to wait for a generation or two. “For the sins of your fathers you, even if you ain’t yourself guilty, must suffer.” But that goes for mothers, too.’

‘My mother did nothing except kill herself to look after her children,’ said Everett.

‘Oh, she didn’t just kill
herself
, young Everett. She killed my Gerard. And who knows how many other men? I’m not trying to tell you that my Gerard wasn’t to blame for going with her, nor that any of those other men were pure in heart. But she killed
me
, too. She killed my dreams. When my Gerard passed away, that was the end of my life. I was still breathing and walking around and my heart was still beating but I was as dead as he was.’

Sissy said, ‘But you and your son . . . you’ve been killing all these other girls, too.’

‘Aha, but that’s retribution! That’s what sinners get for sinning, and what else can they expect? We end their sinful lives and we cut up their sinful bodies and we feed them to the men who they’ve been sinning with. It’s the perfect circle of justice. Nobody never misses them, these girls. Nobody never asks where they are or what happened to them. Maybe once or twice a man might say, “Where’s that Cherie? I really used to like her.” And that’s when you’re tempted to say, “You and your greedy friends, you came to our restaurant a couple of weeks ago and between you, you ate most of her, and you even told me how delicious she tasted, if only you’d known . . .”’

‘My God,’ said Sissy. ‘What kind of justice is that?’

‘It’s justice for good lives taken away, before they’ve had the chance to be lived.’

The small figure in the black sheet let out a strange, goat-like
baaaaah
! Vanessa Slider laid her hand on top of its head and said, ‘Yes,
bebette
, you too.’

Sissy said, as firmly as she could manage, ‘Is T-Yon here? Can we see that she’s safe?’

The banging and clashing of saucepans and spoons and skillets rose to a crescendo, as if the head chef and his assistants were deliberately trying to drown Sissy out. It was surrealistic, like the kitchen scene in
Alice Through The Looking-Glass.
The smoke that was rolling across the kitchen from the hamburger grill was becoming denser and increasingly pungent, and Sissy had to cup her hand over her nose and her mouth to stop herself from coughing. Her eyes were watering and her tears made Vanessa Slider’s face appeared to jerk and twitch.

‘Oh, for sure your precious T-Yon is safe for now, not hurt at all. Bring her out, Shem! We may not be forgiving, but we’re civilized.’

Shem went back to the white enamel door, opened it up and disappeared inside. A few seconds later he came back out again, and this time he was pulling T-Yon behind him, by the wrist.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ said Everett. ‘You call this
civilized
? What the hell have you done to her?’

Shem dragged T-Yon closer, but stayed just far enough away so that Everett wouldn’t be able to reach out and snatch her. T-Yon looked shocked, as if she couldn’t understand where she was or what was happening to her. Her face was white and her eyes were swollen and her blonde hair was all messed up. She was bundled up in a grubby brown blanket, which she was clutching with her free right hand. Her feet were bare and her teeth were chattering uncontrollably.

‘There, not a mark on her,’ grinned Shem. ‘Just like
la pauvre defante mom
told you. You want to see for yourself?’

With that, he wrenched the blanket out of T-Yon’s grip and swung it wide open, to reveal that, underneath it, T-Yon was completely naked. She wasn’t cut or bruised, but she was covered in scores of grubby black fingermarks, especially her breasts and her thighs.

Everett tried to wrench himself forward, but Sissy gripped his hand as tightly as she could.

‘
Don’t
,’ she whispered, and then coughed. ‘
Humble, remember. Submissive
.’

Everett was breathing hard. ‘Shit, Sissy. I’m going to kill him. I swear it.’

T-Yon dragged the blanket back around her to cover herself up, while Shem gave Everett a self-satisfied wink. He must have heard what Everett had said about killing him but he plainly didn’t care. ‘Real tasty girl, your sister. Yum-yum-yum! Enough to satisfy any man’s appetite, wouldn’t you say?’

Everett was so wired up with anger that Sissy didn’t know how long she was going to be able to hold him back. But Vanessa Slider said, ‘Well, here we are at last. Now that we have you two together, you can make amends, can’t you?’

‘Amends?’

‘Exactly. What your mother did to me, so that she could rear you two sweet little children, that left me gutted. So that’s what we’re going to do to you.’

Sissy glanced worriedly behind her. There was still no sign of Aunt Epiphany in the kitchen doorway. Where the hell was she, and what was she doing? If she didn’t show herself soon, all three of them would be slaughtered like animals and their flesh scraped from their bones and jumbled up together and pushed into the grinder along with all the other poor girls they had killed.

Shem went across to the nearest counter, pulled open the drawer underneath it and took out a heavy stainless-steel cleaver. He came back, smacking the flat of the blade against the palm of his hand.

‘See the size of this chopper? Looks real hefty, huh? But it’s real surprising how del–i–cate you can be with it, once you know how. The Japanese sushi chefs, they use them, and they can slice a filet of beef so thin you can read your horoscope through it. And do you know what your horoscopes say today? They say, you three assholes thought you were going to get the better of the Sliders, but when it came down to it you don’t have the guts. Leastways, you won’t in a minute or two!’

He let out a raucous burst of laughter, and the figure in the black sheet jiggled and giggled. Sissy looked at Vanessa Slider and even though she wasn’t laughing she was repeatedly running the tip of her tongue backward and forward between her lips, as if she could taste her revenge already.

It was then, though, that Sissy felt something brush against her shoulder. She turned, and saw the faintest outline of a woman, walking down to the far end of the kitchen, and she could only see that because of the smoke. It was Aunt Epiphany, but she was almost totally transparent, like polished glass. She was holding up the equally transparent head of Adjassou-Linguetor in front of her and spinning it in a figure of eight pattern, as if she were winding an endless length of yarn.

Sissy had read that voodoo queens and houngans could walk through a room without anybody seeing them – not because they were really invisible, but because they had the power to distract everybody’s attention. They were like magicians, who could vanish from one side of a stage and reappear on the other.

Nobody else saw Aunt Epiphany – not Everett, not Shem, nor the head chef, nor any of his assistants. Not even Vanessa Slider.

But Sissy saw Aunt Epiphany’s glassy outline open the white enamel door that led to the cold store and disappear inside, and even though she couldn’t guess what she intended to do in there, she began to feel that the balance of power was about to change dramatically, from Vanessa Slider’s revenge to Aunt Epiphany’s righteousness.

‘Everett,’ she said. ‘Hold on.’

V
anessa Slider circled around them, her pale green satin dress rustling on the floor. She came up close to Everett and prodded him with one sharp fingernail under the chin, as if he were a slave in a slave market, and she was considering buying him.

‘You’re a very handsome young fellow, Everett. Just like your sister is so pretty. A pity my two children never had the chance to grow up the same way you two did. Look at poor Shem. All those years in the juvenile detention center, and then the orphanage, and foster parents who beat him, and then prison. Plays havoc with a boy’s good looks, that kind of an upbringing, as well as the state of his mind.’

Sissy felt like saying, ‘How about a mother who recruited him to murder prostitutes and then cut them up like cattle?’ but she kept her mouth tightly shut. She kept glancing down to the white enamel door at the end of the kitchen to see if there was any sign of Aunt Epiphany, but so far the door had remained closed. The clamor of pots and pans continued unabated, and it was so deafening that even Sissy found it hard to believe that it all came from Vanessa Slider’s memory. It had really happened, but it had happened over twenty years ago, and now it existed only in the absolute refusal of Vanessa Slider’s spirit to forgive and forget.

Vanessa Slider took a step back and said, ‘What I want you to do now, Everett, is to take off all of your clothes.’

Everett said, ‘
What?
You want me to do
what
?’

‘You heard me. I want you to take off all your clothes. I want to see you bare naked, the same way that your sister is. You’re the son of a whore, why should that worry you?’

‘There’s no fucking way,’ Everett retorted. ‘If you think we’re going to be acting out that nightmare you kept giving to T-Yon, you are sorely mistaken.’

‘
Shem
,’ said Vanessa Slider, without even turning around to look at him. Shem twisted T-Yon’s left arm high up between her shoulder blades and held the cleaver horizontally against her throat.

‘If anybody is sorely mistaken, Everett, it’s you. You don’t think that Shem would hesitate to cut your sister’s head clean off, if I told him to? Shem does everything I tell him to, don’t you, Shem?’

‘Yes, Momma. You bet.’

Again, Sissy was tempted to argue with her – to tell her that upstairs on the third floor she had heard the voice of a very young Shem protesting that he hated to cut up their victims. But she guessed that their relationship had changed since Shem had gone through juvenile detention, and years of abuse, and prison. And since his mother had died, of course, and become nothing more than a bitter, vengeful, domineering shadow of what she once was.

‘You’re insane,’ Everett told her. ‘I don’t care whether you’re dead or not. The dead are supposed to rest easy, and leave the living to their own affairs.’

‘Oh, believe me, I
will
rest easy, once you and your sister have paid the price. I’ll be resting easy like Sunday morning.’

Shem made a suggestive grunting noise as if to warn Everett that he was deadly serious, and he lifted the cleaver right up under T-Yon’s chin so that she had to tilt her head back.

Everett started to unbutton his shirt, and Vanessa Slider beamed and smacked her hands together. ‘You see? Nothing like a little friendly persuasion, is there?’

There was nothing that Sissy could do, except turn her head away as Everett stripped right down to his black Calvin Klein shorts. The head chef and the assistants in the kitchen were turning around and laughing and the girls were nudging each other and banging their skillets even more loudly by way of showing their appreciation.

‘Come on, Everett,’ said Vanessa Slider. ‘Shorts too. Can’t make love with your shorts on, can you?’

‘You witch,’ breathed Everett. But he stepped out of his shorts and dropped them on top of his shirt and his pants and his scarlet Red Hotel socks.

Vanessa Slider came up to him and smoothed the flat of her hand across his chest. He couldn’t stop himself from shivering, but he flared his nostrils and held his breath and managed to control his anger.

‘I never imagined this day would ever come,’ she said. ‘All those years of grief. All those years of pain. But here it is at last. Soon I can close my eyes, and sleep forever, like I was supposed to.’

She slid her hand down Everett’s side, and down between his legs. She didn’t take her eyes away from his eyes, but she cupped his testicles in the palm of her hand, and lifted them a little, feeling their weight. Then she pressed the ball of her thumb against the purple head of his penis, and rotated it around and around, so that her long green-polished thumbnail ran underneath his foreskin.

‘You see? Aroused already. This is what your dear sainted mother did to my Gerard, and she killed him. She might just as well have cut him open.’