The hotel was everything I loved about New Orleans: old, beautiful, decadent, redolent of whiskey, hushed in the hallways, and almost loud enough in the lobby to drown out the tuba player who’d been honking in the street for the last thirteen hours.
His jazzy oompahs pumped up my hangover. I hadn’t drunk that much, only a Sazerac or three in the Carousel Bar, but the oompahs had kept me up until almost four. Plus, I was short. The cocktails had more of an effect on me.
Worse, I had to get up at eight this morning to meet Dash and Travis Reynolds in the lobby at Dash’s request.
Travis was Dash’s cousin and the marketing guy for Dash’s distillery back in Bohemia, where I co-owned a bar. Dash was the stickler who wanted to go over everything one more time for the whiskey tasting this afternoon. He wanted the event to be perfect. Mostly, I just wanted to go back to bed.
Mr. Tuba made sleep impossible, and my romantic illusions of New Orleans were sorely tested at this time of day. Though spring was warm and soft outside, it was the hour when New Orleans smelled more like wet drunk dog than wine and roses, when weary workers hosed yesterday’s effluvia off the streets, and when you weren’t sure if the barflies holding down the stools on Bourbon Street were morning-fresh or left over from the night before.
They had classier barflies here at the Hotel Lebeau, especially during the Cocktailia convention. These were professional drinkers: mixologists, distributors, raconteurs. The courtly Dash Reynolds seemed oblivious to them, but the more boisterous Travis let his gaze linger on the women in their short, silky dresses. The gals joined guys in hipster hats who streamed to the portable Bloody Mary bar in the lobby, sponsored by whatever vodka had the biggest marketing budget this year.
“You look nice this morning, Kayanne,” Dash said.
“It’s Pepper,” Travis said.
Dash looked puzzled.
“That’s her nickname.” Travis shot me a warm smile with enough charm to melt the cheese on a cracker. “Kayanne Pepper. Get it?”
“Well, isn’t that cute,” Dash replied. I wasn’t sure if he was being sarcastic. He obviously hadn’t been paying attention last night when I’d given Travis my nickname, but Dash struck me as an absent-minded-professor type.
Nervous, too. Dash’s smooth, golden bangs flopped over his forehead, and he pushed them back. He did that a lot, when he wasn’t wearing the straw hat he now turned over and over in his hands. He was slender but wiry under his white shirt and tan linen suit, white carnation in the buttonhole.
Dash was a refined kind of handsome, with distracted pale blue eyes and narrow features, more refined than Travis, whose unruly, not-quite-collar-length brown hair complemented broad shoulders, loose clothes, a scruffy chin, sparkling brown eyes, dimples and an easygoing manner.
“OK, Pepper,” Dash said. “It sounds like you have everything you need. You sure they’ll be here in time?”
“Neil and the rest of the bartenders will be here by one,” I told them. “The tasting isn’t until four. Plenty of time. I’ll have everything set up and ready to go.”
“I told you, cuz,” Travis said to Dash. “They’ve got this. All we have to do is show up and let the whiskey talk for itself.”
“The whiskey can’t do all the talking. We have to talk it up. The idea is to get everyone talking. Everything rides on this.” Dash pushed back his hair again, then put his hat on and stood up straighter, every bit the dashing distiller.
“No worries.” Travis grinned and placed a hand on his cousin’s shoulder. “I’ve memorized the name of every blogger and cocktail reporter here. None will escape me.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Dash said dryly, but he appeared mollified, and his smile returned. I got the idea that Travis built all of their sales on charisma while Dash worked his ass off on the technical side.
“Travis is right. We’ve totally got this,” I echoed. “And Neil’s cocktails are fantastic.”
I tried to sound authoritative, but here was the truth: I was the newest Bohemia Bartender, and I hadn’t even met Neil Rockaway in person. I mean, not really. I’d had drinks twice at his bar, The Junction Box, but never when he was there, because my day off from my bar was probably his day off from his. I’d read his kick-ass new cocktail book. But Neil had only just recruited me this past week to join the team.
He’d called me Friday afternoon during a slow shift at Nola, my bar in Bohemia, on Florida’s east coast. He’d been in the Caribbean for a meeting at some high-end rum distillery, so we did the deal over the phone. He thought my insider knowledge of New Orleans and Cocktailia would make it easier for me to get some of the ingredients on site that his planner was having trouble ordering.
So maybe I didn’t tell him that I hadn’t lived in NOLA since I was fourteen. That’s when my parents sent me to stay with my aunt in Bohemia Beach, just after Hurricane Katrina rearranged our house. I didn’t think that was pertinent information, especially if it might change Neil’s mind about hiring me.
I’d heard too much about the Bohemia Bartenders to pass up the chance to join them. A collection of smart mixologists from my Florida town, they traveled to high-end cocktail events to help clients—in this case, Dash and his distillery—and to spread the joy of a well-made drink. They offered just the kind of adventure I desperately needed to up my game.
I wanted to impress Neil. I wanted in. I was good. It’s just that nobody knew it yet.
So I’d agreed to be the advance gal in New Orleans, lined up everything we needed and had the booth almost ready to go by one. And then I tried not to barf when I got the call from the team’s Girl Friday, Millie, telling me the bartenders’ flight was two hours late. Storms in Orlando were the culprit, not unusual for April, but a real pain in the patootie for me.
I was no faker with a shaker, but I couldn’t do this whole thing myself, not with the ambitious cocktail menu Neil had designed to show off Dash’s new rye and bourbon. And there was no way I could handle solo the thirsty hordes that would descend on the tasting room, which featured dozens of boutique distillers.
I was within a smidgen of freaking out. By the time three o’clock rolled around, the bartenders still weren’t here, and we had another problem: The whiskey was missing.
Barnie, who’d been assigned to keep an eye on the stash of cases in the Reynoldses’ storage suite and bring it down for the tasting, hadn’t shown up at the ballroom. While Dash and Travis did an interview with a couple of bloggers, I was tasked with finding their employee and getting him and the whiskey downstairs tout-suite.
If anything, the lobby was ten times as crowded as it had been this morning, and the scent of liquor seemed to saturate every carpet fiber and ooze out of every pore. These borderline flammable vapors were a signature of Cocktailia, which followed up the Bloody Mary bar with historic cocktails at midmorning workshops, snooty samples at high-end liquor seminars, besotted lunches, the first round of afternoon tastings, and the event I was desperate not to screw up: the boutique distillers’ showcase.
As one of my old bartender friends said, you had to “find your level” of inebriation and maintain it, or you’d never survive the week.
Sober and stressed, I did my best to jog through the thronged lobby, jostled by elbows and big purses amid the kaleidoscope of fedoras and tattoos and retro clothes and loud, tipsy laughter.
My phone buzzed against my hip. My own big purse, really an upcycled gray canvas messenger bag that held more stuff than Dr. Who’s time machine, guarded my flank like a shield. I stopped so I could dig my phone out of it.
“Crap!” Where did I put my damn phone? Then I realized the buzzing against my hip had come from my pocket, not the bag. I fished the phone out—not easily, because the pocket was squeezed into a tight, short, black denim skirt. It went nicely with my scoop-neck white T-shirt and black pinstripe vest, what the Brits called a waistcoat. Which also complemented my black-rimmed cat’s-eye glasses and gray-green eyes, which a biology teacher once compared to lichen. You know, that mossy stuff pronounced LIKE-IN? There’s nothing lichen the moment when someone compares your eyes to a symbiotic organism.
My hair was natural, more caramel than chocolate after going through a brief dark goth phase. It was just long enough that I could pin up most of it if I had to. Today, it was up, with several misbehaving tendrils. I liked to think of my look as “hot professional nerd.” Well, pro nerd, anyway.
I checked out the phone message. “They’re en route. 10 minutes out,” Millie had texted me from back in Bohemia.
“Thank Dionysus.” My confidence rebounded as I texted Millie a thumbs-up, stuffed the phone into my bag and began the trot up the wide back stairs of the Hotel Lebeau. My boots echoed on the marble. It was hell trying to get an elevator during the convention, so stairs were optimal. But it was a long way to the third floor.
I gulped air as I finally reached the quiet maze of third-floor hallways. I tried to remember where I was going, wondering if maybe I’d run faster if my curves were a little less curvy. Screw it. I might be short at five-four, but I was proportional, and running sucked. And there were always elevators.
I’d helped the Reynolds boys and Barnie load in last night after the liquor had arrived late. We’d filled the suite with boxes of whiskey and swag, stacks and stacks. Dash and Travis had opted not to store their stuff in one of the spaces offered by the convention for security reasons. It wasn’t like anybody here was hurting for booze, but it was a known fact that drunk cocktail people would spirit away anything that wasn’t nailed down. I’d been to Cocktailia a couple of times, and I’d seen swag-crazed tourists take a loaded picnic basket off a fanciful display and a feathered showgirl headdress right off a model’s head and sprint out the door with it.
“Finally,” I murmured as I rounded a corner and found the suite. The gin-branded do not disturb sign hung on the door handle.
I knocked to no avail. My key cards were stowed in the badge holder slung around my neck, so I held it out and touched it to the lock. A snick and it was open. I bent down the handle, pushed the door and felt the rush of cool hotel-room air whoosh out of the darkness and kiss my face.
“Barnie?” The room was weirdly quiet and dusky and crowded with piles of boxes stacked around the bed, some of them already loaded on a heavy-duty flatbed cart. The shades were drawn, and the TV exuded an eerie flicker.
“Barnie?” I called more loudly. The air-conditioning hummed, and distantly, I heard the tuba mooing. Had Dash’s paunchy assistant fallen asleep?
I found the light switch, flipped it and gasped.
Barnie hadn’t just fallen asleep. He was asleep on the floor, between the bed and the credenza that held the TV, which was flashing photos of elaborate entrees on the “what’s awesome at this hotel” channel. An empty bottle lay next to him.
What the hell?
“Barnie!” OK, this time I might have shouted. We were on the brink of disaster, and he was drunker than a jilted groom.
He didn’t stir.
Just then my phone rang, and I jumped about three feet straight up. I yanked it out of my bag and answered it while staring at Barnie.
“Yeah?” My voice cracked.
“Pepper? Is everything OK?”
“Neil?” I knelt next to Barnie and laid a hand on his forehead. He was cold. Still. His Hawaiian shirt seemed to glow, but his face was ghastly pale.
I touched his arm. Zero response. “Damn it.” I grabbed his beefy shoulder and shook him. Still no response. A frisson of apprehension ran down my spine.
“Pepper? What’s going on? We’re on our way from the airport. We’ll be there any minute. Is everything ready?”
“Neil, I—I have to hang up. I’ve gotta call 9-1-1. Suite 318. Hurry.”