Unsurprisingly, this imaginative scheme came to nothing, and the next time Count Seymore appeared in the newspapers, he was spending an hour a day in the window of a department store in Pittsburgh “demonstrating the correct method of wearing clothes.” Within a year he had moved on to a new obsession—the reanimation of the dead. Yet the count’s “suicide hotel” does make a certain kind of sense, if only in its acknowledgment of the fact that it’s much easier for people who want to commit suicide to do so in a private place away from home. And what place could be more private than a hotel?
This conceit forms the basis of The Suicide Club, Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1878 trilogy of short stories involving a secret society for those who “have grown heartily sick of the performance in which they are expected to join daily and all their lives long.” As one of the society’s members explains, “We have affairs in different places; and hence railways were invented. Railways separated us infallibly from our friends; and so telegraphs were made that we might communicate speedier at great distances. Even in hotels we have lifts to spare us a climb of some hundred steps.” The ultimate convenience—a key to “Death’s private door”—is provided to all members of the Suicide Club.
Outside of fiction, those seeking a key to “Death’s private door” will often register, with brave equanimity, at a hotel. There are various reasons for this, some emotional and others practical, but, to put it bluntly, at home people get suspicious. They want to know why you’re not sleeping, why you’re drinking so much, why you suddenly need a gun. Away from home, there’s far less chance of being interrupted. And even if they’re the reason for your suicide, do you really want your family cleaning up the mess?
According to a 2006 study by a pair of psychiatrists, the risk of suicide among hotel guests is much higher if they’re local residents. In some cases, suicide notes explain the choice of location. One man mentioned the desire to conceal the act from his daughter; another hoped to avert exposure in local media. In cases where no note is left, the authors assume the choice of a hotel is a way of “diminishing the chances of rescue and treatment.” Their study found that hotel suicides were slightly younger than average, but “maintained the male preponderance of suicide in the general population.” (The researchers also noted that suicidal men who are widowed or have never been married have less use for hotels, because “this population tends to live alone more frequently and could be less likely to need to implement strategies to reduce chance of rescue.”)
For hotel managers, dealing with suicide has always been an occupational hazard, though the cleaning staff usually bears its immediate impact. Casino hotels in particular have a higher than average suicide rate. More people kill themselves every year in Las Vegas than in any other place in America. The big Vegas hotels are suicide magnets—partly, though not exclusively, for those who’ve lost their life savings at the gaming tables. For this reason, most Las Vegas hotel rooms have neither balconies nor windows that open more than the inch or two that will permit the minimum required ventilation.
The suicidal leap has many advantages: you cannot change your mind, nor can you be interrupted halfway through; and, as long as the building is high enough, the jump is reliably fatal. In effect, however, the result of “plunge-proofing” Las Vegas hotel rooms has mostly been to drive would-be jumpers to a more public location, such as an interior atrium. In consequence, employees are instructed to be alert for guests who appear agitated and distraught, or for anyone lingering suspiciously in an elevated place. Such vigilance may appear altruistic, but human kindness is often simply a side effect of liability prevention. Suicides are bad for business, and in many cases, hotel proprietors can be held responsible for the damages.
According to an article entitled “How to Properly Respond to a Guest Death in Your Hotel,” published in a journal for hotel managers, one of the major problems of a hotel suicide is what the article’s author refers to candidly as “the gore factor.” “Think of a guest jumping from a balcony and landing in the atrium-style lobby or on the hotel’s sidewalk and I am sure you understand what I mean,” the author explains. “It will be messy and guests will be sickened if they witness the impact or see the impact site.” He goes on to suggest that hotel managers keep “very large dark-colored tarps made of impermeable material” readily available in case such a situation should arise, and advises that “management and security must uphold the utmost discretion in order to maintain some semblance of dignity for the decedent, the decedent’s family, and the reputation of the hotel.”
Today, people commit suicide in hotels for the same reasons they always did. While hotel managers rarely forget suicides on their premises, for obvious reasons they’re reluctant to release or even discuss statistics. However, Neal Smither, owner of the San Francisco–based company Crime Scene Cleaners, says that hotel and motel chains are his company’s biggest clients, and suicide cleanups provide most of his business. After Las Vegas, according to Smither, the region of the country with the most hotel suicides is the I-85 corridor between Alabama and the Virginias.
These days, it is companies like Crime Scene Cleaners, rather than the hotel’s housekeeping staff, that deal with the aftermath of suicides. Today, if a member of the staff encounters what appears to be a dead body in a hotel room, they are usually instructed to back out immediately and alert security. In most of the larger corporate establishments, staff members are given strict instructions not to speak about the incident. Once the coroner has arrived, the body has been removed (through the rear exit when possible), and the police have completed any necessary investigation, the room will be sealed and a professional crime-scene cleanup service brought in, with protective gear and special equipment, to make the room hygienic and presentable.
How long this takes depends on the method of death and the size of the room. Unfortunately for hotel owners, suicidal guests—since they know they will not be paying their bill—tend to choose large and luxurious rooms for their last night on earth. Most hotels err on the side of caution when such incidents occur, replacing the entire bed rather than just the linen and blankets, the whole carpet rather than just a stained rug; they may even replace drywall. Potentially hazardous material needs to be properly disposed of and the smell dissipated. Some hotels will bring in a priest to bless the room, not just for the sake of future guests but also for the benefit of housekeeping staff.
Unfortunately, small, independent hotels that don’t have the financial resources or moral accountability of the larger chains continue to rely on their own staff to clean up after such events. I learned this from a Reddit forum called “Tales from the Front Desk,” where hotel employees share their tales of pitiless managers, indignant guests, and grueling shifts at minimum wage. “A guy committed suicide on my shift,” recalls a hotel maid. “Once the owner found out about how much it cost for professionals to clean up deaths like that, he just had the maintenance guy flip the mattress.” A housekeeper describes how, in her first days on the job, a guest committed suicide using a gun placed under his chin while he was lying in bed. After the body had been removed, her boss asked for a volunteer to clean the room; wanting to make a good impression, she took the job. Before she went inside, she writes, a detective handed her two bags: one for any pieces of body matter she came across, and the other for the bullet, which was still missing. She did as she was asked, placing small scraps of flesh in a plastic bag while searching for the bullet (which turned up during the autopsy inside the corpse). “I still wake up from dreams where I am back in that room with those two bags,” she admits.
Even though larger hotel chains bring in professional cleaning teams to deal with the situation, coming unexpectedly upon a body is still a nasty shock. A desk clerk writes that he, his coworker, and his boss have all walked into guest rooms only to find “brains and blood everywhere.” A porter who works in a Washington, D.C., hotel recalls “a guy who broke down the roof door one night, jumped off, and landed on the second story, smashing
into the window. In a room full of kids at 1AM.” Another desk clerk remembers how he “watched a jumper hit the ground from 20 stories up … I was traumatized.” And yet business must go on as usual: “Still I am expected to smile all night, preen like a peacock, and try not to cringe when some guy tries to dispute his adult movie charges that he clicked on ‘by accident.’”
In his well-known essay “The Jumping-Off Place,” first published in the New Republic in 1931, the writer Edmund Wilson described the Coronado Beach Hotel in San Diego as “the ultimate triumph of the dreams of the architects of the eighties,” contrasting its fabulous façade with the grim truth that San Diego had, for a time, become the suicide capital of the United States. The coroner’s reports, Wilson wrote, made melancholy reading, for they contained “the last futile effervescence of the burst of the American adventure.” In San Diego,
they stuff up the cracks of their doors and quietly turn on the gas; they go into their back sheds or back kitchens and eat ant-paste or swallow Lysol; they drive their cars into dark alleys, get into the back seat and shoot themselves; they hang themselves in hotel bedrooms, take overdoses of sulphonal or barbital; they slip off to the municipal golf-links and there stab themselves with carving-knives, or they throw themselves into the bay …
Those who come to the city to escape from “ill-health and poverty, maladjustment and industrial oppression” discover that “having come West, their problems and diseases remain,” and that “the ocean bars further flight.” These lonely visitors soon realize that the “dignity and brilliance” of exclusive hotels like the Coronado are intended for out-of-towners and convention-goers, not locals with little left to live for. For such people, the hotels’ cruel opulence is often the final insult.
* * *
I have tried to learn all I can about the suicides that took place in the former Belvedere Hotel. The brief accounts in early newspapers are compellingly suggestive. These vignettes of private tragedy are windows on the changing century; they refer to the introduction of automobiles, the telegraph, and the telephone; to the Great Depression, Prohibition, segregation, and revolutions in the hotel trade. Their casts of characters include alienated parents, sons with too much money, the lonely wives of railway tycoons, and businessmen suffering from existential angst. They evoke the genteel and bohemian Baltimore of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein, a prosperous city whose kings were Confederate generals, tobacco lords, and bootleg emperors. They reveal private crises and intimate tragedies that are even today rarely discussed outside the family, except in strained and awkward whispers. I find the suicide notes left by hotel guests especially touching, with their polite, self-deprecating apologies, their regrets to hotel staff for the necessary cleanup job.
Most of the Belvedere’s reported suicides occurred before 1946, when the hotel was sold to the Sheraton corporation. After that, it isn’t clear whether there were actually fewer suicides (this is certainly possible, since the Belvedere was no longer Baltimore’s highest building nor its fanciest hotel), or whether changes in reporting made it appear that way (suicides no longer made the papers unless they involved unusual circumstances or well-known individuals, or occurred in public places). It is possible that for a while, the Belvedere may have seen more than its share of suicides because it was often the first port of call for those who arrived in Baltimore to register as patients at the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, one of the country’s earliest and most sophisticated psychiatric hospitals. With its marble floors, its rose gardens, its private rooms with porches and fireplaces, and its spacious auditorium containing a pipe organ, the Phipps Clinic was considered the height of luxury for the nervously ill. It was where F. Scott Fitzgerald installed his wife, Zelda, in 1934, after her second breakdown (her doctor infuriated Fitzgerald by suggesting that he, too, could benefit from a course of psychoanalysis). The Phipps patients who took their lives at the Belvedere were mostly women; some did so before checking in to the clinic, some after checking out, and others while on a break from treatment.
* * *
Freddie Howard, currently the evening concierge, has worked at the Belvedere for over twenty years and has seen almost everything. This is a place where things happen, he tells me. Although there are rumors of ghosts, Freddie has spent hundreds of nights in the lobby and never seen or felt anything supernatural. There have certainly been plenty of deaths, including suicides, since the hotel became a condominium complex, but Freddie mentions only the two most recent examples he can think of. A gentleman hanged himself on the eighth floor last year. Freddie is not sure whether anyone ever knew the reason. A few years before that, Freddie recalls, another gentleman, on the third floor, cut his wrists over a failed love affair. He survived, but a few days later, he put a pillow over his head and shot himself.
The second time, he got it right.
III
IT IS LUNCHTIME on Wednesday, May 24, 2006. Rey Rivera has now been missing for eight days. Mark Whistler and Steven King leave their office in Mount Vernon and walk down Charles Street to get lunch. King and Whistler both work for the Oxford Club, a financial company for which Rivera has recently been doing some freelance video production work. Steven has known Rey for about a year, but Mark, who’s only recently moved to Baltimore, has met him once, and then just briefly.
Steven and Mark go to pick up some lunch from Eddie’s, a nearby grocery store. On the way back, they see Steven’s friend George Rayburn. He seems to be hanging around outside the gay bar across the street. Steven has known George for a long time; in fact, it was George who first brought him into the company, though they currently work for different subsidiaries.
For a joke, Steven calls George on his cell phone. “Hey, George,” he says. “What are you doing hanging around outside a gay bar?”
George isn’t in a mood to joke around. Steven and Mark cross the street to find out what’s going on. George says he’s been looking for Rey. He’s visibly upset.
For eight days now, George, Mark, and Steven have been canvassing the streets, handing out missing-person flyers at bars and restaurants, putting up posters, asking business owners whether they’ve seen anyone matching Rey’s description. On Wednesday morning, George returns to work but finds himself unable to sit still in his office, unable to concentrate on ordinary business affairs. He tells Mark and Steven he’s been walking around the block where Rey’s car was found, looking for clues. Anything might help, he reasons.
“If Rey’s been abducted or killed, there must be some kind of evidence,” says George. Rey is a really big guy, an athlete. “He’d never go down without a fight.” George wants to check out the Belvedere’s parking garage.
“That place is creepy,” says Steven. “We’ll go with you.”
The three men cross the street and walk a block north to the seven-floor indoor parking garage on Charles Street next to the Belvedere and adjacent to the outdoor garage on St. Paul, where the Montero was found.
To the east, this garage is attached to an extension of the first three floors of the old hotel. This extension, the parking lot, and a cocktail lounge on the thirteenth floor were all added in 1964, when the Belvedere underwent renovation. The basement level of the extension contains retail space. A Japanese hibachi restaurant occupies the storefront level on Charles Street, which is accessed through a glass-and-steel entrance to the hotel, built along with the extension. There’s a glass roof above this entrance; behind the glass roof is the flat roof of a retail office. Above this is a second flat roof, one side of which abuts a row of windows. These look down on the hotel’s indoor swimming pool, which was made into offices when the Belvedere was turned into a condominium complex. Above these windows, there is a third roof, which would once have been the top of the pool, from which protrude two half-barrel-shaped glass skylights.
The three men walk through the parking garage, searching for anything that might be a clue—Rey’s wallet, maybe, or his phone, or h
is money clip. They get all the way up to the top level of the parking garage, but find nothing out of the ordinary. Mark decides to search the stairwell. A few minutes later, his phone rings. It’s Steven, telling him to come back up to the roof. He and George have found something, says Steven, though they’re not sure what.
Mark goes back up to the top of the garage. Looking over the lower roof toward the Belvedere, all he sees are the kinds of things you might expect to see on a roof—rocks, plastic planters, cans, other kinds of trash.
But then he sees something else.
It is a very large brown flip-flop.
Steven touches his shoulder and points out a second flip-flop, along with a cell phone and what could be a wallet and a bunch of keys. Also, there is a hole in the lower roof.
Not a huge hole. Bigger than a Frisbee, but smaller than a hula hoop. Steven leans over and tries to see inside it, but the glare of the midday sun is too bright. When the men look up to the top of the building, they see an old banquet chair dangling off the edge of the building, caught by one of its metal legs. Steven starts to feel a sense of dread.
The hole in the roof
George calls James Mingle, the detective in the missing persons unit assigned to Rey’s case. He describes the scene, the hole, and the chair to Mingle. The men feel very uncomfortable. Mingle asks them to stay where they are—he’ll be right there, he says. But ten minutes later, he calls back: he can’t work out how to get into the Belvedere’s parking garage. George tells him just to pull his car into the Charles Street entrance to the west. “If you show your badge,” says George, “surely the attendant will let you in?”
An Unexplained Death Page 3