An Unexplained Death

by Mikita Brottman

  Detective Mingle tells the three men to go downstairs and wait for him in the Belvedere’s lobby. They find an elevator that takes them to the back quarters of the hotel, and from there, they find their way to the reception desk. A security guard shows them to an area by the wall where they can wait. There are no chairs, so the men sit down on the floor. Here, they wait in awkward silence.

  They’ve been sitting there for what seems like forever when suddenly everything starts happening at once. There are cops everywhere—a big crowd of cadets. There is a man in uniform, wearing rubber gloves, with a stethoscope around his neck. Realizing he must be the coroner, Steven almost loses consciousness. Later, when the cops come back, Mark goes over to one of them and asks whether the body is Rey’s, but the officer won’t tell him. A few moments later, a policeman approaches the three friends, introduces himself as a detective from the Baltimore police’s Central District, and tells them they need to come downtown with him. Steven, Mark, and George get shakily to their feet, and the detective leads them through the crowds in the lobby, into the street, and into an unmarked vehicle. Through the wing mirror, as they drive away, Steven glimpses a local news anchorman straightening his tie.

  The concierge on duty at the Belvedere that day is a capable, heavyset gentleman in his fifties named Gary Shivers. At the request of a man who introduces himself as a police detective, Shivers goes into the room behind the front desk to find the keys to the offices on the second floor, then leads the police and the pack of cadets up two long, steep flights of stairs, through a double set of doors, and down the hallway toward the annex. Taking a right turn, he leads the parade past the second-floor freight elevators and pushes open a door at the top of three steps. This door opens onto a narrow hallway leading to the hotel’s former swimming pool. When the Belvedere was turned into a condominium complex in 1991, this space was divided into two offices, each with a half-barrel skylight and a row of windows at the top of its eastern wall.

  One of these offices belongs to the Belvedere’s in-house catering company, which at that time was a business called Truffles. The other is empty, although its opaque glass door announces it as the headquarters of the Army of God Church in Christ and the Elijah School of the Prophet Institute. This Pentecostal congregation was using the space when D. and I first moved into the building in March 2005. It took us a while to locate the source of the praying and chanting on Sunday mornings, and when we realized it was coming from the old swimming pool below our apartment window, we were worried that it might become annoying. But the Army of God Church in Christ soon found a new home, and by early April 2006, the Sunday-morning hallelujahs had ceased.

  The Truffles staff have been complaining about a bad smell for the last few days. They think there might be a dead rat in the wall. When they hear Gary and the police arriving, they stick their heads out of their office to see what all the fuss is about.

  Gary is fumbling among all the keys on his big key ring, trying to work out which one fits the door of the vacant office. He isn’t thinking about how the hole got in the office roof. When he finally locates the right key, he opens the door and lumbers into the room. He’s taken three or four steps across the floor before the smell hits him and he realizes he’s looking at a dead body.

  Gary Shivers turns and runs. He runs past the lead detective, who’s casually taking out a stick of Vicks VapoRub. He runs past the girls from Truffles, who later tell me that Gary, who is black, had “turned white.” He runs all the way downstairs to the basement, runs down the hallway and past Antiques at the Belvedere, then bursts out through the side door into the heat of the afternoon. He runs west across Charles Street and up the steps into Zena’s salon. Zena is in the middle of a manicure when Gary bursts through the door, shaking and sweating. He tells Zena he has had a shock and he needs a drink. Zena asks one of the girls to take over her client’s manicure. She leads Gary to the back room where he can sit down, and fetches a shot glass and a bottle.

  Gary closes his eyes and swallows. He takes three shots. By the third he is no longer shaking. But he knows it’s too late. He’ll never forget what he has just seen.

  Zena asks him what happened.

  “A dead man fell out of the ceiling,” says Gary.

  * * *

  When the Truffles girls realize that what they thought was a dead rat in the wall was, in fact, a dead person, they can’t avoid thinking about the wedding reception held at the Belvedere four days ago. The bride and groom were photographed in rooms on the second floor. Violets Are Blue, a wedding photography website, still features images from the reception. In one of the photographs, the loving couple can be glimpsed looking down romantically from a window in the old hotel. In another room on the same floor, at the very time this photo was shot, Rey Rivera’s dead body was decaying in the summer heat.

  * * *

  Half an hour after the body has been removed from the Belvedere, I come down to take my dog for his afternoon walk. The building is still swarming with police. Charles Street has been closed to traffic and pedestrians. Crime scene tape is tied from one side of the road to the other. I ask one of the officers what’s going on. He tells me they’re “conducting an investigation.” He refuses to say anything else. Turning away, I see a neighbor walking his elderly dachshund, and ask if he has any idea what’s happening.

  He’s heard they found a body. “They think it’s that missing guy.”

  I finish my walk and return to our apartment. Upstairs, I open the living room window and wedge myself tightly into the frame, which gives me an almost perfect view of cops climbing around on the annex roof. A small group of people is also observing the scene from the top floor of the parking garage directly opposite.

  We all watch as two policemen use a ladder to get from the second to the third level of the annex roof, then from the third to the fourth. One of the cops goes to retrieve the flip-flops and cell phone, almost indiscernible against the dark membrane of the roof. I can see the hole. It is just within my line of vision, and seems remarkably small for someone of Rivera’s height and weight. It’s almost circular, not one of those people-shaped holes you see in cartoons.

  Even though they can see we’re watching them, the cops are surprisingly casual about the whole thing. The first cop is on the pool roof. The second cop stays on the lower level, holding the ladder. The first cop picks up a flip-flop and throws it down to his colleague on the lower level. He then throws the second flip-flop, which almost hits the other guy on the head. The second cop yells something at the first cop, who laughs and yells something back. I do not see them putting anything in an evidence bag, taking photographs, or checking for fingerprints. Neither that day nor at any time afterward does anybody knock on our door to ask questions about anything we might have seen; nor, as far as we know, do the police interview any of our neighbors.

  Some accounts, confusing the mystery further, report that Rivera’s corpse was found in an “old church adjoining the Belvedere hotel.”

  * * *

  At the Central District police station downtown, George Rayburn, Steven King, and Mark Whistler are sent to wait in a room painted in bright colors, with children’s toys and games scattered around the floor. It’s completely wrong. A television is tuned to WJZ-TV, a local channel. When the news comes on, the men see images of the Belvedere, and a long line of police cadets entering the hotel. The news announcer, Richard Sher, reports that a body found in “a conference room of the Belvedere Hotel” has been identified as that of “the missing financial writer Rey Rivera.” The three men sit in silence again, this time for hours. Eventually, they’re brought out one by one to be interviewed separately by detectives, one of whom is either so tired, so bored, or so hungover that he actually falls asleep while interviewing George. The questions they ask are strange and inappropriate—for instance, “Where are your parents?”

  After this comes more silence. None of the three friends are interested in speaking to the press, so whenever anyone c
ontacts them, they forward the inquiries to their company’s public relations officer. Jayne Miller, an investigative reporter, tries repeatedly to contact George. He talks to her once, very briefly. Among the three men, there is little discussion of the incident. Steven King enters therapy to deal with it. George Rayburn continues working for the same subsidiary until 2013, when he joins King at the Oxford Club. The year after Rey’s death, Mark Whistler is let go from his job.

  * * *

  Once the corpse has been removed, the police have left, and all the commotion is over, I find my way down to the former swimming pool. I assume the door will have been sealed by police tape and I’m surprised to find it propped open—to get rid of the smell, I imagine. There is nothing to prevent me from entering the room.

  From beneath, the hole is substantially bigger than it appears from above. The ceiling is half collapsed; some of the rafters and roof beams have fallen in, and the musty carpet is covered in big chunks of plaster. The main area of damage is in the back right-hand corner of the room, where the carpet is stained almost black and scattered with what look like grains of rice, which, when I get down on the floor to study them more closely, turn out to be dried insect larvae.

  While I’m inspecting the scene, two girls who work in the nightclub at the top of the building come by to take a look before their shift begins.

  This nightclub is called the 13th Floor.

  * * *

  The majority of hotels, in deference to superstition, don’t list a thirteenth floor on their elevators. Most commonly, the number 13 is simply skipped, so the floors listed on the console go from 12 to 14. In some hotels, the thirteenth floor may be called 12A or 14A; in others, it may have a special name such as the Marble Floor or the Magnolia Floor, or it may be used to house offices, storerooms, or mechanical equipment. Some hotels don’t even have rooms numbered 13. Even progressive modern psychiatry pays homage to this ancient superstition. Although the formal dedication of the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins took place on April 16, 1913, the date engraved on the plaque above the main entrance says 1912.

  In this regard, the Belvedere is remarkably progressive—or dangerously hubristic, depending on your point of view. But perhaps the curse doesn’t count: the top floor is not actually the thirteenth floor but the fourteenth, the fifteenth, or something in between, since the ballrooms on the first and twelfth floors are two stories high, and the Belvedere is built on the slope of a hill.

  As soon as the two girls enter the room, they hold their noses and make theatrical gagging noises. I don’t find the smell to be so bad. Something has obviously been sprayed around the room to cover up the worst of it: a sweet, floral scent. Plus, the door has been propped open for hours. Still, the girls act as though they can hardly stand it. One of them says that, unlike me, she’s smelled a dead body before. She repeats the well-worn cliché: “You never forget the smell of death.”

  If this is the smell of death, I think, it’s been well concealed. The room smells no worse than a bag of trash that has been left out for couple of days in the sun.

  * * *

  Apart from being surprised that the door to the former swimming pool was left open and that I was able to get inside with no problem, D. expresses little interest in Rey Rivera’s death, and although he is happy to listen to and even indulge my speculations, they don’t seem to spark any curiosity.

  He is not uninterested in death, but his concerns are different from mine. For example, not long ago he asked me whether I had heard anything about a man who had committed suicide by jumping from a roof at Lincoln Center onto a New York street. He didn’t want to know the name of the man or the reasons for his suicide, but the particular structure at Lincoln Center that he jumped from. D. knows Lincoln Center well, or he used to, and he couldn’t picture a building whose roof abuts the street. “There’s been a lot of rebuilding going on there,” he tells me. He can just about still recognize Alice Tully Hall, but most of the other structures are unfamiliar to him. “It must have been one of the new buildings,” he decides, stoically, as if living outside New York for ten years is a form of suicide in itself.

  * * *

  The night the body is found, I go to visit a new friend, C. Although her apartment is small and cramped, she’s arranged things nicely for the two of us. She’s put sparkling wine on ice and set out little plates of strawberries dipped in powdered sugar. I don’t tell her about the dead body right away. It’s not appropriate, partly because C.’s boyfriend, a poet twice her age, has been undergoing treatment for brain cancer. When I finally tell her about Rey Rivera, she doesn’t seem as interested as I thought she’d be. I was hoping that C. might be the friend I was longing to find, who shares my “love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of everyday life,” as Sherlock Holmes says of the deep bond between himself and Dr. Watson. I am disappointed, but given her boyfriend’s brain cancer, I imagine that C. wants relief from depressing subjects.

  The next time we see C.’s boyfriend, he is in front of a large audience and reading a poem about his erectile dysfunction, an unanticipated side effect of chemotherapy. After the reading, he announces that not only is he in remission, but he has just been declared 100 percent cancer free. This earns him a standing ovation. Three years later, he is discovered alone in his apartment, dead at sixty-two. C. had broken up with him by then. She stopped calling me around the same time. Apparently, she had lost interest in me, too. Or perhaps I had become invisible to her. Even among those who see me at first, I gradually fade out of sight.

  Sometimes I wonder whether I am perfectly visible but people simply don’t like me. Perhaps I am just a thoroughly unpleasant person, stubborn and morbid, saturnine and antisocial, like the writer Patricia Highsmith, who thrived on lies and deceit, loved busting up couples, and preferred snails to people, bringing them to dinner parties in her handbag, attached to a head of lettuce.

  * * *

  When I get home the night the body is found, the air is still warm, and the moon is almost full. Before entering the Belvedere, I go up to the roof of the parking garage to get a look at the hole from above. There is a much better view from the garage roof than from our apartment window, and at midnight, I think, no one will wonder why I’m standing gazing over the edge of the parking lot for so long. Or so I assume. But as I stand there, I hear voices above me, and look up. On the Belvedere roof are the two bar girls from the 13th Floor. They have gone up to smoke cigarettes. When they see me, they cling together in mock terror, laugh, and wave, the tips of their cigarettes glowing like fireflies in the summer night.

  * * *

  Later that night, lying in bed, I suddenly remember something. About a week ago, around ten at night, while we were reading in bed, D. and I heard a loud noise outside. It was loud enough to make the windows shake in their frames, loud enough to make me get out of bed, go over, and look down into the street to see if there had been a car crash. The Belvedere stands on the intersection of two busy streets in the middle of an area with plenty of bars and restaurants. It can be noisy at weekends, but this was a weeknight and the streets were quiet. Seeing nothing, and hearing nothing more, we quickly dismissed the crash as just another of those inexplicable noises in the night.

  I’d made a note of the mysterious noise in my journal. It had occurred on the previous Tuesday, May 16, the day Rey Rivera went missing.

  * * *

  The police report of the incident describes how officers from the Central District were dispatched to the Belvedere Hotel to deal with a questionable death. “Upon arrival,” the report continues, “the area was searched and located in a vacant room under the damaged roof … a decomposed body of a male was discovered.” On the “Missing” poster, Rey was described as wearing a “black pull-over jacket, shorts and flip-flops” and carrying $20 in cash, no bank cards. Allison Rivera, who must have given this description, was right about the black jacket and flip-flops, but Rey was actually wearing a yellow shirt, and
long green pants (not shorts), in the pocket of which were an American Express card and his Maryland driver’s license.

  “A decomposed body of a male.” This is what the handsome Rey Rivera has become. The body is taken to the forty-one-year-old building at Pratt and Penn Streets that houses the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner; here, an autopsy is performed. The building is part of the University of Maryland School of Medicine, which opened in 1807 and was immediately closed again for almost seven years because of riots protesting the dissection of human corpses, many of which, rumor had it, were stolen from St. Paul’s churchyard adjoining the medical school. So great was the public outrage that dissection wasn’t a part of the curriculum until 1832, and even then, it had to be carried out in secrecy; human dissection was not permitted in Maryland until 1882.

  It seems right to be unhappy about cutting up corpses. There is something nightmarishly inevitable about the autopsy, with its photographs and final report. I’m already the kind of person who cringes at any business that involves putting my living flesh in the hands of another, be that a hairdresser, dentist, or gynecologist. It’s not that I’m afraid of what they will do to me, but rather that I dread their unspoken criticism, and the idea of being judged by my body alone: my weight; the condition of my skin, my teeth, my hair. An autopsy, should we be subject to one, is the ultimate impersonal procedure to which our bodies will have to submit: our final, official summing-up.

  * * *

  Cora Crippen, the wife of the famous murderer Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen, was identified by a piece of her belly that clearly showed an old abdominal scar. Escaping the quicklime in which the rest of Mrs. Crippen’s body was destroyed, this fragment of flesh was later exhibited at Crippen’s trial, where it was passed around among members of the jury on a soup plate.