An Unexplained Death

by Mikita Brottman

  I am disappointed that Carlos has nothing to share with me and that such a promising lead has taken me nowhere at all. Two days later, however, he contacts me again.

  “Strangely enough,” he writes, “I was reminded of your project today when reading a Chinese text from about 1247 (translated title The Washing Away of Wrongs):

  The similarities between those who jump into wells, those who are thrown in, and those who lose their footing and fall are very great. The differences are slight.… If the victim was thrown in or fell in accidentally, the hands will be open and the eyes slightly open, and about the person he may have money or other valuables. But, if he was committing suicide, then his eyes will be shut and his hands clenched. There will be no valuables on the body. Generally, when someone deliberately jumps into a well, they will enter feet first. If the body is found to have gone in head first, it is probable that the victim was being chased or was thrown in by others.

  I think again of Auguste Dupin, who proclaims in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” in his clumsy English: “Truth is not always in a well. In fact, as regards the more important knowledge, I do believe that she is invariably superficial.”

  I wonder: Am I making the error Dupin warns of, looking too deeply into the mystery and ignoring the surface truth? Rivera’s autopsy says nothing about whether his hands or eyes were open at his death, but he did land feet first, which, according to this ancient Chinese text, would indicate suicide. But such metaphysical forensics would not stand up in today’s courtroom. One might as well, like the fortunetellers of ancient Egypt, attempt to descry the future by gazing into a pool of ink.

  I arrange to meet Carlos in the Owl Bar. He is a short, heavyset gentleman dressed in a dark suit without a tie. His shirt is open at the neck and he wears a prominent gold crucifix. He has a strong Hispanic accent. There is a streak of gray in his hair. He reminds me of a well-fed badger.

  Carlos is extremely helpful in explaining to me the history and origins of Agora—what the company does, how it works, how it makes so much money, and details of the SEC ruling against Stansberry. When I tell him that I have encountered many people who are paranoid about the influence of Agora, Carlos says he is not unfamiliar with such sentiments. He knows people who believe Agora has hired secret agents to follow them, bugged their phones, hacked into their computers, and worse.

  When I asked him whether there is any truth in these rumors, he says there is none at all. Agora, says Carlos, is just the kind of company that attracts nutty speculation and conspiracy theories because it has expanded so quickly and makes so much money without creating any tangible product. Agora also keeps a low profile.

  “Most people don’t understand what goes on there,” Carlos tells me. “They call themselves a publishing house, but what they publish, for the most part, are hyper-aggressively marketed newsletters selling secret systems for predicting stock prices. It’s not surprising that people become suspicious of a company that boasts that it deals in clandestine information.”

  The Owl Bar, 1934

  “So Agora doesn’t employ any secret agents?” I ask him, slightly disappointed.

  “No. In fact, Agora themselves circulate such rumors in order to give readers of their otherwise very mundane investment letters the impression that the company is connected to all these underground sources of knowledge.”

  “So it’s just a sales tactic,” I say.

  “Correct,” says Carlos. “Everything else is nonsense.” He gives me a sly smile. I am not sure what it is, but something about him wins my trust.

  * * *

  I email Jayne Miller and ask whether I can speak to her again about Rey Rivera’s death. She agrees, and gives me a time to call. A week later, we talk on the phone.

  She has no memory of speaking to me before. This is hardly a surprise, considering the number of people she must speak to every day. But I am taken aback to learn that she barely seems to remember the case itself. After we hang up, I realize that, as an investigative journalist, Miller must cover many different stories every month, whereas for me, it is always the same story over and over again. But then I recall the words she used when we last spoke: “This is one of the most mysterious incidents I’ve ever encountered in thirty-five years as an investigative reporter.” Was she exaggerating? If not, how can she have forgotten everything so completely?

  When we speak on the phone, Miller tells me that most of her notes on the case come from her conversations with Michael Baier, one of the two homicide detectives initially assigned to investigate Ray Rivera’s death.

  Miller recalls that Baier was reassigned because his superiors thought he was spending too much time on the case, investigating it as a homicide when everybody else thought it was a suicide. She noted that Baier thought the story was a lot more complicated than Rey just going off the roof. There is no evidence that he slipped. Rey’s wife knows Baier and has kept in touch with him. She also made a note of the fact that Baier thought it was important that Rey was a movie writer, and that he traveled a lot. Baier, she recalled, thought the case was too overwhelming for the Baltimore police to sort out. She also noted that Rey was a swimmer.

  Might he have thought the Belvedere’s swimming pool was still in use?

  I sense Miller is short on time. I ask her if she recalls anything else that might be important.

  She continues to read aloud from her notes: “Baier thinks Rey’s death may be connected to the Nicaragua situation. Agora was doing some development deal in Nicaragua at the time.”

  Then she pauses again.

  “I have to be careful here,” she says. “I assume you know about the SEC injunction against Stansberry?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Well, in a news piece I did on the case for WBAL, I made a putative connection between Rivera’s death and the SEC conviction, and right after it aired I got an angry email from Agora’s lawyers.”

  I ask her if she can tell me what the email said. I realize I am pushing my luck. But she finds the email and reads it aloud to me over the phone.

  “‘Rey was a childhood friend of many people who worked at Agora, and the connection you are trying to make is deplorable.’”

  I ask her if it would be possible for me to get a copy of the email.

  “No,” she says bluntly. “That’s a private email sent from them to me.”

  Even though I’m on the phone, I blush. To cover my awkwardness, I say, lightly, “Well, I’m sure I’ll be getting my own soon.”

  “I’m sure you will,” says Jayne Miller.

  * * *

  The next morning, I am drinking coffee on the sofa before work, scrolling idly through my email, when my attention is suddenly caught by a message from Carlos: there is something he forgot to mention when we met; can I give him a call?

  Short of time, I call him on the way to teach my morning class.

  “I just remembered,” says Carlos. “Agora did, in fact, have one intelligence connection—and I should tell you, I use the word ‘intelligence’ advisedly. Sometime in the mid-1990s, they hired William Colby, the former CIA director, to edit his own newsletter, The Colby Report, which was a complete flop, As I recall, it attracted less than a hundred subscribers.”

  “Can you remember why it failed?” I ask him.

  “Probably because it was so badly written,” Carlos says. “I can recall a particularly deplorable article on the ‘bullion biz’ in Europe. It began, ‘That’s when I knew I had to go into the bullion biz.’”

  We both snicker.

  “He was not there for long,” says Carlos. “If I recall, he was supposed to join Bill Bonner’s newsletter, Strategic Investor, as a contributing writer, but something went wrong. I can’t recall exactly what happened, but it ended up in litigation. And then Colby died in mysterious circumstances. Rather interesting. You should look it up.”

  I do so. On April 27, 1996, Colby set out from his weekend home in Rock Point, Maryland, on a canoe trip, even though it was
already dark. He went alone. Nine days later, his body was found lying facedown in a marshy area. Although his death was ruled accidental, others suspect suicide or foul play.

  * * *

  By this time, I know so much about Rey Rivera’s death that I can tell you in what direction the wind was blowing on the roof of the Belvedere that night, the exact phase of the moon, what stars were visible, what planets were in transit. But none of what I have learned has shown me anything but further contradictions and complexities. All I really know is that Rey Rivera met his death when his body, precipitating violently from a height, crashed through the roof of the Belvedere’s former swimming pool.

  * * *

  Suicides are sometimes misclassified due to investigative error; however, it is true that people have plenty of reasons for wanting suicides hushed up, including no-suicide clauses in insurance contracts, religious taboos, and the reputation of the family. The latter is more and more rarely a factor today, unless you are in line for a title or a throne, but it may very well have led to the conspiracy of discretion around what happened to Mrs. Ann Rieman Duval, who died in her suite at the Belvedere on Tuesday, February 17, 1914.

  Mrs. Duval was the oldest daughter of Dr. John Hanson Thomas, a former slave owner, a Confederate sympathizer, a bank president, and the owner of an elegant mansion four blocks from the Belvedere, on the northeast corner of Charles and Monument. This splendid house was once the talk of the town. It had a hydraulic elevator, speaking tubes for the family to summon their servants, a Tiffany skylight, terrapin tanks in the basement, and—according to rumor—a mysterious chamber reached through a secret door, purpose unknown.

  Mrs. Duval’s husband, Colonel Henry Rieman Duval, was a Confederate veteran just like her father. He was president of the American Sugar Beet Company and a major investor in the railroads. Although the couple had houses in New York City, on Long Island, and in Florida, Mrs. Duval preferred to live quietly in the Belvedere, where she kept a suite and lived a dignified life with her secretary, two maids, a housekeeper, and a chauffeur. She also had a personal cook, even though the Belvedere’s chef, Francis Vallagéant, was reputed to be the best cook south of the Mason-Dixon line. It would simply not have been appropriate for a lady of Mrs. Duval’s standing to eat alone in a public restaurant, and women were not permitted in the hotel bar.

  In the early afternoon of February 17, Mrs. Duval’s physician arrived at the Belvedere in response to a call from her daughter Nannie, who was paying her mother a visit. Mrs. Duval, sixty-four, suffered from diabetes and had been in bad health for many months. Nannie told the doctor that her mother had apparently consumed an unknown amount of Holloway’s Ointment, a greasy, strong-smelling cream containing turpentine and meant for rubbing on gouty or rheumatic limbs. The version of Mrs. Duval’s obituary that was published in the Brooklyn Eagle included the information that her maid had left the Holloway’s Ointment in a glass, into which her mistress had mixed an envelope of Seidlitz powders, a laxative and digestive aid containing bicarbonate of soda that, when stirred into a glass of water, made a carbonated drink. Why the maid had put Holloway’s Ointment in a drinking glass remains a mystery.

  The doctor administered an antidote. Before long, the patient had made a full recovery and was sitting up in bed working busily on a crossword puzzle. She seemed so much better, in fact, that Nannie decided to take the train to New Orleans to attend the Mardi Gras, as she had planned to do before her mother had taken to bed.

  After her daughter left, however, Mrs. Duval became seriously ill again. According to her maid, she was sick all night. The maid kept asking whether she should call the doctor back, but Mrs. Duval repeatedly said that it was not necessary. According to the maid, Mrs. Duval started to “shake horribly.” Then she stopped shaking and would not respond. The maid believed that Mrs. Duval had fainted, and “went to touch her lightly on the arm, only to discover her skin to be quite cold.”

  Everyone admitted that Mrs. Rieman Duval’s passing was sudden and unexpected; her death, however, was attributed to “natural causes.” Nobody said that she swallowed the ointment on purpose, and perhaps she did not. It was described in her obituary as a “mistake,” and perhaps it was. Mistakes, like suicides, come in many forms.

  A suite in the Belvedere, circa 1914

  XI

  ANOTHER OF MY favorite places to explore in Baltimore is the neighborhood surrounding the high stone walls of Green Mount Cemetery, which, perhaps twenty feet high, are topped with another ten feet of barbed wire. Once the most fashionable resting place for Baltimore’s prominent families, Green Mount Cemetery is now also a mausoleum for this lost world of gentility. The cemetery is surrounded by poverty, and city authorities are obviously concerned to protect its marble stones and sculptures, and to keep the destitute from sleeping there at night.

  Wandering through Green Mount’s sixty-three acres of monuments to military grandees, senators, judges, businessmen, and philanthropists, you may come across the resting place of the assassin John Wilkes Booth, the legless sideshow performer Johnny Eck, or the inventor Elijah Bond, whose tombstone is carved to resemble his most famous device: the Ouija board. Follow the outside of the cemetery walls and you will pass abandoned homes overgrown with bushes and tangled vines, vacant lots thick with wild grass, violet cornflowers, pale clover, white and yellow daisies, blue forget-me-nots, and, almost everywhere, the pale, creeping blooms known as devil’s trumpet. What once were the pathways behind houses now look more like caves composed of a thick dark mass, half foliage, half detritus, in which finches and cardinals have built their nests. How rapidly the territory is ceded. Perhaps, in ten years, there will be coyotes roaming these alleyways; I might see a mountain lion sleeping lazily on a half-collapsed wrought-iron veranda. Yet even here, one or two of the houses still display the standard signs of legitimate inhabitation: the jerry-rigged satellite dish, the pit bull chained up in the feces-splattered yard.

  There are no sounds here to trouble the dead in their graves but the twittering of nest-building birds and an occasional police siren. These are supposed to be the most dangerous parts of the city, but there is nothing disturbing here, unless you are afraid of rats. Still, staying away is one of those habits that are meant to keep you safe. You are also supposed to avoid people loitering in places they don’t seem to belong, look through the keyhole before opening the door, ask for credentials, always take your phone and purse with you, and tell someone where you’re going and when you’ll be back.

  Rules like these do not apply when you are invisible. The older I get, the more invisible I become. To be invisible is to be inconsequential. That is the downside. On the upside, since nobody cares about a person of no importance, to be invisible is to be invulnerable.

  To be invisible is to be free.

  * * *

  It’s early 2014. Almost eight years have passed since the death of Rey Rivera. I email Allison again, and this time, I get a reply. Surprisingly, her tone is cheerful and friendly. She identifies herself as “the widow of Rey Rivera.” She has heard I’ve been “sending out inquiries regarding Rey” for a project I’m working on. She’s interested in knowing what angle I’m taking, “since we did not know you.”

  I take great care over the wording of my reply. I want it to sound thoughtful and discreet. I explain to Allison that I live in the Belvedere and have done so since April 2005, that I was shocked and bewildered by her husband’s mysterious death, and that ever since it happened, I’ve been unable to put it out of my mind. I tell her that I’m a writer and a literature professor; I give her information about some of my previous books, and let her know that I’m writing about Rey’s death in the context of the history of the Belvedere. I give her my home address and my cellphone number.

  Allison does not reply. A month later, I email her again. Perhaps, I suggest, she does not want to be involved in a project that might involve opening up the deep wounds caused by her husband’s death. If this is the case, I tell her
, I can understand how she feels. If she ever changes her mind, I ask her to please let me know.

  That afternoon, Allison leaves a message on my cellphone asking whether I have a landline we can speak on. I call and give her my landline number, and she calls me back. She explains that ever since Rey’s death, she has been extremely security conscious. She says I need to grasp the enormous power and wealth of Agora. They will stop at nothing, she says. She is certain that someone at Agora is responsible for Rey’s death, but the company has so much money and so many connections, even among the police, that she knows she could never prove it.

  Allison tells me that, for the first couple of years after Rey’s death, she was obsessed with solving the mystery of what happened to him. She spent all her time gathering evidence. She still has boxes and boxes of the notes she made. But every time she would start to think she was getting somewhere, she would come up against another brick wall. It almost drove her crazy.

  I am taken aback by Allison’s open and friendly manner. She sounds smart, interesting, even funny, which I definitely was not expecting.

  Obviously, I cannot promise I will solve the case, I tell her. But I have become obsessed with it, and when I am obsessed with something, I don’t let it go. I’m curious, I tell her, and determined, and I live right here in the Belvedere. If nothing else, perhaps I can at least draw more attention to the case and maybe even get people to come forward.

  Allison tells me that if I want her help, I will have to come out to LA and talk to her in person. She does not trust the phone, she says, and she trusts email even less.

  I tell her I’ll be happy to meet her in LA.

  The first thing I need to do, she tells me, is get hold of Michael Baier. He was the first detective on the case, and he was helpful and sympathetic. She tells me that Baier knew immediately that Rey’s death was a homicide, and a very complicated one. He was going to start looking into Agora and Pirate Investor immediately. But within three weeks of Rey’s death, Baier had been taken off the case and replaced with another homicide detective, Marvin Sydnor, who was much more “hard core.” When Allison asked Sydnor what had happened to Baier, Sydnor told her they’d taken him off the case because he was “getting too attached” to her. She said she spoke to Baier one last time, when he came to say goodbye. He told her the case was far too complex for Baltimore homicide to deal with and that she should get back in touch with him in seven or eight years, by which time he’d be retired; Rey’s death would be a cold case, and they would finally be able to get some answers.