An Unexplained Death

by Mikita Brottman

  In the Middle Ages, suicides had a stake driven through their heart, and their bodies were buried at a public crossroads rather than in hallowed ground. In many places, it is still a crime to commit suicide, or to help another to do so. At the time of Mrs. Tredwell’s death, the act of suicide was still shrouded in shame; how much more shameful would it have been, then, for a woman like Mrs. Tredwell—the wife of a national hero and the mother of a four-year-old child—to take her own life. Since it was assumed that no healthy, rational person would choose to kill himself, the coroner would often include on the death certificate of a suicide some such phrase as “while suffering from a temporary mental aberration,” a convenient escape mechanism that transformed the suicide into a form of accidental death. This was important, since many workmen’s compensation laws denied death benefits for self-inflicted injuries; many life insurance contracts still exclude death by suicide. In Mrs. Tredwell’s case, however, since nothing more was at stake than the reputation of the family, the coroner’s attempts to prevaricate did not stick.

  * * *

  The corpses of animals are everywhere, strewn across my path every day. I cannot avoid them. In street and alley, I step over the bodies of poisoned rats, laid out in the scrambled posture of their fall, flattened by traffic, dotted with flies. Just yesterday perhaps, these stiff cadavers might have been “gay young friskers,… Cocking tails and pricking whiskers,” as Browning described the rats of Hamelin in his famous poem. Driving down the highway, I see the neatly severed front half of a doe lying by the side of the road, her coiled innards spilling over the concrete. A quarter of a mile later I pass the other half, standing comically by the crash barrier like the back end of a pantomime horse. To the preoccupied driver, the severed body is an everyday sight, forgotten as soon as it is glimpsed.

  But to the turkey vultures, those black shadows perched in a row on the high-mast lights of the highway, the carcass is a feast that can be smelled from over a mile away. On summer mornings when I am driving out of the city for an early hike, I often see pairs of them waiting for the traffic to calm so they can move in on some roadside carrion. Vultures are bald-faced in more ways than one. They are brazenly practical, keeping themselves cool by pissing and shitting on their feet. If any creature bothers them, they vomit in its face. Along I-83, I have seen turkey vultures standing on the lights with their wings outstretched, a cooling posture known as the horaltic pose, after Horus, the falcon-headed god of the sky. Ancient Egyptians knew that dealing with the dead is a sacred task.

  One August, in a small town on the Gulf of Mexico, I stopped my car about five feet from a dumpster to watch the vultures. I found them so compelling that I forgot my plans and sat there for an hour or two. One pair would dive into the dumpster while a second pair stood guard on its brim; then, after twenty minutes or so, the dumpster divers would return to a straggly pine while the sentries take their turn at scavenging. A group of vultures gathered together is called a wake. Clustered on the branches of the pine tree around whatever was rotting in the dumpster, with their black plumage and lowered heads, they did resemble mourners. But there was a difference. Death, to the bobbing, bouncing vultures, brought not grief, but joy.

  XIII

  THREE MONTHS AFTER I meet them in LA, Allison and Megan arrive at the Belvedere. They are here to do research for their screenplay. We meet in the Owl Bar for lunch. Megan is visibly pregnant by now. The two women have already been up on the top floor of the parking garage to take photographs of the swimming pool roof, and they have a meeting with Jayne Miller at half past three. I feel a little unnecessary. I wonder if they are ambivalent about me, suspicious, unsure whether I can be trusted, uncertain whether I am on their side.

  One of the things we talk about over lunch is the hole Rivera’s body made in the annex roof. On my laptop, I show Allison a photograph of the patched-up roof, tracing the outline of the hole with the cursor. It was covered up not long after Rey’s death, and the pool roof was recoated a few years after that, but you can still see the shape of the hole quite clearly beneath the surface.

  Or so I have always thought. But Allison tells me the hole was closer to the side of the Belvedere. She points to a different area on the pool roof.

  I trace the hole again with the cursor. I point out what I believe to be its outline under the new coat of white paint. I describe to Allison how I watched the police on the roof from my apartment window. I even watched the contractor patch up the hole.

  Allison says she will show me exactly where her husband landed. She puts her finger on my trackpad and moves the cursor to a slightly different area, outlining what appears to be another faint circle underneath the layer of white. As I dig for my glasses in my purse, I begin to realize it is far more likely that I am the one in the wrong. Rey was Allison’s husband, after all. She has obviously spent far more time studying the circumstances of his death than I have. Still, it is difficult for me to believe I could be so wide of the mark.

  Allison is engaging and animated, as before, but as she talks, I am unexpectedly overcome by a feeling of great listlessness and disappointment. I manage to go on smiling, nodding, and making the appropriate noises, but it seems as though all the energy has been drained from the mystery, leaving nothing but a series of repeated anecdotes and memories that lead nowhere.

  Allison is staying with her aunt in Ellicott City; Megan is staying in a hotel. They plan to call around the following day to look at the documents I have collected on the case.

  The following afternoon, I meet them in the lobby of the Belvedere. It is mid-July, and outside, the temperature is rising, but the lobby is cool and quiet. Both women look tall and glamorous in the sleeveless maxi dresses that are fashionable that summer, Megan’s in red and Allison’s in navy blue with white stripes. We take the elevator up to D.’s and my apartment. Megan has brought her video camera; she is filming location material to help her with the screenplay. She wants to take some footage out of the window through which, I told her, I watched the police pick up Rey’s flip-flops and cell phone from the annex roof. We walk through the apartment—D. makes friendly conversation—and I show Megan the window. She leans out, squints, and points her camera. Of course, the “real” hole, whose location Allison pointed out at lunch the previous day, is scarcely visible.

  Over lemonade, we study the folder of documents I have accumulated. I offer to make copies for Allison of anything she would like to take back with her, and I am surprised to find I have many papers that she has never seen, including the police report of the crime scene—basic documents that were nonetheless uncannily difficult to obtain. Allison and Megan are especially interested in the Freedom of Information Act document I received from the FBI telling me that, of the eighteen pages they have on the Rey Rivera case, they are prepared to release only two. Allison and Megan both believe this has to be because Michael Baier is working on the case behind the scenes in his new capacity as an FBI agent; to release all the information right now, they say, would jeopardize his progress. Given the uselessness of the documents the FBI has agreed to release, I cannot help thinking this is overly optimistic of them, but not wanting to crush their hopes, I keep my skepticism to myself.

  Next comes the most difficult part of the visit, at least for Allison—a visit to the roof. When I have been up there in the last few years to take photographs, I have always taken the elevator to the twelfth floor and walked through the kitchens, but today, for some reason, all the elevators, including the freight elevator, have their locks set and will take us no farther than the eleventh floor. It is very unusual for the elevators to be locked on a Sunday. We get out at the eleventh floor, which is nonresidential, only to find that the door to the fire stairs is also locked. We study the windows for a while. Megan has been harboring a theory that Rey could have been lured to one of the offices on the eleventh floor and chloroformed, and that his body was then tossed out of a window there, but the eleventh-floor windows turn out to be not only too smal
l to accommodate a body the size of Rey’s, but sealed shut.

  Still hoping to get up to the roof, I suggest that we go down to the Belvedere office and ask for the elevator to be unlocked. If Allison identifies herself as Rey Rivera’s widow, and explains that she has come to revisit the scene of his death, I am sure no one could possibly object. But when the elevator arrives back in the lobby, Allison’s bright face has lost its color and softness. She looks pale and grim.

  “Let’s forget about the roof,” she says. “I guess it’s just not meant to be.”

  I feel as though I’ve let them both down.

  “Curiosity killed the cat,” adds Allison.

  The two women leave a little abruptly. The experience has been hard on Allison, I think.

  * * *

  The fact that the elevator is locked probably means that housekeeping is preparing the twelfth-floor ballrooms for an event later in the day. While there are a few private parties, office get-togethers, and corporate gatherings at the old hotel, the Belvedere’s soaring ceilings, elegant ballrooms, and glittering chandeliers make it one of the city’s most popular venues for wedding ceremonies. For a few years, when D. and I first moved into the building, a room was kept free on the fifth floor for the bride and her attendants to dress in before the wedding. On more than one occasion, a drunken wedding guest, opening the wrong door, blundered into our apartment in bow tie and tux only to find us sitting watching a movie in our pajamas.

  * * *

  In the hotel’s early days, the Belvedere’s bridal suite was popular among newlyweds who would leave for their honeymoon from the station the following morning. On Tuesday, October 29, 1918, however, this set of rooms was the location for a celebrated scandal that seems to have little to do with romance. On the other hand, as George Bernard Shaw pointed out, “When we want to read of the deeds that are done for love, whither do we turn?” His answer: “To the murder column.”

  At around two thirty in the afternoon, one of the Belvedere’s housekeepers reported that the bridal suite needed to be cleaned but the door was still locked. According to the front desk clerk, the guests had not yet checked out. A bellman was sent up a ladder to peer through the transom, and he descended with an alarming report. The newlyweds, he said, were lying in the bed “as still as the tomb,” and although there was a bottle of whisky on the table, “they looked more dead than drunk.” Since the fire escape did not pass by the windows of the honeymoon suite and the master key could not be found, the manager, John Letton, called a carpenter to come over with a saw and cut out the transom window. He also summoned the hotel physician, Dr. Thomas, and placed a call to the police.

  According to the guest registry, the couple had signed in as Mr. and Mrs. C. P. Webster of Philadelphia (the names were their own, but they were both Maryland residents). They had arrived at three p.m. on Saturday, October 25. The hotel staff had seen very little of the honeymoon couple, but the bellmen who had worked on Saturday night had a different story. They both agreed something very peculiar had been going on in the bridal suite. Mr. Webster, it seemed, had been unusually thirsty. First, he wanted a glass of ice water. Then he wanted a glass of milk. Then he wanted another glass of ice water. Then he asked for another glass of milk. The two bellmen who responded to Webster’s calls both said the same thing. When they got to the room, Webster had been nowhere to be seen. Mrs. Webster, on the other hand, had been very conspicuous. She had been wearing something, the bellmen recalled, but not very much. Each time they had been called, they had both left the room very quickly. They both said it “felt like a set-up.”

  The carpenter sawed out the transom window and lowered it down to Mr. Letton, who made sure the glass was perfectly intact. A bellman was then sent up the ladder to squeeze through the gap and open the door from the inside.

  Mrs. Bernice Chaney Webster, Washington Times, October 29, 1918

  The scene in the bridal suite that day was anything but romantic. The bride lay dressed in a thin nightgown. A sheet covered her lower half, and the part of her that was visible bore evidence of a long, hard fight. Her face was purple and swollen, her neck was badly scratched, and a trail of dried blood led from her nose to the bedclothes, which were stained almost black. Her tongue protruded gruesomely two or three inches out of her mouth

  She was unequivocally dead. Her husband looked done for, too, until Dr. Thomas took out his stethoscope and discerned that he was still breathing, at which point the doctor leaned over and shook the groom firmly by the shoulder.

  “Mr. Webster, are you all right?” he asked in a loud voice.

  Webster opened his eyes. He had a boxer’s face, thick and square. When he saw the crowd standing around his bed, he sat up abruptly, like a resurrected corpse.

  “I’m dying,” he declared. “I’ve taken poison.”

  “Did you kill your wife?” asked the doctor.

  “Yes,” he said. “I murdered her. And now I’m going to die.”

  The police made Webster get out of bed and try to walk. He got to his feet without much trouble. In fact, he did so well they marched him down to Mercy Hospital in his bathrobe, where he confessed he’d swallowed five tablets of mercury, and asked for his mother. “Judging by appearances,” wrote a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, “he did not especially want to die.”

  Police found two letters on the desk of the honeymoon suite, both written on Belvedere stationery. The first was a suicide note written by Webster sometime between strangling his bride and taking the mercury tablets. In the note, he explained that he had quarreled violently with his bride when he discovered—so he claimed—that his suspicions were true and she was not a virgin. “I have believed it and now I know it,” he wrote. “I have loved her so much. We are even with the world and will die together.”

  The other note was from Webster to his mother, giving the same story, though the wording was less starry-eyed. He had “found out” his wife, wrote Webster, so he was going to have to kill her, and then himself. In closing, he asked his mother to pay off his debts. The attempted setups with the bellmen, it appears, were a pathetic attempt to corroborate his story that the new Mrs. Webster was “a loose woman” (it also made it very clear that Webster had planned the murder in advance).

  Carlyle Webster was thirty-two and his bride, Bernice, just twenty. According to the autopsy, Mrs. Webster’s cause of death was “compression and obstruction of the carotid arteries.” The papers wanted to know whether Mrs. Webster had been a virgin, but the coroner “did not testify as to the particular results of other anatomical examination.” Her mother, Mrs. Chaney, told police that Bernice had met Mr. Webster just over a year ago. He had been a customer in the men’s clothing department at Hutzler Brothers downtown, which had been her daughter’s place of employment before her marriage. According to Mrs. Chaney, Carlyle was the perfect gentleman. He was good to the whole family, “and especially good to Bernice, who had been reared very carefully and there was not a blot on her character.”

  Webster’s trial began on March 29, 1919. Though he remained under control, it was obvious he was suffering from terrible strain. When he took the stand, he claimed that he first realized his wife was dead when he awakened and found her “beside him in the bed.” His defense attorney, W. Trickett Giles, put forward the argument that because of “insanity and drunkenness” Webster was not guilty, and he produced witnesses who testified that the accused often lost his memory when drunk.

  Webster had been married before, it turned out, in 1912, and the marriage had ended about fourteen months before the murder. The former Mrs. Webster, née Callahan, was now Mrs. Virginia Trader of Salisbury, Maryland. At the trial, she offered the opinion that Carlyle was quite insane. She testified that his people came from Deal Island, in the Chesapeake Bay, and were “more or less inbred.” His father and mother were first cousins, she said, adding that Carlyle was “subnormal as a child” and had confessed to her that “at least twelve of his relations were certifiably insane.” She sa
id he had an uncontrollable temper that came on at the slightest provocation.

  Giles argued that Webster, weakened by inbreeding and “the cravings of his ancestors for alcohol,” influences over which he had no control, was “in the grip of an irresistible force” when he strangled his bride. On behalf of the prosecution, the psychiatrist Dr. J. Percy Wade, superintendent of Spring Grove Hospital, gave his opinion that Webster was in sound mind when he committed the murder, and had known the nature of his act.

  Most moving of all, according to witnesses, was the evidence given by the victim’s eighteen-year-old sister, Miss Edna van Lear Chaney, who testified that she had known Carlyle Webster for some time, and that, while convincing the rest of her family he wanted to take care of her sister, he had systematically terrorized Bernice into submission. Edna went on to say that Bernice was very pretty and very popular, and that many men were interested in her. As a result, Webster had become fixated on the subject of her sister’s reputation.

  “Long before the wedding,” testified Edna, “Bernice told me that there was something of a most depressing nature hanging over her and she believed she would be killed.” When Edna asked her sister why she was planning to marry Webster, Bernice said “she thought things would be better after the marriage.” However, the night before her wedding, according to Edna, Bernice had dreamed that Webster had tried to murder her, and told her sister “she feared that she had not much longer to live.”

  * * *

  Calling the Baltimore homicide department has started to feel like knocking on the door of a semi-derelict building; there are occasions when someone responds, but when they do, they are as unhelpful as possible, and clearly want me to go away before I cause any trouble.