An Unexplained Death

by Mikita Brottman

  At a loss, I hire a private investigator, a former FBI surveillance specialist who says he has plenty of contacts among Baltimore homicide detectives, both active and retired. I will call him Stein. We meet in a coffee shop. It’s in the middle of August 2016, ten years since Rey Rivera’s death. The heat is overwhelming. I notice Stein as soon as I walk through the door. He is conspicuous not only because he is much older than all the students in their tank tops, shorts, and flip-flops, but also because he is wearing a jacket and tie. He is a stocky man in his midfifties, with slicked-back hair and a walrus mustache.

  To his credit, Stein is completely open about what he can and cannot do for me. He says that the Baltimore homicide division is a very small world; it contains around forty detectives, and they all know one another, at least to some degree. He says he can put me in touch with the retired detectives who worked the Rivera case, though he cannot guarantee they will talk to me. He asks me for the name of the lead detective on the case. When I mention Marvin Sydnor, he gives me a broad smile.

  “Do you know him?” I ask.

  “Sure, I know him. Everyone knows Sydnor,” says Stein. “He’s a legend in Baltimore homicide. He’s a real snappy dresser, known for his colorful bow ties. I’ll go and see him right now, see if I can’t fix up a lunch meeting next week between the three of us.”

  “But Sydnor retired ten years ago,” I tell Stein.

  “I know,” says Stein. “But I know where to find him.”

  The following week, Stein gives me a call, and his tone has changed. He has spoken to Marvin Sydnor, he says, and was surprised to find he won’t meet with me and won’t take part in any interviews about the case.

  “All he would say is that he felt Rey’s family wanted the death to be ruled a homicide, although personally, he thought there was no evidence to support anything other than suicide,” Stein tells me. “When I mentioned the case, he said that he just doesn’t want to talk about it. I asked him why, but he wouldn’t give me a reason. I’ll try him again at another time, to see if he’s had a change of heart.”

  The news about Sydnor reminds me of something the reporter Stephen Janis told me: when he was trying to get information on the Rivera case, he asked a police source to try to get hold of the homicide file. The source got back to Janis and said the file was not where it should have been, with the other homicide case files. Eventually, he learned there was only one copy, which was locked in Sydnor’s desk. The source asked Sydnor in a casual way whether he could take a look at it, but Sydnor refused, and apparently seemed suspicious.

  I wonder: Are the police covering something up, or do they just feel that they have made a mess of the case, and so do not want anyone reading about the botched investigation? I ask Charles Tumosa why a case that was initially treated as a suicide might still be listed as a homicide many years later.

  “At times, it’s a judgment call,” Dr. Tumosa told me. “When I was in Philly, we investigated many deaths that we initially thought were homicides that turned out to be something else. Probably the original call came out as a homicide. When there’s that much damage to the body, you make the assumption it’s a homicide first. Somebody labels it a homicide, even if they later think it’s a suicide, but if nobody’s pushing for it to be reclassified, nobody’s going to change it. We’ve got over three hundred homicides a year to deal with in Baltimore. Six months later, it’s old news.”

  Stein learns from a Master Mason that Fred Bealefield, who was the chief of detectives during the Rivera case and later police commissioner, is also a Master Mason. This news does not surprise me. Many policemen are members of the Freemasons; it does not make either the police or the Freemasons especially sinister. I often invite Master Masons to speak to my classes about the history of their organization, which I have come to see as a benevolent fraternal charity with an archaic structure and hierarchy, not a malevolent force running the universe, or even the city. In other words, I think the Masonic angle is a red herring. I believe Rey’s interest in the group was part of his research for something new he was writing.

  Stein next talks to a retired Baltimore homicide detective who is familiar with the Rivera case, though he did not work on it himself. This detective, Stein tells me, has three theories about Rivera’s death.

  “First,” said Stein, “it could be simply a suicide. Second, there could be some involvement by an outside element—a loan shark or some other criminal entity; third, it could have been a blackmail situation. Do you know if the victim was involved in any affairs outside the marriage?”

  “Not as far as I know,” I said. “He’d only been married seven months.”

  Stein is not so sure. “You know, the Belvedere has a long reputation as being a place where straight men can cruise for gay sex. The detective I spoke to immediately brought up that scenario,” he tells me. “Even if Rivera’s wife was sure he hadn’t been involved with any men in Baltimore, that doesn’t rule out the possibility of a gay relationship, or the possibility that he was about to be exposed. In light of that,” he wonders, “did he feel the need to jump?”

  No one I have spoken to has ever suggested there was any ambiguity about Rivera’s sexuality. Everyone who knew Rey and Allison says the couple was deeply in love—“soul mates” is the phrase most often used—so a homosexual blackmail plot seems unlikely. If Rey had been interested in men, or if he had been involved with men in the past, even if it had been—for whatever reason—on the downlow, then once the news of his mysterious death got out, surely somebody would have mentioned the fact, even if just in the form of gossip.

  More to the point, I have lived at the Belvedere for over ten years and have never heard of it being known as a place for gay-straight pickups.

  I ask Freddie Howard, the Belvedere’s longtime concierge, whether he has heard the rumor.

  Freddie shakes his head. “I’ve never heard that before.”

  “Do you think it’s plausible?” I ask him.

  Freddie rocks backward and forward on his heels and thinks about it for a while.

  “I never know everything that goes on upstairs, at the 13th Floor,” he says, finally. “Also, the bottle club—I never knew what kind of things went on there, either.”

  Freddie is referring to Suite Ultralounge, a notorious gathering that used to take place in the basement of the Belvedere at weekends, and was closed down by police in 2010 after a fight in which two people were wounded by bullets and another stabbed.

  After talking to Freddie, I email Stein and ask him where these hookups are supposed to occur: “Do they happen in a public place, like the 13th Floor or the Owl Bar, or do they take place somewhere secret, like the second stall in the men’s basement bathrooms, or the corner table at Belvedere Bagels and Grill?”

  He picks up on my skepticism, and replies flatly that “with regard to the Belvedere, it is commonly known through law enforcement community as a discreet place to hook up, and has been since the 80s.”

  I ask Rey’s friend Steven King, who got to know Rey when he was working as a freelance video editor at the Oxford Club, whether he ever sensed that Rey might have been struggling with his sexuality, or hiding a secret gay past. King, who is gay himself, replies, “It never crossed my mind that he could be homosexual.”

  I am almost ready to dismiss the rumor when, at a dinner party, I mention it to the other guests. I’m curious whether any of them have ever heard it before. An attorney who used to be a reporter for the Baltimore Sun tells me, a little cryptically, that I should look up the case of Jonathan Oster.

  On April 15, 1982, Oster, forty-nine, a former deputy Maryland attorney general and a partner in a prestigious Baltimore law firm, attended a dinner meeting at the Belvedere, which was followed by drinks in the Owl Bar. When Oster did not return home that night, his wife called the police; early the next morning, officers were sent to search the vicinity of the Belvedere, where the attorney had last been seen in the bar, talking to a man named Frank Tomasek Jr. Jonat
han Oster’s body was found in an alleyway off Maryland Avenue, just around the corner from the hotel. He had been stabbed to death and robbed. News broadcasts reported that Tomasek was wanted for questioning in connection with the death.

  Later that day, a young man seeking financial assistance showed up in the office of Catholic Charities in Ravenna, Ohio. When asked, he gave his name: Frank Tomasek Jr. Someone who had heard the news broadcast recognized it and called the police. Tomasek told them that his car had run out of gas about thirty-five miles southeast of Cleveland. The car turned out to be Oster’s. Tomasek, twenty-one, was charged with receiving stolen property and was held on bond, pending extradition to Maryland. He was subsequently convicted of second-degree murder.

  Oster had picked Tomasek up in the Owl Bar. “The fact that the murder was not a simple robbery gone bad was hinted at but never explicitly laid out in public,” my source told me later, by email. “There was an interesting newsroom debate about what to report. In the end, since the victim was married with two sons, the Baltimore Sun described Tomasek as a “hitchhiker.” The Washington Post referred to him as “a drifter from the city’s south side.”

  * * *

  At a party, a woman I have met enough times for me to consider her a casual friend asks me where I live. When I tell her, she gets excited.

  “Oh, I was talking to someone who lives in that building a few months ago,” she said. “She told me she’d been researching all the suicides that had taken place there going back to the year it was built.”

  I smile and say nothing. Yes, I think. That was me. Who else would it have been? Am I really so instantly forgettable?

  * * *

  The man-sized crater in the swimming pool roof is the rabbit hole into which I have fallen. It is the doorway into the mystery of Rey Rivera’s death. Like Auguste Dupin, I have always been “fond of enigmas, of conundrums, of hieroglyphics.” Now I start to wonder: If I am wrong about the position of the hole, what else might I be wrong about? It is terrifying to learn that all my speculations until now have been so tentative that just the slightest change can send everything spinning into confusion.

  I often think about how I went down to the disused swimming pool the day the body was found to see the place where it had landed. The scene feels fresh in my memory. I even took photographs of the collapsed roof and darkly stained carpet with the cheap digital camera I owned in 2006, before I had a camera in my phone. Digital pictures are so disposable. I take them all the time and delete them a few days later, wondering what ever compelled me to take photographs of an ordinary-looking tree, a disused water tower, an undistinctive chimney, a large stone lying on its side. I have no doubt that I deleted the photographs of the death scene from my camera a month or two after taking them. Why would I have wanted to save pictures of an empty office with a stained carpet and a hole in the roof?

  I would do anything, now, to have those photographs back. This is a mistake I can learn from. Although my photos may feel like clutter, I remind myself how little space they consume, and try to resist deleting them. I have learned that, as each moment fades from my memory, its capital increases. Casually snapped images from nine or ten years ago are infinitely precious to me now, containing my only evidence of meals, trips, and parties I would otherwise have forgotten, of people who have died or moved away and are no longer vivid in my memory, which is proving itself increasingly unreliable as I get older. I remind myself that human memory is not a stable and unchanging source of information, like the memory on a phone or a laptop, but untrustworthy and incoherent, however much we find ourselves insisting otherwise.

  My own memory must be unreliable, because since Rey Rivera’s death, I have not been able to find the former swimming pool.

  So many times, I have thought about my visit to the room after the body was removed—eleven years ago now—and sometimes I wonder whether it really happened. I can clearly remember going up a short flight of steps somewhere on the second floor and walking down a narrow hallway, but for some reason I have not been able to find those steps or that hallway again. I have wandered around the second floor many times—there is really not much to see—but I have never been able to find the short flight of steps to that mysterious door in the wall. I have found a door that fits this description, but it is on the first floor, down the hallway to the parking garage. It leads to an office used by the Belvedere’s resident catering company. Sometimes I think I must have been wrong about the door being on the second floor. But Rey Rivera did not fall through the roof of this office, which is half a story lower than the swimming pool roof, and to the west.

  The more I think about the hole in the roof, the more convinced I become of its importance. I realize I have been drawn irretrievably into the details of this case, spending months pondering and probing some moment or incident, but I cannot seem to make myself back away and consider the bigger picture. I am afraid this picture will look like a jigsaw that is missing certain crucial pieces. I do not want to think about whether everything fits together, because I am afraid it does not. I can feel the pull of the particulars, neglecting the fact that the particulars need to cohere into something larger. This is not a fragmented poem or an abstract painting, I remind myself, but an investigation into something that actually happened: the death of a man. I can start, I realize, by finding out where the hole in the roof used to be. But the more I think about this, the more it worries me, because the hole—this absence through which a man’s body once fell—is at the heart of the mystery.

  After Allison first sowed the seeds of doubt about the location of the hole, whenever I try to find it, I feel as though I’m in a frustrating dream, a mirror world where everything is the opposite of how it should be. I remember how things were, but I cannot remember how to get back to them. Worse, I cannot tell whether the changes are in the building or in me. I keep puzzling over it in my head; it is like an itch that needs to be scratched, and I worry it like an animal biting at a wound. If the hole was where I originally believed it to be, it would mean that Rey must have taken a running jump. If he did so, it is almost impossible that he was murdered.

  At the worst point, my certainty about everything starts to erode, and the story I have been telling myself about Rey Rivera’s death suddenly seems ill conceived, full of contradictions and mysterious blurs. In my head, the hotel’s rooms and levels start to get confused. One morning very early, unable to sleep, I get up out of bed and go down to the second floor. I have a new theory about the location of the door in the wall; as usual, I am mistaken. Returning disappointed, I catch a glimpse of myself in a hallway mirror and am shocked. In my nightdress and bare feet, I look pale and mad, like the sleepwalking Lady Macbeth.

  Perhaps the shock shifted something in my head, because when I wake up the following day I immediately realize: This is a puzzle that can be solved. Someone climbed a ladder and patched up that hole. In fact, I watched him do it. It was Richie, the Belvedere’s on-site handyman, who fixes our leaks and unclogs our waste disposal units. I see him almost every day, working around the building. Not only did Richie patch up the hole, he recoated the surface of the swimming pool roof a few years ago. If anyone knows the exact location of the hole, it will be Richie.

  I sketch a rough diagram of the annex roof—a rectangle with two arches for the barrel-shaped windows of the former swimming pool—and go in search of Richie. I find him having a smoke outside the front entrance, hand him my outline and a pen, and ask him to draw a cross at the location of the hole in the roof. Richie takes my sketch, squints, thinks about it for a couple of moments, then draws an X about four feet north of the first barrel-shaped skylight. The hole he draws is exactly where I remembered it to be. To reach this spot, Rey must have taken a running jump.

  Later, I realize there is another way to confirm my memory of the hole. On my laptop, I have a downloaded copy of Jayne Miller’s WBAL-TV 11 news clip that aired on the first anniversary of Rivera’s death. This includes footage shot fro
m the roof of the Belvedere that zooms in on the hole. When I watch it again, it becomes clear that Richie’s X has marked the spot. I feel a tremendous sense of relief. My mind is back on track.

  I feel even more excited when I learn from Stein that he has tracked down the elusive and shadowy Michael Baier. He plans to give him a call later in the week. I ask Stein to give Baier my contact information, and Allison’s, and to ask him to contact me as soon as possible. I jump every time my phone rings, but Baier does not call.

  * * *

  To clear my head, I take a walk across the bridge into the dead part of the city. Exploring the world around me always frees my mind from its infernal loops. Along these empty roads, choked with the debris of the past, I can always find new ways to look at things. I find a cobblestoned street without a name (at least, without a sign) that seems completely deserted. It is so narrow that if it was accessible to traffic at one time, it must have been a one-way street with no parking, since it is barely wider than a car. On each side of the road are boarded-up two-story row houses with flat roofs; each house has five stone steps leading to its front door. A disused utility pole looms over the road; its shadow pierces the street like a spear.

  As I explore, I listen carefully for sounds from the boarded-up houses, wondering whether anyone still lives here. I imagine people lurking in the shadows, but I hear nothing and see no one. This entire neighborhood is a ghost town, abandoned to the elements and to the trash, which is everywhere: broken bottles, plastic beads, buttons, candy wrappers, rusty hubcaps, the rims of tires, discarded food picked over by gulls and crows. Even in the summer, the weeds that grow in the sidewalks and in between the cobblestones are mottled and decayed, like plants that struggle at the bottom of a canyon. In the shade of the steps a strange fungus grows, smelling of rot and death.