An Unexplained Death

by Mikita Brottman

  * * *

  I spend an afternoon in the federal courthouse, selecting a trial at random, as usual. I am lucky: it is completely absorbing. The plaintiff, a smart, neatly dressed, well-spoken African-American woman in her forties named Charlene Bishop, is suing her employers, an engineering company run by Karim El-Kader, for race and gender discrimination.

  “Why,” asks Ms. Bishop’s attorney as I slip through the door and take a seat in the back row, “did Mr. El-Kader hire the young, unqualified Salma Ahmad rather than the older and more qualified Mildred Welles?”

  “I think it’s because she was pretty and Egyptian,” replies Ms. Bishop. “Everyone said Salma was nice,” she adds, kindly, “but we all knew she was completely incompetent.”

  Karim El-Kader’s attorney, a slick, oily-looking fellow, asks Ms. Bishop whether she ever asked Mr. El-Kader why he did not hire the candidate she had recommended, Mildred Welles.

  “I did,” Ms. Bishop replied. “He sort of rolled his eyes and said, ‘Can you imagine somebody who looks like that sitting outside my father’s office?’”

  “Were both Mildred Welles and Salma Ahmad on the short list of candidates you had chosen?” the attorney asks.

  “Only Mildred Welles,” Ms. Bishop replies. “But when I gave him the short list of candidates, Mr. El-Kader told me they were all too old. He asked me to give him the full list, and said he would screen them himself. And the final list he gave me—it was all Middle Eastern names, and they were all young girls with no qualifications.”

  Ms. Bishop went on to describe a culture of discrimination at the company—Middle Easterners were given preferential treatment; women were told to look at the floor and fold their hands together when they were being admonished. Mr. El-Kader’s son asked Ms. Bishop whether she could call in some good-looking but unqualified interview candidates so he could “pick them up.” When the company was hiring administrative assistants, male candidates were routinely thrown out of the interview pool, because Mr. El-Kader believed that “men do not belong behind a desk.”

  I’m transfixed. Charlene Bishop is a star. I could not imagine a stronger, more convincing case. But then I glance at the jury—a group of disheveled strangers, lost, tired, and defeated—and my hopes collapse at once.

  The Belvedere’s second-floor hallway

  * * *

  It is a dark, rainy Saturday afternoon in January 2016, and I am down on the second floor searching, yet again, for the mysterious door. I walk quietly down the main hallway, with its red carpet, its walls painted in two soothing shades of beige, its crystal chandelier, its doors—to function rooms and doctors’ offices—labeled with discreet gold plates.

  Unexpectedly, I hear the bright ping of the VIP elevator, and out steps Mr. C., our neighbor from apartment 503, dressed for a workout.

  Mr. C. and his wife are the founders and owners of the events and catering company that runs the Owl Bar, the first-floor and second-floor function rooms and offices, the twelfth-floor ballrooms, and the 13th Floor. One of the concierges recently informed me that Mr. C. and his wife have separated, which explained why D. and I were no longer running into him on the fifth floor or in the elevator, as we used to do.

  “What are you doing down here?” asks Mr. C., curiously. The second floor contains only offices and ballrooms, and since most of the offices are closed, as it is a Saturday, I am unsure what to say. For a moment, I consider telling him the truth: that for the last ten years, I have been trying to find my way back to a room into which a body fell through the roof. But I do not. Mr. C. is a jolly type, always ready with a cheerful greeting, but I do not sense in him any touch of curiosity, morbid or otherwise.

  “I thought I saw a massage studio somewhere around here,” I tell him, which is the first thing that comes to mind—I have, in fact, just walked past a massage studio. “I’ve got a stiff neck from sitting at my desk all day.”

  “Let me call Bill and ask him,” says Mr. C., ever helpful. He calls the Belvedere’s manager, and it turns out there are three massage studios in the building, two in the basement and one on the second floor, but they’re all closed on Saturdays.

  “Never mind,” I say. “I’ll try on Monday.”

  We chat for a while. I ask about his daughter’s puppy. Mr. C. scrolls through the photos on his phone to show me some new pictures. The puppy is now a large dog.

  Mr. C. mentions that he is going to the gym.

  “Do you use the gym opposite, Mount Vernon Fitness?” I ask him.

  “Actually,” he tells me, with a bashful chuckle, “we have our own private gym. When we first moved here, we thought that was the one thing the building lacks, a gym, and so we made our own, for me and my wife, our daughter, and our guests. Would you like to see it? It used to be the swimming pool.”

  “I’d love to,” I tell him.

  “Follow me,” says Mr. C.

  He leads me to the trash room, walks past the freight elevators, takes out a bunch of keys, and there it is: a door at the top of a small flight of three steps.

  I had never once thought to look in the trash room. I had assumed it would be the same as all the other trash rooms in the building—a small area, around six feet by eight feet, with a window at the far end, and the two freight elevators on the left. But then I remember that the second floor is an annex, and different from the others. The raised door is where the window should be. Of course, it is the door I have been searching for. As Mr. C. unlocks it, everything falls into place. Here are the three stairs; here is the narrow hallway; here is the glass door that was left propped open to get rid of the smell.

  Mr. C. is explaining the construction they had to do in order to cut off access to the pool: “We blocked off the whole passageway. Everything here used to be open. This hallway went all the way around here, you see?”

  As I follow him through the door and down the hall, everything feels right. I am in control again. I can see the second floor from a new perspective. I follow Mr. C. like Orpheus returning to the underworld, already knowing what I will see: a line of electric lights set into the floor and forming a rectangle where the sides of the pool used to be, and a parallel rectangle of lights on a frame suspended from the ceiling.

  Naturally, there are differences. The room is no longer divided, so it is twice the size of the room I remember. The carpet has been changed, no doubt more than once. The room is full of exercise equipment; at the front sit a huge flat-screen television, a sofa, and a shag rug. The ceiling, much higher than I remember, is open, the rafters and beams all visible. And although the space has been repaired and renovated, I can still see a couple of dented girders to the north of one of the skylights.

  Human memory may be flawed, but the Belvedere has a memory of its own.

  XIV

  HERE’S THE THING about accidents. We make them happen, but we don’t want them to. We say they happen “to us,” which means we are not at fault. In legal terms, the closer our aggression is to consciousness, the more we are held responsible for it. There are degrees of intention, just as there are degrees of homicide; an act committed “with malice aforethought” will be punished more severely than one that results in an “accidental” death. Under the law, slips of speech, memory, or physical movement are never the consequences of motivation, however repressed.

  Still, some accidents are incontrovertibly accidents. An article in Forensic Science International describes a case in which a group of middle-aged friends returned from a party to the hotel room they had rented for the night. The room contained a double bed and two Murphy beds. The following afternoon, while cleaning the room, the maid had trouble unfolding one of the Murphy beds. When she knelt down to find what was jamming the mechanism, she discovered a human arm hanging down between the bed and the wall. It turned out that, due to mechanical failure, one of the Murphy beds had abruptly folded up into itself during the night. The fifty-one-year-old man sleeping there, apparently still heavily intoxicated, was suddenly forced backward
, head over heels, and crushed. The cause of death was given as “traumatic asphyxia.” In the morning, upon seeing his bed neatly folded into the wall, the man’s friends simply assumed he had checked out early. (And in a way, he had.)

  Accidents can also be invisible. Death by the inhalation of hydrogen sulfide, better known as sewer gas, is particularly insidious because the gas’s presence and concentration are unpredictable and it is neurotoxic at relatively low levels. Victims of sewer gas poisoning can be identified by the greenish discoloration of their skin and internal organs (liver, trachea, esophagus, stomach).

  In one case I read about in a forensic journal, a sewer worker was overtaken by fumes and died shortly after clearing an obstruction in a wastewater cistern. When he did not return, another man was sent after him. He, too, was overcome with fumes and died. A third man was sent. Then a fourth. Then a fifth. Ultimately, six men died in the attempt to rescue their colleagues, falling one after another like a line of dominoes. One of the first effects of sudden exposure to sewer gas is the subtle paralysis of the olfactory nerves, so you are no longer able to discern the tell-tale stink of rotten eggs. At this point, as the authors of the case study put it, “death may come on like a stroke of lightning,” sending you straight into oblivion.

  * * *

  I begin to wonder whether Rey Rivera’s death could have been an accident. Of course, one does not “accidentally” take a running jump from the roof of a fourteen-story building. But what if Rivera did not fall from the roof of the Belvedere at all? What if his fall was only through the roof of the pool?

  As he mentioned more than once, at the time of his death Rivera was under a very tight deadline to finish editing his video of the Oxford Club’s annual conference. The conference took place from March 15 to March 18, 2006, and Rey was planning to make DVDs to send out to those members who could not attend in person. On May 16, Rey reserved an edit suite for the weekend, sounding as though he was, according to Mark Gold, who booked the equipment for him, “under a crunch for work.” On the evening he went missing, we know he was summoned at around four p.m. by a phone call from someone at Agora, which flustered him and made him leave home at once, presumably for either a last-minute meeting or a previously scheduled meeting he had forgotten about.

  For a while, I wondered whether Rey might have somehow messed up the edits, accidentally deleted the tape, or found that he had made a serious recording error and his tapes of the conference were blank. Such a mistake would have cost him the money he had paid up front for equipment rental, crew, travel expenses, editing hours, and the duplication of DVDs, which Allison estimated came to around $70,000, not to mention reimbursement of the hundreds of subscribers who were waiting for their DVDs. Would Rey have committed suicide rather than face the consequences of screwing up on such an epic level? Was the phone call from Agora right before he left home a final request for the videotape he did not have?

  This scenario doesn’t ring true. No reasonable person would take their own life rather than confess to a mistake that would have been, essentially, an expensive inconvenience. Rey might no longer be asked to work for Stansberry, but the job was only temporary in the first place—he and Allison were planning to return to LA. Suicide would have made no sense for another reason, too: Rey would be leaving Allison with the burden of paying off the $70,000 (which, in fact, she had to do because it was on her credit card).

  After the mysterious meeting with the person from Agora, Rey may have accompanied whomever he met for a drink afterward somewhere near the Belvedere, moving Allison’s car to the lot on St. Paul once the attendant had left for the night, at six p.m. According to the medical examiner, the alcohol found in Rey’s system could have been a by-product of decomposition, or it could have been consumed shortly before his death. Would it be possible that, after having a few drinks, Rey went up to the top floor of the Belvedere parking garage, perhaps to walk someone back to their car?

  The parking garage is about forty feet from the street and twenty feet from the roof of the pool. Its top floor is on a level with our bedroom window. You might think that not much happens on the roof of a parking lot, and for the most part you would be right, but the space is sometimes used for unexpected purposes—as an impromptu viewing platform for the fireworks over the Inner Harbor on July 4, for the lighting of the Washington Monument in Mount Vernon Place at Christmas, and for the show put on by the US Air Force during Fleet Week. After dark, I have twice seen couples using the roof as a place to make out—and I have also seen suspicious-looking figures pacing, brooding, and waiting. One night, we were transfixed by a young woman in jeans and a leather jacket sitting on the wall at the edge of the roof overlooking the street. Was she about to jump? We thought about shouting to her, or calling the police, but she seemed calm and peaceful; much to our relief, after smoking a cigarette, she climbed down and walked off into the dark. When the roof is free of cars at the weekend, I have seen people use the flat expanse of the top story to practice yoga, to hula-hoop, to roller-skate, to film a video dance routine, to fly a kite and a remote-controlled airplane, and, once, to train a pet kestrel to come to the glove.

  For someone with a serious phobia of heights, this surface would not be as terrifying as the Belvedere roof. It has walls at every side, so there are no exposed drops. If Rey went up there that night, he might have leaned over the waist-high wall of the top floor to check out the view to the west. If he jumped or fell from the top of the parking lot rather than the roof, could he still have landed where he did? I realize the question can be answered by means of a mathematical equation. I have no head for figures, but I know that in legal terms, they are the equivalent of facts—the only things that matter.

  Once again, I contacted Rod Cross in Australia. He told me to go up to the top of the garage roof and drop down the end of a very long piece of string tied to something heavy (I used a shelf bracket), then measure the string. I also used a piece of string to measure the horizontal distance from the parking garage wall to the hole in the swimming pool roof. Cross compared these figures with the original calculations and concluded that “the jump speed is almost the same in both cases, and both are easy for any adult given a short run up. The speed is too high for a push.” However, a running jump from the top of the parking lot would be impossible, as it is surrounded on all sides by a wall of at least four feet.

  But there is another scenario. What if Rivera was leaning over this wall and his phone slipped out of his pocket and landed on the swimming pool roof, about twenty-five feet below? What if, instead of going to the front desk of the Belvedere, Rey decided it would be easier to climb down to the roof and retrieve the phone himself? Or maybe he went looking for the concierge and found nobody at the front desk to help him. This would not have been unusual in 2006. It happens now; it happened to me this morning when our newspaper was not delivered. All the concierges are overworked; they are regularly called on to fix leaks, carry packages, replace lightbulbs, clean spills, and deal with whatever else arises in the daily business of the building. Another possibility is that someone who had not visited the building in years could have told Rivera that the Belvedere had an indoor swimming pool, and Rey, in search of a place to swim, decided to check it out himself by climbing on the roof.

  The swimming pool roof and wall of the Belvedere parking garage

  The parking garage is connected to the swimming pool roof by an enclosure that houses the garage stairs, the elevator shaft and machinery, and auxiliary structures for the building’s mechanicals—pumps, boilers, furnaces, the HVAC system. There is also what appears to be a ventilation system containing two large, chimneylike exhaust ducts and a garbage or linen chute, along with pipes, shafts, coils, hoods, and compressors.

  From the roof of the parking garage, it would not have been difficult for someone with Rivera’s athleticism to climb down onto the swimming pool roof. At the time, this roof was old, its rubber membrane patched and worn. The steel girders that support the s
tructure beneath were exposed. If one of these girders was weak and rusty from water damage—not impossible for the roof of a swimming pool—could the pressure of Rivera’s substantial weight in the wrong place have caused the unsupported roof to collapse the moment he stepped on it?

  Dr. Melissa Brassell, the medical examiner who conducted Rey Rivera’s autopsy in May 2006, concluded that he “died of multiple injuries sustained as a result of precipitation from a 13-story building.” I wonder if there is anything specific about the injuries to the body to suggest Rivera had fallen thirteen floors, as opposed to, say, eight. I try to speak to Dr. Brassell, but I am informed that, as a rule, medical examiners do not talk about anything outside the scope of the autopsy report, nor do they speculate or offer personal opinions.

  I am certainly no expert in this area; I have never even witnessed an autopsy. However, I have read numerous articles by forensic scientists who, after studying the type and severity of injuries in hundreds of falling deaths, have created mathematical models by which medical examiners can determine the height of the fall. Unfortunately, these models do not apply to Rivera’s case, since the roof would have slowed his fall and changed the pattern of his injuries significantly. Instead, I compared the injuries listed in Rivera’s autopsy report with those commonly listed in studies of the injuries to construction workers who fall through a roof onto a concrete floor.

  Such falls are often fatal, even if the height is less than twenty feet. One such study conducted in Denmark concludes that what distinguishes fatalities in such falls is the presence of serious head injuries (skull fractures and brain injuries). Rivera had multiple skull fractures and hemorrhages. In addition, the lacerations on either side of his chest, his broken leg and ribs, his internal injuries, and the absence of serious injury to his spine and arms, are all consistent with a scenario in which he fell through the swimming pool roof and landed on his feet. This is so whether he fell from the top of the Belvedere or just through the roof.