But there is a problem with my theory. Even if Rivera had climbed down to the roof wearing nothing but a pair of flip-flops, why were they found on that roof, separated by at least sixty feet?
* * *
Stein continues to press his theory of homosexual blackmail. I am openly skeptical, but Stein invests all his faith in police knowledge. Still, even if Rey was having an affair with a man he first met at the Belvedere, why would they continue to meet there? Why not select a more discreet rendezvous, especially if the other party was planning to blackmail Rey? Why risk being seen and overheard? Surely Rey’s death took place at the Belvedere because of its height and its proximity to where he was that evening, not because of its reputation in Baltimore’s gay subculture—unless there was some kind of symbolic message in the choice of location, which, as far as I can tell, Stein does not seem to be suggesting. On the other hand, it is not out of the question that a married man might be driven to suicide by guilt over a previous or current homosexual liaison.
* * *
In 1929, shortly before noon on a cold February day, a concerned guest told the front desk clerk at the Belvedere that he could see what appeared to be the body of a gentleman on the roof of the second-floor sun parlor. When a bellman was sent to confirm the report, he returned with the news that the guest was correct; the gentleman on the roof was dressed in pajamas and appeared to be dead. He added that the window of a room on the tenth floor was standing open. A glance at the hotel guest book showed that this room was registered in the name of a Mr. William H. King Jr., who had arrived at the Belvedere the previous day in the company of his friend Mr. William Faison. Mr. Faison had already checked out of his room and was sitting in the lobby waiting for Mr. King. The police and coroner were called to the scene, and Mr. Faison identified the body as that of Mr. King.
To those who knew him, William Harvey King Jr., forty-six, appeared to have a perfectly stable life, and he had recently made great advances in his career. Born in Portsmouth, Virginia, he had continued to live there until just prior to his death, when he and his family (wife Nancy and three children) had moved across the Chesapeake Bay, to Norfolk. In the early 1920s, the shipping lines and railways were booming. Mr. King had worked as private secretary to a series of businessmen of increasing importance. At the time of his death, he was secretary to L. R. Powell Jr., the president of the Seaboard–Air Bay Line Company, which owned both steamboat lines and railroads. It was a key position. King was well known in shipping and railway circles, and business frequently brought him to Baltimore. At the time of his death, he was moderately wealthy and at the height of his career.
King’s companion at the Belvedere, William Faison, forty, also married with children, was the manager of the Atlantic Steel Castings Company. On February 1, 1929, the two friends were traveling together on business when they made a side trip to Baltimore to attend the annual Bal des Arts. This was a bohemian party held by the Charcoal Club, a group that had been formed in reaction to what many considered the prudishness of Baltimore’s traditional art scene, where nude models were thought indecent. Under the leadership of such prominent citizens as the dentist and caricaturist Adalbert Volck and the architect Joseph Evans Sperry, the Charcoal Club was known for its progressive attitudes and ever-changing stable of nude models, both male and female. The Bal des Arts was a wild, all-night affair with dancing, jazz music, prizes for creative costumes, and a yearly theme—which, in 1929, was “Mount Olympus.”
It is not known whether Mr. King and Mr. Faison attended the ball in costume, but according to the correspondent of the Baltimore Sun, “Apollo and Aphrodite led the lesser gods and goddesses in a jubilation that they will not soon forget.” Inevitably, “all restraint was cast aside” and, disregarding Prohibition, the defiant revelers drank and danced to the music of a “Negro jazz band” until three thirty a.m.
Mr. William King, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 2, 1929
After the Bal des Arts ended, the two Williams must have found somewhere else to continue their revels: according to the desk clerk, they did not return to the Belvedere until around six thirty a.m. William Faison told police that when he got back to the hotel, he went up with William King to his room on the tenth floor, stayed for an hour or so, then returned to his own room. He managed to get a little sleep, then rose at nine, bathed, dressed, then went to the tenth floor and knocked loudly on his friend’s door. There was no reply. Assuming that Mr. King was sleeping off his night of revelry, Faison went down to the restaurant, breakfasted alone, returned to his room to pack, and then tried knocking on King’s door again. Finding himself unable to rouse his friend, he checked out of the hotel, bought a newspaper, and sat down to wait in the lobby.
The coroner, William T. Riley, estimated that William King had either fallen or jumped from the window of his room on the tenth floor sometime between seven thirty, when Faison left the room, and eleven thirty, half an hour before his body was discovered. According to police, there were no signs of a struggle, but neither was there a suicide note, and those who knew Mr. King could think of no reason why he would want to take his own life. A wallet found in his clothing contained $83.
Mr. William Faison, Who’s Who in Delaware County, 1925
Mr. Faison did not believe that his friend was especially depressed. He thought that perhaps, opening the window of his room for a breath of fresh air, King may have attempted to sit on the sill, lost his balance, and toppled out. While the window was too high to step through accidentally, the sill was broad enough for a man to sit on, though it is hard to imagine why he would do so, since the temperature outside was close to freezing. Nothing was said in the coroner’s report about alcohol, but Faison’s story makes little sense unless King had been drinking heavily, since the Belvedere’s window ledges are broad and it would be difficult to imagine sitting on the ledge then “toppling out of the window” unless perhaps, very drunk, you fell asleep for a moment and, waking up, lost your balance and plunged forward. Still, this is hard to picture.
The coroner agreed with Faison’s speculation. He stated that to judge from marks in the dust on the radiator just in front of the window, “Mr. King lost his balance and fell to his death while opening the window to admit fresh air,” adding that “the fact that his body was found close to the wall ten stories below indicated that he did not jump.” The verdict was not suicide but accidental death, and it does seem possible that this was true. But there can be unconscious motivations for suicide. If the incident had occurred today, no doubt further questions would have been raised about the relationship between the two men, their night at the bohemian Bal des Arts, and the hour they spent together in Mr. King’s room after returning to the Belvedere. In light of the men’s social positions, families, and business connections, however, the relationship between them was left unexplored.
* * *
I get an email from Stein with the unfortunate news that Michael Baier is not comfortable participating in an interview. Baier is not working for the FBI, as he had told Allison he planned to do after he retired from Baltimore homicide. He is working as an investigator for the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services. “He has concerns about jeopardizing his current position by making official statements, and is not willing to talk candidly,” writes Stein, then summarizes his brief telephone conversation with Baier.
From this conversation, notes Stein, certain inferences can be made. First, Baier does not believe that Rey’s death was a suicide. Second, Baier’s statement that he would be willing to talk after he retired “indicates that there is more to the case than is reported.” That Baier is unwilling to jeopardize his current career suggests that his suspicions are unpopular and could possibly land him in some kind of trouble. Third, he neither denies nor confirms any of the speculations surrounding the case.
I had asked Stein, if he ever found Michael Baier, to pass along Allison’s contact information, and let him know she has been trying to reach him
for the last five years. But Baier told Stein that he did not want to be put in touch with Allison. In short, he did not want her bothering him and trying to convince him to solve the case.
All these years, Allison has believed that Michael Baier was working on the case of her husband’s murder in secret, from an FBI office staffed with cold-case detectives. This has been her last and final hope: she continued to believe that someone, somewhere, was working to solve the mystery of Rey’s death. When I let her know the truth, she is heartbroken. She cries for three days.
I, too, am taken aback by Baier’s response. Why the casual dismissal? Was he surprised to hear from Stein? Did he simply lose all interest in the case long ago? Does Stein think Baier is hiding something? Since Stein has managed to track down the elusive Michael Baier, it should be easy for him to put me in touch with Porter Stansberry, who is, at least in a minor way, a public figure. Of course, I have tried writing to Stansberry many times—at Stansberry and Associates, then at his home address, then via his attorneys—but he has not replied, not even to let me know he wants nothing to do with my project. It seems counterproductive to keep pestering him, so for my portrait of Stansberry I have relied on his podcasts, blogs, and video interviews; on public documents; and on other people’s accounts of him. I realize this has given me a certain impression of the man—one that is far from objective—so naturally, I am still eager to talk to him. And although he may not respond to me, I am certain that Stein, the professional, will be able to get a response from him at last, even if it is just a big fat no.
But I am unprepared for what happens next. Stein goes AWOL for weeks, leaving my phone messages and emails unanswered. When he finally gets back in touch, his emails include cryptic references to being “out of pocket,” even though, according to the accounting statement I ask for, almost half of my two-thousand-dollar retainer remains unused. I ask him when we can meet. He puts me off with vague references to doctor’s appointments. I tell him it does not have to be during the day. Finally, after some pressing, he agrees to meet me on October 20, 2016, at six in the Owl Bar.
I arrive early. The bar is not busy, but Stein is already there, sitting at a high table in the farthest corner, with his back to the wall. He nods at me from across the room. I realize he is probably carrying a gun.
“I took the liberty of ordering two drinks,” Stein says: a beer for himself, and a margarita for me.
He must be showing me his detective skills by finding out from the bartender what I usually order. At least, so I assume until the bartender comes over and asks me what I’m having, at which point, I’m blindsided.
I ask for a margarita with lots of ice.
Stein, it seems, has ordered himself two drinks, a beer and a cocktail. I am no private investigator, but if I were, I would read that as a sign of nerves.
I ask Stein whether Baier was surprised to hear from him.
“Sure he was,” says Stein.
“How did you find his number?”
“I’m a professional, Mikita.”
I ask about some of his other cases. He tells me that much of his work involves staking out husbands and wives looking for evidence of infidelity.
“When you think somebody’s cheating, they usually are,” says Stein. He also does a lot of cybersecurity work and has recently been consulting for the police on a homicide case.
The conversation doesn’t go as I had hoped. I ask Stein a lot of questions and press him for details, but either he is not a fluent raconteur, or he’s unwilling to discuss his work, even off the record. But he tells me enough to give me the impression that he sees things through the lens of his own preconceptions. To Stein, people are either innocent or sinful, and although he doesn’t exactly put it this way, he believes that even the innocent have their Achilles’ heels and that everyone, if tempted in the right way, can be led astray.
In short, the impression I get is that he doesn’t want to talk about his job, but about his problems: his nagging sense of guilt, his ex-wife, his mother, his current wife, his kids.
He keeps glancing at his watch as he talks. I find this so unnerving that I finally ask him whether he has to be somewhere.
He stops looking at his watch.
“I have all the time in the world for you, Mikita,” he says. Then he nods to the bartender and orders another round of drinks.
Stein, I think then, is one of those men who have spent so long learning how to flatter and manipulate women that they begin flirting automatically, even when they have no interest in the woman, and have nothing to gain. If I were more honest, I would tell him that I find his smooth talk just as offensive as his discourtesy, but the fact is, I like being complimented. If I believed he was being sincere, I might even have been able to play along for a while, but everything about his conversation seems so calculated, from what he is prepared to reveal to his repeated use of my name, that I squirm uncomfortably on my barstool and change the subject.
I ask Stein about his surveillance work for the FBI. He tells me that is confidential information, but says he joined the FBI because working in the homicide division was starting to eat his soul. He would watch the other cops dealing with dead bodies every day, and noticed how they behaved after work.
“They all needed to wind down, let off steam,” he told me. “There’s no way they could go straight home to their wife and kids after dealing with that shit all day. They would do anything to take their mind off it. They had to get it out of their system before they went home. They’d drink, do drugs, fuck anything with a pulse.”
Stein says he left the police because he did not want his soul to be eaten up like that. But by the time he got out, he said, not much of his soul was left.
I ask whether he can arrange for me to meet with Porter Stansberry. The phone call made to Rey from Agora that made him leave home in a rush, and the meeting that presumably followed, leave a huge hole in my investigation. What happened during this missing time is the seemingly unbridgeable gap in the chain of events—it is the key to the mystery, the smoking gun, the missing corpse, the vanishing clue, the unsolvable puzzle that, if this were a work of fiction, would be solved in the end after all. Someone at Agora made that call, someone met with Rey shortly before he died, and I believe Porter Stansberry knows who this person is.
“Easiest thing in the world,” says Stein. “Are you free at lunchtime tomorrow? I’ll set it up for you. I should be there as well, just in case.”
I think: Just in case what?
Stein gets out his phone and fires off a few texts.
I ask for the check. Stein picks it up and pays it.
I don’t see him again for almost two months.
* * *
The weather turns freakish overnight. It’s eighty degrees in November, with the smell of decay in the air. Somebody moves out of the Belvedere, leaving a vintage wood-and-leather Chesterfield sofa by the dumpsters in the loading dock. I pay two men to bring it up to my apartment. When I sit on it, as I am doing now, it engulfs me like a leather tomb. I adore it. Still, I can’t help wondering who owned it before me, and why they attached the four clawed feet to the frame with rebar, as though giving it a set of concrete shoes. And why, when I sit on it, do I start to itch? I bleach and scrub the couch incessantly, but the itching continues, and a rash appears on my arms and legs. I think of Walter Benjamin’s aphorisms on late-nineteenth-century furniture. “The bourgeois interior … fittingly houses only the corpse. ‘On this sofa, the aunt cannot help but be murdered.’ The soulless luxuriance of the furnishings becomes true comfort only in the presence of a dead body.”
It feels as though something dark has suddenly entered my life, has crept into the apartment inside the Chesterfield. All the inanimate things in my life seem to turn against me. The eucalyptus tree dies overnight. The piano goes off-key. I start to get terrible headaches. In that heightened state of consciousness that can be a side effect of intense pain, I lie on the Chesterfield for hours unable to move, lis
tening to ice cracking and falling into the tray in the refrigerator, the dog’s claws pattering on the wooden floor, the ceiling fan turning above me, the mourning doves scratching for seed on the sills. When the headaches come, I can do nothing but trace the progress of the pain; it starts behind my eyes and moves in terrible increments slowly backward, spreading the agony over the drum of my skull.
I become unaccountably edgy, checking the locks on the windows, noticing shadows under the door, jumping at sudden noises, sensing movement out of the corners of my eyes. I wake up in the early hours of the morning, drained from nightmares.
I go to the closet to take our rugs out of storage, and they fall to pieces in my arms. They are no longer fabric, but a huge nest of pupae: case moths, I discover. This, it turns out, is the cause of my itching.
A tarot card reader once told me that the Ace of Wands is the only card that has no bad in it. Life is not mostly good fortune, as people think, but mainly bad, with a bit of luck thrown in, more for some than others. But who among us is really prepared to take an honest look at the cards they have been dealt? “The creative mind is better off with hints than with extensive knowledge,” wrote the society hostess Marion Hooper Adams, wife of the historian Henry Adams, who, on the morning of December 6, 1885, committed suicide at the age of forty-two, by swallowing a vial of potassium cyanide.
* * *
In December, feeling depressed, I decide to go up to the roof of the Belvedere. I think some dangerous exploring might bring me comfort. It usually does.
The door to the roof is unlocked, as usual. The ladder leading to the access door is steeper than I remember. When I reach the top, I step out into the bright winter sunshine, and there, maybe four feet in front of me, is the narrow edge of the building, “protected” by a thin metal railing about two meters long. The rest of the perimeter is wide open.
An Unexplained Death Page 21