An Unexplained Death. Mikita Brottman

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ percent cancer free. This earns him a standing ovation. Three years later, he is discovered alone in his apartment, dead at sixty-two. C. had broken up with him by then. She stopped calling me around the same time. Apparently, she had lost interest in me, too. Or perhaps I had become invisible to her. Even among those who see me at first, I gradually fade out of sight.

      Sometimes I wonder whether I am perfectly visible but people simply don’t like me. Perhaps I am just a thoroughly unpleasant person, stubborn and morbid, saturnine and antisocial, like the writer Patricia Highsmith, who thrived on lies and deceit, loved busting up couples, and preferred snails to people, bringing them to dinner parties in her handbag, attached to a head of lettuce.

      When I get home the night the body is found, the air is still warm, and the moon is almost full. Before entering the Belvedere, I go up to the roof of the parking garage to get a look at the hole from above. There is a much better view from the garage roof than from our apartment window, and at midnight, I think, no one will wonder why I’m standing gazing over the edge of the parking lot for so long. Or so I assume. But as I stand there, I hear voices above me, and look up. On the Belvedere roof are the two bar girls from the 13th Floor. They have gone up to smoke cigarettes. When they see me, they cling together in mock terror, laugh, and wave, the tips of their cigarettes glowing like fireflies in the summer night.

      Later that night, lying in bed, I suddenly remember something. About a week ago, around ten at night, while we were reading in bed, D. and I heard a loud noise outside. It was loud enough to make the windows shake in their frames, loud enough to make me get out of bed, go over, and look down into the street to see if there had been a car crash. The Belvedere stands on the intersection of two busy streets in the middle of an area with plenty of bars and restaurants. It can be noisy at weekends, but this was a weeknight and the streets were quiet. Seeing nothing, and hearing nothing more, we quickly dismissed the crash as just another of those inexplicable noises in the night.

      I’d made a note of the mysterious noise in my journal. It had occurred on the previous Tuesday, May 16, the day Rey Rivera went missing.

      The police report of the incident describes how officers from the Central District were dispatched to the Belvedere Hotel to deal with a questionable death. “Upon arrival,” the report continues, “the area was searched and located in a vacant room under the damaged roof . . . a decomposed body of a male was discovered.” On the “Missing” poster, Rey was described as wearing a “black pull-over jacket, shorts and flip-flops” and carrying $20 in cash, no bank cards. Allison Rivera, who must have given this description, was right about the black jacket and flip-flops, but Rey was actually wearing a yellow shirt, and long green pants (not shorts), in the pocket of which were an American Express card and his Maryland driver’s license.

      “A decomposed body of a male.” This is what the handsome Rey Rivera has become. The body is taken to the forty-one-year-old building at Pratt and Penn Streets that houses the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner; here, an autopsy is performed. The building is part of the University of Maryland School of Medicine, which opened in 1807 and was immediately closed again for almost seven years because of riots protesting the dissection of human corpses, many of which, rumor had it, were stolen from St. Paul’s churchyard adjoining the medical school. So great was the public outrage that dissection wasn’t a part of the curriculum until 1832, and even then, it had to be carried out in secrecy; human dissection was not permitted in Maryland until 1882.

      It seems right to be unhappy about cutting up corpses. There is something nightmarishly inevitable about the autopsy, with its photographs and final report. I’m already the kind of person who cringes at any business that involves putting my living flesh in the hands of another, be that a hairdresser, dentist, or gynecologist. It’s not that I’m afraid of what they will do to me, but rather that I dread their unspoken criticism, and the idea of being judged by my body alone: my weight; the condition of my skin, my teeth, my hair. An autopsy, should we be subject to one, is the ultimate impersonal procedure to which our bodies will have to submit: our final, official summing-up.

      Cora Crippen, the wife of the famous murderer Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen, was identified by a piece of her belly that clearly showed an old abdominal scar. Escaping the quicklime in which the rest of Mrs. Crippen’s body was destroyed, this fragment of flesh was later exhibited at Crippen’s trial, where it was passed around among members of the jury on a soup plate.

      If, when leaving the Belvedere, you turn right and walk four blocks, you come to a bridge over the highway. I think of this bridge as the gateway to the Other City. Cross the bridge, and you are in a ghost world. Street after street lies empty. The houses are boarded up. Perhaps one in every twenty houses in the Other City is inhabited. Some are fully vacant, some semi-abandoned, some you just never know. A house with planks nailed over the doors and windows and trash piled ankle deep outside might turn out to have a pit bull on a leash that rouses up to bark and lunge at you as you hurry by.

      There is something sublime about this ghost city, with its forbidding tracts of emptiness, derelict yards, and cul-de-sacs, its homes that could be crime scenes and perhaps are. I love the bright graffiti, the old brick, the flaking paint, the cracks and holes exposing the innards of buildings, the rusting fire escapes overgrown with ivy. Here in the mists and barrens of this shadow city, I’ve seen a man walking a fox on a leash, a thick black snake coiled up inside an abandoned baby buggy, a mural of crocodiles and Egyptian goddesses painted on the inside wall of a vacant garage. I have found bullet casings, human teeth, a dead cat, an intelligence scale for children, a rusting unicycle, a string of seed pearls, a Mexican silver-and-abalone letter opener, a typewriter, a collection of old tobacco pipes, and four cans of tinned mackerel from times gone by.

      IV

      AT FIRST, LIKE everyone else, I assume Rey Rivera has taken his own life. When you learn that a man has plunged to his death from the top of a high building, you generally assume he has jumped, not that he has been pushed.

      But those who knew Rivera say the idea of suicide makes no sense at all. They say he never showed the least sign of depression, and is the very last person they can imagine wanting to die. He was young, good-looking, newlywed, and excited about the future. He and Allison had put their house on the market, and were making plans to move back to Los Angeles to start a family. After her husband’s death, Allison looked through all Rey’s private journals, notebooks, computer files and caches, but she found nothing conspicuous or unusual, certainly nothing to suggest he was unhappy in secret.

      What’s more, Rey had been particularly busy the week he died. Earlier on the day he went missing, he made a call to a company that rented out video editing equipment, and he booked an editing suite for the coming weekend to finish a project. He spoke to a man named Mark Gold, who’d rented equipment to him before. Gold said Rey sounded under a lot of pressure to get the project finished on time, but that “it sounded like a fairly average editing task.” Other than that, said Gold, it was an ordinary, everyday conversation.

      Rey’s colleague, Steven King, confirmed that Rey’s editing project was due the following week. In March 2006, Rey had filmed the Oxford Club’s annual conference in Delray Beach, Florida. “We needed the video to send out to those subscribers who hadn’t been able to make it to the conference,” King told me. “Rey had been working on the video along with our advertising team. Our advertising manager spoke to him about it the day he went missing. She asked him if he had any idea when the video would be ready, and he’d said he’d have it to her by Monday.”

      Rey booked the edit suite for Saturday, May 20, but he never showed up. After learning about his death, Mark Gold said that, in conversation, Rivera sounded “totally not like someone who would throw himself off a building. It was too banal. He sounded like he was under a crunch for work.” Steven King said he never got hold of the videotape Rey had been working on. All Rey’s computers and video equipment СКАЧАТЬ