An Unexplained Death. Mikita Brottman

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СКАЧАТЬ removed, her boss asked for a volunteer to clean the room; wanting to make a good impression, she took the job. Before she went inside, she writes, a detective handed her two bags: one for any pieces of body matter she came across, and the other for the bullet, which was still missing. She did as she was asked, placing small scraps of flesh in a plastic bag while searching for the bullet (which turned up during the autopsy inside the corpse). “I still wake up from dreams where I am back in that room with those two bags,” she admits.

      Even though larger hotel chains bring in professional cleaning teams to deal with the situation, coming unexpectedly upon a body is still a nasty shock. A desk clerk writes that he, his coworker, and his boss have all walked into guest rooms only to find “brains and blood everywhere.” A porter who works in a Washington, D.C., hotel recalls “a guy who broke down the roof door one night, jumped off, and landed on the second story, smashing into the window. In a room full of kids at 1AM.” Another desk clerk remembers how he “watched a jumper hit the ground from 20 stories up . . . I was traumatized.” And yet business must go on as usual: “Still I am expected to smile all night, preen like a peacock, and try not to cringe when some guy tries to dispute his adult movie charges that he clicked on ‘by accident.’ ”

      In his well-known essay “The Jumping-Off Place,” first published in the New Republic in 1931, the writer Edmund Wilson described the Coronado Beach Hotel in San Diego as “the ultimate triumph of the dreams of the architects of the eighties,” contrasting its fabulous façade with the grim truth that San Diego had, for a time, become the suicide capital of the United States. The coroner’s reports, Wilson wrote, made melancholy reading, for they contained “the last futile effervescence of the burst of the American adventure.” In San Diego,

      they stuff up the cracks of their doors and quietly turn on the gas; they go into their back sheds or back kitchens and eat ant-paste or swallow Lysol; they drive their cars into dark alleys, get into the back seat and shoot themselves; they hang themselves in hotel bedrooms, take overdoses of sulphonal or barbital; they slip off to the municipal golf-links and there stab themselves with carving-knives, or they throw themselves into the bay . . .

      Those who come to the city to escape from “ill-health and poverty, maladjustment and industrial oppression” discover that “having come West, their problems and diseases remain,” and that “the ocean bars further flight.” These lonely visitors soon realize that the “dignity and brilliance” of exclusive hotels like the Coronado are intended for out-of-towners and convention-goers, not locals with little left to live for. For such people, the hotels’ cruel opulence is often the final insult.

      I have tried to learn all I can about the suicides that took place in the former Belvedere Hotel. The brief accounts in early newspapers are compellingly suggestive. These vignettes of private tragedy are windows on the changing century; they refer to the introduction of automobiles, the telegraph, and the telephone; to the Great Depression, Prohibition, segregation, and revolutions in the hotel trade. Their casts of characters include alienated parents, sons with too much money, the lonely wives of railway tycoons, and businessmen suffering from existential angst. They evoke the genteel and bohemian Baltimore of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein, a prosperous city whose kings were Confederate generals, tobacco lords, and bootleg emperors. They reveal private crises and intimate tragedies that are even today rarely discussed outside the family, except in strained and awkward whispers. I find the suicide notes left by hotel guests especially touching, with their polite, self-deprecating apologies, their regrets to hotel staff for the necessary cleanup job.

      Most of the Belvedere’s reported suicides occurred before 1946, when the hotel was sold to the Sheraton corporation. After that, it isn’t clear whether there were actually fewer suicides (this is certainly possible, since the Belvedere was no longer Baltimore’s highest building nor its fanciest hotel), or whether changes in reporting made it appear that way (suicides no longer made the papers unless they involved unusual circumstances or well-known individuals, or occurred in public places). It is possible that for a while, the Belvedere may have seen more than its share of suicides because it was often the first port of call for those who arrived in Baltimore to register as patients at the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, one of the country’s earliest and most sophisticated psychiatric hospitals. With its marble floors, its rose gardens, its private rooms with porches and fireplaces, and its spacious auditorium containing a pipe organ, the Phipps Clinic was considered the height of luxury for the nervously ill. It was where F. Scott Fitzgerald installed his wife, Zelda, in 1934, after her second breakdown (her doctor infuriated Fitzgerald by suggesting that he, too, could benefit from a course of psychoanalysis). The Phipps patients who took their lives at the Belvedere were mostly women; some did so before checking in to the clinic, some after checking out, and others while on a break from treatment.

      Freddie Howard, currently the evening concierge, has worked at the Belvedere for over twenty years and has seen almost everything. This is a place where things happen, he tells me. Although there are rumors of ghosts, Freddie has spent hundreds of nights in the lobby and never seen or felt anything supernatural. There have certainly been plenty of deaths, including suicides, since the hotel became a condominium complex, but Freddie mentions only the two most recent examples he can think of. A gentleman hanged himself on the eighth floor last year. Freddie is not sure whether anyone ever knew the reason. A few years before that, Freddie recalls, another gentleman, on the third floor, cut his wrists over a failed love affair. He survived, but a few days later, he put a pillow over his head and shot himself.

      The second time, he got it right.

      III

      IT IS LUNCHTIME on Wednesday, May 24, 2006. Rey Rivera has now been missing for eight days. Mark Whistler and Steven King leave their office in Mount Vernon and walk down Charles Street to get lunch. King and Whistler both work for the Oxford Club, a financial company for which Rivera has recently been doing some freelance video production work. Steven has known Rey for about a year, but Mark, who’s only recently moved to Baltimore, has met him once, and then just briefly.

      Steven and Mark go to pick up some lunch from Eddie’s, a nearby grocery store. On the way back, they see Steven’s friend George Rayburn. He seems to be hanging around outside the gay bar across the street. Steven has known George for a long time; in fact, it was George who first brought him into the company, though they currently work for different subsidiaries.

      For a joke, Steven calls George on his cell phone.“Hey, George,” he says. “What are you doing hanging around outside a gay bar?”

      George isn’t in a mood to joke around. Steven and Mark cross the street to find out what’s going on. George says he’s been looking for Rey. He’s visibly upset.

      For eight days now, George, Mark, and Steven have been canvassing the streets, handing out missing-person flyers at bars and restaurants, putting up posters, asking business owners whether they’ve seen anyone matching Rey’s description. On Wednesday morning, George returns to work but finds himself unable to sit still in his office, unable to concentrate on ordinary business affairs. He tells Mark and Steven he’s been walking around the block where Rey’s car was found, looking for clues. Anything might help, he reasons.

      “If Rey’s been abducted or killed, there must be some kind of evidence,” says George. Rey is a really big guy, an athlete. “He’d never go down without a fight.” George wants to check out the Belvedere’s parking garage.

      “That place is creepy,” says Steven. “We’ll go with you.”

      The three men cross the street and walk a block north to the seven-floor indoor parking garage on Charles Street next to the Belvedere and adjacent to the outdoor garage on St. Paul, where the Montero was found.

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