An Unexplained Death. Mikita Brottman

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       The hole in the roof

      George calls James Mingle, the detective in the missing persons unit assigned to Rey’s case. He describes the scene, the hole, and the chair to Mingle. The men feel very uncomfortable. Mingle asks them to stay where they are—he’ll be right there, he says. But ten minutes later, he calls back: he can’t work out how to get into the Belvedere’s parking garage. George tells him just to pull his car into the Charles Street entrance to the west. “If you show your badge,” says George, “surely the attendant will let you in?”

      Detective Mingle tells the three men to go downstairs and wait for him in the Belvedere’s lobby. They find an elevator that takes them to the back quarters of the hotel, and from there, they find their way to the reception desk. A security guard shows them to an area by the wall where they can wait. There are no chairs, so the men sit down on the floor. Here, they wait in awkward silence.

      They’ve been sitting there for what seems like forever when suddenly everything starts happening at once. There are cops everywhere—a big crowd of cadets. There is a man in uniform, wearing rubber gloves, with a stethoscope around his neck. Realizing he must be the coroner, Steven almost loses consciousness. Later, when the cops come back, Mark goes over to one of them and asks whether the body is Rey’s, but the officer won’t tell him. A few moments later, a policeman approaches the three friends, introduces himself as a detective from the Baltimore police’s Central District, and tells them they need to come downtown with him. Steven, Mark, and George get shakily to their feet, and the detective leads them through the crowds in the lobby, into the street, and into an unmarked vehicle. Through the wing mirror, as they drive away, Steven glimpses a local news anchorman straightening his tie.

      The concierge on duty at the Belvedere that day is a capable, heavyset gentleman in his fifties named Gary Shivers. At the request of a man who introduces himself as a police detective, Shivers goes into the room behind the front desk to find the keys to the offices on the second floor, then leads the police and the pack of cadets up two long, steep flights of stairs, through a double set of doors, and down the hallway toward the annex. Taking a right turn, he leads the parade past the second-floor freight elevators and pushes open a door at the top of three steps. This door opens onto a narrow hallway leading to the hotel’s former swimming pool. When the Belvedere was turned into a condominium complex in 1991, this space was divided into two offices, each with a half-barrel skylight and a row of windows at the top of its eastern wall.

      One of these offices belongs to the Belvedere’s in-house catering company, which at that time was a business called Truffles. The other is empty, although its opaque glass door announces it as the headquarters of the Army of God Church in Christ and the Elijah School of the Prophet Institute. This Pentecostal congregation was using the space when D. and I first moved into the building in March 2005. It took us a while to locate the source of the praying and chanting on Sunday mornings, and when we realized it was coming from the old swimming pool below our apartment window, we were worried that it might become annoying. But the Army of God Church in Christ soon found a new home, and by early April 2006, the Sunday-morning hallelujahs had ceased.

      The Truffles staff have been complaining about a bad smell for the last few days. They think there might be a dead rat in the wall. When they hear Gary and the police arriving, they stick their heads out of their office to see what all the fuss is about.

      Gary is fumbling among all the keys on his big key ring, trying to work out which one fits the door of the vacant office. He isn’t thinking about how the hole got in the office roof. When he finally locates the right key, he opens the door and lumbers into the room. He’s taken three or four steps across the floor before the smell hits him and he realizes he’s looking at a dead body.

      Gary Shivers turns and runs. He runs past the lead detective, who’s casually taking out a stick of Vicks VapoRub. He runs past the girls from Truffles, who later tell me that Gary, who is black, had “turned white.” He runs all the way downstairs to the basement, runs down the hallway and past Antiques at the Belvedere, then bursts out through the side door into the heat of the afternoon. He runs west across Charles Street and up the steps into Zena’s salon. Zena is in the middle of a manicure when Gary bursts through the door, shaking and sweating. He tells Zena he has had a shock and he needs a drink. Zena asks one of the girls to take over her client’s manicure. She leads Gary to the back room where he can sit down, and fetches a shot glass and a bottle.

      Gary closes his eyes and swallows. He takes three shots. By the third he is no longer shaking. But he knows it’s too late. He’ll never forget what he has just seen.

      Zena asks him what happened.

      “A dead man fell out of the ceiling,” says Gary.

      When the Truffles girls realize that what they thought was a dead rat in the wall was, in fact, a dead person, they can’t avoid thinking about the wedding reception held at the Belvedere four days ago. The bride and groom were photographed in rooms on the second floor. Violets Are Blue, a wedding photography website, still features images from the reception. In one of the photographs, the loving couple can be glimpsed looking down romantically from a window in the old hotel. In another room on the same floor, at the very time this photo was shot, Rey Rivera’s dead body was decaying in the summer heat.

      Half an hour after the body has been removed from the Belvedere, I come down to take my dog for his afternoon walk. The building is still swarming with police. Charles Street has been closed to traffic and pedestrians. Crime scene tape is tied from one side of the road to the other. I ask one of the officers what’s going on. He tells me they’re “conducting an investigation.” He refuses to say anything else. СКАЧАТЬ