An Unexplained Death. Mikita Brottman
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Название: An Unexplained Death
Автор: Mikita Brottman
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9781786892645
isbn:
He’s heard they found a body. “They think it’s that missing guy.”
I finish my walk and return to our apartment. Upstairs, I open the living room window and wedge myself tightly into the frame, which gives me an almost perfect view of cops climbing around on the annex roof. A small group of people is also observing the scene from the top floor of the parking garage directly opposite.
We all watch as two policemen use a ladder to get from the second to the third level of the annex roof, then from the third to the fourth. One of the cops goes to retrieve the flip-flops and cell phone, almost indiscernible against the dark membrane of the roof. I can see the hole. It is just within my line of vision, and seems remarkably small for someone of Rivera’s height and weight. It’s almost circular, not one of those people-shaped holes you see in cartoons.
Even though they can see we’re watching them, the cops are surprisingly casual about the whole thing. The first cop is on the pool roof. The second cop stays on the lower level, holding the ladder. The first cop picks up a flip-flop and throws it down to his colleague on the lower level. He then throws the second flip-flop, which almost hits the other guy on the head. The second cop yells something at the first cop, who laughs and yells something back. I do not see them putting anything in an evidence bag, taking photographs, or checking for fingerprints. Neither that day nor at any time afterward does anybody knock on our door to ask questions about anything we might have seen; nor, as far as we know, do the police interview any of our neighbors.
Some accounts, confusing the mystery further, report that Rivera’s corpse was found in an “old church adjoining the Belvedere hotel.”
___________
At the Central District police station downtown, George Rayburn, Steven King, and Mark Whistler are sent to wait in a room painted in bright colors, with children’s toys and games scattered around the floor. It’s completely wrong. A television is tuned to WJZ-TV, a local channel. When the news comes on, the men see images of the Belvedere, and a long line of police cadets entering the hotel. The news announcer, Richard Sher, reports that a body found in “a conference room of the Belvedere Hotel” has been identified as that of “the missing financial writer Rey Rivera.” The three men sit in silence again, this time for hours. Eventually, they’re brought out one by one to be interviewed separately by detectives, one of whom is either so tired, so bored, or so hung-over that he actually falls asleep while interviewing George. The questions they ask are strange and inappropriate—for instance, “Where are your parents?”
After this comes more silence. None of the three friends are interested in speaking to the press, so whenever anyone contacts them, they forward the inquiries to their company’s public relations officer. Jayne Miller, an investigative reporter, tries repeatedly to contact George. He talks to her once, very briefly. Among the three men, there is little discussion of the incident. Steven King enters therapy to deal with it. George Rayburn continues working for the same subsidiary until 2013, when he joins King at the Oxford Club. The year after Rey’s death, Mark Whistler is let go from his job.
Once the corpse has been removed, the police have left, and all the commotion is over, I find my way down to the former swimming pool. I assume the door will have been sealed by police tape and I’m surprised to find it propped open—to get rid of the smell, I imagine. There is nothing to prevent me from entering the room.
From beneath, the hole is substantially bigger than it appears from above. The ceiling is half collapsed; some of the rafters and roof beams have fallen in, and the musty carpet is covered in big chunks of plaster. The main area of damage is in the back right-hand corner of the room, where the carpet is stained almost black and scattered with what look like grains of rice, which, when I get down on the floor to study them more closely, turn out to be dried insect larvae.
While I’m inspecting the scene, two girls who work in the nightclub at the top of the building come by to take a look before their shift begins.
This nightclub is called the 13th Floor.
The majority of hotels, in deference to superstition, don’t list a thirteenth floor on their elevators. Most commonly, the number 13 is simply skipped, so the floors listed on the console go from 12 to 14. In some hotels, the thirteenth floor may be called 12A or 14A; in others, it may have a special name such as the Marble Floor or the Magnolia Floor, or it may be used to house offices, storerooms, or mechanical equipment. Some hotels don’t even have rooms numbered 13. Even progressive modern psychiatry pays homage to this ancient superstition. Although the formal dedication of the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins took place on April 16, 1913, the date engraved on the plaque above the main entrance says 1912.
In this regard, the Belvedere is remarkably progressive—or dangerously hubristic, depending on your point of view. But perhaps the curse doesn’t count: the top floor is not actually the thirteenth floor but the fourteenth, the fifteenth, or something in between, since the ballrooms on the first and twelfth floors are two stories high, and the Belvedere is built on the slope of a hill.
As soon as the two girls enter the room, they hold their noses and make theatrical gagging noises. I don’t find the smell to be so bad. Something has obviously been sprayed around the room to cover up the worst of it: a sweet, floral scent. Plus, the door has been propped open for hours. Still, the girls act as though they can hardly stand it. One of them says that, unlike me, she’s smelled a dead body before. She repeats the well-worn cliché: “You never forget the smell of death.”
If this is the smell of death, I think, it’s been well concealed. The room smells no worse than a bag of trash that has been left out for couple of days in the sun.
Apart from being surprised that the door to the former swimming pool was left open and that I was able to get inside with no problem, D. expresses little interest in Rey Rivera’s death, and although he is happy to listen to and even indulge my speculations, they don’t seem to spark any curiosity.
He is not uninterested in death, but his concerns are different from mine. For example, not long ago he asked me whether I had heard anything about a man who had committed suicide by jumping from a roof at Lincoln Center onto a New York street. He didn’t want to know the name of the man or the reasons for his suicide, but the particular structure at Lincoln Center that he jumped from. D. knows Lincoln Center well, or he used to, and he couldn’t picture a building whose roof abuts the street. “There’s been a lot of rebuilding going on there,” he tells me. He can just about still recognize Alice Tully Hall, but most of the other structures are unfamiliar to him. “It must have been one of the new buildings,” he decides, stoically, as if living outside New York for ten years is a form of suicide in itself.
The night the body is found, I go to visit a new friend, C. Although her apartment is small and cramped, she’s arranged things nicely for the two of us. She’s put sparkling wine on ice and set out little plates of strawberries dipped in powdered sugar. I don’t tell her about the dead body right away. It’s not appropriate, partly because C.’s boyfriend, a poet twice her age, has been undergoing treatment for brain cancer. When I finally tell her about Rey Rivera, she doesn’t seem as interested as I thought she’d be. I was hoping that C. might be the friend I was longing to find, who shares my “love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of everyday life,” as Sherlock Holmes says of the deep bond between himself and Dr. Watson. I am disappointed, but given her boyfriend’s brain cancer, I imagine that C. wants relief from depressing subjects.
The next time we see C.’s boyfriend, he is in front of a large audience and reading a poem about his erectile dysfunction, an unanticipated side effect of chemotherapy. After the reading, СКАЧАТЬ