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.
To the east, this garage is attached to an extension of the first three floors of the old hotel. This extension, the parking lot, and a cocktail lounge on the thirteenth floor were all added in 1964, when the Belvedere underwent renovation. The basement level of the extension contains retail space. A Japanese hibachi restaurant occupies the storefront level on Charles Street, which is accessed through a glass-and-steel entrance to the hotel, built along with the extension. There’s a glass roof above this entrance; behind the glass roof is the flat roof of a retail office. Above this is a second flat roof, one side of which abuts a row of windows. These look down on the hotel’s indoor swimming pool, which was made into offices when the Belvedere was turned into a condominium complex. Above these windows, there is a third roof, which would once have been the top of the pool, from which protrude two half-barrel-shaped glass skylights.
The three men walk through the parking garage, searching for anything that might be a clue—Rey’s wallet, maybe, or his phone, or his money clip. They get all the way up to the top level of the parking garage, but find nothing out of the ordinary. Mark decides to search the stairwell. A few minutes later, his phone rings. It’s Steven, telling him to come back up to the roof. He and George have found something, says Steven, though they’re not sure what.
Mark goes back up to the top of the garage. Looking over the lower roof toward the Belvedere, all he sees are the kinds of things you might expect to see on a roof—rocks, plastic planters, cans, other kinds of trash.
But then he sees something else.
It is a very large brown flip-flop.
Steven touches his shoulder and points out a second flip-flop, along with a cell phone and what could be a wallet and a bunch of keys. Also, there is a hole in the lower roof.
Not a huge hole. Bigger than a Frisbee, but smaller than a hula hoop. Steven leans over and tries to see inside it, but the glare of the midday sun is too bright. When the men look up to the top of the building, they see an old banquet chair dangling off the edge of the building, caught by one of its metal legs. Steven starts to feel a sense of dread.
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