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, he announces that not only is he in remission, but he has just been declared 100 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: