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Canongate Books - Mikita Brottman

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147 pages

English

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Shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger for Non-FictionWhen the body of a missing man is discovered in the Belvedere, an apparent suicide, resident Mikita Brottman becomes obsessed with the mysterious circumstances of his death. The Belvedere used to be a hotel dating back to Baltimore's Golden Age but is now converted into flats, and as Brottman investigates the perplexing case of the dead man, she soon becomes caught up in the strange and violent secrets of the Belvedere's past. Her compulsions drive her to an investigation lasting over a decade. Utterly absorbing and unnerving, An Unexplained Death will lead you down the dark and winding corridors of the Belvedere and into the deadly impulses and obsessions of the human heart.

Sujets

True crime

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Publié par	Canongate Books
Date de parution	08 novembre 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781786892645
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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Extrait

Mikita Brottman is a writer and a professor in the Department of Humanistic Studies at the Maryland Institute College of Art in downtown Baltimore. She is also a certified psychoanalyst and runs a true crime podcast called Forensic Transmissions. She lives in the old Belvedere Hotel in Mount Vernon, Baltimore, with her partner, David, and French bulldog, Oliver.
@MikitaBrottman | mikitabrottman.com forensictransmissions.com
AN UNEXPLAINED DEATH
MIKITA BROTTMAN
First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition first published in 2018 by Canongate Books
Copyright © 2018 Mikita Brottman
The moral right of the author has been asserted
First published by Henry Holt and Company, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 263 8 eISBN 978 1 78689 264 5
Designed by Kelly S. Too
CONTENTS
Author’s Note
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
Notes
Illustration Credits
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
In order to maintain privacy, I have changed the names and identifying characteristics of certain people. Some conversations have been reconstructed to the best of my recollection, some from notes and recorded interviews, and others from court transcripts and legal documents.
Then I turned like a man, intent
on making out what he must run from
undone by sudden fear,
who does not slow his flight
for all his looking back:
just so I caught a glimpse of some dark devil
running toward us up the ledge.
Dante, Inferno, XXI, 25–31
AN UNEXPLAINED DEATH
I
MY BULLDOG IS only ten months old. He still needs to go out early in the morning, while it is dark. I get out of bed, put on my sandals, pick him up, and, in my nightdress, quietly leave my apartment and press the button for the elevator. In the lobby, we slip silently past the concierge, asleep in his chair behind the desk, and out into the morning. Although the sun has not yet risen, the air is already warm.
I see strange things at this hour. Once I saw five rats walking toward me, one in front of the other, right in the middle of the street.
The poster is new. I notice it right away, taped to a utility pole. Beneath the word “Missing,” printed in a bold, high-impact font, are two sepia-toned photographs of a man dressed in a bow tie and tux. One shows a close-up of his face; the other is shot from medium distance, showing his head and shoulders. He looks like an old-fashioned movie idol. Under the images are the details. Name: Rey O. Rivera. Age: 32. Description: 6′5″, brown hair, brown eyes, 260 lbs. Last Seen: Tuesday, May 16, six p.m. Leaving home (Northwood neighborhood) to run errands in his wife’s car. Wearing pullover jacket, shorts, and flip-flops. Carrying $20 in cash, no bank cards. There’s the name of a detective in the missing persons division, a phone number to call, and a $1,000 reward for information leading to Rey Rivera’s safe return.

The poster intrigues me. Rey Rivera parts his hair on the left. He has a slightly bashful smile. In the medium close-up photo, you can just see the trace of a flower in his buttonhole. Not a rose or a carnation; something less traditional—a sprig of jasmine, perhaps. He’s so tall and handsome I find it difficult to believe he’s gone missing. But then I realize I’ve rarely seen a “Missing” poster for an unappealing or angry-looking person. People on “Missing” posters generally look happy and beautiful because whoever makes the posters chooses the best pictures they can find. Often, they’re professional portraits taken at a prom, graduation, or wedding. To grab your attention, missing people have to possess a certain allure. They have to mesmerize you.
A student, Rachel, went missing when I was at college. I didn’t even know she had gone until I noticed the posters. The last person to see her was her boyfriend, John. He told the police that after visiting Rachel, he went to the train station, and Rachel went with him. Waiting for his train, they ran into someone Rachel knew—a friendly, long-haired young man who offered her a ride home.
It didn’t escape notice that John had long hair himself.
The next time I saw my tutor, I asked whether there had been any news about Rachel. It seemed the polite thing to do, the way you might ask about someone’s sick mother. I was expecting a friendly platitude. Fingers crossed! But my tutor’s answer made me catch my breath.
“They won’t find her alive,” she said.
My tutor was the kindest person I’ve ever known. When I missed my tutorial because I had strep throat, she came to my dormitory, sat down on the bed beside me, and placed her hand on my hot brow.
“The police gave us all the facts about missing people,” she explained. “They said it’s extremely rare that responsible people disappear the way Rachel did, without even taking their purse. But when they do, if they’re not found the same day, they have almost no chance of being found alive. The police said now it’s just a matter of finding her body. They’re about to trawl the river.”
She was right. Rachel’s body was found eighteen days after she first went missing. John, it appeared, had strangled her in a fit of jealous passion. He’d spent hours looking around her house for a place to hide the body. Eventually, he’d found an eight-inch gap at the back of a closet under the stairs crammed with household junk. After emptying the cupboard of its contents, he’d pushed Rachel’s body through the gap into the recess and under the floor. He’d then stretched out on his belly, pushed the dead body in front of him, and pulled himself along through the cavity until he was all the way under the floorboards of Rachel’s bedroom. After eighteen days in this small, hot space, Rachel’s body had partially mummified.
Full urban mummification is not as common as you might think. It requires a particular set of circumstances. Not only does the environment have to be either extremely hot or extremely cold, with low humidity and good ventilation, but also these conditions have to remain stable during the several years it takes for mummification to occur. Urban mummies are formed only when a person dies in a home with the right kind of atmospheric conditions, and only if the death goes undetected for a long time. In one recent case, the mummified bodies of a sixty-three-year-old German woman, her neurologically impaired thirty-four-year-old son, and their German shepherd dog were found preserved in their home in Florida. The cause of death was determined to be an overdose of benzodiazepines. The mother had administered the drugs, dissolved in liquid, first to her son and then to their dog, laying the pair out to die on twin beds beside each other. She left a handwritten note in German, which translated as “God’s perfection now finds expression through my body.” The trio’s mummified cadavers were found four years later. Mother was lying on the kitchen floor, clad in a dressing gown surrounded by insect larva cases, her eyeglasses adjacent to her head, a full brown wig resting gently on her bare skull.
The posters of Rey Rivera multiply. The reward has now been increased to $5,000. Walking down Charles Street in the morning, I point one out to D., who recalls how, as a young boy, he used to hear about men who went out to buy a packet of cigarettes and never came back. They usually turned out to be supporting another family in another town, he tells me. Either that, or they had just walked away from their wife and kids and gone to start life over again in another state. D. says you never hear about men doing that anymore.
I wonder: Why was it always a packet of cigarettes? What if they didn’t smoke?
As soon as you go missing, according to the FBI’s National Crime Information Center, the chances of your survival start to diminish rapidly. Still, there are miraculous exceptions. A small percentage of people who have been missing for years manage to reach out from whatever dark world they now inhabit and leave signs for friends and family to decipher: a garbled, untraceable phone call, a scrawled message on a dollar bill, a note scratched in red nail polish in the restroom of a public eatery. Kidnap victims have been recovered as long as eighteen years after their abduction. Often, they’ve been both here and not here all along, living among us in a locked basement, a converted bomb shelter, a box under someone’s bed.
High-profile missing people are almost always young white women, and on the rare occasions when they’re found, an uneasy feeling seems to be generated around the question of their return. It is almost as if, once people enter the liminal realm of the missing-and-presumed-dead, there’s an unspoken assumption—you might even call it a faith—that they are no longer one of us. Some follow every development in such cases, vowing they’ll never give up hope that missing girls will one day be safely back home with their loved ones. But the same people often express disquiet if, after begging for the public’s help in finding their daughter, sister, or wife, family members suddenly go mute, or request privacy, when the missing woman returns.
When no explanation is offered for a person’s absence, those who have been following the story in the media or online will sometimes feel they have been cheated. In the comments section of newspaper articles and in threads devoted to the case online, there will often be grumbles that the story does not add up, that we are not being given the full picture, that the missing girl might not have been “really” missing but off on a jaunt or drug binge. You will hear the complaint that, since taxpayers’ money has been spent on the search, then we have a right to find out what “really happened.”
In the case of missing women who