Читать книгу Gone at Midnight - Jake Anderson - Страница 9

CHAPTER 2

Found

THE TAP WATER OOZED out of the faucet as a thick brownish red sludge and almost looked like it was saturated with red blood cells. However, you can’t waterlog blood cells enough to expand them to be visible to the naked eye. Whatever these grotesque globules are, Natalie Davis thought, standing over the faucet in her new, temporary bathroom, I’m better off not knowing.

Steven and Gloria Cott saw the same thing. They had not checked into the Cecil Hotel expecting their room to be adorned with silk curtains and crystal cutlery. Nor had they more faith in the purity of the hotel’s tap than any other municipal source of water. However, they had most certainly not planned on brushing their teeth with water that looked like it had been dredged from a corpse-infested swamp and pumped through the crotchety pipelines of an eighty-year old, 600-room building in the decrepit heart of downtown Los Angeles.

And for this reason, Steven Cott lodged a formal complaint with the hotel management. Upon his approach to the concierge’s desk and his subsequent verbal grievance, the hotel manager, Amy Price, managed to suppress a groan. It was the third complaint over the hotel’s tap water that night, and the tenth that week. Some residents complained about the water pressure, reporting that the water only dribbled out of the faucets; others said it smelled, and that it had a “funny, sweet, disgusting taste.”

Amy Price knew the protocol on dealing with the complaints of hotel guests. In many cases, especially at the seedy Cecil (which boasted the patronage of two serial killers, multiple sex offenders, several horrifying murders and over a dozen suicides) guests weren’t so much protesting a specific grievance as they were expressing a general uneasiness with the hotel itself. There was little Amy or any of the other managers could do about this without a solid reinvestment into infrastructure by the hotel owners.

The fact of the matter was, the Cecil Hotel was an old establishment in a very run-down neighborhood and its primary clientele consisted of travelers, transients, and low-income locals looking for the cheapest possible lodging—ranging from $65 to $95 a night. Spend much time on the downtown Los Angeles Main Street, mere blocks from Skid Row, you find yourself looking for commercial refuge with a quickness.

On this particular day, the consistency and frequency of the complaints over the water had Amy a bit on edge. Maybe there really was something wrong with the hotel’s water. Perhaps a pipe had burst; maybe the supply had been contaminated. She had started to think it was time to actually check the situation out. That’s when Steven Cott came to the desk describing what looked like red-brown sludge with blood cells.

In the morning, Amy dispatched a maintenance worker to the roof to make sure the hotel’s water cisterns were properly functioning.

A GRIM DISCOVERY

On February 19, 2013, Santiago Lopez clocked in at the Cecil Hotel just like any other day. Of course, it wasn’t like any other day. A young woman who was a tenant of the Cecil was missing, and police had been trundling around the building for two consecutive days. One detective even questioned him briefly.

But besides that, it was a normal day. He couldn’t possibly have known that within only a few hours, he would have one of the most haunting visuals imaginable permanently sewn into the fabric of his memory.

Santiago had been a maintenance worker at the Cecil for three years. Most people didn’t know that in addition to being a hotel, the Cecil also offered permanent occupancy on some of its floors. Some of the residents had lived there for decades. While the rest of Los Angeles remained fragmented into harsh class divisions, the Cecil still stood proudly in the heart of a gentrified downtown neighborhood as a home for low-income tenants.

It made the job of maintenance somewhat more complicated, as the staff had to balance the demands of overnight transients and vacationers with the needs of people spending their lives there.

In contrast to some of Los Angeles’ other famous hotels—the Roosevelt, the Biltmore, etc.—the Cecil had long since relinquished the limelight and glamour and had devoted its resources to housing disenfranchised people.

But the Cecil shared something in common with the other hotels and many other spots in the City of Angels: a grimy reputation filled with strange, unsettling stories. Santiago had never been one for ghost stories and murder conspiracies, but there was something undeniably peculiar about his employer’s history. How could so many awful things happen in one place?

Within ten minutes of starting his workday, he already had a lengthy to-do list. A litany of small repairs, unremarkable duties, and, frankly, annoying follow-ups. It turns out some people don’t know how to properly operate a faucet. He didn’t know that was possible. It was kind of one of those tasks one internalized into muscle memory after years and years of habit, starting in early childhood, like flipping on a light switch or flushing the toilet.

Yet in the last few days, there had been a multitude of hotel tenants reporting impairments in their showers and sinks. The reports were both consistent and varied. Consistent in that they were coming from all over the hotel at a steady clip, and varied in that the complaints concerned everything from pressure and delayed flow to strange-smelling water, funny-tasting water, and even “dark water.”

He received two complaints from the guest in Room 320, who said the water pressure was too weak to get the soap out of his hair while showering. It wasn’t a first-world problem, of course. And while shower quality is a sanitary condition, it’s hard not to want to make a baby-crying sound when someone complains that they can’t get the soap out of their hair.

The Cecil Hotel is configured in an E-shaped pattern, with a main building flanked by three interconnected wings that, in all, contain 600 rooms. On a usual day, Santiago found himself taking care of business on one wing, then moving on to the next wing, and so on to the next. He consolidated tasks to prevent himself from having to run back and forth to different wings.

Unfortunately, it was mid-morning and he had already visited each wing twice, running around like a chicken with its head cut off. Nothing pisses guests off more than water problems.

In Room 320, he noted impaired water pressure. The tenant glared at him when he was unable to fix it. Santiago said he would return within the hour. He didn’t like leaving tasks unfinished but he’d run through the initial diagnostic list; he couldn’t do anything more until he ruled out larger issues.

Next he took the elevator up four floors and to Room 720, which is serviced by the same water line as 320; in this room, too, the water pressure was impaired.

Walking back down the hall, he felt a prickly sensation in his hands. It was just in his head, he knew, but it always seemed to happen on the 7th and 8th floors. He tried to minimize the amount of time spent on these floors.

Throughout its history, there had been “jumpers.” Guests who committed suicide by leaping out the windows of the hotel. And people were brutally murdered, their killers never brought to justice.

Santiago’s next stop, fortunately, was on the 4th floor. Unfortunately, it was room 451, located in the middle wing. Upon arriving, he realized it was the same room that had been involved in another very strange story from a couple years earlier. A man staying there reported waking up in the middle of the night with the sensation of being violently choked. He came to the front desk trembling and drenched in sweat and said it felt as though an invisible person had gripped his throat. He demanded another room; when he learned one was unavailable, he packed up his belongings and left.

Same room. No choking report, though. Just low water pressure.

Incredibly, this same room had yet another bizarre annotation. The previous year, a young boy by the name of Koston Alderete took a photograph of the outside of the hotel. Upon close inspection, the photo seemed to feature a wispy gray apparition coming out of the window of a 4th-floor room. After studying the configuration of the hotel, Santiago determined that it was the window of room 451, directly three floors below where yet another jumper had committed suicide decades earlier.

There was another water complaint coming from the 9th floor—in an entirely different wing of the building, of course.

The note referencing the complaint just said, “Room 943–water pressure.”

The guest who answered the door was a young woman named Natalie. She seemed unnerved. Santiago ran the tub water. It wasn’t red at the moment but he could see the residual stains left over from earlier.

Usually discolored water is the result of deposits in the pipes. Red would most likely be the result of rust. It can also be sediment stirred up by the water heater. Obviously, that’s not what you want to see, but it’s usually completely harmless.

Santiago told Natalie this and added that he was running tests and that her problem was a top priority. He said he would check back in with her shortly.

“Thank you,” she said, and then as Santiago opened the door to leave, Natalie asked him, “Do you know if anyone has died in this room?”

Santiago stopped in dead silence, staring down at the floor. Then he met her gaze.

“Someone has died in every room here,” he replied.

It was clear now that he would need to inspect the rooftop tanks to ascertain the cause of the problem.

Using his maintenance key, Santiago bypassed the alarm to the rooftop access door on the 15th floor. This alarm, if triggered, would issue a highly unpleasant noise that can be heard across the 14th and 15th floors of the hotel, as well as at the front desk on the first floor. Of course, the noise was only theoretical; the alarm had never been triggered in the time Santiago worked at the Cecil, so he didn’t know what it actually sounded like or if it worked at all.

Besides the emergency fire escapes, the access door was the only path to the hotel’s roof.

In his sworn testimony later given to the Superior Court of the State of California, Lopez confirmed that on the date of his inspection, the rooftop alarm was in working condition before he deactivated it in order to proceed to a flat, gray nondescript slab of concrete. There he observed four 1,000 gallon water cisterns clustered together at the edge of the hotel like cylindrical gargoyles overlooking downtown Los Angeles. A gravity-based system pumped water from a main water line below street level upward into the cisterns, supplying all of the hotel’s drinkable and potable water.

Each tower was ten feet tall and six feet in diameter. Situated on a four-foot platform, accessing, much less servicing them, was not easy. He ascended a narrow ladder to the first platform; to reach it he had to slither between the tanks and plumbing equipment. That brought him to a second ladder that he scaled alongside the tank itself and that delivered him to the top.

The first thing he noticed, he would later testify, was that the lid to one of the tanks was open. Each cistern lid was 18” by 18” and quite heavy. What the hell was it doing open? The police had been on the roof looking for the missing woman—could they have left it open?

Rising to his feet, Santiago dusted off the grime that accumulated on his pants during the climb and took in an eagle-eye view of downtown Los Angeles and beyond—a decollage of shadowy structures under a salmon-colored late afternoon sky crossed and dotted with contrails, drones, and helicopters.

He looked down into the open lid. Recessed in the dark cistern, something caught his eye—a color where there should be none. The color red.

As he later reported to the hotel manager, detectives and court officials, when Santiago looked inside he saw the body of a woman floating face-up in the water, approximately twelve inches from the top. After nearly two weeks submerged, her left eye was bulging and skin slippage had warped her face into something ghoulish. The woman’s clothes, including a red hoodie, floated beside her.