An Unexplained Death by Mikita Brottman

Author:Mikita Brottman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

The Owl Bar, 1934

“So Agora doesn’t employ any secret agents?” I ask him, slightly disappointed.

“No. In fact, Agora themselves circulate such rumors in order to give readers of their otherwise very mundane investment letters the impression that the company is connected to all these underground sources of knowledge.”

“So it’s just a sales tactic,” I say.

“Correct,” says Carlos. “Everything else is nonsense.” He gives me a sly smile. I am not sure what it is, but something about him wins my trust.

* * *

I email Jayne Miller and ask whether I can speak to her again about Rey Rivera’s death. She agrees, and gives me a time to call. A week later, we talk on the phone.

She has no memory of speaking to me before. This is hardly a surprise, considering the number of people she must speak to every day. But I am taken aback to learn that she barely seems to remember the case itself. After we hang up, I realize that, as an investigative journalist, Miller must cover many different stories every month, whereas for me, it is always the same story over and over again. But then I recall the words she used when we last spoke: “This is one of the most mysterious incidents I’ve ever encountered in thirty-five years as an investigative reporter.” Was she exaggerating? If not, how can she have forgotten everything so completely?

When we speak on the phone, Miller tells me that most of her notes on the case come from her conversations with Michael Baier, one of the two homicide detectives initially assigned to investigate Ray Rivera’s death.

Miller recalls that Baier was reassigned because his superiors thought he was spending too much time on the case, investigating it as a homicide when everybody else thought it was a suicide. She noted that Baier thought the story was a lot more complicated than Rey just going off the roof. There is no evidence that he slipped. Rey’s wife knows Baier and has kept in touch with him. She also made a note of the fact that Baier thought it was important that Rey was a movie writer, and that he traveled a lot. Baier, she recalled, thought the case was too overwhelming for the Baltimore police to sort out. She also noted that Rey was a swimmer.

Might he have thought the Belvedere’s swimming pool was still in use?

I sense Miller is short on time. I ask her if she recalls anything else that might be important.

She continues to read aloud from her notes: “Baier thinks Rey’s death may be connected to the Nicaragua situation. Agora was doing some development deal in Nicaragua at the time.”

Then she pauses again.

“I have to be careful here,” she says. “I assume you know about the SEC injunction against Stansberry?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Well, in a news piece I did on the case for WBAL, I made a putative connection between Rivera’s death and the SEC conviction, and right after it aired I got an angry email from Agora’s lawyers.

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