Columbus Day Pt. 04

Ten years earlier...

8:13 am. A police cruiser is double parked in front of the twenty-two-story Marriott hotel at Broadway and Market Streets in downtown St. Louis. From my fourteenth-floor office across the street, I can see two tiny figures emerge from the car and walk with purposeful strides toward the entrance. The officers disappear into the hotel lobby. I raise my head and look into her room, less than 70 feet away. She is still on the bed, mostly nude and in a fetal position. The man is gone. My hands are shaking. I drop the binoculars.

Eleven minutes earlier, I had walked into my office, closed the door, set my briefcase on the desk, and took a sip of caramel macchiato. I walked to the window overlooking Broadway and Market and scanned the high-rise Marriott hotel for early morning activity. Typically, by 8 am on a Monday, most hotel guests have already left their rooms. Open curtains usually reveal vacancies with unmade beds. Other rooms are shielded with closed curtains or are obscured by the shadow of my building. Sometimes, usually in the afternoon, I can see children jumping on beds or standing on the windowsills, faces pressed to the windows. (I wonder what it would be like to be here at night. The lighting would be perfect.) My office is in a building that is twenty-four stories of mirrored glass—two-way mirrors really. Many guests at this hotel apparently do not think this through. A twenty-four-story mirrored building is all windows. You can't see me, but I can see you. If hotel guests realized this, I wouldn't see women and men standing in the windows, nude, looking at the St. Louis skyline, taking photos of the Gateway Arch.

At 8:03 I saw movement. A white man, long brown hair (dreads maybe), beard, dirty plaid shirt, pushing a woman to the bed, ripping off her robe. He turned her over, doggy style, holding her arms behind her, thrusting violently, mad with lust. She struggled against him, screaming, shaking her head wildly, beautiful red hair whipping back and forth. Then, apparently giving up or going into shock, she went limp. The rapist is unfazed. His rhythm does not change. I look down and begin counting from the concrete patio on the third floor. "Three, four, five," I whisper. "Six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, fourteen. . ." I count over from the left. "Fourteen sixteen, fourteen seventeen, fourteen eighteen. Room 1418. Oh my god."

I pick up the phone on my desk. I dial 9-1-1.

"Emergency nine-one-one. What is your emergency?" The dispatcher's voice belongs to a woman. A smoker, I think. She seems irritated. I pause. She speaks again, this time putting a stress on the word is. "What IS your emergency?"

"Yes. Hello. A woman is being raped at the Marriott hotel on Broadway. Fourteenth floor."

"Sir, how do you know this?"

I pause again. "I can see it from my office across the street. Please send the police."

"OK. Let me understand this. You can see a couple having sex in a hotel, and you believe it is against the woman's consent?" She is unconvinced, dismissive, now even more irritated.

"Yes. Yes! She was screaming, I think, and fighting him. She has gone limp now. But she is still being assaulted. Right now." I look back at room 1418. He continues hammer his body into hers. "Please hurry. This is not a joke." I think I'm sounding like a rational person, but I feel helpless, desperate.

"Sir, how can you..."

I hang up the phone. I call 9-1-1 again, praying for a different dispatcher.

"Hello!? Did you just hang up on me!?" She is angry now.

"I need to speak to someone who will send the police to stop a violent rape. If you won't do it, I will go over there myself. So you need to send the police to stop me from committing a battery on a man with a beard who is raping a woman on the fourteenth floor of the Marriott."

"Hold on." Pause. "Sir, officers are en route. What is your—"

I hang up. It is now 8:06 am. I don't know what to do. I reach for my binoculars. Should I call the front desk? Should I go to her room? How long will it take to get to her? Five minutes? Six? Will the police call me back? Yes, you idiot, they will be calling. I'm a witness, for christsakes. I put the binoculars to my face. At 7x magnification, the scene is sickening. Oh my god. They will want to know how I knew the floor. Shit. They will want to know why I know there is no thirteenth floor. Should I have told them the room number?

I speed-dial the hotel.

"Marriott at Busch Stadium. Front desk. Brad speaking. How can I help you?"

"Room 1418 please."

"What is the name of the guest you wish to speak to, sir?"

"Please just ring the room!"

"Sir for security reasons, I must insist—"

"Security!? If you had decent security, a woman would not be being raped in her room this very minute. Send your security to room fourteen eighteen immediately. Police are on the way."

Click.

Brad hung up on me.

8:16 am. A male police officer is standing in the window of room 1418. He is perhaps looking at his reflection of my office window. I know he can't see me. He looks up, then down at the traffic, then over his shoulder at the woman on the bed. A female office is tending to her. He closes the drapes.