Fatal Friends, Deadly Neighbors (38 page)

The University Towers staff was naturally concerned about who might be prowling unseen through the huge hotel, and they were all cooperative. Peck said that he and Morris Babani, the desk clerk, had heard noises coming from the mezzanine just before the fire was discovered.

“We thought at first that the sounds were coming from our catering division, cleaning up after one of the banquets,” Peck said.

But the noises had increased, and Rodger Peck said he had gone up the north stairs to the mezzanine—the same stairs that Seattle police officer Hanna had taken minutes later—and he had tried the door.

“I tried the door but I couldn’t get it open.”

Oddly, this was the same door that Hanna had opened with ease, although the door was very hot to the touch when he reached it.

“I went back to the lobby,” the security guard continued. “I took the elevator back to the mezzanine, went through another door. As I walked out of the elevator, I could see black smoke seeping from the top of the fire door into the hall. It was then that I shouted to Morris that there was a fire.

“I ran back to the fire door, got the fire extinguisher, and tried to put out the flames. It’s full of dry chemicals and they’re supposed to work—but they didn’t.”

Peck recalled that he’d looked into the mezzanine room and had seen one large ball of fire.

“I had no choice then but to shut the door.”

Jack Hickam wondered at the time lapse. He found it difficult to believe that there could have been such an involvement in flames within forty-two minutes—between 11:30
P.M.
and 12:12
A.M.,
when the firefighters from Battalion 6 arrived to fight the fire in the mezzanine. The carpet in the mezzanine room had two pads—one hair and one rubber—which would account for the heavy, black smoke that clogged the stairwell. The type of accelerant used, if any, would be difficult to detect; the room was completely destroyed by fire.

Hotel lobbies are natural draws for what Washington State law enforcement personnel call a “220” or “219 and a half” and California police term “51-50s.” These are the unfortunate individuals with mental aberrations that lead them to march to the proverbial tune of a different drummer. Some are homeless; some simply enjoy sitting in public libraries, parks,
and
the lobbies of posh hotels whiling away their time.

Security guards are always on the alert to spot mentally disturbed people who are an annoyance or a threat. Most of them aren’t.

The University Towers was no exception with its roster of somewhat bizarre people to look out for.

Rodger Peck had run across many of them. He told Jack Hickam a few of the more recent encounters. He wasn’t sure of the exact date, but sometime between the second and third fires, he had found a little old lady sleeping at the top of a service stairway that led from the fifteenth floor up to the penthouse.

“Can you describe her?” Hickam asked.

“She was just a little old lady. She told me that she was about forty-five or forty-six, but she looked a lot older than that. She said she had no place to stay and that she had been sleeping here in the hotel for quite some time. But I never found her before.”

Peck felt sorry for her because it was storming outside, but he told her she couldn’t stay up there. The penthouse was very posh. An early owner of the Meany Hotel, Evro M. Becket, had lived up there for thirty years until his death in 1960. Now it was occupied by very wealthy guests who wouldn’t be happy to find a bedraggled street person on their doorstep.

Rodger Peck explained that she would have to come down to the lobby, but she could sleep on a couch there until morning.

“Then I told the desk clerk on duty about this old woman and I said she was on her way down. But fifteen minutes passed, and we saw no sign of her,” he continued. “When I went back to check on her, she was gone. I looked all over the hotel for her because I knew she didn’t come down on the elevator. I finally saw her coming out of the Regent Room on the mezzanine. She told me she’d come down the back stairway—and that’s where the fire was later.

“When I got off work in the morning, she was still sitting in the lobby.”

The security guard said he had talked to her while she was in the lobby. “She didn’t make much sense. I never saw her again.”

Desk clerk Morris Babani told Bill Hoppe about another character who’d showed up at the Towers.

“On the night of March tenth,” he said, “I was working at the desk at nine thirty when a man came in and asked me for some writing paper. He was about fifty, white guy, with a stocky build, gray hair, and he had a short, full white beard. He wore an army surplus green raincoat, and he had no socks on—only tennis shoes with the toes cut out. He was definitely not our usual Towers guest.

“He went over to the desk in the corner of the lobby that the guards use and started writing a letter.”

Rodger Peck came on duty at 10
P.M.
After he’d made his first round, he’d stood at the desk and talked with Babani because the stranger was using his desk.

“I saw the man mail some letters in the hotel mailbox,” Babani said. “Then I lost sight of him for a while.

“Rodger made his rounds at eleven thirty and reported to me that he found the doors open in 1109 and 1110. He was surprised at that because he said he’d already checked the rooms out and found they were okay. He locked the doors and continued his rounds.”

Around 11:30, the oddly attired man came in the front door again and began making calls on the pay phone that was about twenty feet from Babani’s station. “I could hear him making calls to hotels and asking about room rates,” the clerk said. “He came over at one point and asked me for change for the phone.”

Morris Babani was growing nervous about the way the man was acting. “I looked over and saw that Rodger wasn’t sitting at his desk in the lobby. This guy made some more calls, and then he asked for more change. I told him he would have to go downstairs to the bar. He did, and came right back up to the pay phone.

“Rodger came from the back of the lobby while this man was still using the phone. I asked him where he’d been, and he told me he had slipped around the corner so he could watch this guy without him knowing it.”

“How long was Rodger gone?” Bill Hoppe asked.

“Oh, not long. He wasn’t out of my sight for ten minutes at the most.”

Babani was sure that Peck hadn’t used the elevator, because he would have seen him.

“I told Rodger not to leave me alone in a situation like that one again. The way the guy with the beard was acting, I was afraid he was off his rocker, or maybe was planning to rob me. I was relieved to see him go, but I didn’t notice which direction he went.”

The desk clerk recalled that he and Peck had talked for a few minutes—and it was then that they heard noises from the mezzanine “like chairs being stacked. Rodger asked me if he should go and check and see what it was. I said, ‘No,’ that it was probably just Olaf that worked in catering.”

But moments later, they heard more noise—this time like breaking glass and something “popping” from the mezzanine. Peck had seemed anxious to check out the noise, and as it grew in intensity, Babani said, “Go check it, Rodger.”

Peck had headed toward the stairs and thirty seconds later called to Babani that there was a fire. Officers Hanna and Viegas had walked into the lobby at almost the same moment.

Babani also told Inspector Hoppe that Peck thought he recognized the man with the “open-toed” shoes as the same man who had “attacked him with an axe” a month before as he walked on a nearby street.

“Rodger asked if I thought I should call 911. I told him it was up to him—but he didn’t call,” Babani said.

Beyond the “little old lady” and the stranger with the white beard, the president of the corporation that owned the University Towers came up with yet another suspect.

“It was about a week before the last fire,” the CEO said, “when I spoke with our employees in the Tally Ho Lounge downstairs. They told me they had been approached by a well-dressed man about thirty years old.

“He said he was a fire marshal and wanted to see our insurance papers. When they asked to see his ID, he said he didn’t have to show them anything because he was an
Oregon
fire marshal.

“That made the bartender suspicious, and he refused to show any papers to the ‘fire marshal.’

“The guy got huffy and said that maybe the police should be called in. That was just fine with our people and they said that was a good idea.

“They were leading this stranger to the office off the lobby,” the CEO said. “But, when they passed the desk, the ‘Oregon fire marshal’ kept walking—straight out the front door. He got into a 1970 or ’71 bright red Chevrolet and he drove away so fast that his tires squealed.”

“What did he look like?” Bill Hoppe asked. “Did they get a name?”

“Let me check—they wrote it down for me. “Six feet, one inch tall, clean-cut, wore a three-piece suit, tie, and a camel’s hair overcoat with leather trim,” the head executive said. “Oh—and they got a license number on the Chevy.”

A check on the license number with the Department of Motor Vehicles showed that the car was registered to a man with an address in Seattle’s north end. The car, which was financed through a Tigard, Oregon, company, matched the description of the red Chevrolet.

There was more. The registered owner’s records had a red flag. Evidently he had a penchant for violent rages; he was known to erupt without any warning that he was about to attack.

The warning noted: “Carries hatchet under his left arm in a holster—also hunting knife in same place.”

The fake fire marshal had a rap sheet listing arrests as far back as 1969 for narcotics possession, traffic violations, and DWI. Inspector Bill Hoppe scratched his head as he read about the stranger. He had resisted arrest in each case. His last arrest had involved a high-speed chase after he had single-handedly wrecked a Ballard area restaurant, and his car had finally hit a pole.

No one had seen this man in the Towers since the night of the phony fire marshal incident. More important, he was able to prove his whereabouts on the night of March 10–11; he was miles away from the University Towers.

There was certainly no dearth of odd suspects. The University Towers Hotel was beginning to sound like it was Grand Central Terminal for weird characters.

Even so, the Marshal 5 investigators kept mulling over Rodger Peck’s story. He always seemed to be Johnny-on-the-spot when the fires were discovered. They knew from long experience that the “hero” in a series of fires is often a prime suspect. And when they reviewed an assault complaint filed by a maid in the hotel three days before the first fire, it didn’t add much to Peck’s credibility.

The pretty young woman—Bernadette Casey*—told Inspector Fowler that she finished cleaning the rooms assigned to her on December 28 about 5
P.M.
The weather was blustery and frigid, and she lived some distance from the University Towers.

“I had to be to work really early the next morning,” she said. “They were nice enough to let me sleep in an empty room in the hotel.”

“Did you know Rodger Peck?” Inspector Fowler asked. “Did you talk to him earlier in the day?”

She shook her head. “No. I didn’t speak to him during the day or that evening—but one of the other girls told me that he was asking who I was. I just started working at the Towers.”

At 2
A.M.,
Bernadette had retired to room 509. “I watched TV for a while and then I fell asleep,” she said. “I’m a really sound sleeper. But I woke up around five 
A.M.,
and somebody was standing beside my bed. They were hitting me on the head with a hard object. I lifted my hand to protect my head, and somebody hit me again. I was really scared.

“Then I started screaming, and the person who was hitting me stopped and ran out of the room.”

“Was it a man or a woman?” Fowler asked.

“A man. I saw him outlined in the doorway. He was about five foot eight or nine. I got out of bed and followed him. I don’t know what I thought I could do. I watched him as he ran down the hallway toward the center stairway.”

Bernadette said she had seen her assailant in profile for a second as he turned toward the doorway. It was light in the hallway.

“He was African-American—or maybe Hispanic,” she said as she closed her eyes to bring back what she saw that night. “He had short hair, and he wore a light blue shirt and navy blue or black trousers. He wasn’t wearing a coat.”

“Did you recognize him as someone you had seen before?”

“I think he looked like one of our security guards,” she said quietly. “The one named Rodger.”

With the first shock over, Bernadette had still been very afraid. She called down to the desk and in less than five minutes, two other maids and Rodger Peck came to her room.

“He seemed awfully nervous—he was kind of trembling,” the maid said. “His voice was really high-pitched. Maybe it’s always like that. I don’t know.”

Bernadette Casey said Peck had actually told her that he knew she suspected him, even though she hadn’t said anything like that. He hastened to explain to her that he had been down in the lobby.

She couldn’t be sure that Rodger was the person who attacked her, and Bernadette didn’t want to accuse the wrong man. She chose not to file charges.

Peck’s association with the University Towers hadn’t been entirely smooth. He had been reprimanded on occasion for sleeping on the job. On the night of the March 6 fire in room 904, a memo to Peck was waiting for him in an envelope on the night manager’s desk. Ralph Jefferson had intended to give it to Rodger, but he forgot about it when the security guard first came on duty. After the excitement of the fire, he remembered it, but when he looked for it, it was gone.

The memo had been a warning for Rodger. It said that if he didn’t “shape up,” he would be fired.

Was it possible that Peck had found the note, and become angered enough at the hotel management to torch a room?

None of the other employees who had access to the night manager’s desk was aware that memo existed. The arson inspectors felt that if anyone other than Peck had taken it, the hotel grapevine would have rapidly circulated gossip that Peck was in trouble.