1408- Suicides

“You’re telling me all this just to scare me, Mr. Olin, aren’t you?
To scare me off.”

“Indeed I am not. You know the history of the room, beginning
with the suicide of its first occupant.”

Mike did. Kevin O’Malley, a sewing machine salesman, had taken
his life on October 13, 1910, a leaper who had left a wife and seven
children behind.

“Five men and one woman have jumped from that room’s single
window, Mr. Enslin. Three women and one man have overdosed with
pills in that room, two found in bed, two found in the bathroom, one
in the tub and one sitting slumped on the toilet. A man hanged him
self in the closet in 1970—”

“Henry Storkin,” Mike said. “That one was probably accidental . . .
erotic asphyxia.”

“Perhaps. There was also Randolph Hyde, who slit his wrists,
and then cut off his genitals for good measure while he was bleeding
to death. That one wasn’t erotic asphyxiation. The point is, Mr.
Enslin, that if you can’t be swayed from your intention by a record of
twelve suicides in sixty-eight years, I doubt if the gasps and fibrilla-
tions of a few chambermaids will stop you.”

- 1408, chapter I