Fecal tooth brushing in the naked city

By Frank Moraes

There are eight million stories in the naked city, and this is two of them. The water in the Cecil Hotel in downtown Los Angeles was trickling in. Two British tourists, Michael Baugh and his wife, complained. "What kinda country you got here? You don't know about water pressure?!" So the management checked out the system. The pipes seemed fine. That's when they found an obstruction in the water tank. It was a dead body.

It's a sad story—two sad stories. You see, the people were having trouble brushing their teeth. And if that's not enough, there was that soggy dead dame. She was 21-year-old Elisa Lam from Canada. She was supposedly going to Santa Cruz, which is over 300 miles closer to Canada than where her body was found. There are 60,000 stories in Surf City, and this was not one of them.

The authorities are trying to figure out if her death was the result of an accident or foul play. I wonder—I really do! According to the Associated Press, "The opening at the top of the cistern is too small to accommodate firefighters and equipment, so they had to cut a hole in the storage tank to recover Lam's body."

I'm thinking "accident": she takes the elevator to the top floor; she climbs the stairs up to the roof; she deactivates the alarm and picks the lock on the door; she climbs the later up to the tank and then climbs up the straight sides of it; And then she squeezes into the small hole at the top, because, you know: who hasn't wanted to go swimming inside cistern; but she forgot she couldn't swim and drowned. It's the most likely thing to have happened!

As for the more important story: that poor British couple brushed her teeth with that water. Even more shocking: they brewed coffee with it. Personally, I'd rather be murdered and have my body disposed of in the bottom of some hotel cistern. But the police say not to worry! The only thing to worry about is from fecal material. Apparently, when people die they often defecate. That's right: defecation.

There are eight million stories in the naked city, and two of them have to do with murder and brushing your teeth with the victims feces.

Afterword

Before anyone gets on me: my point is that as creepy as the couple's story is, what most matters is that this young woman was murdered. But the murder alone would not have made the AP.

(Cross Posted at Frankly Curious.)