Water Torture

Regina Colwell, a young provincial legislator with a passion for social justice, is summoned to the scene of a crime: one of her constituents, Norman Water, has been found dead, drowned in the bathtub of a shabby hotel room. Regina's name and phone number were written on the emaciated boy’s hand, though he and Regina had never met. On the walls of the bathroom were long columns of washed-out numbers, like hieroglyphics.

Regina checks into the hotel to investigate this death that the police deem unsuspicious. But the young politician encounters resistance at every turn from the hotel staff. She must wrangle a room for the night from Digger Greenwood, the manager, a myopic accountant, who doesn’t want her to stay. Queenie, the assistant manager, warns her away from the hotel with thinly veiled threats. As Regina interviews the staff about the dead boy, she finds that everybody had a grudge against Norman and were all victim to one of his practical jokes. Yet Regina cannot figure out how or why he died.

As she further investigates, she discovers that The Apartment Hotel is less and more than it seems, and the staff was colluding against their least favorite tenant. It seems that Norman’s jokes were offshoots of his own sense of social justice as he retaliated against them. When Lily the desk clerk short-changed Norman, he hid her credit card machine. When a server embarrassed him, she discovered a large lipstick kiss on the backside of her uniform. When local politicians expell him from the dining room during their prayer breakfast, he doped their meal with a powerful laxative.

Regina continues to search for the truth, and tests the limits of everyone’s patience and every pretense of hotel hospitality. The staff harass her, the same way they harassed Norman. Inadvertently, she recreates Norman’s spiral downwards – Queenie tries to blackmail her; Rose, the maid, tries to cheat her out of money. Assaulted and alone in the room where Norman died, Regina looks at the faded numbers that Norman Water had written on the wall and realizes the dark truth of The Apartment Hotel: Norman had discovered a massive scheme of electoral fraud being organized from inside the hotel, one that involved Regina’s political well-being. Norman’s quest for justice is what led him to try to contact her. It also led to his murder.