Nancy's mom, Joyce, used to live at the Hamilton Hotel. She was kind of like the "den mother" to the people on the third floor. They used to have a really interesting collection of people residing there, mostly older folks with low incomes, before it was torn down to make the Justice Center, with its marble halls designed to inspire a feeling of awe in the face of Justice, and its quotation from Martin Luther King chiselled into stone in its outer walls. I think Joyce liked working at the Hamilton. She felt needed, appreciated, valuable.

One day the bathroom on the third floor was occupied for so long that people were starting to wonder. It had been like three hours since this guy had gone in there. People started peeping through the keyhole to see what was going on, and it looked like there was indeed a guy sitting on the crapper. Joyce pounded on the door, hollered "hello!" really loudly a couple of times, but there was no response and couldn't get the door open, so she had to call on the guy from maintenance to open the door.

So here's what they saw when they got the door open: there was a guy, looked to be about 25 or 30 years old, sitting on the crapper with his pants down around his ankles. Clutched in one hand was a used syringe, and clutched in the other hand was a huge wad of money. It turned out to be about 1800 dollars. No one had ever seen him before, he wasn't a lodger at the Hamilton.