Death Angel (23 page)

“Are you expected, sir?” the young housekeeper asked when she opened the door to Mike, Mercer, and me.

“No, ma’am. I’d like to see Ms. Sorenson,” Mike said.

“She’s not in at the moment.”

“We’ll wait,” he said, trying to charge past the petite woman.

“I’m afraid I can’t admit you until she returns.”

“How is Miss Dalton doing today?” I asked.

“Very well, thank you.”

“Perhaps I could just talk with her for a few minutes? The gentlemen can wait in the living room.”

The housekeeper didn’t know how to respond.

“She invited us to stop back,” I said. “She really did.”

“But you’re police, aren’t you? You’re not going to agitate her with talk about Lucy?”

“I won’t do that. I promise.”

Reluctantly, she pulled back the heavy door and let us in. I motioned to Mike and Mercer to stay put and let the housekeeper lead me through to the dayroom. This time, Lavinia Dalton was sitting in a wing chair, wearing a long-sleeved dress with a chenille sweater around her shoulders. Her cheeks were rouged, her hair had been curled, and the sapphire suite of jewels had been replaced by pink stones on her fingers and earlobes. She looked as though she might have been expecting the Duchess of Cambridge.

Again there were two nurses attending the elderly woman, one of whom had been working on our earlier visit. I introduced myself, and they offered me the chair opposite Lavinia’s sunny window seat.

“Hello, Miss Dalton. I’m Alexandra Cooper.” Although her eyes looked bright, it was obvious she had no recollection of seeing me just a day before.

“Pleasure, my dear. Is Archer keeping you waiting?”

“No, ma’am,” I said, returning her warm smile with one of my own. “I just came to talk with you.”

“How lovely.”

One of the nurses spoke over my head. “Miss Lavinia’s very happy today. After lunch, we’re going to take a walk in the Park,” she said, pointing to the wheelchair. “It’s her very favorite thing to do.”

“It’s one of my favorite things, too.”

I had just promised not to ask questions about the heartbreak of Baby Lucy’s disappearance. But here was a perfect opportunity—without Sorenson’s censorship—to see what nuggets Dalton’s long-term memory had that might give us guidance.

“Where do you like to go inside the Park?” I asked.

“Gardens, my dear. I love the gardens. But they’re so far away I can never get to them.” She looked out the window so wistfully.

The nurse spoke. “Don’t you remember, Miss Lavinia? We went with the car to the Conservatory Garden just last week. It was all so beautiful.”

“Yes, yes, it was,” Dalton said. But I had no good reason to believe her mind had been able to capture that recent memory.

“Do you like the Carousel?” I asked.

She lifted a hand—such a fragile-looking wrist, encircled by gold bangles—and pointed. “Since I was a child, dear, I’ve loved the Carousel. You can see it there, can’t you?”

It was just south of the 65th Street Transverse, and I was able to see the roof of the building, which was more than a hundred years old.

“Do you know, dear, that the first time I rode that Carousel,” Lavinia Dalton said, perking up as she talked with her hands, expressively and so clearly in the moment of a long-ago time, “it was powered by a live animal? And I couldn’t see him anywhere, but I could hear the noises he made. The neighs of a real horse.”

“How funny.”

“You don’t believe me, do you?”

“Of course I do.” I had no idea what she meant.

“When Miss Lavinia was a little girl,” the nurse said, “the Carousel wasn’t run on electricity, like it is now. And in a hole beneath the platform where the beautiful painted horses sit . . . Am I right, Miss Lavinia?”

“You’re exactly right. The poor animal was in a hole in the ground.”

“There was actually a live mule, chained to a harness, which is what made the Carousel go around.”

“And the operator who took our nickels, he would stamp his foot, and that’s how the mule knew when to start and stop the Carousel,” Lavinia said. “I bet you didn’t know that, young lady.”

“You’re absolutely right, Miss Dalton.” But now I knew she had a sharp image and details of something that had happened more than eight decades ago.

She reached for her cane and asked the nurse to help her to her feet so she could stand and look out the window, leaning her other arm on the windowsill.

“And there’s the Lake where I used to ice-skate. And rowboats, of course. I was courted in rowboats, even though my father didn’t allow it.”

“That must have been fun.”

“More fun than you can imagine. And worth the paddling I’d get from time to time. Come stand beside me, missy.”

I moved next to her.

“This is my home,” she said to me, looking up to make sure I was taking it all in. “And when I was a little girl, my father used to tell me that he built this Park just for me. The sheep grazed in the meadow right below my bedroom. At night, with my windows open, I could hear the noise from the band shell. John Philip Sousa and all his marches. There’s an angel—a glorious angel right over there. Do you know her?”

“The Angel of the Waters,” I said.

“She was there to look out for me,” Lavinia Dalton said, grasping my hand in hers. “I believed that, you know? She’s my very own angel.”

A death angel, to be sure.

“I was glad other people loved the Park, of course. But I was so badly spoiled, missy, that I actually believed it was all designed for me.”

Lavinia Dalton grew tired quickly. She reached out her arm to the nurse, who stepped her backward and reseated her in the chair.

“Did you ever play in the rooms upstairs?” I asked. “When you couldn’t go to the Park, when the weather was foul?”

“The gymnasium?” she asked, clutching the ornate silver handle of the cane between her hands. “There’s a wonderful gymnasium upstairs.”

“No longer, Miss Lavinia,” one of the nurses said. “It’s not there anymore.”

“There weren’t many children in this building when I was growing up. And that was the only place to meet them. There’s the croquet court and the tennis, too, downstairs.”

“Gone a long time,” the nurse said, shaking her head at me.

Lavinia Dalton was so firm in her insistence of describing the past that she tapped her cane on the thickly carpeted floor. “Papa objected to my doing sports, so it was hard for me to play with the others at croquet. But the gymnasium was on the tenth floor, and there was the great dining room up there as well.”

“Dining room?”

“Oh, yes, missy. A grand hall where all the families could eat if it was their cook’s day off, or there was company.”

The nurse shrugged her shoulders and gave me a look that suggested she didn’t know whether Lavinia’s memories were sound.

“We hardly ever went there—public rooms—because Papa had such a fear of germs. Immigrants and their plagues, he used to say. Never wanted me mixing with other children, for fear they were being raised by foreigners who brought every illness with them from Europe.”

“The tenth floor?” I asked. “I didn’t know the Dakota had a tenth floor. I was hoping you’d tell me about the ninth floor.”

She looked at me with a mischievous grin, almost whispering. “You won’t tell Papa, will you?”

It was as though she had taken a literal step back into the past.

“It’s wondrous up there”—talking in the present tense, as though she still visited the servants’ quarters. “It’s my happiest place to play, when I have to be indoors.”

The nurses both seemed bemused, as though they had heard this all before.

“Why is that?” I asked.

“I’ll take you up when I’m feeling stronger, missy.”

“Tell me why you like it up there.”

“Don’t you always like best the places you aren’t allowed to go?” Lavinia Dalton said, with a conspiratorial grin. “I certainly do.”

“It was staff quarters, you understand,” one of the nurses said.

“Papa doesn’t like me to be with some of the common people,” she said, then waved her hand in the direction of one of the nurses. “Not them, you see. These girls are professionals. Papa’s nurses always have rooms in the house, don’t you, dears?”

“But the cook and—?”

“And the housemaids and the laundress and the chauffeur, well, they’ve got all these wonderful nooks and crannies upstairs,” Lavinia Dalton said. “And they’re all wee and such.”

“Wee?” I asked.

“The rooms are small, not all ostentatious like this, missy. Nothing in them a child can break or damage. Nobody to tell you to keep away from the porcelain or not to put your fingers on the windowpane. No one to remind you the carpet came from Kathmandu and the vase is Ming dynasty.

“Somebody always has sweets up there for me, and a child of their own sneaked in from home if they had to work a holiday or weekend. A child I could play with to my heart’s content and then run downstairs to Papa the minute my nanny hears that Papa has come home.”

“It sounds wondrous indeed, Miss Dalton. And who’s up there now?”

That was a major gaffe. I wanted to know about the present day—about the figure in the ninth-floor window that appeared in the photograph—but Lavinia Dalton was in another place, happily reliving moments from her childhood.

“There’s no one up there now, Ms. Cooper,” Jillian Sorenson said, startling me out of my seat. Her footsteps had been muffled by the thick Oriental carpet, and I hadn’t heard her approaching. “Nothing but a bunch of dark and dusty rooms.”

“What, Jillian?” Lavinia asked, as though snapped back to today. “What’s dusty?”

“Nothing at all to trouble you, Lavinia,” Sorenson said. “Miss Cooper has to be leaving now.”

“Yes, yes, I do.” That was the first moment at which I noticed the older housekeeper, Bernice Wicks, standing behind Jill Sorenson.

“It’s a beautiful day, Lavinia,” Sorenson said. “Take a rest and then you’ll go to the Park for an hour.”

I was walking past Dalton’s social secretary. “How rude of you to take advantage of Lavinia when I wasn’t here to protect her.”

“I wasn’t trying to take advantage of her at all. A piece of evidence came to our attention this morning and—”

“Evidence about Lucy?” Sorenson asked.

“No, no. About the body found in the Lake last week,” I said, but Sorenson’s remark had done the damage.

“Lucy?” Lavinia Dalton said. She had heard the child’s name loud and clear. “Where’s Lucy?”

The brightness was gone from her eyes, as though a curtain had descended in an instant.

“You’re going to rest for a while, Lavinia.”

“Has she come down from the ninth floor yet? Is Lucy playing up there with Bernice?”

“I’m right here, Miss Lavinia,” Bernice Wicks said, coming around me to comfort her longtime employer. “Been here with you all day.”

The young housekeeper had been right to worry about Lavinia Dalton’s agitation. In my brief visit, I had lifted her from the muddled perception of today’s events to a happy series of memories from her childhood and now landed her in the heartbreaking territory of Baby Lucy’s disappearance. The distress I had caused the kind old woman was conspicuous.

“Lucy must be upstairs playing with the children,” Lavinia Dalton said, an exaggerated tremor now visible in the right hand that she held out to Jillian Sorenson. “You must bring her down to see me. I promised she could go with me to the zoo today.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Don’t give us the boot,” Mike said to Jillian Sorenson as she ushered us toward the door. “We’d like to see the apartments that Miss Dalton owns on the flight above this one.”

“That’s not possible.”

“It’s not only possible, it’s necessary. You’ve got keys?”

“I neither have keys nor the lawyers’ permission to give you access, Detective. We haven’t used most of that space for years. In fact, Miss Lavinia sold several units off to other residents.”

“Most of that space?” Mike asked. “What about the rest of it?”

“I misspoke. We’ve used none of that space recently. It’s not like it was in the old days, Mr. Chapman. We have a very small staff now, and there’s room for all of us here in the apartment. Bernice and I spend a lot of time here, along with the nurses and the other housekeeper. The men—the butler and the chauffeur—are only part-time now, so they go to their own homes.”

“Where on the ninth floor are the units that were sold off?”

“I don’t know exactly.”

“Well, facing the Park? On the north end of the building or the south? Facing the courtyard?”

Bernice Wicks was at the far end of the room. She was standing in the archway, hands folded across her apron. She looked like she was about to burst with information. I remembered that she told us yesterday that she used to spend time in the quarters upstairs, even bringing her son to stay with her when she wasn’t able to be at home.

“Miss Jillian,” she said, “would you like me to answer the questions?”

“That won’t be necessary, Bernice. You might help the nurse with Miss Lavinia’s lunch.”

“What do you prefer, Ms. Sorenson?” Mike asked. “A search warrant or a battering ram?”

“What’s the evidence you’re talking about?” she said without flinching.

“You answer a question with a question. Seem like the battering-ram type to me. Make a note of that, Mercer, will you?”

“And publicity?” Sorenson asked.

“I don’t believe in it. No reason to alert the press.”

“If you had enough evidence for a search warrant, you would have arrived here with it.”

“I thought I’d try a courtesy visit first before letting everyone in the courthouse know we’re doing a drop-in.”

She licked her lips and adjusted her headband. “Which apartment are you interested in?”

“Maybe you didn’t get my point. First I want to know which apartments are still owned by Lavinia Dalton and the family trusts. Then I’d like to know the lay of the land before I—”

Mercer was making his way to the front door.

“Where are you going, my man?” Mike asked.

“There’s a management office downstairs,” he said. “It’s a much smoother way to get where we want to go. Floor plans, records, nobody with something to hide. Time is precious, my good Mr. Chapman.”

“I’d prefer you don’t go to the office,” Jillian Sorenson said. “We don’t need them meddling in our business. Bernice and I can try to figure this out for you.”

“Better attitude,” Mike said.

“Bernice, would you see if there are keys in the kitchen cabinet for any of the ninth-floor rooms?”

The housekeeper scurried off as though she’d been invited to a ball and needed to ready herself to go.

“It’s been so long since I’ve been upstairs,” Sorenson said, seemingly flustered by the thought that we were getting into the rooms one way or another. She began to describe the complex arrangement of rooms, and the sell-off of several in the last few years, with the soaring value of real estate property in Manhattan, and especially after the onset of Lavinia Dalton’s dementia.

“Is there anything in the rooms that belongs to Miss Dalton?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t think much. I believe we left the beds and dressers, that sort of thing. But when we put the silver collection in storage, Bernice and the butler cleaned out much of the property left behind in those rooms.”

Bernice Wicks returned in several minutes bearing an assortment of metal chains with keys extended from them.

“Keys to the kingdom, Mrs. Wicks,” Mike said.

“Oh, yes, sir.”

“Your kingdom?”

She laughed at him. “Once upon a time, Mr. Chapman. It would never happen today that a servant had the best view in the city, but we did.”

“Stairs or elevator?” he asked as we closed the apartment door behind us.

Wicks pointed. “There are service elevators around the corner on each end of the hallway—north and south. We’re not allowed to use the ones for residents, at least not while in uniform.”

“Let’s take the stairs,” he said. “Are you able?”

“It’s good for me to do, the doctor says.”

“Where are they?”

“See the wide door, the last one on the corridor on each end? That would be the staircase.”

The southernmost door was directly opposite the room that once had belonged to Baby Lucy. Mike caught that, too. “Let’s go to the one down there.”

The heavy oak door opened easily. The steps were broad and deep, and we mounted them slowly so that Bernice—grasping the banister tightly, stopping to catch her breath—was able to lead us.

The ninth-floor corridor had an entirely different look than the residential hallway below. The ceiling was much lower than the fourteen-foot apartment height, the walls were a dark-paneled wood, and there was an endless lineup of doors on each side, much closer together than in the grand suites that comprised the eighth floor. There was a claustrophobic, almost sinister feel to the long, silent space.

Bernice stopped still as soon as she reached the first doorway. Jillian Sorenson walked past her, taking the sets of keys from her hand.

“So this line of rooms to your right,” she said, “from this first one all the way to the farthest end—the ones which face Central Park—they were all the property of the Dalton family from the time the building opened.”

“Every one of them?” I asked.

“As I’ve told you, the staff was rather large in those days, and until quite recently,” Sorenson said. “The rooms on the left—well, that’s a bit deceptive. A couple of them are apartments, am I right, Bernice?”

“You are, Miss Jillian. May I?”

“Certainly.”

“The staff quarters, you see, are quite small. Just a few feet across, with a bed and a tiny cabinet for your things. A little sink in the corner. That’s why there are so many more doors up here,” Wicks said, taking a few steps. “Three common baths. All of us on the hallway had to share them, no matter who you worked for. I’ll show you them as we go along.”

“How many altogether?”

“Staff rooms? Probably twenty—and eight of them were Miss Lavinia’s. The Park side, of course. Then keep in mind we had laundry rooms up here, over the courtyard. There were dumbwaiters down to the apartment.”

“Dumbwaiters?” Mike asked.

“Oh, yes, and didn’t the children love those?” she said. “Put in when the place was built so the help didn’t have to carry all the cleaning supplies and heavy linens and such up and down the stairs. Ran all the way to the ground floor. My Eddie hid in one overnight, when he got bored with himself waiting for me to get off work. Scared the wits out of me till Cook found him sleeping there in the morning.”

“Miss Dalton was telling me how she thought it was ‘wondrous’ up here,” I said, looking directly at Sorenson to let her know the direction of our conversation, and that I had not been trying to upset the gracious woman. “Just like Mrs. Wicks just said, that it was a happy place for kids to play.”

Jillian Sorenson almost smiled. “It has always been popular for that.”

“A little too dark and gloomy for my taste,” Mike said.

“We’ll open a few doors and you’ll see how magical it is.”

“Thanks.”

“The first three units on the right were sold to another building resident three years ago. This is a cooperative, of course, so the only buyers allowed are residents, who have already passed the scrutiny of the board. This owner is a well-known screenwriter—thrillers and that sort of thing. Miss Lavinia was very fond of him, although she didn’t much enjoy crime stories, as you might imagine—and so when he inquired about purchasing some of the rooms to create a writing studio, Justin Feldman arranged the sale of these spaces to him.”

“So some of this floor has been remodeled?” I asked.

“Most definitely. A number of the rooms have been gutted by their owners and repurposed. Several on the courtyard side and the back of the building remain big storage closets for their owners, which will all change someday. No one today would use this valuable property—you’ll forgive me, Bernice—for their staff. The rooms may be small, but the Park views will take your breath away.”

“It’s not configured as it was in Lavinia’s day?” Mercer asked.

“Not even the same as when Lucy disappeared, if that’s what you’re getting at,” Sorenson said. “It was a maze of cubbyholes and passageways, staircases to everywhere and to nowhere in particular, hallways restricted to staff and other parts to residents. It was a place to stay when one didn’t want, or need, to be seen, and it was a delightful escape when children wanted to play hide-and-seek with one another—or just be rambunctious.”

The fourth door, Wicks showed us, was unlocked. It was a bathroom, recently renovated, that had the necessary toilet facilities and several shower stalls.

“Four more, is it, Bernice?”

“Six, Miss Jillian.”

“Six more rooms still belong to Miss Lavinia.”

She searched the bale of keys until she found one with a tag that corresponded to the brass number above the doorknob. The door opened, and she and Wicks waited in the hallway while Mercer, Mike, and I went in.

The room was tiny, spare, and almost monastic in appearance. Mercer’s head nearly reached the ceiling. There was a single bed—a very old metal headboard painted white supporting a bare mattress with sagging springs. There was a plain bedside table and a primitive bureau, with two photographs of Dalton railroad cars hanging slightly ajar on the wall. The room had been stripped of all else, and a layer of dust covered all the surfaces.

But when I stepped to the window, it was as though the shabby room might have been within a palace. Spread out beneath me was most of Central Park, from a vantage point low enough to make out people on the ground, but high enough to see the great expanse of the magnificent green playground of the island of Manhattan.

The three of us took turns practically pressing our noses against the window, spellbound by the views it offered. Behind us, Bernice was apologizing to Sorenson for allowing so much dust to gather.

“So sorry, Miss Jillian. I haven’t gotten up here in months. I didn’t see the need, really.”

“I didn’t either. You’ve got nothing to be sorry about.”

They waited until we’d had our fill of gawking and locked the door behind us. Sorenson found the key to the second room, and we peered inside, with identical results.

“Have you ever spent much time at the Dakota stables?” Mike asked her as she matched the third key to the lock.

“I’ve been there, Detective. And for a while I garaged my own car there, but the chauffeurs have always had the responsibility for dealing with that part of our life.”

“Ever heard of an African American community called Seneca Village?”

“No, Mr. Chapman. Where is it? Why do you ask?”

The third and fourth rooms had stacks of cardboard boxes labeled
BANK RECORDS
and
FAMILY CORRESPONDENCE
—all dated from the 1940s and 1950s.

“Something else we found in the Park is all. A small object that might have come out of an old church,” Mike said. “A guy who worked at the garage when he was a teenager claims it was his.”

“Does it have any significance to what you’re investigating?” Sorenson asked.

“Not likely.”

The fifth room, which was much farther down the hallway, separated from the others by several units that had been sold and by another common bath area, was crammed with Dalton family sports equipment. There were a few sleds, half a dozen pairs of very old cross-country skis, snowshoes, tennis racquets, and croquet sets. It looked like the athletic division of a more modern King Tut’s tomb.

“You mean the fellow who runs the garage?”

“No, no. Actually a homeless man who lives in the Park,” Mike said.

“You don’t mean Vergil Humphrey, now, do you?” Bernice Wicks asked.

I couldn’t have swiveled around any faster to face her.

“In fact, I do,” Mike said. “But you’ve always worked in the house, haven’t you?”

“Bernice,” Sorenson said, “there’s no need to—”

But the words were already out of the older woman’s mouth. “Verge worked in the Dakota when he was a boy,” she said. “Helped the handymen with the trash and all that.”

“The guy at the garage told us yesterday that Verge had nothing to do with the Dalton staff.”

“He didn’t really,” Bernice Wicks said. “But he couldn’t keep his hands to himself, that boy. He didn’t last very long here. His father had them hire him over at the garage before he got fired from this job, so maybe that’s why they didn’t know he worked here first. It’s not like they were ever going to get a good reference for him from the staff here.”

“Is there anything you don’t know about this building, Bernice?” Mike said. “I might put you on retainer.”

“You’re a flatterer, Mr. Chapman,” Wicks said, exchanging her warm smile for a look of profound unhappiness. “I know most of the Dakota’s secrets. The one I’d have given everything to figure out, though, that’s never come to pass.”

Jillian Sorenson wiggled the key in the lock of the sixth door.

I could see from the length of remaining hallway—one door left on this side—that the room we were about to enter was the one in which the outline of a figure appeared in the Panoscan photograph. Mike winked at Mercer and me, nodding as he did. The fingers of his right hand were already running through his hair.

“Bernice,” Sorenson said, “did anyone change the lock? I can’t seem to get this one to open.”

“No, Miss Jillian. No one’s been up here at all, to my knowledge.”

She held the key up again and put on her reading glasses to check the number. “It’s the right one, but it won’t seem to turn.”