“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.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
“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?”