“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.”