“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.”
“You mind if I try?” Mike asked.
“If you think you can get it to work, be my guest.”
He twisted and turned his hand, but the lock wouldn’t give. “This won’t open it,” he said. “Don’t you have a master?”
“I don’t think so,” Sorenson said. “Haven’t you seen enough? Or will you let me call one of the custodians tomorrow and see if we can get you in?”
“I’d really like to have a look,” Mike said, turning his side to the door and throwing his weight against it.
Jillian Sorenson let out a yelp when she saw Mike’s movement. “Don’t!”
But he had already launched his assault. The dry wood cracked and split as the two women gasped. The lock didn’t give, but Mike reached in through the hole he’d created in the splintered panel and opened the door.
The room was very much like the first three-a single bed, a nightstand, a bureau, and a window with a glorious view of Central Park.
But there were also signs of life.
There were footsteps-large ones-imprinted on the dusty surface of the floor. There were two cardboard coffee containers, both empty, resting on the windowsill, along with a wax paper wrap that looked like it had once held a sandwich lying open on the floor below the sill. It looked as though someone had nested here for a while, leaving a few pieces of yellowed newspaper and other fragments of a transient life resting on a paper bag in the far corner.
Mike held out his arm so that neither woman could enter the room. “Get a team up here,” he said to Mercer. “Maybe there’s something unique in the shoe prints. And there’s certain to be DNA on the coffee cups.”
Someone had stood in this very window, watching Angel’s body being removed from the Lake, exactly one week ago this morning.
“I’m going to ask you again, Ms. Sorenson,” Mike said. “Who’s got access to this room?”
She held out both hands, dangling the chains. “I’ve got no idea. Someone’s obviously changed the keys.”
Bernice Wicks looked frantic. “I’m so sorry to make trouble, Miss Jillian. Last time this happened it was my fault.”
“Let’s not discuss that, Bernice.”
“It was my Eddie, that time. I gave the key to him-”
“Bernice!” Jillian Sorenson’s single-word reprimand echoed in the gloomy corridor.
“Who’s Eddie?” Mike said.
“My son. Eddie’s my boy.”
The frightened housekeeper had talked about the fact that he used to stay here during his childhood when she had to work late nights or weekends. Perhaps he’d been back here more recently.
“He’s not a boy, Bernice. Eddie’s fifty-nine years old. Stop babbling, will you?”
“Can’t be him who was here anyway,” she said, trying to force a smile. “Poor Eddie’s been away almost a year now.”
“Away?” I asked, trying to calm her. “Where is he?”
“We had him committed, ma’am. Rather, I had him committed,” Bernice Wicks said, looking over to Jillian Sorenson. “Civilly, that is. He didn’t do anything to anybody but himself. He’s in the psychiatric ward at Bellevue Hospital.”
TWENTY-NINE
“Eddie Wicks has spent a good deal of his life in mental institutions,” Jillian Sorenson said. “Private ones, mostly. Paid for, most generously, by Lavinia Dalton.”
Mike and I were sitting in the living room of the Dalton apartment with Sorenson and Bernice Wicks, who was wringing a linen handkerchief between her trembling hands. Mercer had remained on the ninth floor, trying to get a Crime Scene crew to go over the small room, looking for evidence.
“The new lawyers are interested in conserving more of Miss Lavinia’s money. This time Eddie’s in Bellevue.”
“Blue-papered?” Mike asked.
“Sorry?”
“An involuntary commitment?”
The form authorizing involuntary hospitalization had long been done on blue paper, and those two words had become synonymous with the process.
“Yes,” Sorenson said.
“For what reason?”
“Must we do this in front of Bernice?” she asked.
“Bernice is more forthcoming than you seem to be. If her son had new keys made a year ago, then they might have been stolen by someone or passed on by him. I’m not looking to add to her woes-or to his.”
Jillian Sorenson nodded. “May I tell them, Bernice?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Eddie Wicks is bipolar, Mr. Chapman. Are you familiar with that condition?”
“Somewhat. Tell me about his case.”
“When Bernice first started working here with Miss Lavinia, Eddie was an adolescent.”
“Fourteen,” the housekeeper said, her small body almost enveloped by the oversized wing chair. “I came here in 1968.”
That was three years before Baby Lucy’s kidnapping.
“His father-Bernice’s husband-had taken his own life a year earlier,” Sorenson said. “She told you yesterday that he had passed away. In fact he was a suicide.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said to Bernice.
“Nobody called it a disease back then. Just said it was depression. But he jumped out the window of our apartment in Queens, right in front of me and Eddie.”
Not even the handkerchief could slow the tears that were falling.
“Miss Lavinia recognized that Bernice and her children needed help. Eddie most especially. She got him a wonderful psychiatrist, who diagnosed bipolarity by his midteens,” Sorenson said. “Although experts still don’t fully know its cause, there is certainly a view that it runs in families. That it’s congenital.”
“Did Eddie go to school?” I asked.
“My son’s very smart, ma’am. He’s very well educated and accomplished.”
“Yes, Ms. Cooper,” Sorenson said. “Eddie’s quite intelligent. He was mainstreamed throughout school, at his psychiatrist’s insistence, and he handled it well. Eddie got a Regents scholarship to one of the SUNY colleges. He’s a mechanical engineer. Smart and accomplished.”
But wounded, I thought. Damaged, like the people our murdered girl liked to collect.
“And why the institutionalizations?” Mike asked. “Did they start when Eddie was a teenager?”
“The behavior did, but nothing that required hospitalization.”
“How did it manifest itself?”
Again, Jillian Sorenson took the lead. “The mood swings were extreme. Eddie’s older sister couldn’t handle him alone at home, of course, which is why he spent more and more time here. Upstairs, in fact, in that little room.
“When he was in a manic phase, he had enormously high energy levels. There were times he was extremely happy. He’d go out into the Park for hours on weekends, and we’d hardly see him. Or he’d roam about the corridors up here late at night, looking for things to do.”
“That was a good thing,” Bernice added. “There was always something for him to amuse himself with in all these little rooms. The other staff were awfully good with him, too. Except for the tantrums.”
“That’s the manic side of it,” I said. “I’ve had a lot of cases with teenagers. The swings from the great highs to the irritability and temper tantrums of the lows.”
“Yes, ma’am. Eddie sure had those.”
“Did he ever act out sexually, Mrs. Wicks?”
“What?”
“A lot of the young men with a bipolar condition-well, they begin to use very sexual language, inappropriate language. Touch their own genitals a lot,” I said, thinking of Baby Lucy and how she loved to play on the ninth floor. “They often come on to others in a sexual way.”
“Not my Eddie.” Bernice Wicks seemed shocked by the very idea. “Not my son.”
“I want to know how Eddie wound up in Bellevue,” Mike said, getting us back on point.