“She’s got the staff on a short leash, I think,” Mike said. “I wonder if it’s Sorenson or the lawyers who’ve tightened up on the spending. If Eddie Wicks has been in private facilities for all his other hospitalizations, Bellevue might be its own form of shock treatment.”
Mike had cut to the east on 34th Street. I recalled for him, from my English lit lessons, the writers who’d made it through Bellevue’s psych services. Eugene O’Neill was sent there after a suicide attempt, Malcolm Lowry battled his alcoholism as an inpatient, and Norman Mailer had a stay after stabbing the second of his four wives.
We parked and entered the building, where I’d spent many hours doing competency hearings for defendants-like Raymond Tanner-who were in the prison wing of the hospital. I pointed to the sign for the administrative offices, and we walked down a linoleum-lined hallway until we reached the glass-paned door.
The secretary took our names and asked for our identification. When she came back, she told us that Dr. Hoexter, the director of the psychiatric unit, would see us.
Herman Hoexter’s office was a large room, full of metal desks and file cabinets, without character or style but clearly the professional home of a busy man.
“How can I help you?” he asked. “I presume you’re here about a prisoner.”
“Actually, no,” Mike said. “It’s about a guy who was blue-papered last summer. No handcuffs, no penal law violations. We think he can assist us with an investigation that’s stalled.”
“Let me see if I can help,” Hoexter said, turning to his computer. “What’s his name?”
“Edward or Eddie Wicks. Male, Caucasian, about fifty-nine years of age.”
Hoexter typed the name and waited for it to come up on the screen. I watched the doctor’s expression change as he read the information.
“I’m glad all you needed was some help from him, Mr. Chapman. I’m afraid Eddie Wicks is lost.”
“Lost?” I said. “You mean he’s dead?”
“No, we lost him-quite literally-in what our staff call the Bellevue diaspora. The horror that was Hurricane Sandy.”
“What’s does that mean, literally?” Mike asked, tapping his fingers on the edge of Hoexter’s desk.
“You may remember that we were one of the hospitals that flooded in the great storm. We had that massive evacuation, which began the night after Hurricane Sandy hit last October, and we had to move five hundred patients out of this building in several hours’ time because our basement and ground floor were underwater. We were completely without power.”
“So they scattered,” I said, “like a colony of people living away from their homeland. Like a diaspora.”
“Yes.”
“I thought most of your patients were accounted for.”
“Most were, Ms. Cooper. But Eddie Wicks? Eddie Wicks got lost.”
THIRTY-ONE
“How do you lose a patient?” Mike asked. “A psych patient, no less, who threatened to kill himself and off his old lady, too?”
“If you calm down, Detective, I’ll remind you.”
The storm that struck the New York metropolitan area on Monday, October 29th, was the largest Atlantic hurricane on record, with a diameter spanning more than 1,100 miles.
“Water had flooded the streets in lower Manhattan that night, and flooded the hospital’s basement as well. Our generator was gone, and we had a pretty desperate mission to make our patients safe. You’re thinking of psych patients, Mr. Chapman, but we also do heart surgery here and deliver babies; we have people on dialysis and ER admissions with brain trauma and life-threatening injuries.”
“I didn’t mean to imply-”
“By the next day, all of our thirty-two elevators had shut down. We lost our ventilators, so we put portable oxygen equipment next to the patients who needed it We ran out of food and we had no drinking water, Detective. But if you stood still for a minute, you could hear a sound like Niagara Falls roaring through the elevator banks as the river water submerged all of our generators. Any of this sound familiar?”
Hoexter had silenced both of us.
“I began to urge that we evacuate, like the NYU and Coney Island hospitals had done before us. And you know what? I received resistance to that idea, even while sleep-deprived nurses were carrying newborns down ten flights, and two of my best docs were helping a triple-bypass patient navigate an unlighted staircase, dragging his oxygen tank behind him.”
“I’m sorry I sounded so critical,” Mike said.
“The NYPD was great. So was the National Guard.” The silver-haired doctor seemed overcome by emotion. “I sat at my desk with a couple of flashlights but no phones, trying to figure out who should be saved first, while ambulances-ambulances by the dozens, organized by FEMA-lined up in front of my hospital and squared the block, two or three times over.”
Those images had been shown on the national news over and over again that evening and in the days to follow. It was an unforgettable scene. Emergency truck after emergency truck, from every hospital and service and department anywhere within an hour’s drive had responded, red lights flashing in the rainy night as they waited to take on patients while the storm surge continued to wipe out all the power in the city’s southern grid.
“I had no idea where these individuals were going,” Hoexter said, reliving the desperation of that moment as he retold the story. “All we knew is that they couldn’t survive here. ICU, the nursery, the coronary care unit-those patients went first. Where we were sending them, God only knew.
“I’m told that when each stretcher arrived at the front of the line, a dispatcher-someone on our staff-had triaged the patient, and the corresponding ambulance made its own determination about which facility-Mount Sinai, Roosevelt, Lenox Hill, Cornell, Columbia Pres-about which one could take that particular person and treat his or her needs.”
“And off they went into the night,” I said.
“Most of them left Bellevue without medical records to accompany them. All of them left with uncharged cell phones because we’d been without power for so long. Neither they nor we had the ability to notify next of kin. And when they walked-or were wheeled-out the door, none of them had the slightest idea where they were going. Nor did we.”
“So you lost patients, literally.”
“Seven of them, Ms. Cooper,” Hoexter said, dropping his head into his hands, elbows on his desk.
“All psych?”
“Yes. All civil commitments. The NYPD got all the criminally insane prisoners out. But Wicks was among the last patients evacuated. He had no urgent medical needs, like the others in his unit,” Hoexter said, checking the notes on the computer. “He’s quite intelligent and really hated being confined. Somehow, in all the confusion of that dreadful night, Eddie Wicks simply put on a rain jacket, followed the others out of the building, and walked away from his keepers.”
Hoexter tapped a button on his keyboard and printed out a photograph of Eddie Wicks. He passed it across the table for both of us to see. I looked at it, then handed the paper to Mike.
I didn’t know the significance of Wicks’s disappearance. Clearly, it shouldn’t have presented the threat to society that the escape of Raymond Tanner did. Wicks was a danger to himself, and possibly to his mother. And maybe Mike’s concern about the figure in the window of the Dakota was legitimate. Maybe Eddie Wicks had returned to his favorite hiding place.
“How about his mother?” Mike asked. “Why does she still think he’s here in Bellevue?”
Hoexter scrolled down through the file. “I don’t know what she thinks.”
“She’s next of kin. Why didn’t she get notified?”
“She may be next of kin,” the doctor said, “but Mr. Wicks is fifty-nine years old. He didn’t want any relatives notified about anything. The head of his team says a lot of his anger is directed at his mother. Bernice Wicks, is that her name?”