Death Angel

THIRTY

It was two o’clock in the afternoon. I checked my phone when we got to the sidewalk and saw that I had a full mailbox, most of the calls originating from Battaglia’s office.

“Where to?” I asked.

“Want to hit Bellevue?” Mike said.

“Exercise in futility.”

“Why?”

“You didn’t get enough double-talk from Vergil Humphrey?”

“Don’t answer a question with a question,” Mike said, opening the car door for me. “This guy isn’t crazy like Verge.”

“No. He’s smart but self-destructive. He hates his mother.”

“He’s spent more time in the Dakota than Minnie Castevet,” Mike said, referring to the eccentric old neighbor played by Ruth Gordon in Rosemary’s Baby. “He’s the maven of the ninth-floor corridor, and he’s responsible for the last change of lock and key.”

“You want to put a name on the shadowy figure in the Panoscan photography. I get it.”

“Maybe Eddie Wicks can help me do it.”

“Let’s go.”

Mike headed south toward First Avenue in the 20s, home of the oldest continually operating hospital in America, founded as a haven for the indigent four years before George Washington’s birth.

“Is Battaglia looking for you?” he asked.

“Seems to be.”

“Ease up on him, Coop. He’s worried about you.”

“He should know that if he can’t find me, it’s unlikely that Raymond Tanner can.” I slumped down in the seat and put my feet up on the dashboard. “Any word from Manny Chirico about the love judge?”

“Nope. If you’re not nicer to me, I might leave you at Bellevue.”

“The place totally creeps me out.” The hospital did great public service work, but the psych facility still remained the most substantial part of its daily business. “I feel badly for old Mrs. Wicks having to kowtow to Jillian Sorenson.”

“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.”