Death Angel

FORTY

I was engulfed by a wave of nausea.

More than forty years had passed since the kidnapping of Lucy Dalton-most likely by someone who knew her, by someone who knew his way around the home in which she lived, by someone who knew his way in and out of all the service entrances and design anomalies of the luxurious Dakota apartment building.

I needed to get out of this burial vault before Eddie Wicks came back for me. I needed to find a way to return Lucy Dalton’s remains to the grandmother who had lived four decades with the uncertainty of the fate of this beloved child.

I closed the lid on the box and went back to the stone wall, redoubling my efforts to clear the blockage and escape. Two of the oversized rocks were out of my way, but there was still not enough room for me to climb up and over the others.

When I reached for the third small boulder and swung it around, I wasn’t able to hold it up. It was much heavier than I’d anticipated and it slipped out of my arms, landing with a thud on top of another one.

Now I could hear Wicks moving above me, padding on his soft-sole shoes in my direction. I was certain he’d heard the commotion I’d created.

I pulled at the next-to-bottom rock but could barely budge it, so I climbed up on it and started to stick my right leg through the opening. I was over the top of the pile, and I was stretching to make contact with solid ground below, but Eddie Wicks had me by the neck.

“Mike!” I screamed. I thought the noise could be heard for miles around. But it was the last thing I got to say before Wicks clamped a hand over my mouth, shoving more dirt inside as he pulled me back onto the floor of the cave.

“I didn’t think you’d come alone.”

“It doesn’t matter what you think. If my friend was still around, he would have followed me in here by now,” I said, spitting out dirt as he tried to keep my head from moving. “We got separated hours ago.”

“Don’t move or I’ll have to hurt you.”

I was struggling against him, pushing at his chest with both arms. I could feel blood trickling down the backs of my legs where they had scraped against the rock surfaces when he dragged me inside again.

Eddie Wicks was about my height and outweighed me by a good thirty pounds. He kneed me in the abdomen this time, more worried now about my flailing arms than about my mouth.

“Let me out of here,” I screamed.

He had more of the same material: a pale-pink gauze that he wound around my hands in a crisscross motion, and then another length that he loosely wrapped-despite my kicking-around my ankles. He knew as well as I did that it couldn’t hold me very long, but I didn’t know what else he had in mind to do to me.

Then Eddie Wicks stood up to assess his handiwork. He backed up, keeping an eye on me, while he refortified his fallen wall. He was so used to this dark interior that he didn’t seem to need anything to illuminate his way around.

That’s when he caught sight of the wooden box, the makeshift coffin that held the child’s yellowed bones. He saw-as I just realized now-that I had not replaced the lid properly, and that it was slightly ajar on top of the box.

He went into a rage, screaming at me-his words bouncing off the walls of the cave-until finally he knelt beside the box and lifted the lid off it completely.

“Why did you have to open this?”

“I-I didn’t open it.”

“You moved it. The box wasn’t open like this before.”

“I didn’t touch it. Maybe I backed into it when the rock fell,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady, on an even pitch. “All I want is to get out of here. Out of your-your life. You have no reason to hurt me, and I have no reason to hurt you.”

I was trying to stretch the gauzy fabric he’d tied me with by pressing my legs apart while Wicks was preoccupied by the thought that I had seen the bones.

He was rocking back and forth on his haunches. “You saw her, didn’t you?”

“Her? All I can see are those silver things and a box. I just want to go home. I didn’t see anyone.”

“You saw the child, didn’t you?” Wicks rose up to full height, turning back to me.

“What child? There’s no child here.”

“My friend,” he said. “That little girl was my friend.”

I didn’t want him to talk. I didn’t care why he had Lucy Dalton’s remains in a box in a cave in the middle of Central Park. I just wanted to see daylight and run as far away from him as I could.

“Don’t tell me anything about it, sir. I don’t-”

“Nobody ever calls me ‘sir,’” he said, smirking at me.

“I’m very squeamish. I-I just want you to let me out of here before I get sick.”

“You’re the only one, then, that doesn’t want to know about the child,” Wicks said. “Why is that?”

“Because I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know anything about a child-and I’m so tired and hungry. Let me out of here and I’ll run and I’ll never look back. I promise you that.”

“The girl was my friend,” Wicks said, coming closer to me. He had picked up another length of the pink gauzy fabric somewhere across the room-perhaps from behind the wooden box-and he squatted beside me, wrapping it around both his fists. “I didn’t have many friends when I was a young man. Do you?”

“A few. Only a few,” I said. But I knew they would do anything for me if they could only find me. I tried to stay confident that they would come back before too long, unless I could get this unhinged madman to let me loose.

“There was someone you called out to when I grabbed you.”

“Not a friend. Just a guy I met on the path today. He loaned me his field glasses to look at the birds.”

“If he’s your friend, he’ll try to find you, won’t he?”

“I’m very shy, really. He’s not my friend. I’ll never see him again.”

“I was seventeen when Lucy died,” Wicks said, jumping around from subject to subject, as though he was unable to hold a thought for very long.

“You were a kid yourself,” I said, trying to be empathetic.

“You’ve heard of her, of course. Lucy Dalton?” he asked.

“No. No, I haven’t. But I’m not from here. I’m-I’m from Wisconsin. I’m just visiting. That’s why if you just-”

“You must be ignorant, young lady. She’s a very famous little girl,” Wicks said, his bug-eyed sneer seeming so sinister in the dark surroundings of the cave. “She was kidnapped a very long time ago. More famous than the Lindbergh baby, people say.”

I couldn’t tell if he was getting madder because I claimed not to know the story of Lucy Dalton, but there was no going back on my decision to play dumb about her.

“Are you the one who-?” I asked. “Did you hurt your friend?”

“That’s a stupid thing to say, isn’t it?” Wicks said, raising his voice as his cheeks reddened. “She was just a little girl, only three years old. I had no reason to hurt her.”

I picked up my head to look at him. “But she died, and-”

“It was an accident. All the brilliant reporters and the police investigators and even the servants who knew me as well as they knew Lucy, they all got it wrong. And I couldn’t tell them the truth because Lucy was with me when she died.”

Eddie Wicks sat on the floor of the cave, just inches away from me. He started to stroke the fabric that was wound around my legs-not my legs themselves but the gauzy cloth. And then he began to cry as he continued to talk.

“We loved this place-this Park. It’s what Lucy and I had in common. The zoo, the Carousel, all the playgrounds. And one day she asked me to take her with me to the Park, to play there in the afternoon.”

The crying stopped. He was angry again. The mood swings were violent and abrupt.

“We lived in a big house, in a great big house, right near the Park. It was Lucy’s house, and sometimes I felt like it was my house, too. I thought it was the safest place in the world,” Wicks said, now winding the gauze more tightly around his own hands, holding them up in the air like he was playing a game of cat’s cradle.

“I don’t want to know any of this,” I said. I wanted to buy time by talking about almost anything, but I feared that if he disclosed too much to me about Lucy’s death, he would become more determined to do me harm.

“But you can’t go now, dear. That wouldn’t be right. There has to be someone to tell the truth to people after I’m dead, don’t you think?”

“You’re very much alive. And you’ve frightened me horribly. And if the child’s death was an accident, then just let me go and you can tell them that by yourself.”

“I might not be alive for long,” he said. “It’s a terrible burden to live with this.”

“With what? To live with what?”

“Lucy’s dead because of me,” Wicks said. “My father’s dead because of me.”

“How do you mean?”

“I was thirteen when my father jumped out of the kitchen window in our home. I was sitting at a table ten feet away from him, and I didn’t stop him. Do you understand how that made me feel? Do you understand how people blamed me for that-my mother? My sister? How they told me it was my fault?”

“But you were a child yourself. I doubt you could have stopped him,” I said, trying my amateur psychology on a man who’d been through years of treatment, most unsuccessfully. “If he was intent on killing himself-if those were his demons-then he would have succeeded another time whether you stopped him that day or not.”

“But I didn’t even try.”

Survivor guilt, I knew, was a powerful paralytic.

“But the child- Is her name Lucy?” I asked. “You said her death was accidental.”

“Do you think anyone would have believed me at the time? Do you think anyone would have believed that if they had found her little body?”

“I don’t know what people would have thought. You’re a very intelligent man. I’m sure someone- Was your mother alive then?” I asking, feigning lack of knowledge. “I’m sure someone would have believed you.”

“My mother was a housemaid,” he said, baring his teeth as he snarled at me. “Nobody cared what she thought. Even I didn’t care what she thought.”

“I’m sure-”

“It was a day in June when the accident happened. A much cooler day than this one. I was staying in a room above Lucy’s home because my school year had finished. And because I didn’t have any friends to keep company with.”

“Why are you-?”

“Shut up,” Wicks said as he pulled on my restraints. “I told Lucy I’d take her to the Park. I promised her, even though no one would have allowed me to do that. To them, you see, I was damaged. I was my father’s boy, and too damaged to be around that happy child.

“After her nap she came upstairs looking for me. We had all these wonderful rooms in the house where we could hide from the adults, where I could amuse her and do magic tricks that made her laugh.”

I thought of the endless string of rooms we had seen yesterday at the Dakota-the quirky layout, the labyrinth of spaces, some private, some public-all removed from the living quarters where Lavinia Dalton and her pampered grandchild were cared for.

“Lucy had a dress on-a smock, really. Pink-and-white gingham, because her grandmother always insisted that she was dressed in pink.”

Then Wicks stopped and adjusted his position to get closer to me, to look me in the eye to make sure I was listening to him.

“And Lucy had this on, too,” he said, holding his hands out to me.

“This?”

“This beautiful material that her grandmother had ordered for Lucy from Paris. And my mother had sewn into a party dress for the child.”

It was the gauze that he had bound me with, the gauze he had primed in his hands for use on something-or someone.

“Pretty, isn’t it?”

“Lovely.” I had nothing else to say.

“So pretty and so much of it that my mother made a shawl out of it for Lucy, too. A long strip that the child used for dress-up, that she liked to put around herself when she was pretending to be a princess,” Wicks said. “She wanted to wear it out to the Park, even though I thought that was kind of silly. That it was too warm to wear it. But she insisted on it because it was so light and filmy, not warm at all, and so I couldn’t disagree.”

“But how were you going to take her out if no one in the household would allow that?”

Eddie Wicks rocked back and forth again, never taking his eyes off me as he told me what happened-testing me, perhaps, to see how his story went over.

“I had a plan, of course, so that we wouldn’t be seen. No one would miss us because they’d all assume we were playing in the attic, that Lucy was happy to be with a friend who was part of the household.

“There was a dumbwaiter,” he said. “It could go all the way from the top floor of the building to a service room on the ground floor. Nobody used that room anymore, and nobody really used the creaky old machine.”

I thought of the archaic device, and even what an attractive nuisance-almost a game-it might have been for an inquisitive child.

“Lucy? Well, the dumbwaiter was her favorite place to hide. It wasn’t meant to fit people-just loads of laundry or cleaning supplies or dirty dinner service-so it could only hold a child at best. We decided together-” Wicks said, pausing for a moment before he went on.

We decided, I thought-a damaged teenage boy, possibly sexually charged during one of his manic phases, and a three-year-old child who was his favorite companion.

“Lucy got in the dumbwaiter, in her gingham smock with her princess shawl wrapped twice around her shoulders and neck like a scarf, as she always wore it, smiling and laughing about our secret trip,” Wicks said. “That’s how I left her, how I always want to think of her.”

I tried to conjure up that cheerful image but brought to mind only a wooden box full of bones.

“I pressed the button to send her to the ground floor, and then I ran down the servants’ staircase-the rear staircase-just as fast as I could, so I’d be there to help Lucy out, so we could go on our way, through one of the back doors.”

Eddie Wicks stood up and started to pace back and forth.

“But when the doors opened, there was this helpless little child-she’d been strangled to death-whose knees were bent beneath her, hanging from the top of the tiny elevator car.”

The image was chilling and repellent. I bit down hard on my lip.

“The tail of Lucy’s shawl caught in the door when the dumbwaiter closed, many flights above, choking the baby, before the material ripped apart as the machine carried her down to me.”

I recoiled against the wall of the cave, shuddering at the picture of the dumbwaiter beginning its descent, slowly asphyxiating the vibrant three-year-old, who was on her way to an adventurous afternoon in the Park, wearing her princess-like shawl wrapped around her shoulders and neck.

I thought I was going to be sick. “Please don’t-”

“Don’t tell you any more? I live with that image of Lucy every day of my life. It’s more than I can bear, so don’t tell me not to say it, now that you’ve found her broken little body.”

“Didn’t you try to get help?”

“She was dead, young lady. No question about it. Her face was blue, her neck was mangled, and though her body was still warm, Lucy was dead. And I knew I’d be blamed for her death.”

“But you didn’t leave her there,” I said.

“In the dumbwaiter? Of course not,” Wicks said. “I brought her here. I knew this place well. The Indian Cave, they called it when the Park was designed. But then there was trouble inside it from time to time, and it had to be closed up. I found a way in-the same way that you did-when I was just a boy. It’s where I came to get away from people who were mean to me.”

I didn’t say a word.

“There wasn’t a speck of blood. There was nothing to mark the place where Lucy died. No one had to know,” he said, in a conspiratorial whisper. “I found a laundry bag in one of the washrooms, and I put Lucy inside it, as gentle as I could be, and I carried her out in my arms, past all the workmen near the back door. It was a big building, you know, and an important one, but everyone there was used to seeing me come and go. And there wasn’t anybody who cared to talk to me. Not that day, not ever before.”

“And you came to this-this cave?”

“I know every inch of this Park, every last inch of it. I wanted Lucy to be somewhere safe. I wanted her to be somewhere I could see her and watch over her.”

What a sick idea had taken over Eddie Wicks’s mind all those years ago.

“And most of all, I wanted to die beside her. I wanted to kill myself, miss, but I found out that I was too much of a coward to do that.”

“That’s not being a coward. That’s-”

Wicks was walking toward me, holding out the same gauzy fabric that had been the instrument of death for Lucy Dalton.

“I’ve tried to kill myself, and I’ve even failed at that. I’ve tried four times, maybe five,” he said, and I knew the most recent one had resulted in his Bellevue hospitalization, “and I haven’t been able to do that right, either.”

“Let me take you out of here and get you help,” I said.

“I’ve got a better idea, although the last person I tried to enlist in this endeavor wound up dead herself,” Wicks said. “An impetuous girl, actually, who should never have made it her business to tell anyone about Baby Lucy.”

I thought of the body in the Lake-the homeless girl who thought she was best at helping wounded people, damaged people like Eddie Wicks.

“I know about her, I think. I read it in the papers last week,” I said. “The girl who was found at Bow Bridge.”

“I’ll make a deal with you, Wisconsin,” Wicks said, his eyes bulging as he tightened the ties on my legs. “All you have to do is kill me. Make me know the pain that Lucy knew in the minutes the life was sucked out of her. Maybe that will be the way you can get out of this burial chamber alive.”