She was all business, stern and unsmiling.
“Thanks for having us in on such short notice,” I said.
“Jillian,” Lavinia said to her, “Jillian, is Archer coming today?”
“No, Lavinia. But you’ve got lovely guests who are here to see you.”
We went back and forth with Lavinia for several minutes, and although she was talkative and good-natured, it was obvious her memory was compromised.
I asked Jillian Sorenson if we might talk to her in another room, and Mike and I retraced our steps to one of the small parlors.
“We don’t want to upset Miss Dalton,” Mike said, “but we do have some questions to ask.”
“Why not start with me?”
“Well, because we’d like information about things that go back quite a long time.”
“I’ve been with the Daltons since the late 1960s,” she said. “That’s why Lavinia knows my name, even though she can’t call the nurses by name these days and she’s unlikely to remember she just talked to you now if we reenter the room in half an hour. There’s still a good amount of the long-term memory intact.”
“Will we upset her,” I asked, “if we talk about her family?”
“Most likely.”
“And you-?”
“I went to Vassar with Archer Dalton’s wife, which is how I found out about the position as Lavinia’s assistant,” Jillian said. “It was a tremendous challenge for a first job because she was such a vibrant social figure in those days. Hard to keep up with her.”
She was a few inches shorter than I and spoke with a clipped upper-crust accent. I was guessing her roots were on the Philadelphia Main Line.
“I imagine it was,” I said. “Do you live in the apartment?”
“When I got out of college, I did live here for the first six years. I have my own home, but for the nights Lavinia isn’t doing well, I do keep a room here.”
Mike seemed to perk up. “So you were on the staff when Lucy was kidnapped?”
Jillian Sorenson’s back stiffened. “I thought your interest was in the silver, Mr. Chapman. I hope you don’t intend to bring Lucy’s name up in front of Lavinia.”
“It is about the silver, but-”
“And I wasn’t considered staff,” she said, responding rather archly, “like the other servants were. I was in charge of all Lavinia’s business and philanthropic correspondence. I was treated like family, and I lived in the family quarters.”
“Were you working here when Archer Dalton and his wife were killed in the crash?” I asked.
“Yes, I was. Lavinia had me fly to Zurich to identify their bodies,” she said, “and arrange to bring them home. It was devastating for me, of course, because we’d been so close.”
“And when Lucy was kidnapped?”
“Why don’t you read the old newspapers, Ms. Cooper? And the police files?” Sorenson said, snapping at me. “There were nine of us working here that day while Lavinia was out. And each of us was interrogated and fingerprinted and questioned time and time again. My photograph was in all the newspapers, which proved rather an embarrassment to my family.”
“An embarrassment for them versus a tragedy for Lavinia Dalton,” Mike said, shifting his arms like a set of scales.
“I’m not minimizing the horror of Lucy’s disappearance-of her death, although that’s a word I’d never use in front of Lavinia. But we all paid a dreadful price for being here that day,” Sorenson said, her arms crossed as she clenched them with her hands. “Even my fiancé was dragged through the dirt by the tabloids.”
“Why-?” I started to ask.
“Because those reporters who thought the Dakota was impenetrable by strangers and assumed the kidnapping was an inside job were looking for a mastermind smarter than the butler. My fiancé was an investment banker. They figured he might have typed some of the ransom notes, which dictated how the money was to be paid and delivered, Ms. Cooper. He ended our engagement the day before we were to be married.”
And my fiancé had been killed in an accident the night before my wedding. I understood her anger and pain.
“So if you two are here to play sleuth all over again about one of the largest manhunts in police history, you’ve come too late. Neither Lavinia nor I have anything to say about Lucy,” Sorenson said. “If you have questions about the silver collection, however, I’m happy to tell you everything I know.”
This was not the reception I’d been counting on based on Mia Schneider’s story last evening.
“Is the collection here?” Mike asked.
Jillian Sorenson paused before she answered. “Yes. May I assume this has something to do with last week’s murder and not Lucy’s kidnapping?”
“I can promise you it’s not about Lucy,” Mike said. “That’s all I can tell you.”
“May we see the pieces?” I asked.
“I told Mia I’d show them to you,” Sorenson said. “You’ll have to come this way.”
Instead of retracing our steps through the parlors and dining room, Jillian Sorenson led us out into the hallway that seemed to run half the length of Central Park West. Doors lined both sides of the wide corridor.
“These doors,” Mike said, “what do they lead to?”
Sorenson wasn’t happy to have more questions, but she did her best to answer them as we walked along.
“As you might know, when the Dakota was built, it was meant to have sixty-five apartments, places in which rich people could live as comfortably as in their private mansions, but with far more services available. They were all rentals at that original time, not offered for ownership until decades later.”
The dark corridor was lined with photographs, large nineteenth-century prints commemorating the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad, interspersed with superb portraits of Lavinia’s forebears posed with presidents and potentates.
“No two apartments,” she said, “were alike, so there is no single floor plan that matches another one. Archer Dalton rented six of the large apartments on this floor and broke through to combine them.”
“Six?” I said. “He could have housed an army.”
“That was his plan. He hoped his family would grow in generation after generation-which never happened-and he counted on a large staff being one of life’s necessities. The rooms that face the Park are all the major ones, as you’ve seen, including three master bedrooms.”
“Lavinia’s?” I didn’t dare say the names of Lucy and her parents.
“Then a sitting room, then young Archer’s, and then the nursery for Baby Lucy.” Jillian Sorenson did it for me.
“So the nursery was the last room in the south corner,” Mike said. He was back to the kidnapping, seeing how easy it would have been to sneak the child away without calling attention to yourself, if you were familiar with the extraordinary maze of doors and hallways.
“On the other side,” Jillian said, gesturing to the rooms on the right, “are the kitchen, the laundry rooms, my old bedroom and office, some of the quarters where the more important senior staff could sleep.”
“And the rest of the staff?”
“Some were day workers who slept downtown in their own homes, like the laundress and the kitchen workers-except for the cook. Others had quarters upstairs, which was quite common in those days.”
Mike winked at me-a nod to the eyelid windows under the eaves of the building.
“So no view on that side,” Mike said, “where your room is?”
“No view of the Park,” Sorenson said, “but the Dakota is a real novelty. Since it’s built around a courtyard, it has fresh air and brightness from both sides. It’s quite cheerful from these rooms really, with large windows and lots of western light all afternoon.”
Halfway down the hallway was a wall that split the block-long corridor in half. We had to zigzag around it to get to the bedroom wing. It provided a natural barrier between the more public rooms and the intimate spaces, which might also have proved of good use to the kidnappers of Baby Lucy.