“I’m calling our lawyer, Mr. Chapman. He’ll have something to say about this.”
“That’s fine. Go right ahead.”
The number rang five times before going to voice mail. Jarvis slammed the phone down without leaving a message.
“What about the record keeping you do here for each account?” I asked. “Perhaps if you explain it to me, we can put that issue to rest.”
Will Jarvis was on high alert and reluctant to trust me. He thought his answer through before speaking. “We’ve been computerized for twenty-five years, Ms. Cooper. Before that, everything was done by hand.”
“So you can call up the Dalton account right on your computer?”
“If I chose to do so, yes. It would give me a quarter of a century of information.”
“So a family or individual with eight vaults, would the contents of those vaults be listed?”
“Never. Do you tell the bank what’s in your safety-deposit box?”
“Is there a date when each vault was rented?”
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
“And a record of every time the Portovault leaves this building to go to an account and make a pickup?”
“Or a delivery,” Jarvis said. “Yes.”
“And a notation when an account holder comes to this building to get access to his or her vaults?”
“Just like a bank, Ms. Cooper. A record is made, signed by the holder or his representative, and countersigned by one of our agents, too.”
“And what if something is added into a vault during one of those visits?”
Will Jarvis took a few seconds to answer. “That wouldn’t be information we’d know. That’s our client’s right.”
“How about if something is removed?”
He scratched his head. “Removed from his or her own vault? You don’t seem to get my point, Ms. Cooper.”
“So you don’t issue receipts for that kind of thing?”
“We’re very discreet, you understand. The customers entrust their objects to us—everything from moose-head mountings to Queen Anne furniture to solid-gold Krugerrands. If they want to pay a visit, we ask them to sign in—we have a signature card with assorted permissions for family members or trustees—and we provide an armed guard to secure their visits, their transactions,” Jarvis said. “We don’t issue receipts, Ms. Cooper. This isn’t a pawnshop.”
Mercer removed the plastic bag from his jacket pocket and put it on the desk, under Will Jarvis’s nose. “Now, what do you call this little tag?”
The middle-aged manager’s face reddened as he leaned forward to look at it.
“Day & Meyer, right?” Mercer asked. “Sure looks like a receipt to me.”
“This—this would be a different sort of circumstance,” Jarvis said.
“Exactly what?”
“It would mean that someone authorized on the account paid a visit—a visit to one of the vaults.” Jarvis paused, moistening his lips as he struggled for an explanation. “Someone authorized, I remind you. He or she removed something from the Portovault—I couldn’t possibly tell you what that was—and stored it with us for a period of time in a safe. A small safe. A service we offer our clients for smaller objects and short durations of a hold. It’s occasionally more convenient for people to put items here—securely—without going through the trouble again of opening an entire vault. That’s why we offer the alternative of smaller safes.”
“And this receipt?” Mercer asked.
“That would have been used to retrieve the object from a safe. There should be a stamp on the back of the tag,” he said, reaching for the plastic bag.
But Mercer got there first. “There is a stamp on the back. And a date,” he said. “The date is May 10th.”
“So the only thing missing is for you to tell us who signed for this receipt,” Mike said. “Who had access to one of Lavinia Dalton’s vaults in the weeks or months prior to May? And is that the same person to whom this receipt was issued?”
Will Jarvis didn’t budge.
“We want a name, Mr. Jarvis. We want to leave here with a name.”
“If I give you this information, I don’t have to appear before a grand jury?”
“That sounds fair,” I said.
“And you won’t tell Jillian Sorenson about this?”
“We have no reason to.” Although I was interested in what his relationship was with Sorenson and why he seemed so fearful of her reaction to our visit.
“Then would you please read me the account number on that receipt, Mr. Wallace? It’s the first set of figures.”
Will Jarvis turned his back to us to face his computer. He entered the numbers, and results appeared on the screen. He printed out several pages of paper.
“In the spring of last year—during the month of April—the trust commissioned two Portovaults to go to the Dakota. Four guards escorted the trucks, and they were returned at the end of the same day. They were added to Lavinia Dalton’s account as vaults number seven and eight.”
That might have corresponded to the storage of the Dalton silver collections—one vault for Archer Dalton’s train set and the second for Lavinia’s Central Park.
“At some point in May,” Jarvis said, “Jillian Sorenson signed in to our facility. She spent the better part of an hour on the twelfth floor. The two newest containers were opened for her. There isn’t any more information than that, as I would expect.”
Jarvis studied the paper from which he was reading to us—and signature cards that appeared to have been scanned into the system.
“Then in June, one year ago,” he continued, “a visitor came to the building and spent an hour or so here, also signed in to the newest vaults. Both were opened for her, but one was closed immediately. She spent time in the other one.”
“She?” I asked.
“Here’s the signature card, Ms. Cooper.” Jarvis was nonplussed now. “I don’t know the woman personally, but she must be the one on the list of proper signatories, you can see that for yourself.”
He slid the paper across from me. The name on the line for the June 8th visit of the year before was Wicks, with simply the capital letter B after it. The authorized list of signatures, which Jarvis also showed to me, had Bernice’s full name printed out and signed.
The person who’d written her name on June 8th had a much firmer hand than Bernice.
“Bernice Wicks,” I said, “is one of Lavinia Dalton’s housekeepers.”
“Then that makes sense,” Jarvis said.
“But the signatures don’t appear to match, Mr. Jarvis. And no one seemed to require Mrs. Wicks’s full name on this June 8th record.” I passed the record to Mike and Mercer.
“It must have been a busy day. Mistakes happen. Let’s see what the signature is when the items on that receipt were picked up. That will be the numbers in red, Mr. Wallace.”
The next paper printed out.
“So, the receipt shows,” Jarvis said, “that the items were claimed on November 5th.”
“One week after Hurricane Sandy,” I said. “And who signed for them?”
He looked up from the paper. “B. Wicks once again.”
Of course Eddie Wicks would have known that his mother was a trusted signatory of the Dalton properties. He had probably seen the dramatic arrival and departure of the Portovaults many times while staying at the Dakota since his youth.
“Mr. Jarvis,” I said, with renewed urgency, “how about the video surveillance you have inside this place? There must be cameras everywhere. There would have to be.”
“That’s not something we advertise, Ms. Cooper.”
“I understand, but it would be stupid to think you didn’t need them in this day and age.”
Jarvis didn’t know whether to give it up or not. “We have other measures of security that are quite sufficient. Our clients prefer privacy—and a great measure of discretion. There are no video cameras to record their comings and goings.”
Mike was practically on top of him. “Do you take photos of people who come through your front door?”
“No. That would be ridiculous. We get deliveries and service people and inquiries that have nothing to do with—”
“Go back, please, to that November 5th sign-in sheet, will you?” I said. “I’d like you to print out a copy of the signature.”
Will Jarvis didn’t lift a finger.
I picked up the plastic bag and waved it in his face.
“The number again, please?” he said.
I read the four digits that were handwritten on the bottom of the tag. “8521.”
“What? That can’t be right,” Jarvis said. “Our identification numbers are longer sequences than that.”
“Not those handwritten numbers on the tag,” Mercer said to me. “Give him the figures in red print.”
I found them and read them aloud while Jarvis entered them in his computer. The printer groaned again and rolled out a copy of the signature of a B. Wicks.
“Maybe Eddie Wicks came here right after the storm of the century,” Mike said, “to pick up something he must have wanted pretty badly.”
“He’s one possibility,” I said. “That’s for sure. But why is Jillian Sorenson so arch about all this? She certainly didn’t want us up on the ninth floor and in the room where this receipt was found. If she didn’t want to be caught with her hand in the till, what better than to sign Bernice’s name?”
I looked to see whether Will Jarvis reacted to my speculation about Sorenson, but he was stone-faced.
“You both seem to be ignoring the fact that Vergil Humphrey has known Eddie Wicks—and Bernice—for a very long time,” Mercer said. “And he claims to have been the keeper of the black angel.”
“What about it?” I asked.
“Well, the angel was found in the Park with both of the silver pieces. I’m just sayin’—because a man is toothless doesn’t mean he can’t write.”
Fifteen minutes later we were on the twelfth floor of the massive storage facility.
Will Jarvis had acknowledged the giant security breach and admitted that whoever signed B. Wicks’s name had forged it. He agreed to let us eyeball the contents of Dalton Portovaults number seven and eight, in light of the subpoena, and because whoever visited a year earlier had been unauthorized to do so.
“You can physically get into the vaults without the owner, can’t you?” Mike asked.
“Certainly. We have to be able to do that in case of a fire or an emergency like that. We’ve had two or three abandonments as well, when owners died without heirs.”
Four workmen had followed us up in the service elevator, and Jarvis pointed them to the units we wanted to view.
One of the men stationed himself near the control switch. When Jarvis gave him the signal to start, the system generated a noise that was frightening in its volume and intensity.
The huge steel vault shook awake like a hibernating bear, whatever motored it growling at us in the dark space. Suddenly, Portovault number seven lurched forward on its rails, coming toward us in the middle of the floor, then chugging as the man at the controls was able to regulate its speed and bring it to a stop.
A pair of wheeled jacks, operated by two of the men, helped them spin the container around to reposition it. Will Jarvis explained that only one end of the giant vault had a door that opened. We stood to the side as he used the master keys—a duplicate of Lavinia Dalton’s set—to unlock the fist-sized bolt, while the foreman disengaged the Day & Meyer backup lock.
It took two of the men to slide open the heavy metal door, chaining it in place on the inner wall of the vault.
Jarvis handed each of us a battery-operated flashlight so that we could look inside the black hole that was the mouth of the vault.
“Watch your step,” he said to Mike. The steel rollers on which the container had been moved were slippery. One of the workers walked over with a stepladder that had been leaning against the far wall of the large room.
Mike and Mercer climbed up onto the platform and stepped into the vault. They were on either side of the container, beaming their lights downward, and I could see the reflection of the many shiny objects inside.
“It’s Archer Dalton’s train set,” Mike said. “An entire silver city of railroad miniatures.”
I saw him squat and pick up one of the cars.
“The originals?” I asked.
“Gorham and Frost. The real deal.”
“The Park?”
“No need to jump up here, Coop,” Mike said. He replaced the train and walked farther into the dark void of the vault. His flashlight’s beam and Mercer’s crisscrossed each other as they examined the contents of the space. “There’s nothing from the Park in here. The railroad tracks take up the entire thing. Grand Central Terminal, the old Penn Station, and every kind of train you can imagine.”
“All in silver?”
“Like Jillian Sorenson said, it must be worth a king’s ransom.”
They took their time examining the entire vault before stepping onto the platform and down the ladder.
“Satisfied, Detective?” Will Jarvis asked.
“For now,” Mike said. “Let’s see number eight.”
It was a difficult job for the men, once they had resecured the locks on the Portovault, to wheel the jacks back into place, push the weighty container into alignment with the rollers, and position it to be docked back into its berth.
There was a slight incline to the floor—perhaps from decades of wear by the loads it bore—and when the motor roared on again, two of the men got behind the vault and steadied it while they shoved to get it moving. Mike and Mercer added their strength to the crew’s manpower, each throwing a shoulder against the giant-sized container.
“Okay, guys,” Jarvis said. “Let’s bring out number eight.”
The foreman never left the controls to help the other men on his team. He was out of sight, near the elevator, and responding to orders from Jarvis.
Mike and Mercer followed two of the workers across the set of rails from the vault they’d just examined and got into place on either side of the transfer platform in front of which number eight would come to a stop.
The rollers beneath number seven stopped humming and vibrating as it was shut down, while its neighbor started to make noise.
The behemoth of a container nosed out of the darkness and headed our way.
Another sound, behind me, made me turn my head. The elevator door was opening, and a shrill voice was calling out for Will Jarvis.
“Where are you, Will? What’s going on?”
It took me a couple of seconds to place the voice, but I recognized it as Jillian Sorenson. Jarvis had managed to call her after all, to alert her to the fact that he was taking Mike and Mercer up to the vaults.
The metal rollers were grinding as the number eight container came barreling down toward us.
Mike had heard the voice, too. “Yo, Ms. Sorenson,” he called out, trying to cross the rail track. “This is police business. You’ll have to wait down—”
I watched in horror as his foot caught between two of the rollers and he fell to his knees.
“Stop it!” I screamed. “Stop the damn thing.”
More than a ton of steel—a Portovault on a fast track—was aiming straight for Mike, ready to crush him against the concrete-reinforced pillar that separated both sides of the vast storage space.
I charged toward Mike as he tried to free his right foot from the roller, praying that the foreman would brake the system, although he couldn’t see what was wrong.
Jarvis had also yelled to cut the power, but the vault kept coming.
Mercer’s back had been to Mike when he fell—looking to see who had gotten off the elevator—but he was still closest to our fallen friend.
The big man bent over and lifted Mike beneath his shoulders, dragging him to safety a moment before the speeding Portovault mashed Mike’s loafer into the spinning rollers and came to a screeching halt.