VC01 - Privileged Lives
Privileged Lives
A Vince Cardozo Mystery
Edward Stewart
For Diane Reverand
Contents
1
T
HE DARKNESS WAS CHARGED
with an unfamiliar silence. In some way that Babe couldn’t quite define, it felt different from the dark she had fallen asleep in.
She couldn’t hear Scottie breathing beside her. She couldn’t smell him, couldn’t sense his weight and warmth. She turned her head.
Tried to turn her head.
The movement took unexpected effort, as though she had to push through masses of jelly.
Puzzlement went through her. It wasn’t her pillow—not her goose down pillow from Altman’s, freshly scented with jasmine potpourri. This pillow smelled of nothing, it had an almost aseptic absence of smell, like air-conditioned air.
And now a second puzzlement.
She couldn’t see Scottie in his place beside her. There was no outline, no familiar silhouette. She reached a hand.
Tried to reach.
The hand had to crawl, finger by finger. It seemed to her that the sheet felt rougher than the combed cotton she had gone to sleep on. A dull pain went up her arm, lodging in her elbow and shoulder. She reached through the pain.
Her hand met emptiness.
She stilled a twinge of panic, told herself to think this through. Scottie had to be in the bathroom—or in his dressing room—or maybe downstairs, locking up.
Of course. Banks and Mrs. Banks would have gone to bed long ago. Scottie would be locking up.
As she lay waiting for him, she remembered the party of only a few hours ago. The champagne, the laughter, the three hundred guests. The dinner, the dancing, the drinking—far too much drinking. Calling it a day at two
A.M.
, tumbling into a limo with Scottie. The two of them staggering arm in arm to the front door—dropping the keys—laughing—
And then …?
There was a blank where the next image should have been.
Babe was aware of strange skittering sounds, voices muffled through walls. Her eyes were beginning to adjust. She lifted her head—again, a simple movement that was usually automatic took astonishing concentration.
The darkness had the wrong shape. A curtain was pulsing dimly in a space where her bedroom had no window. A floor-level night-light that she had never seen before squeezed a tiny beam through the darkness.
She blinked, trying to make out the clock on the bedside table. The shining roman numerals were nowhere to be found. Mrs. Banks must have tidied and left the clock behind the telephone.
Babe reached toward the space where the bedside table should have been. It felt as though elastic straps were holding her arm down to the mattress.
Her fingers dislodged something solid. Glass shattered on the floor.
There was an approaching patter of heels. A door swung inward, spilling a wedge of dim light into the room. Through the opening something blurred but solid passed. It had a woman’s face.
The woman glided through the dimness with the calm authority of a housekeeper. She leaned over the bed.
Babe had never seen the woman before.
I’m still dreaming,
she told herself.
This is one of those dreams-within-a-dream… If I concentrate I’ll wake up…
The woman was playing the beam of a penlight across Babe’s face.
Wake up Babe, count ten and wake up…
Babe clenched her eyes shut and opened them again.
The woman was still there. She was wearing a nurse’s cap. Everything about her seemed plump: the shape of her face, her arms and bust, and especially her eyes. Large and warm, ringed with dark lashes, they were studying Babe with a curious remoteness—as if Babe were a picture in a magazine.
“Who the hell are you, and what are you doing in my bedroom?” Babe said.
Tried to say. To her surprise, she had to push the words out of her throat.
The muscles of the woman’s face jerked into a knot. Her hands scrabbled beside the bed, and the room was flooded in light.
The first thing Babe saw clearly was a call-button cord swaying eight inches from her face. It was hanging from the rung of a metal retainer that enclosed her like a rabbit cage.
Gradually, the space beyond the cage came into focus: not the soft peach tones of her hand-blocked silk walls, but a low-gloss, institutional white.
A man hurried into the room.
“She talked!” the nurse said breathlessly.
The man came around to the bed. A name tag angled carelessly across his breast pocket said Dr. H. Rivas. “Can you hear me?” he asked.
Babe said, “I hear you.”
He pulled back. “Do you know who you are?”
“I’m Babe Vanderwalk Devens and I’d like to know who you two jokers are.”
Confusion flickered in his eyes. “I’m Doctor Harry Rivas. And this is nurse Emmajean Deely.”
“Whose nurse is she?”
“She’s your nurse.”
“And you’re my doctor?”
“I’m the night intern. Dr. Corey is your neurologist. He’ll be here as soon as we notify him.”
“Notify him of what? What do I need a neurologist for?”
Dr. Rivas glanced at nurse Deely. “You had an accident.”
“What kind of accident?”
“Don’t worry about that now. You’re going to be fine.”
“This is a dream.”
The doctor glanced at the nurse.
“You’re not real!” Babe screamed.
The nurse’s hand took firm hold of Babe’s shoulder. Babe stared in surprise at the clear polished nails and the wedding band: it was a real hand, strong and warm, really pressing into her flesh.
Deftly and quickly, the young doctor slipped a needle into Babe’s upper arm.
The pricking was real too.
Babe was sitting up in the hospital bed, trembling but awake, when a swarthy male nurse brought in her lunch tray.
“Nice to see you up, Mrs. Devens.” The man moved the wheelchair away from the bed—Babe’s one effort to get to the john on her own had been a disaster—and then he slid the tray onto the hospital table. “Enjoy.”
She studied the meal—a bowl of anonymous yellow soup and a mysterious compote that resembled fruit.
She became aware of a woman studying her from across the room. The woman was trim and wavy blond and childishly sexy in her not very well closed white hospital smock. There was a soft slow something in the woman’s glance that made Babe stare back.
Babe raised her hand and the woman raised hers at the same instant. With a start Babe recognized herself in the dresser mirror. Her face was pale and hollowed and there were dark lines under her eyes. A disturbing sense of unreality rushed in on her.
“My hair’s different,” she said.
“People have been moving you around,” the nurse said. “Hair gets mussed up.”
“It’s shorter,” Babe said. “Did they operate on my head?”
“Don’t be silly.”
“How long have I been here?”
The nurse came across the room and spoke gently. “Here. Let me.” She took the spoon and dipped it into the soup bowl.
Babe watched the plump hands, wide and strong.
“Needing a nurse to spoonfeed me my soup—I’m not that helpless.”
“Think you can feed yourself?”
“I’m damned well going to give it a try.”
Babe took the spoon and on the second try scooped up a bit of soup and wobbled it to her mouth.
“That’s good, Mrs. Devens.”
“Look, you’ve taken me to the potty and wiped the drool off my pillow—that qualifies us as intimates. I wish you’d call me Babe.”
“Okay, Babe. And you call me E.J.”
“What’s E.J. stand for?”
“Emmajean. Is Babe your real name?”
“Beatrice.”
“Why do they call you Babe?”
“My mademoiselle called me Bébé. When I went to kindergarten the other girls thought it was a hoot—a great big five-year-old with a name like that. It got shortened to Babe and it stuck through school and college—after that it just came along with me—like an albatross.”
Something had happened to E.J.’s eyes: suddenly they were crinkled and quizzical. “You said ‘albatross.’ You don’t have any trouble remembering words, do you.”
“Am I supposed to? E.J., what kind of accident did I have?”
E.J. hesitated. “I don’t know exactly.”
“That’s bull. You do know exactly.”
“Only the doctor or immediate family can tell you. Regulations.”
Later. E.J.’s voice. “Visitors, Babe.”
Babe surfaced, opening her eyes. She saw a woman in a navy blue dress with a single strand of pearls. The woman was holding an issue of
Town and Country.
“Mama?” A question, not a statement.
Webbing out from her mother’s eyes were small creases that Babe had not seen the night before. The hair was different too—chic and gray, caught loosely at the back of her neck by a tiny gold coil.
“Beatrice, darling.”
Her mother said it as one word.
Beatricedarling.
Lucia Vanderwalk had never accepted her daughter’s nickname and had loathed it when it caught on in the press.
A kiss.
Lucia’s hands made a protective circle around Babe’s face, small white hands with wonderfully long fingers, manicured to perfection. A little whiff of her perfume came drifting down—Tea Rose, her favorite, her only. “See who I’ve brought you.”
Lucia stepped back to make room for a man in a three-piece gray pinstripe suit. He was a big bear of an old fellow with cheerful blue eyes and curly hair, and he was holding a bouquet of pink gardenias, grinning.
“Papa.” Babe opened her arms.
With the slightly formal carriage of an investment banker, Hadley Vanderwalk III bent down and planted a gallant little kiss on Babe’s forehead. “How’s my Babe?” His lips smiled below the small moustache that had been brown last night but was gray today. “Gosh, you look dandy, kid.”
He handed her the flowers. She didn’t know what to do with them. E.J. took them and scurried off to find a vase.
Babe’s parents placed chairs near the bed. Lucia spent a moment arranging herself and Babe wondered why she looked so much older than the night before.
“You’ve been asleep,” Lucia said. “You had an accident.” The voice had changed. She still had her New York Brahman accent, but there was a darker timbre than Babe remembered. “Don’t worry. The doctors and nurses have taken excellent care of you.”
Babe said, “What kind of accident?”
Lucia dug into an enormous petit point shoulder bag and came up with tea bags, a silver teapot, lemon slices, a plastic bag of crystallized sugar that was colored like sand on a magic beach, a pint of Dellwood vitamin-D-enriched milk. “Nurse, may we have some cups and boiling water?”
