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Privileged Lives

A Vince Cardozo Mystery

Edward Stewart

For Diane Reverand

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Preview: Deadly Rich

About the Author

1

THE 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.