each other. The rear entrance was reserved for family,
friends, and neighbors.
“Mother?” Judith mouthed and started for the door.
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Cairo put a hand to stop her. “Dilys will get that,” he
said. “It might be a reporter. Shoo him—or her—off,
will you, my girl?”
The young woman cautiously opened the door to reveal a startling figure. A tall platinum blonde of more
than a certain age stood on the threshold in an emeraldgreen satin lounging robe slit to the hip. She was carrying a paisley umbrella in one hand and a glass in the
other.
Judith’s jaw dropped. It was a neighbor, all right, it
was sort of family, but it wasn’t necessarily a friend.
Vivian Flynn, also known as Herself, was Joe’s first
wife and Judith’s nemesis. Their visitor dropped the
umbrella and swayed into the kitchen with a big
crimson-lipped smile on her face.
“Stone Cold Sam!” she cried, setting the glass down
by Judith’s computer. She reached out her arms, embraced the detective, and kissed him three times. “It’s
been too long!”
Cairo, his chin on Vivian’s shoulder, gave Joe a
wink and a smile. A nasty smile, Judith noted, and
thought the night would never end.
EIGHT
“LET’S GET OUT of here,” Joe whispered to Judith.
“We’ll go into the front parlor.”
Unobtrusively, Judith tried to edge toward the
door. The crime-scene tape barred her way. Joe
glanced at Cairo, saw that he was still in Vivian’s
embrace, pulled the tape aside, and with an arm
around Judith, slipped out through the dining room.
Dilys, though evincing curiosity about her partner
and Joe’s ex-wife, raised an eyebrow at the Flynns’
departure but made no comment.
“Good Lord.” Judith sighed, collapsing into one
of the two matching armchairs in front of the stone
fireplace. “I’m exhausted! And what’s Vivian doing
here?”
Joe’s grin was off center. “You know Vivian,
you’ve watched her for six years since she moved
into the cul-de-sac. She keeps late hours. No doubt
the emergency vehicles caught her attention.”
Meanly, Judith figured it was more likely they’d
roused her from an alcohol-induced stupor. Herself,
as Judith preferred to call Vivian, had brought a
glass with her. Maybe she’d come to borrow a refill.
Despite Joe’s efforts to get his ex to join AA, she
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continued to drink. Vivian Flynn wouldn’t admit that
she had a problem.
“Vivian obviously knows Stone Cold Sam,” Judith
remarked as Joe stirred the embers in the small fireplace.
“Oh, yes,” Joe replied, adding some paper and a
couple of small pieces of wood. “They go way back.”
“They must.” Judith stared into the fire, which was
now sparking into orange-and-yellow life. It rankled
her that Joe and Vivian had such a long—if rocky—
past. The marriage had been a mistake from the start, a
catastrophe set in motion by Joe’s first encounter with
a fatal teenage overdose. The cop bar he’d gone to afterward had offered strong drink and a stronger comeon by the woman perched atop the red piano. In
fighting off the shadows of wasted fifteen-year-old
lives, Joe lost his grasp on reality. When he awoke the
next morning, he was in a Las Vegas bed with a new
bride, the already twice-wed Vivian.
There was no going back, though Joe had tried.
He’d called Judith from the hotel casino to try to explain, to beg forgiveness. But Gertrude had told him
that her daughter never wanted to see him again. The
irony was that Judith never knew about Joe’s call, or
his subsequent attempts to reach her. Brokenhearted
and abandoned, she had married Dan McMonigle on
the rebound. That union was also doomed from the beginning. When Judith learned years later what had happened to Joe, she realized that both of them had
married alcoholics and were paying the price for their
folly. Joe’s folly more than her own, she had often
thought, but no one had compelled her to marry Dan.
It was only retaliation—and the unborn child she was
SILVER SCREAM
127
carrying—that had sent her so recklessly to the altar.
Eventually, she had begun to understand Joe’s ties to
Vivian. In addition to having been married twice before, she had a son by each ex-husband and was down
on her luck. Joe was a sucker for the underdog. Having
taken the vows, he felt obligated to live them, for better or for worse. And like Judith, Joe had endured more
worse and no better.
Those long, mean years had tempered both of them.
It hadn’t been just the chance meeting twenty years
later that caused him to file for divorce. The marriage
to Vivian had been a shambles for more than a decade;
the only good thing that had come of it was a daughter,
Caitlin. Perhaps it was proof of the dismal state of matrimony in the first Flynn household that had kept
Caitlin, now forty, from seeking a husband.
The thoughts flickered through Judith’s brain like
the flames dancing in the grate. She could picture Joe
and Vivian hosting a departmental party, with Stone
Cold Sam Cairo running his hand up the welcoming
slit in Herself’s dress. She could see Joe chatting with
his longtime partner, Woody Price, on the deck—if the
Flynns had had a deck—and being introduced to a
young woman named Sondra, who would later become
Mrs. Price. Joe would tend the barbecue, rustling up
steaks and burgers for many of the cops whom Judith
met later in life, and for some she’d never known at all.
Despite a decade with Joe, Judith still resented the
wasted years during which Vivian had held him
hostage.
“. . . too long now,” Joe was saying.
Judith realized she hadn’t been listening. So caught
up in her thoughts, so weary was her body, so en- 128
Mary Daheim
wrapped in what had been and what might have been,
she hadn’t heard her husband.
“I’m sorry,” she apologized, “I faded out there for a
minute. What were you saying?”
Joe gave her a sardonic look. “That they can’t do
much tonight. They need the ME’s report to proceed if,
in fact, foul play is suspected.”
“Oh. Good,” Judith said. “You mean they’ll have to
go away?”
“Right.” Joe, who had sat down in the other armchair, turned as Stone Cold Sam Cairo entered the
parlor.
“So you’ve got two wives in the same cul-de-sac,”
he said with another one of his leers. “Two wives, two
slaves, and some sexy movie actresses upstairs. I guess
you’ve got it made, eh, Flynn? Maybe I should retire
right now. Then you could tell me your secret for the
good life. Har, har.”
“Don’t count on it, Sam,” Joe responded with a sour
expression. “What’s up?”
“Do you really want to know? Har, har.” Cairo
laughed again, then sobered. “I just heard from downtown. They won’t know anything until midmorning.
Bruno Zepf may be a big shot in Hollywood, but he’s
just another stiff on a busy Halloween weekend.”