shock, then swore as the faulty cupboard door swung
open and rested gently against his right ear. “What’s
with this thing?” the detective demanded. “Ghosts?”
Judith shook her head. “The spring is sprung. Or
something. It does that often.”
Cairo glared at Joe. “Can’t you or your slave here
120
Mary Daheim
fix the damned thing?” He gave the door a vicious
slam, rattling china and glassware in the cupboards.
Judith gritted her teeth.
But Cairo’s gaze was now on the spider above the
sink. He turned to Judith. “What about you, Mrs.
Flynn? Is that scary tarantula wannabe one of your
Halloween decorations?”
“No.”
“Oh?” Cairo grew curious. “Then who put it there?”
“I’ve no idea,” Judith replied. “I didn’t see it when I
was in the kitchen before . . . before Mr. Zepf died.”
Cairo nudged Dilys. “You hear that, young lady?
Mrs. Flynn doesn’t know how that nasty old bug got
there. What’s your idea?”
Warily, Dilys looked up at the spider. “Are you sure
it’s not real?”
Cairo reached up and gave the spider a spin. “Definitely fake.”
Dilys gave a nod. “So maybe . . .” Her small voice
trailed off.
“Yes?” Cairo urged. “Maybe what?”
“Maybe”—Dilys swallowed hard—“someone put
the spider up there to frighten the deceased. You know,
like a practical joke.”
Cairo frowned at her. “Come now, isn’t that pretty
far-fetched?”
Dilys was blushing furiously. “Ah . . . maybe, but—”
“She could be right,” Judith put in, unable to watch
the young woman suffer further. “The deceased—Mr.
Zepf—was superstitious about spiders. They terrified
him. Someone had already tried to scare him by placing one of these phony tarantulas in his bed.”
SILVER SCREAM
121
“No kidding.” Cairo moved his frown to Judith.
“You sure about that, Mrs. Flynn?”
“Absolutely,” Judith replied. “There were several
witnesses. Not to mention that Mr. Zepf became frightened by a very small but very real spider out on the
back porch. I saw that with my own eyes.” To Judith’s
satisfaction, Dilys had slipped behind Cairo and was
making bunny ears above his head. Maybe, she
thought, the young detective wasn’t quite as cowed as
she pretended.
At that moment Angela La Belle and Ben Carmody
appeared in the hallway that led from the back stairs.
“What’s going on?” Ben asked, looking sleepy.
Joe turned to the pair. “Didn’t Ms. Best tell you?”
Ms. Best hadn’t. “What’s to tell?” Angela inquired.
“Bruno’s dead.” She was wearing a paper-thin wrapper
over a sheer, short nightgown. “Are there any truffles
left?”
Cairo’s dark eyes were bugging out from underneath the black brows that grew together. “Now who’s
this, I might ask?” He leered at Joe. “Another one of
your slaves?”
“This is Angela La Belle,” Joe said woodenly, “and
Ben Carmody. They’re part of the movie company that
came here with Bruno Zepf. You do have a list of possible witnesses, don’t you?”
“Ah!” The question was ignored as Cairo beamed
and put out a pawlike hand. “Celebrities! I’m thrilled.”
Despite the grin, it was obvious that Cairo would have
preferred meeting a pair of real tarantulas.
Dilys, however, was goggle-eyed as she stared at
Angela La Belle. “Ohmigod! I saw you in your first
122
Mary Daheim
big movie, that musical— Enjoy Your Pants! You have
such a beautiful voice!”
Angela was scanning the kitchen counters, apparently for truffles. “Thanks. It was a small part. My
voice was dubbed.”
“But the dancing!” Dilys enthused. “Looking down
from way up high on you with all the spinning and
leaping and twirling and—”
of plastic containers. “I’ve got two left feet.” She
looked at Judith. “So they ate all the truffles?”
“I guess so,” Judith replied. “Eugenia Fleming
seemed especially fond of them.”
“Bummer.” Angela took in the official yellow tape
that Stone Cold Sam Cairo was putting up between the
kitchen and the dining room. “Oh,” she said with mild
interest, “is this a crime scene or what?”
“Bruno couldn’t have drowned,” Ben Carmody remarked. “Win must be wrong. He probably had a heart
attack. Not that I blame him after what happened
tonight.”
Cairo whirled around with surprising agility for
such a thickset man. “And what was that, young fellow?”
Ben gazed incredulously at the detective. “The premiere. What else? Bruno bombed. Big time.”
“Ah, yes.” Cairo rummaged in the pocket of his
navy-blue raincoat. “What’s it called?” He peered at a
small notepad. “The Gasbag?”
“It might as well be,” Ben said with a heavy sigh.
“It’s The Gasman, ” he added, emphasizing the final
syllable.
“So,” Cairo said, stuffing the notepad back inside
SILVER SCREAM
123
his raincoat, “the deceased had suffered a big disappointment, had he? Did he have a history of heart trouble?”
Angela and Ben looked at each other.
“Ulcers, maybe,” Angela said.
“High blood pressure?” Ben suggested.
“Ask Win.” Angela pulled the folds of her wrapper
more tightly around her body. “Win knows everything,” she added with a sniff.
Cairo nodded sagely. “Let’s have a word with this
Win. That would be Winifred Best, correct?”
“Right,” Ben said. “Come on, Angela, let’s go back
upstairs.”
“But no further,” Cairo called after them. “We don’t
want any of you fancy birds to fly the nest. Har, har.”
Angela, who had started down the hallway, turned
around and glared at the detective. “What do you
mean? Are we stuck in this place for some weird reason?”
“That’s right,” Cairo said with a sharp shake of his
head. “You’re stuck until I unstick you. Surely you’re
enjoying the company of Mr. and Mrs. Flynn here.”
Angela managed an ineffectual smile. “They’re
nice, but . . .”
“We’ve got meetings to take, lunches to do, people
to . . .” Ben began in a not unreasonable voice.
“In due time, my lad, in due time.” Cairo waved the
pair off with a faintly sinister smile.
They had just disappeared up the stairs when someone knocked at the back door. Judith and Joe stared at
each other. The rear entrance was reserved for family,
friends, and neighbors.
“Mother?” Judith mouthed and started for the door.
124
Mary Daheim
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
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
126
Mary Daheim
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.”
“His compan
ions won’t like that,” Joe said.
“They’re used to first-class treatment.”
“So what are they doing here?” Cairo slapped his
thigh and laughed even louder than usual.
“It’s a fluke,” Judith said, and wished she’d kept her
mouth shut.
“A fluke?” Cairo looked mildly interested.
“A superstition,” Judith replied as Herself and Dilys
SILVER SCREAM
129
entered the parlor. “Bruno Zepf considered B&Bs
lucky for his movies.”
Cairo scowled. “Not this time.”
“Goodness!” Vivian exclaimed, cradling her chimney glass, which was now almost full of what looked
like bourbon. “To think that all these Hollywood
people were here and I never noticed! That’s what I get
for being such a night owl! I miss the comings and goings during the day.”
Judith felt obliged to offer Joe’s ex a thin smile.
Cairo was moving restlessly around the room, his
gaze darting between Herself’s glass and Herself’s décolletage. “I’d better chat up these folks, just to remind
them they shouldn’t wander off.” His hooded eyes
turned to Joe. “You want to tell ’em to rise and shine?”
“No,” Joe responded. “I don’t think that’s necessary.”
“Hey!” Cairo raised his voice and scowled at Joe.
“Who’s in charge here?”
“You are,” Joe retorted. “You tell them to rise and
shine.”
Cairo started to speak, stopped, and turned his scowl
on Dilys. “You’re it.”
Dilys’s gray eyes widened. “Me?” She hesitated, as
if waiting for verification. “Okay.” Obediently, she
trotted out of the parlor.
“Now,” Vivian said, slithering onto the window seat,
“tell me about all these gorgeous hunks who are sleeping just over my head.”
When Joe didn’t answer, Judith stepped in. “There
are only two actors, Dirk Farrar and Ben Carmody. The
actresses are Angela La Belle and Ellie Linn.”
In a dismissive gesture, Herself waved the hand that
130
Mary Daheim
wasn’t holding her drink. “Actresses! They’re all
made-up hussies. Surely there must be more . . . men.”
Judith glanced at Joe, whose expression was blank.
He and his ex remained on friendly terms, and not only
because they had a daughter. It seemed to Judith that
Herself was some kind of source of amusement to Joe.
Or maybe she was a reminder, the living reinforcement
of Joe and Judith’s good luck in finally finding each