A Dream Apart

Book 0: A Vic Varallo Mystery

by Dell Shannon

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

'My favourite American crime-writer' New York Herald Tribune Vic Varallo and the Glendale P.D. are startled by the latest addition to their team: a woman detective no less, and a very smart one at that. Delia Riordan soon makes her mark with enthusiasm, flair and a capacity for sheer hard work. And Riordan soon takes centre stage in the investigation of the killing of Mrs Endicott, the pastor's mother. The pastor has confessed, in an attempt to protect his wife who believes she is the killer, and it will take all of Riordan's womanly intuition to get to the bottom of this mystery.

Release date: July 28, 2014

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

It was like switching on a light. One second, blank dark; and then she was here, not knowing how or when or why. She shouldn’t be here; she couldn’t remember just
where she’d been, what she’d been doing—only a moment ago?—in the house; she would remember in a moment. Nothing like this had ever happened to her before, and she was
frightened. She felt her heart thudding. She was very tired, but that wasn’t new; she was tired most of the time now.

She was standing just below the shallow crooked wooden steps to the narrow porch of the little house behind the church. It was very quiet: Sunday afternoon. It was still Sunday, wasn’t it?
No noise from the children in the apartment next door. A long way off, a motorcycle buzzed dimly.

Wesley had said those motorcyclists had been riding around the alley again; it was dangerous, he’d complained to the police.

Sunday. Again, after this awful week. What was she doing, standing here? She ought to be—she had been—in the house (as usual, as always) and then something had happened—

The light wasn’t right. The sun was low in the sky, it was late afternoon. That couldn’t be, because the last she remembered it wasn’t late at all—church over, and lunch,
and Wesley had left to go to the Thrift Store—

She turned to look at the sun, low toward the horizon—January, it would be dark by about six o’clock, but it couldn’t be nearly six o’clock— There was a
black-and-white police car at the curb, in front of the church.

Her heart thudded. She had always been afraid of policemen.

She didn’t know where she’d been, what she’d done, since—she grasped at definite memory futilely—she’d been where she was supposed to be, in the house. And
what they’d say, what they’d ask—must be going insane, things like this only happened to insane people—but she couldn’t stand here, she had to go in. Where she was
supposed to be.

The old woman—having a fit, left alone, she’d never hear the last of it—insane— Wesley, home? This late—

Sunday. Sunday? She still had on her best dress, she hadn’t changed after church. A prim, dowdy dress: the dress she’d been married in; a while after she got it, she realized
she’d never liked it. She’d bought it two weeks after Mother Ruth’s funeral, hadn’t really paid much attention to color or style or fit. She’d lost weight since, and
it hung on her loosely now, a sad dress, too pale a blue, with a too-skimpy collar.

Couldn’t just stand here. Must go in. Whatever they said or did. The old woman—

She was frightened—insane—but she forced herself up on the porch, opened the sagging screen door. The inner door was ajar; she pushed it open and stepped into the little
living room.

Into the Dream—the reality of the Dream.

All her life she had known it was waiting for her, somewhere ahead. Now, without warning, it was here; and black terror engulfed her.

The Dream had come to her ever since she could remember. There would be months when it didn’t come, and she’d forget all about it; then it would come three, four,
five times in succession. The only person she’d ever told about it was Sharon, and Sharon was dead now; nobody knew. It was queer that she’d never told Mother Ruth. But even Sharon
hadn’t understood at all how the Dream so terrified her.

“It’s really nothing, is it?” she’d said blankly. “Nothing about it to scare you so much, Eileen. Why should it?”

Perhaps telling about it, there wasn’t. But even just telling it, she felt the cold sweat break all over her. When it came, foggy and incomplete and mysterious, it brought terror with it
all too real, and she would wake fighting the tangle of bedclothes, sweating, her heart pounding and breath short.

In some of the places—before she was sent to Mother Ruth—she’d been scolded and punished for having the Dream, making disturbance. Mother Ruth had just said, poor baby, no
wonder you have nightmares, never mind. But it was queer that Eileen had never told her about it, that it was always the same one.

She didn’t understand why it brought such terror, such abject guilt and remorse.

It was always exactly the same.

She came from somewhere—outside or another room—into a room. It wasn’t clearly defined—foggy, subdued, indefinite. Darkish walls, furniture around but not clearly seen;
and—very clear, she always saw that—a sedate gray cat sat on the back of a chair. There was the policeman, very tall and broad in a dark-blue uniform with bright brass buttons, and
there was someone else there too, but she could never quite see who it was.

The policeman said something, but his voice was so muffled she couldn’t hear what he was saying, until a little while after she came in it was clear and loud and he said, “It was
deliberate murder.” Then more muttering, and all the while she knew he was talking about something terrible—terrible and important to Eileen, because whatever it was that had
happened, it was all her fault, and the awful consciousness of guilt was like a great heavy stone in her heart. And then someone else said clearly, “I don’t know why it had to
happen!” All the while the cat was washing its face, taking no notice at all. The policeman said, “We’ll have to leave that to the detectives.” And,
“There’s nothing you can do for her now.” All the while Eileen stood there frozen, silently screaming inside herself, “I didn’t mean to, I didn’t
mean to!”—but nobody paid any attention to her. And when she woke each time from the terror, her cheeks would be wet with tears of some awful loss and guilt.

Sometimes it came often, sometimes it didn’t come for months. But she had always known that it was a foreview of some reality to come, that some day she would walk through a door and into
the Dream, when it was really happening.

And now, at last, she had.

She saw and heard everything clearly. The policeman was tall and broad in his blue uniform. She’d never seen his face in the Dream; now she saw that it was square and
snub-nosed, and he was young. It was a closed-looking face, wary and alert. He glanced sharply at her, and Wesley said, “Eileen!” It was Wesley, the other one in the room, except for
the old woman in the wheelchair, its back toward the room, facing the little hall. She was quiet and still. She wouldn’t be asleep, she would be furious, and Wesley would say feeble
things—

“Eileen, where’ve you been? The most terrible—I don’t understand—”

The policeman said, “Mrs. Endicott?”

Mrs. Endicott was the old woman. It always came as a little surprise to Eileen, even now, that she was Mrs. Endicott too. And just at that moment, irrelevant to anything else she was feeling,
she thought it was strange that she’d never called her anything else. Like a stranger. What else could she have called her? Mother was Mother Ruth. Mama, just a word with
dim connotation long ago: nothing.

Furious, she’d be furious—left alone so long (How long?)—she would—

She was immensely tired, numbly tired, but habit ingrained sent her toward the wheelchair, and she thought she started to say, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Endicott—”

“Just stay where you are, please, ma’am,” said the policeman. “There’s nothing you can do for her now.”

“Eileen—Eileen—” said Wesley with a gasp. “I don’t—where have you been? Why did you go out? Mother’s dead. She’s dead. The most
terrible—”

“Dead,” she said dully. It sounded stupid, but the panic fear, and heavy guilt, and the awful, reasonless remorse flooded all her being—because this was the reality, it was ten
times worse than the Dream. Either she or Wesley said it again, over and over, dead, dead. She sat down carefully in the shabby green armchair. She said carefully, her heart in her throat,
“She was all right—when—”

“I don’t know why it had to happen!” said Wesley. “I don’t know why! She was—she’s been—you said—” he looked at the policeman
wildly.

“It was deliberate murder,” said the policeman stolidly.

“Where were you?” asked Wesley. He sounded fretful and surprised. “She was never left alone—never. You never left her—”

Eileen was nearly suffocated with the rising panic; she held herself very still in the chair. She looked at Wesley sitting on one end of the couch. There was a pile of material beside
him—the curtains, of course, the curtains he’d gone to buy at the Thrift Store, if there were any the right size; and she thought, of course he would have gotten the ugliest color there
was. It was a dull saffron yellow, sleazy-looking stuff, like dull, cheap satin.

“You never left her!” he said. “I don’t understand—all so terrible, so terrible—she’s been—someone got in and—stabbed her—pair of
scissors—I found her when— But where were you?”

She looked at him, feeling she’d never really seen him before. A thin little man going bald, with weak, pale-blue eyes behind his heavy glasses, making ineffectual flapping gestures. A
silly little man. “Eileen?” He turned on the policeman then. “What are you doing? Aren’t you going to do anything? I don’t understand—just standing
there—”

“Just take it easy, sir,” said the policeman. He was writing in a notebook. “We’ll have to leave that to the detectives.”

Eileen made herself stay motionless in the chair, but she felt her heart pounding so hard it might burst out of her body. And all the while the cat sat there—of course the old woman was
dead, or she’d have been screaming about the cat—the fat gray cat who lived across the street but used to live here and sometimes came back. It had gotten in somehow, and it sat there
on the back of the other chair calmly washing its face, until Wesley noticed it and jumped up in a flurry, shouting absurdly, “Shoo—shoo—get out of here!”

Affronted, the cat leaped down and stalked away toward the back of the house, stopping to rub its chin on the wheelchair. The chair and the old woman trembled a little, and Wesley said,
“Oh my God—oh my God—” He collapsed onto the couch again.

Being real, the Dream went on, past what she knew. Steps on the porch, and another policeman, even taller, in uniform. They muttered together, across the room, their eyes on Eileen and Wesley;
the other policeman went around in front of the wheelchair and looked. Detectives. Murder.

At least she’d always waked from the Dream, however terror-stricken, and forgot till the next time. Always knowing it waited somewhere ahead. And now it was real, it was happening, there
was no waking up.

It was toward the end of shift, and Varallo was alone in the detective office with their new plainclothes officer when the call came in. O’Connor was off somewhere with
the Secret Service agents, though it was officially his day off; Katz and Poor were out on a burglary, and Forbes was home with the flu.

Sergeant Bill Dick on the desk relayed the call from the black-and-white, and Varallo took down the address. Putting down the phone, he said, “Overtime. New homicide.” Their newest
detective glanced across at him and stood up.

Changes had come again to the Glendale Police Department. Changes would always come, which didn’t mean that anyone had to welcome them.

It was just after they’d cleaned up that sordid homicide of the three little kids, last June, that they’d lost Sergeant Fred Wayne. The end of a hot June Sunday, a quiet day for the
force, no homicides, only a few heists to work; and Wayne had been downtown at LAPD headquarters watching a witness look at mug shots. He hadn’t made any. Wayne had ferried him home, which
was in La Crescenta, and been on his own way home back to Glendale, down La Crescenta Avenue, when a drunk juvenile in a stolen car broadsided him, doing about seventy, at the intersection of
Roselawn. The juvenile was pried out of the wreckage with a broken ankle. Wayne was DOA at the emergency hospital.

Every cop on any force lived with the possibility of sudden mayhem or death, a slightly more possible eventuality than the general run of the population knew; but it still had shock value when
it came.

“And it’s easy to say, worse if it was somebody else—worse!” O’Connor was saying that to Katz when Varallo landed at the hospital half an hour later. “At
least he wasn’t married—no family—so goddamn easy to say—but damn it, goddamn it, Joe, a slug from some punk’s equalizer in the middle of a shootout, it’s one
thing—but damn it, at least it’d have been for a reason! That goddamned nothing of a teen-ager—and you know what a judge’ll hand him—”

They hadn’t had to guess about that; and there was no profit in swearing about it, though everybody did. It got written down as involuntary manslaughter: sixty days and three years’
probation. There was all the grim fuss of an official funeral up at Forest Lawn, and then there was just the empty desk in the middle of the detective office.

It left a hole. In two ways, it left a big hole. They’d all worked with Wayne for years, and he’d been a good man to work with: always the same, easygoing, good-natured, efficient,
tough when he had to be—a good cop. They missed him, big, hard-muscled Wayne lounging at his desk there. And it left a big hole another way, for in the past couple of years, with the
transient population growing, street crime and other kinds of crime were way up, and they could have used two or three more plainclothesmen to help carry the load.

The official notices went out. A couple of the beat men were bucking for detective, but neither had the course credits built up to be eligible yet. There were just two applications sent in, and
it was a while before they heard the results. In the middle of a busy Saturday afternoon, with Katz questioning a suspect in a homicide and Poor listening to three witnesses to a heist, Chief
Jensen had come in with an official-looking letter in one hand and a rather peculiar expression on his face and marched over to O’Connor’s desk. Two minutes later O’Connor had let
out a bellow. “My sweet Jesus Christ!” Varallo and Forbes gave up trying to type reports and went to see what was happening. “They can’t do this to us!” said
O’Connor, outraged.

“Now, Charles,” said Jensen, grinning, “be broad-minded. There really wasn’t much choice—she was thirty points ahead of the other one on the exam. And these days,
equal hiring practice—”

“A female detective, for God’s sake! A fe—oh, God give me strength!” By that time of day, O’Connor always needed a shave; he had pulled his tie loose and taken off
his jacket, and the worn shoulder holster holding the .357 magnum bounced as he flung himself back in the chair.

“Now,” said Jensen, “she’s been with LAPD for five years and has an absolutely clean record—been commended a few times. She sounds like a very competent girl, and
you know we’ve said it’d be useful to have some female personnel—”

“Policewomen, yes—female detectives, I don’t know,” said O’Connor sourly.

“Don’t be a male chauvinist, Charles,” said Varallo with a grin. “She’s certainly not inexperienced, coming from LAPD. What’s her name?”

“Delia Riordan,” said the chief, glancing at the papers in his hand. “Twenty-seven. I’ve got a very complimentary letter from an Inspector Danielson, praising her to the
skies. Smart, reliable, co-operative, and so on and so on.”

“Sounds fine to me.” Jeff Forbes was intrigued and interested. “Maybe we could use a little womanly intuition around here.”

O’Connor growled. He went on growling about it to Katharine when he got home, but Katharine was intrigued too. At the time, which was late October, she was looking very unlike his usual
svelte, slim Katy, bulging amidships with the baby; and of course the first thing she said was, “I wonder if she’s attractive or—twenty-seven. Well, the kind of girl who goes into
it as a career—”

“There you are!” said O’Connor crossly. “If she is good-looking, every unmarried officer in the building in a tizzy, and all the wives jealous—”

“Don’t be silly,” said Katharine. Maisie, the outsize blue Afghan hound, sat up anxiously at O’Connor’s tone and came over to plant a wet kiss on his cheek.

“—And,” said O’Connor, getting out his handkerchief, “having to think twice before we use a cuss word—”

“Which will be very good training for all of you,” said Katharine, “though you have quieted down some since I’ve been civilizing you, darling.”

Varallo was cautiously positive toward the idea; when he told Laura, she was interested. “A lot of things that come along, a woman can be better with witnesses, some women would feel
easier talking to another woman, and juveniles—most big forces have a good many policewomen these days, and LAPD tells us they can be invaluable. But it’s not just so often you find one
wanting to go on and make rank.”

“She sounds interesting,” said Laura. At the time she was bulging amidships too—she and Katharine had a bet on as to who would produce first. “I wonder if she’s
attractive, Vic.”

“Femminile eterno!” said Varallo, amused. “What does it matter? If she’s been an LAPD officer for five years, she’ll know how to discourage unwanted
admirers. Though I suppose if it created any rivalries in the office—Forbes and Rhys are still bachelors, and Dick Hunter—well, we’ll have to take it as it comes.” He
wandered down the hall to inspect their best-ever baby, not quite a baby now but almost two, his darling Ginevra.

In due course Laura won the bet, riding decorously to the hospital in a cab while Varallo was downtown testifying at a burglary trial, and without much trouble producing J. . .