The Damned Don't Die

by Jim Nisbet

“Oh—”

  “Your sister know a guy named Trimble?”

  “Only by his mailbox.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Wait—”

  He waited. Down the block a jackhammer started up. The Cadillac cruised by in the opposite direction, slowing in front of the liquor store and the whores. From out of the police car window a milkshake cup fell into the gutter. Thursday didn’t wait.

  “She was a good kid, Windrow. Straight ahead. Why her and not me? Christ, when I think of the kinks I been with …” Her voice trailed off.

  “Maybe you can read men like books in the dime rack, honey, but your sister couldn’t. Or wouldn’t … Which was it?” He heard the soft click of ice against glass through the phone. The jackhammer started up again; he hadn’t noticed it stop.

  “Oh, I don’t know, we weren’t that close. She was like, she was like everything I wasn’t. Had a good job, never got in trouble, paid her taxes, slept with somebody not too important around the office once a week …” She sobbed. “Then she, I don’t know, she … She never would tell me what was going on in her head; I don’t know if she was even paying attention to her life. She had this career, she was the first woman accountant with this big company—”

  “What company?”

  “Oh—P.—ahm, P. A.—P.J. Brodine; it’s an accounting firm, you know. People hire them to figure out their bookkeeping systems and do the payroll and taxes and stuff.”

  Windrow wrote “P.J. Brodine” on his pad. “She ever talk to you about her work?”

  “Yeah, she’d tell me about the men there, mostly, figuring that would be what I was interested in. I mean what do I care about counting beans? There was a guy a couple of desks down thinking about leaving his wife. He never did.”

  “That over?”

  “Yeah, but it took a while. Longer for her than him. It was, like, a beseeching look over the water cooler every day for, oh, I don’t know, months. He just quit speaking to her. I guess they slept together about twice. Then, whammo, no contact. Poor girl.”

  “We all have to learn.”

  “Oh, tough guy.”

  Windrow said nothing.

  “Listen …”

  He listened.

  “I’m coming apart.”

  “Yeah. So’s the Bay Shore Freeway.”

  “You son of a bitch. When’s the last time your little sister fell into a meat grinder?”

  He pinched his sinuses. “Sorry.”

  Silence. The pneumatic drill had stopped.

  “Listen … I’d like some help with this. It’s pretty bad. They needed somebody to identify her …”

  Windrow rubbed his forehead.

  “Are you—I mean, if you happen to run across this creep …” She took a drink. “Do you carry a gun?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Bring it over here.”

  “You sure you need that kind of help?”

  “Yes. No.”

  “I see.”

  “Please … ?”

  “I’ll get there around nine.”

  She gave him the address and hung up.

  Windrow swiveled his chair back around to face his window, gingerly leaned back, and twirled his pencil between the fingers of both hands. The cop car and one of the whores were gone, and as he watched, the Cadillac came back down the street for the third time. Windrow counted the stitches in his cheek with his tongue, forward and backward. Down the hall someone closed a door with a glass panel in it and locked it. Footsteps came down the hall, passed Windrow’s office, and faded down the staircase. Eventually, the street door opened and closed, two stories below. Far beyond the buildings, up the street to the west, Windrow could see the leading edge of the fog bank, boiling over and down the slopes of Twin Peaks.

  The telephone rang. Windrow reached behind him and picked up the glass of Scotch. The phone rang again. He took a drink. The phone rang a third time and a fourth before he picked up the receiver.

  “Windrow, where you been? I been calling all day. Don’t you ever call back?”

  “I’ve been out getting shown grisly things.”

  “Skip the editorial. They found a bloodstain on Trimble’s doorknob.”

  “Inside or out?”

  “What? How should I know? You want to know?”

  “Might be something.”

  “I’ll get back to you. But the heat’s on Trimble for sure.”

  “He’s all they got.”

  “Yeah, but unless he comes unglued in front of witnesses, they got no case. Or is there something I don’t know?”

  “There’s nothing you don’t know, Emmy. It looked circumstantial to me, but they’ve hung women for less.”

  “I’ll bet that just tickles you pink.”

  “Show a little leg in court, I always say.”

  “No, that’s what I always say. I just hired the foxiest grad student you ever—or you might ever … Want to meet her? She’s a lot smarter than you are. You might learn something from her, about the law I mean.”

  “Sure. When I find Trimble I’ll give her second crack at him. Unless the cops get to him first, in which case she’ll just have to read it in the papers like the rest of us. Has his wife heard anything?”

  “I was going to ask you that.”

  “I guess I’ll have to ask her, then. I’m on the way over there, to get visual reconnaissance and a picture. Okay, boss?”

  “Get to him first, Marty. Maybe you’ll get paid this week.”

  “Thanks.”

  Emmy Cohen hung up. Windrow turned back to his window and sipped his Scotch. Then he turned around again. He pulled the typewriter board out from under the desktop and ran his finger down the stained list taped there until he found a number, and dialed it.

  “Hiya, Steve. Windrow. Was the blood on Trimble’s doorknob inside or out? What? Yeah. No, I’m holding him in a closet in the Filmore until I get my price from the P.E.N. American Center. You in for half?

  “It was on the inside knob? Hm. No, nothing.” Windrow sat silently for a moment. Gleason told him they’d found Trimble’s fingerprints in the Sarapath apartment.

  “You haven’t found him yet? What type blood? Whaddaya mean, you don’t know? Okay, I’ll call back. Right. If I see him, I’ll let you know, the very first thing. Right. Oh, yeah. I need a pic of the deceased. Can do? Yeah, yeah. Come on, Stevie. Okay. Great. Yeah. Thanks. So long.”

  He hung up and moved to the refrigerator, situated between the entrance door and the bathroom. Inside, he thought to himself: So the bloodstain was on the inside of Herbert Trimble’s locked apartment. He opened the refrigerator and looked inside. The first two packages, wrapped in white paper, he removed and threw into the trash basket beside the desk without looking into them. He pulled out a frosted glass, a bottle of dark beer, and an egg. Opening the freezer compartment he dug two ice cubes from a plastic bucket and dropped them into the glass. He closed the doors, humming tunelessly. He carried everything back to his desk and set it all down on top of his mail, thinking, well, the future doesn’t look too good for old Herbert, no matter how he fits into this. He poured the two ice cubes from the frosted beer glass into the nearly empty Scotch glass. Then he broke the egg into the frosted glass, threw the shell halves into the wastebasket and, holding the beer glass up to the light from the outside window, carefully poured the dark Mexican beer down the side of the glass, minimizing the head. He drank the remainder of the beer in the bottle and threw it into the trash. He belched and walked over to the window. Carefully, so as to avoid the sutures in his abdomen, he inserted one hand in his trouser pocket, and contemplated his view. The third prostitute was back with the others, in the doorway across the street. Above their heads a couple of doors down the neon silhouette of a pink cocktail glass tilted one way, filled up with three big, green bubbles, went dark, then tilted the other way and filled up again.

  Windrow turned from the window and retrieved a letter opener from his desk and, resuming his survey of the stree
t, stirred the beer and egg. The concoction foamed considerably, and he had to sip the barm off the rim to keep it from spilling. With an expansive gesture he toasted the street. “It’s a good thing I don’t smoke,” he said aloud, and quaffed half the beer-and-egg solution. “Ah,” he said and turned on an old radio that squatted on top of one of the two file cabinets that stood between the bathroom door and the window hall. A loud hum emanated gradually from it, then, distantly at first, came the tinny strains of an old big band hit from the forties. It got louder, though never as loud as the hum; and Windrow was back at the window and nearly finished with his beer and egg before he recognized the tune. It was Glen Miller’s Orchestra, playing “Pennsylvania 6-5000.” What had nearly been a smile in Martin Windrow’s features decayed into the hard, faraway expression of a man who wasn’t seeing what he was looking at, as the fog of late afternoon rolled down Folsom Street, between the town and the sun.

  Chapter Five

  MRS. TRIMBLE OPENED THE DOOR WIDE. “WHO IS IT?” She was not beautiful somehow.

  “Windrow …”

  For just a moment, he was taken aback by her appearance. The bones in her face were too square and she wore too much makeup over them, bizarrely colored. She had blonde, almost white hair that looked permanently bleached and sculpted into its shape. She wore tight, black-leather pants, tied at the ankles, that might have been less revealing than a fluoroscope, but not much. Her blouse was of diaphanous white silk, and she wore a black brassiere under it. The light from the rooms behind her silhouetted the lines of her ribs and her very small breasts and, as she turned aside to let him in, the aureole of a nipple. Around her neck she wore a tight-fitting collar, consisting of chromed, rectangular links about an inch high, each link connected to the next by a stack of tiny metal loops. But even so large and bright a piece of costumery as this necklace could not hide the bruises on her throat, which displayed their extreme edges perfectly when she turned in the hall light. Better to say, Windrow thought, as he brushed past her, that she pivoted to let him in, for the nearly vertical high-heeled shoes on which she’d perched herself permitted little else.

  More words jumped into Windrow’s mind as he entered the living room. Lush, not to say gracious, occurred to him immediately. The room was lit by a small reading lamp leaned over the arm of a chair in one corner, and by candlelight everywhere else. Leather-bound books in dark cases lined one wall. The carpet was white and so deep that he thought her shoes might be more practical than he’d first thought. Not that she looked impractical, exactly, he thought again, turning to face his hostess, who’d followed him into the room with the pizzicato gait peculiar to her kind of balancing act.

  “Drink?” she said, striding past him to the bottle-covered glass-and-chrome cart on wheels which stood in a corner. She held up an unmarked decanter, one third filled with a dark fluid. Beyond her, through a large sliding-glass door, the city twinkled through wisps of fog. Her earrings dipped in and out of the distant points of light.

  “Ah, sure.”

  With the elbow of the hand that held the drink resting against one prominent hip, she swirled the liquid in the cut-glass decanter. “Brandy?” she said in a voice so full of meaning, so thick with import—and through a smile so lascivious—that Windrow, convinced she couldn’t be serious, decided that her tone couldn’t convey anything more complicated than a trace of mockery.

  Still, he suddenly realized, he’d see this woman in hell before he’d try any of her brandy.

  “Scotch,” he said. “I’m kind of in a hurry.”

  Her face collapsed visibly, then buoyed again. She changed bottles and poured five ounces of labeled, good Scotch into an eight-ounce water glass. She held it up. “Ice?”

  Taxi, Windrow thought to himself, looking around the room. “Please, ma’am.”

  He heard two distinct plunks, as if she’d dropped the cubes down a well shaft. She poured herself a discreet slug, without ice, from the jug of cut glass, and walked the drinks over to Windrow.

  “Here,” she said. It was two or three hours’ worth of booze. “Cheers.”

  They each took a sip. Windrow set his drink down on the low glass tabletop in front of the sofa and put both hands in his front pants pockets, thumbs out. The four fingers of his left hand gently covered the stitches in his abdomen. Mrs. Trimble walked around Windrow and set her drink on an end table next to the black sofa behind him.

  “Nice place you have here, Mrs. Trimble,” he began, but before he could tack the proper intonation onto the end of this pleasantry, she had him. Expertly, she placed one leg behind his knees and pulled him backward over it.

  As they fell to the sofa, he landing on his back, she on his legs, he saw that he had a clear shot at her head. The balled fist of his right hand might easily have knocked her senseless. But having an idea of what she was about, he used his right hand to reach around his back and cushion the impact of the sofa on his sutured buttock, leaving his left hand still covering the abdominal wound. In spite of this precaution, the sutures tugged at his flesh. One or two might have torn loose. As he’d fallen, his stomach muscles had automatically hardened, and the broken rib, constricted by them, jabbed his lung. He exhaled sharply, and his eyes filled with water, through which he looked down his supine torso at the leering, blonde features of Mrs. Trimble. Her smiling mouth was just above her hands, which were on his zipper and what was underneath.

  “Honey’s the name,” she said, unzipping his pants. “My master told me to get as much experience as possible.” She rubbed her chest against him; the tip of her tongue flashed along her upper front teeth.

  She was voracious. The multiple bracelets on her forearms jangled.

  He let her work at it awhile.

  Then she rolled her eyes up at him, catching his. He could see no understanding in her eyes, only puzzlement. How could this fail? She slowed, stopped. Windrow, wincing from another jab in his lung, stood up. The seat of his pants was wet.

  “You’re no fun.” Honey Trimble pouted, sitting back on her heels. Her lips and chin were wet with saliva and did, undeniably, look interesting. Though still neatly tucked in at the waist, her blouse had become completely unbuttoned.

  “I work in the circus,” Windrow said, tucking in his shirt. “I only have fun when I’m at home.” He zipped his fly. “Now about that picture.” He walked over to the cart and poured a short hit of Scotch.

  She pouted. “Make me.”

  Windrow looked at her. What did he care if they found her old man? “What about your property settlement?” he said tentatively. She formed the words Make me with her wet lips, but did not say them aloud.

  He stood over her. “Make me,” she whispered breathlessly. Martin Windrow slapped her, not too hard, but firmly, with the palm of his hand; and before she could ask he backhanded her, harder than he’d intended, so that she was knocked off the couch and her breath escaped her in a little scream.

  Jesus Christ, Windrow said to himself. He rubbed the back of his hand. Something dripped down onto the back of his thigh.

  Honey Trimble picked herself up and meekly, in her stocking feet, padded to the bookcase. Windrow looked at his Scotch. He picked up Mrs. Trimble’s drink and sniffed. It had no odor.

  When Honey Trimble turned back to him, carrying a large scrapbook he was standing with his own drink looking at the view. She curled up on the couch with the book and waited.

  “Just the picture, please,” he said, “ma’am.”

  She put the book down rather loudly on the coffee table and began to thumb rapidly through it. She extracted a photograph from under its plastic and handed it to him.

  It was a color picture of a pale man shackled to a wall. He was naked, spread-eagled, bound and gagged.

  “I took that just before we separated,” she said. Then she giggled.

  The wall looked like masonry, and he thought he could make out the edge of a floor drain in the extreme foreground.

  “Did you show this to the cops?”


  “Oh, no. They weren’t as nice as you. Besides”—she giggled again—“there were too many of them.” More giggles. “I gave them the museum catalog, with pictures of the staff.”

  He extended the photograph back to her. “These Polaroids are pretty fuzzy,” he said, “and there’s a line or something across the mouth. Do you have anything else?” She swiped the photograph out of his hand. “The mouth is very important,” he added, “for purposes of identification.”

  She flipped furiously through the scrapbook, backward, he noted, and extracted another snapshot. This time it was a black-and-white of the same man, but he was sitting on the same couch Honey Trimble was sitting on, fully clothed, holding a drink and looking at the photographer’s feet. On the table behind the couch stood glasses and bottles, all of them various degrees of empty, and among them Windrow could make out a corner of the very photo album Mrs. Trimble now held open in her lap. The man looked moody, distracted, and slightly unhappy. Possibly he was uncomfortable or bored. The picture window behind him was lit up by the camera flash. There were arms and shoulders on both sides of the shot, obviously taken during a party, but no other faces were visible.

  Windrow slipped the picture into his coat pocket and set his drink on the wheeled tray. “Thank you, Mrs. Trimble,” he nodded and headed for the front door. Mrs. Trimble petulantly, but almost menacingly, slammed the scrapbook closed and stood up to follow him.

  One foot across the threshold, Windrow turned to look at her. “By the way, Mrs. Trimble …”

  She looked at him, all eyes. “Yes?”

  “How well did your husband, your ex-husband, know Virginia Sarapath?”

  Mrs. Trimble draped herself around her front door. “Well, I’m sure I don’t know, but I assume they were sleeping together.”

  “Oh? Why?”

  “Why? Well, people just do, don’t they? Sleep together?” She veiled her eyes. “Well! Some people do …”

  “Right. Good night, Mrs. Trimble …” He turned away. “By the way”—he turned back again—“who’s your master?”

  She looked at him. Except for the fact that he wasn’t buying, it was as if she thought she was the snake and he was the frog.