by Jim Nisbet
His eyes followed her gaze to its focus. Her hands met them there.
“Mine, too,” he said with a grin.
Chapter Eight
THE AIR WASN’T TOO THICK, THOUGH IT WAS THICK ENOUGH, and the stairs weren’t too steep, though there were two flights of them; but Martin Windrow climbed them slowly, and when he’d gotten to the top of them, he breathed heavily.
It’s a good thing I don’t smoke, he thought to himself as he limped down the hall, his breath rasping slightly through the mucous in his throat. Then again, because he didn’t smoke, he could smell the pungency of iodine that wafted around him when he stopped. He could smell the stale whiskey on his breath. And he could smell and still taste someone else’s day and night and early-morning cigarettes in his mouth. And, yes, among these odors he could pick out others: Someone’s cat had sprayed the corner where the hall wall met the stairhead. He could smell cops as he approached the end of the hallway that led to the opposing doors of Virginia Sarapath and Herbert Trimble. And he could smell … a perfume, one he’d smelled before.
There was a new padlock on Virginia’s door and a straight-backed chair in front of it. Under the chair were two editions of the Examiner, and three or four empty Styrofoam cups. Someone had run out of coffee, and the morning Chronicle had been on the street for an hour.
Windrow stood between the two apartments and stared at the knob on Herbert Trimble’s door, counting the stitches in his mouth with his tongue. The blood was the same type as the Sarapath girl’s, Windrow thought, and it was on the inside of the door. Who knows, it might have been Trimble. He’d always wanted to skin a woman, probably his ex-wife. But he was some kind of writer, a hack writer; he wrote hack horror stories for a cheap pulp magazine under a pseudonym. Didn’t that mean he got to take out his aggressions against women on paper? Wouldn’t that be sufficient revenge for their transgressions, real or imagined, for a man who lived mainly in his imagination?
The long, lugubrious sound of a cello, its lowest note carefully bowed, penetrated the door as Windrow stared at it. He couldn’t believe his ears. Short strokes on the same string reinforced his original impression: Someone was in Herbert Trimble’s apartment, tuning a cello. As Windrow listened, the musician successively bowed and tuned the rest of the strings and then, after a pause, began to play scales and exercises. Slowly at first, then faster and faster, with precision.
Windrow looked at the empty chair, its back against Virginia Sarapath’s door. So the uniformed cop played the cello?
Very carefully, he tried the door. The knob turned easily and quietly. Still standing in the hall, he eased the door open with his fingertips. The air of the room as it moved to meet him bore the unmistakable odor of burning marijuana. The scales didn’t stop, but now little scraps of musical compositions began to appear in them. The cellist played a scale up in major, then down in minor that modulated into another major, then up in that major, then down again using a piece of actual music that went in the same direction. Then he modulated out of that piece. When he got back down to the next note in his progression he left the musical piece and, modulating, turned upward again in a scale or through another musical piece. The whole exercise had impressive, virtuosic coherence. Windrow closed the door and stood in the entryway, listening. The player was good; and stoned, too, judging by the thick air in the apartment.
He walked into the studio. The man sitting in the simple folding metal chair, facing a lyre-shaped stand heaped with music, sawing and swaying with a look of furious concentration, took no heed of him. Though hunched in that position peculiar to cellists at work, the man looked to be of medium height, with blond, almost platinum hair. Windrow noticed immediately that the man’s hair was the same color as Mrs. Trimble’s, only much shorter. He wore sneakers, a pair of lemon-yellow pressed pants, a pinstriped shirt with cigarette pocket and button-down collar, a French-style cravat, and some kind of bracelet. Perspiration ran in two rivulets from his left sideburn to his jawbone, and as he worked at his cello, the sweat gleamed in the morning light.
The room was more disheveled than it had been the previous day. The Murphy bed was still down out of the wall closet, the same closet in which, only yesterday, Steve Gleason had found Trimble’s drugs.
Obviously, Trimble had more than one stash.
The bed sheets were extremely rumpled and creased; they looked like they hadn’t been laundered in a couple of weeks. Most of the blanket draped to the floor, on which a number of articles of clothing were scattered. Among them something gleamed, catching Windrow’s eye. He studied it, and its shape became apparent to him, and then he recognized it. It was the necklace Mrs. Trimble had worn the night before, when he’d seen her at her house. The big, square links, connected by the little steel annulets were unmistakable. It was possible, just possible, that it was a duplicate …
Mentally, Windrow shrugged. Some people could never get themselves straight over a divorce. They would fling themselves away from their partners, hire lawyers, sue and threaten each other, then, after weeks of animosity, take off with their estranged spouse for three days in a honeymoon hotel in Carmel. Though, he reflected, a bed’s a bed.
Then he realized that the rest of the links in the outlandish necklace, invisible to him, were hidden in the folds of a black material very similar to that of the pants he’d last seen Mrs. Trimble wearing. He looked behind him toward the bathroom door situated directly across from the hall entrance. It was closed. So they weren’t alone, he and the cellist. Turning slightly, so that he could keep a corner of his eye on the closed door, he cleared his throat, loudly.
“Ahem. Mr. Trimble?”
The man glanced up at Windrow, finished the scale he was on, and stopped playing. He appeared to be seriously considering the answer to this question, but something else, another question, perhaps, flitted behind his eyes.
“Yes?”
“You’re Herbert Trimble?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve got some papers for you.” Windrow reached into his pocket and pulled out the copies he’d gotten from Emmy, after he’d left Marilyn.
“You should hire a telepath,” she’d said, “or a psychic. People could give you the runaround.”
“They work for free, too?” was all Windrow could manage as he’d headed for the door. Now he handed the two pages to the man he hoped, finally, was Herbert Trimble. Trimble glanced at them, smiled, and stuck them between the pages of a music book on the stand.
“What’s so funny?” said Windrow. “How come everybody’s getting a little kick out of this lousy court order?”
“Who, you mean all two of us?” said Trimble.
“I’m not laughing,” said Windrow. “Where were you two nights ago, about two thirty in the morning?”
The man stroked four melodramatic bass notes on his instrument and watched Windrow, his eyes not blinking. They were the famous clichéd notes of the theme to Dragnet, one of the original T.V. cop shows. The guy knows something, Windrow thought, though I’m no iridologist.
“Right here, trying to get some sleep,” Trimble said irritably. “Only that bitch next door was working her way through Masters and Johnson, backwards, and I couldn’t close my eyes for the visions.” He bowed the low string again, then rounded his stroke, so as to let the bowing catch some of the other strings, and fretted a little progression. “As of dancing sugar plums,” he said, “with nylon legs.”
“Why should that bother you, Trimble? Had it never happened before?”
“Never,” said Trimble. He looked Windrow in the eye. Trimble’s eyes were big and wet. “Anywhere,” he almost whispered that one, as if its certainty were as horrible as its truth.
“What? Never? Anywhere? How did you know that?”
“Oh,” said Trimble, thumbing through some music on the stand, “I get around.”
“I know,” said Windrow. “I met your wife yesterday.”
Trimble turned to look at him. But his face didn’t show shock or out
rage at the deliberate crudity of Windrow’s remark, merely amusement. Trimble chuckled. “Ex,” he said. “Ex-wife.” He laughed out loud. Something was tickling him, no doubt about it. But no sooner had he shown his amusement to Windrow than he frowned and looked away. He stared at the baseboard on the other side of the cello for a moment. As if coming to himself, he looked up at the music, thought a moment, and rapidly thumbed through it.
“You’ve heard of Elgar?” he said, nervously arranging the pages of the book so that they might stay open without help. Windrow reached over and closed the book.
“Yeah, yeah. So your wife has read the Kama Sutra, how come the lady next door bothered you so much? Was it loud?”
Herbert Trimble stared at the cover of the book. “Very loud,” he said. “She kept me up all night.”
“All night?”
“All night, until about four o’clock or so. Then, then I—well I …”
“Come on, Herbert. Spit it out. It’s time.”
“I had this idea for a story. I, you see, I write these silly things … Hack them I mean, for money.” He ran his hand up and down the back of the neck of his cello, lovingly. “She’s an expensive habit,” he said dreamily. “Time, you know. It takes an awful lot of time to make this whore play.”
“So you got up and started to write this story.”
“Yes. I’d had the first line for hours, the idea, the whole story even, I guess. … But it’s so degrading to let the libido run around undisciplined like that. And it takes energy, precious energy.”
“Away from her?” Windrow indicated the cello.
Trimble smiled and glanced shyly at Windrow. “Yes, you—perhaps you understand. It takes time, and energy, just like she takes time and energy, but the difference is a matter of worlds.”
“Her,” Windrow said.
“Oh, yes,” said Trimble, “I’m not unique in that. Ask any musician. His instrument is his animas, his her … Of course,” he added, pointing to his desk with his bow, “there’s always her, too.”
Windrow looked at the manuscript stacked neatly on one corner of the desk behind Trimble. “You mean The Art of Death?”
“Yes, Mr. Windrow.” Trimble batted his eyelids. “I’m a bigamist.” He laughed gaily. “There are lots of hers in my life, Mr. Windrow, as you are beginning to see.” He laughed and bowed a few carefree notes.
“Yes, it looks that way, Mr. Trimble. What about the one next door?”
Trimble looked at Windrow, frowned, then shifted his glance back to the music stand. He bit his lip.
“I typed the first line,” he said. He looked down at his bow and minutely adjusted the knob that tightened the horsehairs. “Then the tone of her voice, which I’d been listening to for hours at that point, the tone of her voice … changed.”
Windrow waited “Changed how, Mr. Trimble?”
“Until then, her moans and exclamations had been mostly of pleasure—some of them, perhaps quite a few of them, emanated from those little pains one encounters on the way to greater pleasures, but everything I’d heard seemed to derive from … well, from good sportsmanship, shall we say. And, therefore, it was none of my business.”
“But something changed that.”
“Not something, Mr. Windrow. Someone. Someone began to do things differently. Someone had begun to hurt the lady Sarapath.”
“What did you hear? Blows? A shot? Screams?”
“Oh, no, no. It was very subtle, at first. In fact, it had probably been going on for some time before I noticed it. But notice it I did. The woman was experiencing pain. Very complicated, profound pain.”
“Complicated? Profound? You mean it was emotional as well as physical?”
“Yes, but more than that. She was emotionally involved with it, true, but she must have been experiencing something that was new to her, something that surprised her, perhaps shocked her, but somehow it, the pain, was … seducing her. She couldn’t run away from it, she couldn’t turn it off, she couldn’t stop it.”
“Couldn’t?”
“Wouldn’t.”
“Why? Why not?”
“Because, Mr. Windrow, she was enjoying it.”
Trimble had been applying resin to his cello bow. He stopped and looked at Windrow, who stared back at him.
“It was excruciating, Mr. Windrow, for me to sit there and listen to it, but—I will be perfectly frank with you—it was also … titillating. I hope you don’t misunderstand me.”
There was a pause.
“So you continued to write?” Windrow finally asked, quietly.
“I never got past the first line. By the time I’d brought myself to write that, the disturbance next door was becoming more than I could bear. Once again, sitting behind my desk, I sat and listened. I listened for a long time.” Trimble suddenly began to fidget. The end of the bow bobbed up and down below the music stand. “Until I heard one last long, sobbing, excruciating, broken …” He turned the palms of his hands upward. The bow end flicked upward and tapped the underside of the music stand in response to his loss of words. “… moan,” he said. “It was the hideous, hopeless moan of someone completely, thoroughly, utterly lost. A cry of the damned.”
Windrow waited for a moment. He didn’t think that Trimble needed any prompting, but when no further information seemed forthcoming, he said, “Was that when you went next door, Mr. Trimble?”
Trimble looked at him briefly and looked away. He’d begun to shake, just perceptibly. His head was rigid, at a peculiar angle to his neck. His eyes stared helplessly at some scene reenacting itself in the dust and shadows under the bed.
“I went next door,” he managed to say, apparently with great effort. Windrow thought that the man’s voice was beginning to change on account of the strain.
“You went next door …”
Trimble looked up into Windrow’s eyes. Trimble’s eyes were sad, afraid, resigned, faraway, and … Windrow realized—too late—that Trimble’s eyes saw someone else. Whoever that someone else was had great agility, too, for before Windrow could turn around and see who it was, the someone had, as they say, jerked the rug out from under Windrow, and turned out the lights. And the agile someone was generous. In the darkness that followed, the someone made a present to Windrow. It was a beautiful display of sparks, brightly colored, and they were wonderful sparks. He thought that he could feel them, behind his eyes, better than he could see them, just before he could neither feel nor see anything at all.
Chapter Nine
MARTIN WINDROW TESTED HIS EYES AND SAW THE LARGE, squinting, purple face of Max Bdeniowitz, inches from his own. He closed his eyes and tried to think of naked women, but all he got were people in overcoats on flat, overcast beaches. He turned his head from one side to another and smacked his lips. The inside of his mouth tasted like the floor of a dairy shed; and his tongue seemed three sizes too large. And the pain. When he moved his head, his skull creaked like a dilapidated piece of wooden furniture. His eyes had been removed and batted around and put back out of round, in the wrong sockets. The fingers of his left hand pinched tenuously for the slightest purchase on the bare wooden floor beneath him.
He forced his eyelids to become slits. They allowed only the minimum of optical information to pass through them. What he saw was more than enough, and he groaned. Above him was a circle of human figures, all of them cops. Only one of the figures was paying any attention to him, but if he’d had his choice, he’d rather that all of them were watching him grovel on the floor, instead of the single one who was now glowering down at him.
A patient man Max Bdeniowitz wasn’t. If Max had a man on stakeout, he’d rather that man do enticing body language to attract the subject he was waiting for, than just sit in his car and drink coffee, waiting. If a man held hostages in a building at gunpoint, with plastic explosives wired to himself and the Transamerica Pyramid, Max would not be the man to call in to negotiate. If Max somehow by mistake showed up on the scene, he would go in after the guy, while everyb
ody else helped evacuate the neighborhood, to take the maniac’s toys away from him. If the guy’s arm came off with the gun, too bad. It would still be attached to the gun, too, when it showed up in court as evidence. Max was an honest cop.
And right now, Max was impatient. He prodded Windrow’s ribs with his toe.
“Wake up, Marty. Show-and-tell time.”
“Ow,” said Windrow, wincing. “Kick a good one.”
“If there was a good one left, I’d kick it, Windrow. Get up.”
Windrow crawled to a wall and sat himself up against it. As he lifted his head, an avalanche occurred inside it, and miscellaneous retired brain matter cascaded into his neck.
“What happened?”
“Sorry, Windrow. That’s my question. Just tell us what happened, and then one of the boys will give you a nice ride downtown.”
“Downtown? Why? It’s not my bowling night.”
“If I got anything to do with it, Windrow, you’ll never bowl again. What happened?”
Windrow had no idea what had happened. He couldn’t remember anything since yesterday. He fought a wave of dizziness, then his stomach turned over. He groaned.
Silence.
“Look, Max …”
“I am. It’s making me sick.”
“Suppose you tell me where we are first.”
“Oh, come on, Windrow …”
“Just a hint, Max.”
“Look, Windrow, if there wasn’t the press outside, I’d fill you with booze and drown you in the bathtub—”
“Bathtub … There’s a bathtub here …?”
Bdeniowitz sighed. “Yeah, but you can’t afford the rent.”
“The bathroom. She must have come out of the bathroom.”
Bdeniowitz looked significantly at Steve Gleason, who sat on the Murphy bed, his hands in the pockets of his trenchcoat, smoking a cigarette. “She?” he said.
“His wife, Mrs. Trimble. She must have slipped out of the bathroom and coldcocked me while he was telling me his story.”
“He, Windrow?”