The Damned Don't Die

by Jim Nisbet

  The guy was good. Windrow wondered how and when the man in the car had gotten that cigarette lit, while, no doubt, watching the man in the overcoat stroll down the block. Probably with the car’s cigarette lighter, so there was no flare from a match or other type of light for Windrow to spot.

  But Windrow had spotted him, and that was all he needed. It seemed very unlikely that the police department would have more than one man on a given shift to spare on the long shot that a murder suspect would make the same stupid move twice. At any rate, that was another chance that Windrow would have to take.

  Having crossed Clayton Street, Windrow turned right onto the sidewalk and walked the few remaining yards to the intersection of Corbett and Clayton. He crossed Corbett, then turned left on it and walked to a tree that stood at the head of the bus stop there, and leaned on it. From this intersection, Corbett proceeded steeply down the hill, below Clayton, for about a half-mile, until it joined up with Seventeenth Street, many blocks downhill from the intersection of Seventeenth and Clayton, near which Windrow had parked his car fifteen minutes before. Excepting a few curves, Corbett could be said to form the hypotenuse of a traingle, the ninety-degree vertex of which formed the intersection of Seventeenth and Clayton Streets. From the vertex at which Windrow stood, Corbett angled acutely away and down from Clayton, like a terraced switchback on the side of a mountain. On the high side across the street, Windrow could just make out the clusters of needles in the top of the Monterey pine in front of the Trimble house, their undersides dimly illuminated by the light on the porch.

  From the relative neutral zone of the bus stop, Windrow studied carefully the layout of the hill above him, then began to walk leisurely down the side of Corbett opposite the Clayton side. He strolled slowly, his eyes carefully examining every housefront and driveway. At one point he stopped, then walked on. Then he stopped again.

  Across the street from him, what looked like a little driveway ran steeply up the hill, perpendicularly away from the street. He crossed and peered up it. The little driveway extended up the hill sharply, between two tall hedges. He walked up it.

  At its top, the narrow concrete strip flattened into a small parking area that might have held three cars, and contained none, but it would take a very unusual car to climb up into it. A very small bungalow of perhaps two rooms faced on to the parking area to his left. On his right a series of little storage sheds, four of them, each a little higher up the grade than the one next to it, leaned up the slope. The uphill side of the parking area was bordered by a low retaining wall, beyond which were three small, steep yards, and beyond those, much higher up, three houses towered above him. The one on the right was the Trimble home.

  He recognized it by the apartment building that completely filled the lot next to it further uphill on Clayton Street. The large, lit pine stood between them, on the street side. Along the edge of this building, two levels of long balconies provided outdoor access to all of the apartments on that side of the building.

  The yards were all badly fenced, with rickety posts and boards and wire that would surely collapse under the weight of anything heavier than a cat. But one of the balconies ended about ten feet above the roof of the uppermost shed to Windrow’s right. He walked toward that corner of the flat turning a complete circle as he did so. The bungalow was dark. There was no one in sight. He stepped up onto the wall, and levered himself up to the roof of the shed, ignoring the stabs of pain in his rib and abdomen. There he swiftly unbuttoned his coat and vest. A short hop allowed him to grasp the lowest railing of the balcony. He swung himself back and forth three times and hooked his left leg up and onto the cement balcony, between its surface and the low railing. With this foothold he used the metal-rod balusters in the railing to pull himself up and onto the walkway.

  Quietly, he walked past a room with a dryer turning in it, an apartment with a television on in it, and a dark apartment that emanated soft music.

  At the end of the walk a staircase of two flights climbed up to the second-level balcony, which led directly to the street. There was a gate across the entrance, lit, and the light from there flooded the second half of the stairs, from the landing up to the street-level walkway. This entrance was immediately adjacent to the pine tree and the entrance to the Trimble’s house.

  But Windrow was forty feet to the rear of the building from the entrance, and directly above his head, perhaps five feet from the top edge of the walkway above him, was the bottom of a deck that cantilevered off the back of the Trimble house. Stepping onto the guardrail of the lower walkway, he climbed up the outside edges of the exposed treads of the staircase to the first landing and thence, angling toward the back of the building as he went, to the street-level walkway. Not stopping, using a support post he balanced himself on the top of the upper guardrail and, holding on to the post where it hit the eave of the apartment building, leaned out as far as he could.

  His left hand came a foot short of the redwood post on the outside corner of the Trimble’s deck, and a few inches below it. The drop to the sharp slope below was about thirty feet. But Windrow wasn’t looking down. As he leaned toward the deck he looked to the right of the enclosed entrance to the house and the barely swaying trunk of the pine tree, through the steel bars of the gate that led onto the walkway below his feet. Dimly, beyond a parked car and across Clayton Street higher up, he could see the black hood of the Ford.

  He looked at his left hand. It was clearly illuminated by the light that spilled back from the entrances to the two buildings, between which he hung. As he hesitated a draft from out of the fog sifted through the pine boughs above him. The old tree creaked and the boughs sighed. A pair of needles dropped onto his neck and made him start. As he did so he noticed mottled shadows passing over his exposed wrist. He forced his right hand to turn loose, and as he fell away from the building he jumped for the post.

  The left hand grabbed a thin redwood slat, the next in line beyond the post, and his right got the edge of the deck at the corner. There was nothing for it but to lift his right foot up until its heel caught the edge of the deck that ran from the house, on the same edge as the excellent view of the police car out front. His open coat and vest dangled straight down from his nearly horizontal body, but since the pockets were deep and more or less upright, no tools spilled out of them. He hung there a moment.

  His right side was his stronger. If he tried to pull himself up with his left, the rib would dig in, his abdomen and buttocks would open up. Sweating and grunting, he was pulling himself up the corner post when he heard the door open and had to freeze.

  The noise of the television suddenly got louder, and down on the lower level of the apartment building, someone in bare feet—he could see the feet and lovely legs to the waist—walked the short distance from the last apartment to the laundry room, humming. The tune was “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now.” As soon as Windrow heard the door of the dryer open and the machine stop, he hauled himself up so that he was crouching on the outside of the deck railing. Seeing no one on the other side, he fell over the rail, using as low a profile as possible, and leaned against the corner post breathing heavily.

  His hands were full of redwood splinters, and in spite of his caution, his abdomen ached. As his breathing slowed, he once again could hear the breeze in the pine tree out front, the foghorns, the television. He peered through the slats of the side railing. The Ford was still there. He could see the windshied and the driver’s door. He could even see that the resident of the Ford had wiped the condensation off the window in the door. It was still rolled down about two inches, and the vent window was tilted open.

  Below him, Windrow heard the door of the laundry room pulled closed. The legs and bare feet padded back up the walkway, a pillowcase full of laundry dangling beside them. They turned into the first open door, the door closed quietly, the mutter of the television became almost indiscernable.

  Windrow looked back at the Ford and waited. His shirt and pants had soaked up most
of his perspiration, and now the breeze was cooling him off. He carefully pulled the overcoat closed, and peered again through the slats of the deck, past the corner of the house, over the top of the car parked out front, to the dark, glassless slot at the top of the front door of the Ford.

  A car rolled between them. Rapidly and down the hill. Windrow heard it stop at Corbett, then turn left, drive down the street below him, and disappear down the hill. But he didn’t take his eyes off the Ford.

  Then it came. He saw a small, diffuse orange glow, behind where the steering wheel would be, and then the smoke. A thin wisp of smoke that was sucked out of the cracked window and up into the fog.

  He waited a few more minutes. He used the time to inspect the back of the Trimble house. He was crouched on the deck he’d looked out on when he’d first visited here. Through the sliding glass door he could make out the back of the couch, a corner of it; and beyond that, though obscured in darkness, stood the floor-to-ceiling bookcase, a lower shelf of which, toward the middle, contained his objective. Only the slider provided access to this deck. The deck ran the length of the back of the house. At the other end there was a duplicate window and door that matched the one in front of Windrow; a fixed window, about seven by-three feet with a glass door that slid behind it to open, same size. Between, in an expanse of rustic siding, a small window was set into the wall about four feet off the surface of the deck. Windrow guessed that this was a bathroom. He pulled on his gloves.

  The three locks represented the three chances he’d have to gain entrance without breaking something.

  Rested, he crawled on his hands and knees to use as much of the railing for cover as possible, and looked closely at the living room door. He could see no wires or sensors, so he tried the handle.

  It slid open so easily he almost banged it against the stop at the other end of its track.

  Delighted, he could hardly contain himself. His mind quickly flashed the message that he was walking into a trap, but he knew a trap, if sprung by someone other than the police, would be even better than finding some little shred of evidence. If he got out of it, that is, in good enough shape to do something about it.

  But he didn’t smell a trap. All he smelled was furniture, a little stale perfume, or maybe stale flowers, stale tobacco smoke, dust; the odors of a room that had been shut up for a while, through which no air had circulated. The air was only a little warmer than that on the outside. Carefully, he slipped through the entrance and slid the door quietly to behind him. His eyes adjusting to the dark, he shifted their gaze about the room. Everything was there that he could remember: the shiny booze cart to his right, the sofa in front of him and turned away. Against the wall to his left, a table, and behind that began the shelves of books.

  He could hear no sound. He stood up, making no sound of his own. Carefully, so as to disturb nothing, he made his way across the room, to the bookshelf. He tried to remember where the she-Trimble had found the scrapbook. She’d had to lean over a bit, to the second or third shelf from the floor. She’d been standing to the right of the corner table, almost in the middle of the span of shelves. He put his fingers on the place. Their touch brought back to him the memory of the other books he’d seen surrounding the album. There’d been a set of reference books, about four or five of them, each thick and bound in dark green material. These his hands found and counted, four of them. On the other side was a run of unbound materials, magazines or possibly music. Finding these, his hands slid over them and back toward the place where the album had been on its shelf. His hands found the leather-bound set of books again. They backed up. There was a section of loose books, where some of the unbound materials had fallen away from the rest of the sheafs and leaned against the last volume of the upright bound set of four. His hands shuttled back and forth. Bound, unbound, bound.

  Sweating again, Windrow found his penlight and risked its small circle of illumination. The light showed him he had the right place. There on the left were the four green, vellum-bound books with gold titles. On the right was a long row of loose folders, apparently typescripts, sheet music, some in folders and paper boxes. In between the two sets of material was a space of a certain size. Windrow put his fingers in the space and spread them. Though he hadn’t handled the white album, he judged it would fit in the empty slot his fingers made. He’d seen Trimble get the book from there.

  He knew he wouldn’t find it. Throwing caution almost away, beyond drawing the drapes over the big windows, he used his light and searched the house. Two rooms upstairs, plus a kitchen and half-bath, and two rooms downstairs, plus a bath. There were a few books around, but not the one he was looking for.

  The white album was gone.

  Chapter Fifteen

  HE HAD A LONG TIME TO THINK ABOUT IT. THE FIFTY-FOOT nylon cord made it easy enough to get back to the ground and from there it wasn’t much trouble to get over the fence, thence the pavement. Going down the hill he woke up a few dogs, but they were all locked in their garages, and the real work didn’t start until he got to the lower end of Corbett Street where it intersected Seventeenth. From there it was straight up one of San Francisco’s steeper hills, to get back to the intersection of Seventeenth and Clayton Streets. The traffic on Seventeenth Street was usually pretty heavy, but by the time Windrow had managed the ten nearly vertical blocks to his car, a passerby might easily have noticed the strange figure, dressed in black sneakers and a huge, oversized coat, sweating and cursing its way up the hill, with the occasional clink and clank of hidden metal objects. He might easily have been noticed because he was the only pedestrian on the street. The traffic had diminished considerably; it was a week night and when Windrow opened his car door the first thing he saw was his watch, which had stopped at 12:55.

  Yes, he had plenty of time to think about it. He sat behind the wheel of his Toyota, sweating profusely in the overcoat, and turned on the radio. Music from the forties wafted into the little car’s interior, and the windows fogged. The man with the soothing voice came on and told Windrow he was alive at home or in his car at 1:33. Windrow started the car and swabbed the windows, inside and out until he could see well enough to drive.

  He drove through the Haight-Ashbury on Clayton Street turned downtown on Oak until he got to Filmore. He turned left on Filmore and zigzagged a couple of blocks right, then a block left to a parking space, into which he quietly slipped the little Toyota.

  He was parked directly in front of Harry Feyn’s house.

  There were a few lights on, two upstairs and one in the entrance hall. The porch was unlit but Windrow had been there once before, on a clearer night. Feyn’s house was a rundown Victorian, three stories high counting the garage level, which was below the entrance staircase and off to one side. The entire neighborhood was dilapidated. Bottles and newspapers lined the gutters, and here and there a stripped car perched on cinder blocks in a normal parking space. The building two doors down from Feyn’s home was burned out, Windrow could see the black, empty eyes of the two upper-story windows, and the shattered timbers sticking out of them. Feyn had bought cheap, and left it looking that way, on the outside, at least.

  Though there were several lights on in the house, Windrow couldn’t make out any sign of life. As he watched a brand-new white Cadillac turned the corner at the top of the block and cruised slowly down the street. It passed him and drifted through the stop sign at the lower intersection into the bus zone on the other side. The face in the passenger window hadn’t missed Windrow’s presence, but had sized him up as meaning nothing in its own scheme of things.

  Windrow casually noted in his rear view mirror a female figure, black and very scantily dressed, skip out of the building entrance that faced the bus zone and climb into the back-seat of the Cadillac. The car idled there for a moment then its ruby brake lights went off and it slid out of the bus zone and disappeared around the next corner, very submarinelike. This neighborhood would be one that never slept. As if to confirm that thought for him, an old Dodg
e, shooting sparks and noise, dragged its muffler around the lower corner of the block, lumbered just up the hill from where Windrow was parked, and discharged a man from its passenger side almost without stopping. The man fell across the hood of the car parked in front of Harry Feyn’s house, and a sardonic laugh followed him out of the car as it chugged up the block with the passenger door still open. As it rounded the corner at the top of the block, completely ignoring the stop sign there, a metal can was ejected from it onto the sidewalk, and the door closed weakly. The man who’d been dropped off rolled off the hood of the parked car and staggered to the curb using the front and back of two parked cars to hold himself up. He managed to get to the handrail of the stoop next to Feyn’s before he gave up and began to yell a woman’s name, or rather gurgle it. The metal can rolled down the sidewalk behind him and into the gutter in front of Feyn’s house. Windrow couldn’t understand what the man was saying, but his persistent entreaties got results. The door at the head of the stairs, behind an iron grillwork gate, opened and flooded the steps with a weak, yellow light. A woman and a young child, possibly a boy, came down the steps, the woman cursing and shrieking at the man as she walked, she in her nightgown, the child beside her saying nothing. The man cursed back at the woman as she led him through a graceless rumba—two steps up and one back—to and finally through a series of complicated negotiations with the self-closing and locking gate. She finally left the child locked on the outside, and took the man inside. A moment later Windrow heard the electric buzzer on the gatelock; the child quietly pushed the gate open and let himself in the front door. The metal gate crashed shut behind him.