The Damned Don't Die

by Jim Nisbet

  Before the yellow light behind the transom window above the front door was extinguished, Windrow could see that there were at least six doorbell buttons on a panel beside the front gate. Yet he had heard no protest at all to the ruckus. No one had thrown open an upper-story window and rained shoes and curses down onto the heads of the noisy family stumbling around on the front steps. He checked his watch: 2:15. The public bars had closed at 2:00.

  A shiny late-sixties-model Chevrolet rounded the corner at the top of the block and came down the street jumping wildly. As the back end of the vehicle dove toward the ground, the front end leaped so high in the air that the front wheels almost left the pavement. The rear tires jerked and squeaked as the driver alternately goosed the engine and touched the brakes; the headlights swerved wildly in the fog above the street and sparks flew from the extremely loud and low exhaust pipes. This antic apparition convulsed its way through the stop sign at the end of the block, though it bucked and squatted there for a moment, as if indeed looking both ways, then passed on and disappeared into the night beyond.

  Windrow set his jaw. A perfect neighborhood for his operation tonight. Nobody would pay any mind to anything that might happen. Grimly, he pulled his .38 from its harness where it lay on the floor and put it in a pocket of his overcoat. He found a dime among his change in the glove compartment.

  Leaving the car, he walked down the hill and across the street to a darkened store front. A notice-encrusted post held up the entrance to the store, and someone had bolted a pay phone to the post. For some reason, a telephone book was still attached to it. The penlight helped him find the number. Inserting the dime, he watched the upper windows in Harry Feyn’s house while he dialed the number.

  There was no movement in the house, and no one answered the phone. He hung up, got his dime back, reinserted it and dialed again. Same results. No movement in the house, nobody answered the telephone. He hung up.

  He didn’t even wait for his dime. He walked diagonally across the intersection and up the block pulling on his gloves. When he came to Feyn’s steps, he took them two at a time, and had the lock on the entrance gate in the focus of his little flash before he’d stopped at the top of them.

  The lock was an Arrow, a brand he had keys for. He pulled his ring of passkeys out and found three marked Arrow. The second one fit. The gate opened.

  He passed through it and found the locks on the solid-panel front door with the beam of the flash. These were both Schlage locks, and one of them was a deadbolt. He tried his passkeys, and got one of them to turn the tumblers in the knob, but none of them would draw the deadbolt. The doorknob turned, was unlocked, but the deadbolt held firm.

  So Windrow broke the law for the second time that morning.

  He didn’t hesitate. With his flat prybar he opened a crack between the top of the doorrail and the stop, and inserted one of the wooden wedges there. He did the same thing at the bottom of the door. Moving up from the floor, above the second wedge, he inserted another one. The jamb cracked. Above the lock, below the first wedge, he pryed the door back and inserted a fourth wedge. He removed the first wedge from the top of the door, pryed the door carefully, so as not to split the stop before the lock gave way, and inserted it just below the lock. The jamb began to splinter. He placed his prybar an inch above the bolt turned the knob, and the jamb behind the bolt gave way completely with a loud crack.

  He was inside.

  He pushed the door to behind him and listened for a long time. The house was so quiet he could hear the refrigerator in the kitchen—nothing else. He closed the front door and locked it. The damage to the jamb would be invisible from the outside, and the locks would function normally; their noise should give him a warning.

  Windrow started in the living room, to the right of the entrance hall. He didn’t bother with the flash, he just turned on the light. Here he found an elegant room. Like many city homeowners, especially in the run-down neighborhoods, Feyn maintained a drab, even shabby exterior, but an elegant interior.

  In the living room were walnut bookcases full of fine and exotic books of literature, music, science, the macabre, erotica, and pornography. Many were custom bound. There were etchings, oil paintings and sculpture where there weren’t books; lush, erotic, some of them good, and some of them looked expensive to Windrow, though he wouldn’t know. He carefully paced his search through the bookcases. He was after a particular book, and didn’t want to overlook it if it were disguised. Feyn was a smart man. He already knew that the photograph album was a valuable piece of evidence. But he would also think that nobody outside himself and Trimble knew about it. Sooner or later, however, Feyn would have figured out that Windrow would suspect what might be in there, and then Feyn would have to face the possibility that the book would have to be destroyed, or at the very least, well hidden. Feyn and Trimble had taken the great risk of spiriting the book out of the Trimble house, which showed that it meant a great deal to them. Windrow was gambling that it was just possible the book meant enough to them that they wouldn’t destroy it—yet.

  The search of the living room took a long time. Too long. If Windrow didn’t come up with the goods before he was caught here, he’d never bluff his way out of a breaking-and-entering rap if Feyn got ahold of a good lawyer. Come to think of it, Feyn regularly employed one of the best.

  He couldn’t find it. Halfway through the living room, Windrow abandoned his methodical search through the two walls of books and went through the door into the dining room. There he found an antique table under a chandelier, a tall sideboard full of displayed china, another oriental rug under it all. No book. He went into the kitchen. It was a Swedish job, all formica and blond wood. He looked into the refrigerator. There was German beer, milk, cream, unground coffee, a lot of vegetables, and several bottles of white wine. He opened a bottle of dark Beck’s with his prybar and took a long swallow. It was delicious.

  He went upstairs. The first bedroom was a guest room, tastefully but sparsely furnished. No books in sight, outside a few magazines on the night table, and no clothes in the closet. Through the connecting bathroom, which looked clean but lived-in, he found the master bedroom. This was a sight he’d rarely seen the likes of, with heavily draped windows, a massive stereo system, twenty-five feet of shiny, case-hardened chain piled neatly on the nightstand next to a huge double bed, violently erotic art on the walls, and two closets full of clothes of every description. There were men’s business suits, women’s dresses, and leather jackets, chaps, vests, pants and boots.

  Again, there were lots of books, but not the one he was looking for. He went back into the hall. At the end of the hall opposite the stairhead was a door with two locks on it. He tried it. Locked. He used his passkeys, and one of them opened both locks.

  This was the room he’d seen lit from the street. It looked like a newspaper office. Windrow realized he was standing in the editorial premises of Brandish magazine.

  The walls were covered with tacked-up layout sheets, originals of cover art without the titles on them, long strips of galleys, drawings and photographs. There were schedules and bundles of paper tacked on top of each other. Against every side of the room there was a drawing board or desk heaped with materials. Piles of back numbers of the magazine were stacked in corners, and wastebaskets overflowed beneath the desks. The room smelled of ink and glue and paper. Two of the desks had typewriters on them.

  The white photograph album lay on top of one of the typewriters.

  Windrow closed the door behind him and pulled a stool up to the desk with the typewriter and the photo album. He went to the front wall and tried the window there. It opened easily. From it he could look down on the front entrance to the house. He left the window cracked and sat down at the desk, with his beer and the album.

  Chapter Sixteen

  IT WAS, AS HE HAD SUSPECTED, CHRONOLOGICAL. BEGINNING on the first page of the album, the Trimbles had recorded photographically their lives together. The first three pages were wedd
ing pictures, Herbert Trimble the short-haired young bridegroom, and Honey Trimble the pretty, younger brunette Windrow would never meet. They looked happy and enthusiastic. There were pictures of relatives, though not a full complement of them. (One father and one mother seemed to be missing from the family group pictures.) The wedding had evidently been small, and most of those in attendance had been young friends of the bride and groom.

  There followed many pages of photos of parties, of award ceremonies, picnics, of convertibles full of people parked in front of fancy restaurants and on beaches. Every few pages there was a formal portrait of a chamber ensemble or small orchestra, featuring Herbert with his cello. There were a few yellow clippings. One announced the Trimble’s engagement, another their wedding. Two or three told of an orchestra’s triumph and mentioned Herbert, among others, as outstanding.

  Then a few shots showed up of Herbert standing in front of or knee-deep in holes in the ground, surrounded by people in pith helmets and knee shorts. In one such shot a skeleton was laid out on the ground in front of the crew. Everybody squinted in the sun. In another shot a similar crew was surrounded by all sorts of broken pottery and pieces of tools and bones. The museum days.

  Then an odd one showed up. It was a shot of Herbert wearing women’s clothes, looking shy, but coy. After that the usual stuff again, until one showed up of Honey wearing only a bizarre selection of black underwear. She didn’t look too happy in the overlit glare of the flash.

  Windrow sipped his beer. Now the photographs began to be only of social gatherings, of parties that got to be wilder and wilder by the look of them. The people involved had new faces, and many of them were bleary-eyed and expressionless. The number of familiar faces, the ones from the museum parties, the orchestras and wedding pictures, dwindled. When they did show up, among the aggressive and drunken faces of the new round of acquaintances, the old friends looked disapproving or wooden or confused. The Trimbles were heading for a decadent style in which their old friends took decreasing interest. As the pictures continued, the photographers’ attitudes changed. They seemed to delight in catching people in awkward or silly postures. And the Trimbles must have kept them all. The book was crammed with photographs of people sitting in each other’s laps, of men kissing, of swimming pools full of people floating with all their clothes on, heads being doused in punch or champagne or beer, people blowing pot smoke at the camera.

  Then costumes appeared. Everybody at all the parties wore costumes. Men dressed as pirates, as ducks, as women; the women dressed as nurses, as pirates, as men. The costumes got scanty, and people began to tear them off of each other. There were shots of men and women including both Trimbles, barely dressed in shreds of clothing. Herbert looked deliriously happy; Honey looked, as before, as if she weren’t too sure.

  Now and then a completely normal shot would crop up. One of Honey in her flowering garden, smiling; another of Herbert shaking hands and accepting what looked like a check from, ah—Harry Feyn.

  The parties got wilder, and Harry Feyn figured in many of the photographs. A large color print turned up of the swimming pool again. The pool was lit and the picture obviously taken at night. Everybody in the picture, in the pool and out, was naked. There was an air of relaxation in the shot. No one was tearing their clothes off anymore, or throwing drinks at anybody, or pitching fully clothed people into the pool.

  Then the shots went indoors. The people were naked still, and embracing. First shots were of heterosexual couples embracing or sitting in each others laps, smiling at the camera. Then the quality and the content of the photos suddenly changed. A high-class photographer had shown up. The pictures were in color, perfectly focused, well composed. The people involved were openly engaging in sex, no longer paying any attention to the photographer. Many of the shots involved single people in erotic poses. There were several of Harry, and several of Herbert and a few of Honey, and several of people Windrow didn’t recognize. Excepting Honey, they generally looked like they were having fun.

  The faces were changing again. The Trimbles were on a road that had no end as far as they were concerned. It looked like Herbert was in charge, and Honey wasn’t sure. But she was always there.

  The pictures of group sex and the quality of the photos fell off again. Many were blurred, out of focus, badly lit. The groups numbered up to fifteen people. Windrow saw all the kinds of sexuality in these pictures he’d ever heard about.

  But it was none of his business. Not yet. He skipped ahead. He scanned the faces in every photograph, looking for one he might recognize. One finally came.

  It was a shot of the museum staff standing in front of the kind of table and curtains you might expect to find in a banquet room in a motel. The photograph had been done by a pro, with copies going into the annual report and to everyone involved. This copy had been clipped from the report, with its caption:

  Pamela Museum Annual Staff Banquet. (1 to r) Sheila Smith, Sec.-Treas.; D. Stanton, Mus. Vice Chair; T.I. Hoople, Mus. Chair; A.M. Johnston, Mus. Cur.; H. Trimble, Ass. Cur.; W. Schwartz, Ass. Cur.; S. Driscoll, Acc. Cons.

  Windrow stared at the face. Big features; short, straight hair; thick lips; big ears. Eyes close together. A big man Driscoll was, physically outstanding among the museum staff; he would be about Windrow’s size. Except for the ears. The guy had big ears.

  Peering closely at the picture, it looked to Windrow as if Trimble’s head had been turned toward Driscoll, but he’d gotten his eyes around in time to look at the camera over his smile.

  Everyone in the picture was smiling, except for Driscoll. He had no expression and dull eyes. Windrow wondered what it would take to light them up.

  He turned more pages. The poses and manner of dress went kinkier. The parties got smaller. Black leather undergarments started to show up. Windrow spotted Driscoll, Feyn, both Trimbles at a party. The background was Feyn’s living room.

  Then the wall turned up for the first time.

  It was the same picture the she-Trimble had tried to hand Windrow. It had been thrust back into the book without being remounted. Windrow picked it up. Beneath it was a picture of the real Honey Trimble. She was draped from the shackles, with a glazed look in her eyes. Her mouth was open, and a little trickle of something dark ran from it. On the next page was a shot of Trimble himself. He was dressed as a woman, his clothes were in shreds. Dark, thick stripes showed on his exposed flesh. He, too, looked dazed, yet there was a hint of a smile in the line of his mouth. Then a picture of Feyn turned up.

  And then—nothing.

  There were a few pages left in the book, but they were empty.

  Windrow finished his beer and thought a moment. The pages of the album were made so as to receive the photographs onto a gummed surface, over which a thin, transparent plastic sheet dropped and stuck into place to protect the photographs. The pages were bound in the book with a spiral wire of many turns. He held up the book, still open where he’d stopped, and shook it. A few little shreds of paper drifted out of the spine and down to the desk. He examined them closely. They were bits of the same paper the pages of the album were made of.

  He turned to the back of the book. On the inside back cover a little label in the lower-left corner declared in swash italic script that this Hamborg portrait album was made of the finest materials available, without regard to cost. Below that in tiny print: BDT-10010, 100 pages. Windrow counted the pages. They numbered 48. That meant the manufacturer counted each page, 50 pages gave 100 individual sides.

  Which meant four sides were missing.

  Windrow stood up and paced the room. Once, twice, three times. He stopped in front of the desk again. It looked like the one of the four in the room that Feyn used for business. There was a spike with bills on it. There was a desk organizer full of mail and catalogues and lists. There was a checkbook.

  Windrow opened it up and ran his finger down the list of disbursements. Nothing seemed to be unusual. There was a check made out for the light bill, one for the car
repairs, another to a printshop, one to a lithographer, another to a stationer. Feyn obviously ran everything through his magazine business. None had been written less than five days ago.

  But a deposit had been made, just yesterday, a big one. Five thousand dollars, less cash four thousand. It was labeled “Brd Ad.”

  “Brd Ad?”

  As he stood pondering the possible vowels that might fit in between these consonants and make sense of them, he heard strange noises.

  They came from far away, possibly from another building.

  A car went by slowly. The streets were beginning to be wet from the fog, and the cars’ tires hissed in the moisture. He couldn’t hear the unidentified sound anymore.

  But when the car had turned the corner and was gone, the curious strains came back.

  They were made by the bowed strings of a cello.

  Some of the notes didn’t reach his ears, but he was sure of it: They were the notes of a cello. And it was a sure thing they weren’t coming from next door. They were coming from somewhere in Feyn’s house. At that time, Windrow knew only one cello player.

  Very quietly, he returned the checkbook to the desktop, and picked up the white album. He left the room, shut the door and locked it, taking care to make no noise. The cello was still playing, but it was no louder in the hallway than it had been in the office. He walked softly to the stairhead and down the stairs. He had the album in one hand and his other on the gun in his pocket. One tread creaked.

  Downstairs he could find no one, but the cello, though still very faint, was louder in the kitchen than anywhere else. He looked around, and behind the kitchen door he found another door he hadn’t seen before. When he opened it, the cello got a little louder.

  Wooden stairs led away from him into the darkness of a basement, perhaps the garage. He clicked on his penlight and followed them down. They landed on a concrete floor. The little disk of light in his hand showed boxes, hand tools, a bench, dusty furniture. Behind them all, toward the back of the house, his light found a door. The music was loudest there, but not so loud as he thought it should be. The door was large and wooden, and no light escaped from behind it. A large barrel bolt seemed to be the only thing securing the door. Windrow hesitated. Tucking the book under his arm, he drew his pistol out of his pocket and pulled back the bolt with the hand that held the flash. Grasping the knob, he pulled the door open.