The Damned Don't Die Page 9

  Driscoll claimed they had slept together twice, maybe three times; it hadn’t meant much to him, and he couldn’t remember when exactly. She’d never stayed the entire night with him, but only because he wouldn’t let her. She had gotten too serious very fast and he’d had to explain to her he wasn’t ready for that kind of responsibility; he’d just been through a marriage. He just wanted a few laughs, a little sex, some sneaking around the office. She took it hard. She was a lonely girl in the big city and wanted someone firmly established in her life. Breaking off proved to be messy. They’d even convened a bitter, tearful argument in hoarse whispers in a stairwell at work. It’d been difficult for her, Driscoll had said, but eventually Virginia had gotten over him and they remained civil to each other in the office. He had patiently explained to the two deadpan detectives, Gleason and Bdeniowitz, that it was the old story of a young, inexperienced woman becoming overly enamored of an older, experienced man. Her expectations and hopes for the relationship had far exceeded his own, he told them. After he’d let her down as easily as possible and helped her through the emotional pain, they’d stopped meeting. They hadn’t seen each other outside the office for several months. When she didn’t show up for work on Monday and didn’t call, he’d tried to call her that night. No answer. That was that, until he read the Tuesday Chronicle.

  Gleason was unimpressed, and drinking beer. “Guy thinks he’s a Playgirl foldout,” he said rather thickly, “but he’s a fish.” A beer can clicked against the mouthpiece of Gleason’s telephone. “Hey, you should see that crummy sheetrock studio of his. It looks worse than mine, for Godsakes. There’s plastic everywhere; there’s plastic on the ceilings, for Chrissakes. The plastic on the floor he calls furniture; the plastic on the walls he calls art; and the plastic out the window he calls his ‘view.’ And you know what he calls that place? His ‘pee-ed ah tair,’ man. ‘Pee-ed ah tair,’ my ass, Marty.”

  Windrow heard the crash of a beer can as it hit the refrigerator and ricocheted into the metal trash can beneath it, across the room from the table on which Gleason kept his telephone. In the background he could hear the Giants getting whipped on national television. “Pee-ed ah tair. It might have been funny except this guy takes himself seriously. The guy’s got his feet on his neck, man. Shoes between his ears. He’s clean, though. Clean as any playboy of the Western world. We asked around. The manager had seen the Sarapath girl there once; the old lady in the downstairs front had seen her twice. Nobody had seen her lately. Trimble’s number one on our tote, Marty. All we gotta do is find him. When we do, we’ll sweat it out of him.”

  Windrow obtained the address of Driscoll’s love nest and a description, then rang off.

  So Gleason hadn’t yet heard about Honey Trimble. Bdeniowitz probably wouldn’t tell him, then he’d blow a fuse when Gleason didn’t know a thing about it. He might even bless him out in front of the rest of the department for being stupid and neglecting his duty.

  And Harry Feyn had entered the police picture by mistake, and they’d apologized to him for it. The death of Honey Trimble would only make it the worse for Herbert, and if Herbert was innocent, as Windrow thought, it was possible he was being set up as the kinky, unbalanced, homicidal, amnesiac fall guy.

  It was either that, Windrow thought, looking out the window at the whores—two of them now, under the lights of the liquor store across the street—or Trimble was a hell of an actor. That was possible, too. The guy had the talent for it and the stakes were plenty high. Whoever Trimble was playing to—himself, Windrow, Feyn, the cops—he was playing for his life.

  So far, outside simple geography, there was still only one connection between Trimble and Driscoll. Harry Feyn, the man with the sword cane. Harry Feyn probably had all the answers, or most of them. But he obviously preferred not to hand out information for free. If Windrow wanted to get anything out of Feyn—and it looked to Windrow like Feyn was the man with the handles—Windrow would need leverage. Leverage meant evidence. Hard evidence, something even the police were short of. Their case consisted entirely of figures drawn by hands waving in thin air, as if by sparklers whirling in a dark night, just as much as Windrow’s did. But Windrow had noticed the magazines in Trimble’s apartment. He had accidentally talked to Feyn, on the street in front of Honey Trimble’s house. He had met Trimble in both his drags. On a hunch he had discovered that Mrs. Trimble was dead, very likely murdered. He had a witness who had seen Sammy Driscoll in the company of Virginia Sarapath recently, perhaps more recently than Driscoll had been willing to admit to the cops. They’d been seen in a joint that was known to cater to people in the leather scene, an angle that no cop was aware of, outside of the fact that the Sarapath girl’s body showed the signs of deliberate sadism. What did it all add up to?

  Feeling in his coat pockets, Windrow found the old black-and-white photograph of Harry Feyn that the she-Trimble had given him. He studied it. The man in it looked bored, restless, and possibly distracted, just as he’d looked when Windrow first saw the picture. He hadn’t expected it to change. Perhaps, it was just possible that, he’d misread the expression on the man’s face as distracted. It could be the look of a man building fantasies on the floor at the photographer’s feet. Harry Feyn might be a dreamer, or a megalomaniac, or drunk.

  Dropping the picture on the desk behind him, Windrow put both his hands behind his head, and clasped the back of his head with them. Inadvertently, the heel of his left hand rubbed smartly against the knot on the back of his head. He said “Ow,” softly and winced and swore. That was when he remembered it. He dropped his feet off the windowsill, sat up in the chair, and spun around as his feet hit the floor. The sudden gesture disturbed his broken rib, tugged at all of his stitches, and made his eyes smart in their sockets. But he retrieved the photograph, peered at it under the desk lamp, and there it was.

  The picture album.

  He remembered seeing it the first time he’d looked at the photograph, when Trimble had handed it to him at Honey’s house. Now he noticed again that the partially exposed album, lying on a table covered with bottles and glasses behind the couch in the picture, looked the same as the album from which he’d watched Trimble extract the picture he now held in his hand. The table was gone, the furniture had been rearranged, time had passed, but the Trimbles still had their photo album. It was a fat, white, vinyl-bound book, full of memories from their years together. It would start with their wedding pictures; it would contain pictures of both their families, of their friends, pictures taken at concerts, events, parties … pictures taken of themselves by other people … as they tied each other up. He’d seen one of them.

  Herbert Trimble, disguised as a woman, calling himself his wife’s name, had tried to hand Martin Windrow a photograph of Harry Feyn shackled to a wall.

  Windrow had rejected it as it was too weird; he didn’t need a picture like that for the purposes of a simple identification. A shot like that in any other part of the world would have been sufficient heft for blackmail, let alone identification. But this was San Francisco; a picture like that in San Francisco was a mild curiosity and little else. In San Francisco, you couldn’t blackmail a judge with a picture like that.

  So he’d given it back. He hadn’t needed it.

  But he’d been wrong. Harry Feyn had been somewhere in the house while Windrow was interviewing the person he’d thought was Honey Trimble. When Windrow asked Mrs. Trimble for a picture of her husband, a picture they both knew might put the finger on a murder suspect, Herbert Trimble had handed over a photograph of Harry Feyn, tied up. Harry Feyn, tied up.

  It had been a silent plea. A cry for help.

  Windrow banged his open palm on the desk and stood up. Of course! Feyn was there, probably in the very next room. He could have had a gun trained on both of them, or at the very least he’d had his cane, that sword cane. Trimble couldn’t have said a word without endangering himself or Windrow or both of them, because Windrow hadn’t a clue to what was going on. He’d caught them
at that house; for some reason they had needed to be there, and Trimble was supposed to get rid of Windrow or distract him. Hence the big sex act.

  But Trimble wasn’t dumb. Windrow was the dumb one. Windrow was so goddamn dumb he ought to quit now and beg the City to let him spend the rest of his life quietly raking leaves, deep in Golden Gate Park. Trimble had figured out a way to tell the whole story, and Window hadn’t noticed it. For two days he hadn’t noticed it and it had been in his coat pocket the whole time.

  Windrow paced feverishly back to his desk and picked up the picture. The album. There it is. If there were enough pictures in that scrapbook to include one of Feyn naked, chained to a wall, and one of him fully dressed at a party, acting more or less normal, then there must be more, many more interesting pictures in the white album. It would only take one snapshot along the lines of that first one of Feyn to form the last and final link in the deadly chain that stretched from Virginia Sarapath through Samuel Driscoll, Harry Feyn, and Honey Trimble to Herbert Trimble, and back again to Virginia Sarapath. If it existed, such a picture would be circumstantial, but it would be another piece in the story, and maybe, just maybe, it would constitute evidence.

  Chapter Fourteen

  HE PARKED THE TOYOTA A BLOCK AWAY FROM HONEY Trimble’s house, at the top of the hill where Seventeenth Street crossed Clayton, and sat in it, watching the neighborhood.

  Beyond the top of Claytlon Street where it began its descent toward upper Market Street and much higher, stood the immense tripod of the Sutro Tower. Normally, day or night you could see the tower from almost anywhere in town. At night its red warning lights blinked irregularly up and down its legs, from the footings to the very tips of the antennae at its top, but this night the fog had rolled in from the Pacific; it had crested the hill on which Sutro Tower stood and tumbled down into the valley, all the way down to Market Street, south and east of Market, past Windrow’s tiny office, past the Ferry Building, past the docks and piers, back to the interior waters of the bay. Here the fog, having also penetrated inland by following the meandering shoreline and sea-level surfaces of the bay waters through the Golden Gate, joined itself again. Like the foghorns—the “moaners” atop navigation buoys, the timed, lugubrious horns used by anchored shipping vessels—Sutro Tower and the very far end of the city block on which Windrow had parked were completely invisible, swallowed into the billowing, thick, salttanged mists that had enveloped most of the city.

  It looked like a perfect night for burglary. The night would give him cover, and the fog would help in that, too; not only would visibility be difficult, but the fog affected sound in strange ways. A noise made a block away might sound as if it were just next door, and a piece of glass dropped on a roof might never be heard at all. Windrow would be needing that sort of help; he welcomed it and wished he had more. He could, for example, employ a nice little diversion, for he knew the police would be watching the house he intended to burglarize. Trimble’s house hadn’t been staked out the last time Windrow had visited it, but now, with a double murder hanging over the person the police had actually interviewed there after the discovery of the first murder, they would not allow themselves a chance for a slip-up again. The house would be watched.

  Switching over to the passenger seat, Windrow removed his shoes, his coat and his shoulder harness. Over his feet he tied a pair of black running shoes. In place of his coat he wore an old hunting vest which had large game pockets, inside and out, and the smaller chest pockets with loops sewn over them for shotgun shells, and over that an old overcoat that had two pockets on the outside and two inside. Into these pockets he placed a variety of tools, selected from a tackle box on the floorboard between his feet and a larger toolbox on the backseat. These included a small roll of gray duct tape; a hank of nylon rope; his incomplete collection of passkeys; a glass cutter; a small ball of nylon mason’s twine; a Swiss army knife; three tapered wooden wedges; a flat prybar about twelve inches long, two pieces of stiff plastic, about the same dimensions as common charge cards, except for their longer length; a ruler, made of thin flexible steel, one foot long; a penlight, which he tested before stowing it away in his bulging pockets; and a pair of thin, cotton work gloves, dark brown.

  He placed the tools around his pockets so that they wouldn’t make too much noise when he moved and so that their weight hung from him in as balanced a fashion as possible. After he had distributed them, he fingered each tool in its pocket, remembering where each piece of equipment was located. While humming “The Battle of New Orleans,” he removed the Toyota key from its ring and put the ring and remaining keys along with all his change and wallet into the glove compartment. Getting out of the car, he took off his watch and checked it—11:30—and laid it on the seat. He locked the passenger door, dropped the single key into his watch pocket, and walked to the intersection of Seventeenth and Clayton Streets.

  There was very little traffic, and he jaywalked across Seventeenth and continued along Clayton Street. The foghorns floated up to him from the bay, and he could almost hear the fog’s thick moisture as it impinged on his coat and on the leaves of the tree lined street. When he reached the top of the hill he crossed Clayton Street and walked down the hill on the side of the street opposite the Trimble home. Hands jammed in the deep, tool-filled pockets of his coat, his collar up as if against the cool, penetrating breath of the fog, he walked purposefully, a man with someplace to go.

  A third of the way down the block, as he’d begun to round the outside of the curve that didn’t straighten out until it had crossed Corbett Street at the bottom of the block, the Trimble home came into sight. A tall pine in front of it partially obscured his view, but Windrow could see that though the front porch was lit, no light showed from inside the house. He slowed his pace, but not too much, and studied the street in front of the house. There were cars up and down the block, on both sides of the street. He couldn’t see an empty parking place. Most of the front and rear windows of these vehicles had fog on them. This was bad. He had to know where the stake out was before he tried to enter the Trimble house. All the luck and little skill he had in breaking and entering might be sufficient to get him inside the house, find the photo album, and get safely out and away with it, but to attempt to enter the house without knowing where the stakeout was would be foolish. He could discern no signs of life in any of the cars on the other side of the street. As he walked past the ones on his side of the street he looked into each as closely as he dared, without being too obvious.

  He drew even with the Trimble house. Still he’d seen nothing. With each step the house floated further back up the hill, behind him, and still he saw nothing. As he’d walked down the street he’d identified the cars parked there. There’d been a few Porsches, a Triumph, a Cadillac, lots of Volkswagens, Pintos, and Japanese cars, and these he felt he could eliminate. The police department favored plain, medium-sized American sedans. There’d been one such car toward the top of the block, but in the dark he hadn’t been able to discern anything through the wet windows.

  If he couldn’t spot the stakeout he may as well go home. In the morning he’d have to figure out a way to get to Bdeniowitz, and then convince the man he had a good hunch. There’d be a search warrant to obtain, then the search. After it was over, Bdeniowitz was perfectly capable of keeping whatever he found to himself, cutting Windrow completely out of it, and that was okay, but Bdeniowitz would see the evidence, if any, only in terms of whatsoever weight it might add to his case against Trimble. Windrow would be back in his office, drinking beer and watching the girls across the street and waiting for another idea. He’d have nothing for Braddock and nothing to tell Marilyn.

  Of course, it was nothing to Windrow if the gay community got rousted, though a little bonus from Braddock’s committee would be nice. And as for Marilyn, nothing Windrow or anybody else might do would bring her sister back. By the look of things, Virginia Sarapath hadn’t deserved what she’d gotten, not by a long shot. But she’d gotten death, and
a lot more, which brought Windrow to his point. The man—or woman—who had killed and maimed Virginia Sarapath was still out there. There was a chance that the same person had something to do with the death of Honey Trimble—maybe yes, maybe no. There seemed a better chance that the Sarapath murder was not premeditated. It could have been an accident; it could have been an act of passion. True, there were extenuating circumstances; the razor, the dismemberment, the blood on Trimble’s doorknob, but they might have been frills, red herring, alum in the bloodhound’s nose. The circumstances seemed clumsily stacked against Trimble, almost as if by chance …

  In any case, the murderer was still at large. He might kill again.

  The Trimble house had already slipped back around the corner, up the hill and out of his sight but Windrow, toward the bottom of the hill, could still see the black, year-old Ford parked a few cars down from the top of the hill, across the street from the house. At the last possible moment, as if he were going to walk down Corbett Street when he got to it, Windrow turned to cross the street again. As he did so, he looked up the hill, directly at the black Ford. He saw two things before his pace made the Ford disappear behind the low branches of the closely planted trees and hedges that lined the lower end of the inside of the curve on the next-to-last block on Clayton Street.

  He’d seen that the window on the driver’s side of the car was cracked open, about two inches; and just before it had disappeared, a thin plume of smoke had drifted out of that crack and up a bit, above the car, smoke clearly defined by the streetlight at the intersection before it swirled and vanished in the fog.