Читать книгу Every Wickedness - Susan Thistlethwaite - Страница 10

They are thrown away

The trash people

People Nobody Wants

They picked up the trash today

Dwayne Moorehouse, #2165

“Trash Man”

StreetWise

Wednesday, May 17, 9:00 p.m.

A few minutes after the body disappeared over the edge of the shaft, the rope was lowered and I grabbed it. I looped it around my bleeding waist and yelled again, “Pull up!” The rope tightened, I pushed out from the crevice, and I made a painful ascent, my abraded feet leaving bloody footprints up the wall.

When I’d climbed to about a foot below the edge, I was startled to see Commander Stammos above me. He reached down and lifted me under the arms like I was a child who had just fallen off her bike. When we’d both stood up, I topped him by a head, but the strength in those shoulders and arms was impressive. I am no lightweight. Tom had not helped pull me up; he was with two paramedics about twenty feet away, bending over the prostrate body of the young woman. Mel Billman, a campus cop I knew well, was handling the rope, pulling it completely away from the shaft opening and coiling it up out of the way.

Mel nodded to me, looking unsurprised at finding me barefoot, nearly naked, bloody and smeared with concrete. Mel’s features rarely ever registered emotion, and he and I had been through a hair-raising event in the fall that hardly put a crack in his carved features. Alice Matthews, my campus cop friend, was often partnered with Mel and when we happened to be all together, she and I teased Mel, trying to get a rise out of him. If this act of mine didn’t do it, I thought I’d have to tell Alice nothing would. I looked around, hoping to see Alice, but she didn’t seem to be here. Two guys in campus cop uniforms were visible and a third was just coming up the stairs on the outside wall leading two city cops.

Mel wordlessly held out my ruined dress to me and turned his back. I stepped into what was left of it, wincing as I eased the zipper up along my scraped waist.

“Thanks, Mel,” I said and he turned around. He reached down and handed me my shoes as well. No way I was going to be able to get them on my swollen feet.

We both looked over at Stammos who was standing near us. He was looking toward the body. His craggy face registered absolute fury. I thought again what a passionate guy he was, though he had clearly taught himself to keep it under control. Mel, on the other hand, was banked down and you couldn’t tell what he was thinking or feeling. Stammos’s face was so darkened with rage you could practically hear distant thunder. I hoped his anger was only for what had happened to this young woman and did not include me and my jumping into an elevator shaft to pull her out.

I was suddenly exhausted and I turned away from them. I saw my dirty cape lying next to the pile of lumber where I’d found the rope. That moment seemed like days not hours ago. I picked up my cape, pulled it around my shoulders, sat down on a stack of boards, and shivered.

Mel came over and pulled off his own jacket, putting it around my shoulders for additional warmth. I would have thanked him, but my teeth had started to chatter.

“You hurt in any way?” he asked.

I shook my head no. All I was capable of at the moment. Sure, my feet, my hands and my waist were bleeding, but that was nothing compared to having your every body orifice filled with concrete. I shuddered. A waking nightmare. I was still cold, but Mel’s jacket was helping.

I looked over at Stammos, still fixed like a hawk on the medical personnel working over the body.

“Is she alive?” I called to him, braving having him turn his hawk’s eyes toward me.

He came over and I decided to stand. I figured I needed every inch of height to talk to him.

“Wasn’t breathing. CPR now for . . . ,” he paused and looked at his watch. “Four minutes.”

That didn’t sound good at all.

Stammos turned toward the city cops who were walking toward where we were standing. He wouldn’t waste time asking me questions I’d just be asked again in a minute. As they came up, Stammos introduced himself and then told them who Mel and I were. They gave their names and I was very glad I didn’t know either of them. A certain Chicago detective and I have a nasty history and he had been the one to investigate the last serious crime we’d had on campus.

These two guys were in uniform, anyway. The detectives would follow shortly. Even in the dim light I could see their names on their badges. G. Gwynne and F. Kaplan. Kaplan was black, Gwynne was white. Both on the young side, still probably in their twenties. Gwynne was fair and had a mustache so faint it could just have been the product of a dull razor. Kaplan had an earring in his right ear. They were probably just the closest when the call came in. They looked at Stammos.

He took the cue, turned to me, and led me through a description of what Tom and I had been doing up here (I edited that slightly), what we’d heard and done. He went very slowly over whether we’d seen her before she’d fallen, whether she’d been with anybody, whether we’d seen anyone at all on this floor. I told them we hadn’t seen anybody up here, in fact hadn’t even seen her, just heard noise and cries. I told them I’d seen her on the first floor at the reception and described the guy it seemed she had been with as thoroughly as I could. I told them who Tom was and that he probably knew whoever had been her husband, lover, date. I said I didn’t know if Tom knew her as well. I went carefully over the fact that we’d seen no one and heard nothing once we’d left the reception until we heard the scream and the thud. We went over that three times before my repeated ‘no’s’ about seeing other people or anything else suspicious seemed to be enough for them. Both Kaplan and Gwynne took copious notes.

Of course, Stammos was zeroing in on the key point. Had it been an accident or had she been pushed or even thrown in? An accident was possible, though there was that one row of two-by-fours as a guardrail. I guess she could have tripped near the edge on those tiny, teetery sandals and slipped under it, but then why was she up here in the dark and alone? If she’d been with someone and it had been an accident, that person would have been yelling, calling 911, raising a ruckus, something. Unless he, or she, but I was betting a he, given what she looked like, had deliberately pushed her in. Of course, there were other possibilities. She could have come up here to meet someone, been stood up and then stumbled in the dark as she went by the shaft. Then it could have been accidental and he didn’t know. ‘He’ again. Yes, I was jumping to conclusions based on what she looked like. But that kind of knee-jerk reaction can really throw off an investigation. She could be bisexual and have thrown over the fat doc for a female lover. Then they’d quarreled and . . . .

Stammos spoke sharply to me, interrupting my train of thought. I needed to quit this speculating and concentrate on what was happening right in front of me. Stammos wanted me to explain how I’d gotten to her.

I talked about seeing the rope and using it to rappel down into the elevator shaft. Gwynne looked up and broke out with a ‘No way!’ Stammos quelled him with a glance. I ignored him and described as efficiently as I could how Tom had worked the rope and I’d gotten her arm lassoed.

“That’s Dr. Grayson over there, right?” Stammos asked, his large head tilting in Tom’s direction. I nodded and all of us turned and looked at him, and the paramedics. Two more paramedics had arrived with a stretcher and it was clear they were preparing to move her. Since the hospital emergency room was literally across the street, the only tricky part was getting her down the stairs. She was moved to the stretcher, one of them holding an IV bag above her, the other steadying what looked like an oxygen tank, and they strapped her in. They departed rapidly, accompanied by Mel and the other campus cops. Tom’s eyes followed them to the stairs and then looked for me.

I walked over to him, the cops and Stammos coming along. Tom’s black tux jacket was torn around the waist and his tie was missing. No. I glanced down. He’d wrapped the tie around one of his hands. His hands! A wave of guilt washed over me. If my hands were sore from contact with the rope, what must all that pulling have done to Tom’s surgeon hands? He saw where I was looking and he grimaced.

“Yeah. They’re pretty bad. I’m going over to the ER and see this through and get my hands treated as well. You coming? You could use some patching up too. As usual,” he finished, looking at the state I was in.

Tom hadn’t even registered Stammos and the two city cops. Stammos was so close to me on my left I actually felt him stiffen. He certainly didn’t like being ignored.

I hastily made introductions and the city cops dutifully flipped to new pages in their notebooks.

Tom nodded briefly but just took my arm and turned. He said over his shoulder, politely but firmly, “I want to be there when they examine her. You’ll just have to follow I’m afraid.”

And then we were walking at Tom’s race-walking pace toward the stairs. When he gets going, he walks faster than anyone I’ve ever known. He doesn’t actually exercise that I’ve ever been able to discern, but he’s very trim. I have concluded that’s because he race-walks the miles of hospital corridor, loping up and down the stairs, disdaining the elevators as too slow. We were actually at the stairs before Stammos and the city cops got moving. I heard a deep voice say, “Now just a minute, Doctor,” but Tom just kept going. I doubted he’d even heard. Well, Tom was somebody Stammos didn’t intimidate. Thank God my feet felt numb as we hurried down the wooden stairs and across the street.

# # # #

When Stammos and the city cops had finally caught up with Tom in the Emergency Room, he had paused, impatient, but had identified the surgeon who had been with the victim at the reception. The guy’s name was Dr. Russell Wagner.

The city cops would get his name and contact information from the hospital operator.

I waited my turn to check in and get treated. I was still waiting when Stammos came back to the ER waiting room to tell me he was leaving. He’d grimly recounted that when the city cops had reached the doctor at home, Dr. Wagner had been offhand about not knowing much about a young woman he had identified as a ‘date’ he’d met at a party earlier in the week. Her name, he’d said, was Courtney Carlyle and he ‘didn’t really know anything about her.’ The city cops had left immediately to question Dr. Wagner at home. They were likely there now, politely but firmly interrogating him about his apparently casual willingness to misplace his date.

They’d also told Stammos they’d found no ‘Courtney Carlyle’ in their first, citywide records search.

It was 2 a.m. before I’d been able to get Tom to leave the hospital. Courtney was likely not going to benefit from his further attention. In fact, Tom said, a neurologist would be coming to examine her and determine if any brain function could be detected or whether she was brain dead.

I’d already had my superficial cuts and abrasions treated in the ER while Tom had gone with the paramedics. Since the triage nurse had seen me come in with a surgeon, I’d actually been treated relatively quickly. That made a nice change from a previous time I’d had to come to the ER when I’d been made to sit for hours in a freezing white-on-white cubicle. This time when I was ushered into a treatment room, I’d gotten a warm blanket wrapped around me right away, and my cuts had been cleaned and bandaged efficiently.

After I’d been treated, I returned to the waiting room. Earlier, I’d called Carol and Giles to let them know a guest at the reception had been injured and I’d accompanied Tom to the hospital. They (and my boys) worried about me a lot, especially after what had happened this past fall, so I made no mention of my own injuries. I told them to make up a bed for Kelly in the den as we’d be very late.

After a while, I checked my email on my cell phone. The corner was a little dented from having been dropped, along with my tiny purse, when Tom and I had been rushing around trying to save Courtney, but it still seemed to work okay. Nothing to interest me there, and the current news was so ghastly I decided to avoid browsing the Internet. The TV hung on the wall in one corner was either broken or turned off. I left it alone.

Instead, I read the pamphlets on safe sex, which rightly should be called ‘safer sex,’ drug and alcohol abuse, domestic violence and preventing pregnancy that were displayed on racks over the chairs. I’d had a cup of coffee, at least I think it was coffee, from the vending machine down the hall.

I was horrified at what had happened and bored out of my mind at the same time. And I was incredibly uncomfortable. The orange molded plastic chairs ranged around the florescent-lit waiting area had not been designed for long-term occupancy. In fact, since I had so much time to think about it, I realized they were designed to discourage occupancy.

My entire torso was starting to take on the same molded shape as the chairs before Tom returned. He’d come out earlier to tell me about the clinical diagnosis. The skin of his face was almost translucent with fatigue and drawn so tight over his cheekbones it looked like it might tear.

I knew. We hadn’t saved her life. We’d just saved her body.

We left the ER and walked slowly across the shadowed campus, the stone shapes of the buildings rising stone upon stone, lit by the blue moonlight and the halogen floodlights installed to deter crime, though crime still regularly occurred. Gargoyles regarded us passively from the edges of the turrets above, not caring one way or the other if we were mugged.

But we walked safely on. My feet still hurt, but I was not wearing my badly scuffed spangled heels. I carried them in one hand, the remaining sequins hanging by barely a thread. I thought they were probably damaged beyond repair. Instead I was wearing the soft hospital socks and slippers they’d given me.

Tom’s hands were bandaged, as were mine. He must have allowed someone to treat his hands, or more likely, he’d done it himself. There’s nothing doctors seem to hate more than letting other doctors touch them. I’d been afraid he’d ignore his injured hands, but then, as we gingerly touched bandage to bandage at the tips of our fingers, I realized his hands were his livelihood and he would not have neglected them.

We walked on, saying nothing. What was there to say?

Finally, we arrived at my darkened house.

I had wondered, as I’d been sitting and waiting, whether Kelly might have talked to Carol, opened up a little about the tragedy of her mother’s death, the sudden move to Chicago, having to change schools and then live with her Dad. When I got away from Kelly’s smoldering presence, I could sympathize with her hurt, even identify with it a little. I hadn’t lost my parents, it’s true, they’d lost me, but the loss of Marco was something I’d never get over and I still alternated between grief and rage about it.

I unlocked our front door and disengaged the security system before it started wailing and waking everybody. The scene in the front hall earlier with Kelly, the boys and Molly seemed to have happened years and not just hours before. I shut the door behind Tom and me and he put his arms around me. I rested my head on his chest for one moment of peace before we had to face waking Kelly.

The overhead light snapping on made us both jump. I turned and saw Kelly’s accusing face regarding her father and me. I felt Tom start and move quickly away from me.

Too late.

Kelly had seen us embracing.