first there was no motion and I felt panic start in my chest. Then the rope started to move. I was rising.
As I started to rise, I bent my knees and inched my now bleeding feet into an opening about just over a foot above the clotted surface. My feet slid in and I bent my knees more to get my whole body into the indentation left in the shaft for another elevator door opening. It was only eighteen inches deep and a plywood board met my feet as I slid into the crevice. I could feel countless splinters pierce my scraped feet. It hurt like hell. I scooted my butt sideways into the opening and slid in as neatly as you would slide a corpse into a medieval wall burial. Well, nice image, I thought.
When I could sit up, I yelled to Tom to just hold on. There was an answering yell that I took to be assent. I tried to quickly shrug out of the looped rope around my waist, but its concrete encrusted surface resisted my efforts. Finally I got it off me. For a minute I felt the panic again. If I fell off this narrow shelf, I would be drowning in concrete too.
I took a breath and let go of the rope. I yelled to Tom to pull up. Pull up hard.
The rope started to ascend more quickly and the hand came out of the slime. She had sunk some while I was getting the rope off of me. Then came the arm, a shoulder and a torso, the concrete seeming to pull back on the limp form, resisting letting go of its prey. The body moved slowly upward, past where I crouched on the ledge, in a hideous parody of the resurrection of the dead.
4
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
