Death on the Edge Read online

  “It is true, Dex,” the principal said, “and the police are here, wanting us not to contaminate their crime scene, so please don’t come farther into the room.”

  Dex ignored her. “Marcena. If I’d known you were in the building I’d have come at once. What’s going on?”

  I stared as he hurried to Marcena’s side.

  “This is Dexter Vamor,” she said quickly. “He was one of my—our—The Edge’s local judges. We only met in person yesterday.”

  Vamor held a hand out to me. “Chair of the English and Journalism Department here at Mirabal, for my sins. Are you with The Edge, as well?”

  “I’m a detective,” I said.

  “Private,” Conrad snapped. “She’s not with the police, she’s not going to ask any questions, and she’s not going to touch evidence to prove that she’s sharper than we are.”

  I prudently didn’t say anything.

  The next hour was a jumble of questions about who had seen what, and who was doing what in the lounge. All of us, from Keisha and Jasmine to me, and not excluding the principal or Marcena, were tested for gunshot residue and searched for weapons.

  Conrad talked to the principal and Vamor about students or colleagues who might have been angry with Hana, but both were adamant that she didn’t have that kind of history.

  Vamor added, “Of course, there’s always a student who thinks their work is undervalued, but frankly, our kids aren’t looking for that extra decimal on their GPA to get them into Harvard. As for her colleagues, sure, some people liked her more than others, but she’s been here twenty years without making enemies among the teachers. This must have been a random shooting. Maybe she interrupted someone selling or using.”

  “Dex,” the principal said. “We’re not in the business of pointing the cops at our students or our faculty and staff. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t start speculating without any facts to back up your statements.”

  Vamor gave her a mock salute. From the expression on the principal’s face, she wished it was his body on the book cart, but she only turned to Conrad to say that Hana worked hard with students who wanted to excel, but didn’t neglect anyone in her classes.

  “If she had discipline problems, she usually sorted them out herself.”

  When Conrad finally decided to dismiss us, I said diffidently, “If the lieutenant would permit me one question first?”

  Rawlings looked at me sourly. “Meekness isn’t your best act, Warshawski. Ask away.”

  “Mr. Vamor, I’m here because Ms. Milcek apparently had questions about Keisha Dunne’s essay. Since you were one of the judges, you probably have a sense of what she wanted to know.”

  “What questions?” Jasmine Dunne demanded, hands on hips. “I am tired of you insinuating—”

  “Please, Ms. Dunne,” Marcena said. “Keisha’s work is brilliant. But I still needed to speak to Ms. Milcek. Did she know your daughter?”

  “Of course not. Keisha doesn’t go to Mirabal. Milcek might have been my niece’s teacher.” Jasmine looked a question at her daughter, who nodded and muttered that “Fannie Lou adored Ms. Milcek.”

  “Fannie Lou surely wouldn’t bad-mouth you to her English teacher,” Jasmine said to Keisha.

  “No, mama,” Keisha muttered, staring at her feet.

  Vamor meanwhile was upset that Marcena had talked to Hana without telling him.

  “Milcek—Ms. Milcek—found what hotel I was in and called me there,” Marcena said. “She didn’t want to talk on the phone. Vic’s question is a good one: Did she share her concerns with you?”

  Vamor shook his head. “As I said, I saw her at lunch today. We talked about the competition—like a lot of teachers, she had kids whose lives were hit by gun violence and she’d encouraged them to enter—and she knew I was a judge, so she wondered when she could find out about her students. I told her that was up to the people in London, and I couldn’t release names until Marcena told us they were ready to go public.”

  “But you’d already spoken to Keisha and her mother,” I said to Marcena.

  “Of course,” she said. “Under oath of secrecy, since no winners can be announced until we’re dead sure of our finalists.”

  “How did you come to pick Vamor as a judge?” Conrad asked. “A Rust Belt school isn’t exactly on international radar.”

  “But Dex is,” Marcena said. “He writes a regular column for one of the best journalism school blogs and he’s on the faculty for a summer journalism program that works with teens. We knew about him even before we were sure we were going forward with the contest.”

  The principal raised her brows. “Dex, that’s news to me. I’m surprised it’s not in your CV.”

  He looked a little embarrassed. “Doing it on my own time, Albertine.”

  “Usually we know when you’re up to something high-profile. But if there are questions about an essay submitted by one of my students—”

  “She doesn’t go to school here, Albertine,” Vamor interrupted. “She’s at South Side Prep in Chatham.”

  “The essay dealt with the murder of one of your students’ fathers,” I said. “Fannie Lou Elgar.”

  “But Fannie didn’t write the essay,” Vamor said sharply.

  “Fannie Lou, Dexter,” the principal said. “Her father named her for Fannie Lou Hamer. If her cousin’s work deals with Tyrone Elgar’s death, I’d like to read it; it might give me insight into Fannie Lou. She’s one of our most gifted students, but painfully shy inside her shell.”

  “The essays are not being made public yet,” Marcena said. “And they’re the property of The Edge.”

  “It’s mine,” Keisha said. “I wrote it.”

  Marcena smiled at her. “The contest rules state that The Edge owns all the submissions, I’m afraid. Even the ones that don’t win awards we may want to use in some other way.”

  “But you could print it out for us to take a look at,” I said.

  “So you can start questioning it and tearing it apart?” Jasmine said. “I don’t think so.”

  “In that case, I’ll get the state’s attorney to give me a warrant,” Conrad said. “Gun deaths on the South Side are usually about gangs, and if the lady had been shot on her way out of the building I might believe it was an initiation murder. As it is, I’m open to all ideas. Which means all of you can wait here until the state’s attorney gives me a warrant for the essay.”

  Chapter 6

  Marcena was magnanimous in defeat. The principal took her to the school office, where Marcena printed out a half dozen copies of Keisha’s essay, including one for me.

  Conrad pulled me aside for a short talk before he left: he trusted if I knew anything that would shed light on the murder that I would not be a glory hog but would turn it over to him.

  “Talk to Love over there,” I said, pointing to where Marcena was conferring with Dexter Vamor. “She’s the one who pulled me down here and I’m still not sure I know why.”

  Conrad looked at her, but suddenly smiled at me. “I don’t know her, Ms. W., but I know you. You may have come down here for the reasons you state, but you’re obsessed now with Milcek’s death.”

  “Of course I am. Violent death is always a shock, and then, you know, we went to school together. I’m not a glory hog—you must surely know that after all these years—but I want to know why Hana died and who killed her.”

  I shivered; Hana had gotten out of bed thinking about her class schedule, or what she wanted to ask Marcena, or whether she could make her insurance payments on time—the quotidian, not the thought that she would die before supper time.

  “Are the school’s surveillance cameras working?” I asked.

  Conrad nodded. “Tech teams will look at them to see if any strangers came into the school in the last twenty-four hours. Guards sure didn’t sign anyone in, but a school hall can be chaotic; someone could have blended in during a class change. Keep me on speed dial, Warshawski.”

  When he’d left, I went back to the
principal’s office to talk to Albertine Diaz about Hana Milcek’s next of kin. Hana had never married; she’d lived with her mother until the older woman’s death three years ago. If she’d been close to anyone with whom she might have confided her concerns about Keisha’s essay, Diaz didn’t know who that might be.

  As for enemies among students or staff, Diaz shook her head. “Despite what Dex Vamor was saying in the group, he and Hana didn’t get along. She was a serious type and he’s flamboyant. No one ever put together better lesson plans than Hana, but the students gravitate to Dex. Being a teacher is half dedication, half knowledge, and all showman. Sad to say. I often thought Hana would fit in better at a university; I tried to get her to go for the doctorate but she loved being in the classroom. And every now and then, she’d find a student who responded.

  “The Elgar girl, Fannie Lou, she was one of the ones who responded to Hana Milcek’s style. She’s a studious type, too. Shy, serious, super-bright. I don’t know what Hana’s death will do to her. Her mother died in childbirth when Fannie Lou was two, then her father was shot and killed. I hope the cousin told Fannie Lou she was writing about her father’s murder. It would be a nasty shock to find out about it from your English friend’s online performance.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, thinking about it. “I wonder if that’s what Hana wanted to talk about with Marcena. If Fannie Lou was one of her own protégées, she’d have wanted to protect her . . . You said she solved her own disciplinary problems. Did she have many? Did students gang up on her because of her scholarly style?”

  Diaz smiled wryly. “The teenage mind remains a mystery to me, even though I’ve been teaching and administrating in their world for close to thirty years. Kids treated her almost like a pet. I think it was because she was one of the world’s true innocents. She behaved the same to everyone, to me and her peers and the janitors and the students. She thought everyone shared her interest in poetry and literature and she’d listen to anyone’s opinion. She added writers like Audre Lorde to her curriculum, she’d let kids write on rap. She didn’t try to be hip, not the way Dex Vamor does, but she listened.”

  “What’s Vamor doing here, anyway?” I asked. “Seems like a guy who wants a bigger stage.”

  Diaz’s lips tightened. “Yes, indeed. He’s been here three years, came when we added a media department. He’s only thirty-two but he had the credentials to be a department head. I’m sure he’s already planning his next move.”

  Marcena came into the office at that moment, looking for me, hoping it wouldn’t be an inconvenience but she needed to get back to her hotel so she could communicate with her London colleagues on Hana’s death and how that might affect The Edge’s essay competition. I’d noticed her taking pictures of Hana’s body—those would probably be on The Edge’s website within the hour. What a scoop—journalist right there when her subject’s dead body was found. I wondered again if Marcena had known anything about Hana’s death before I found her.

  At home, I curled up with a glass of Amarone and read Keisha’s essay. She wrote with a high degree of sophistication, both in language and in structure. She covered seven funerals she’d attended for people dead from bullets.

  Every story is different, but every story is the same: the same grief, the same incomprehension, the same anger, whether over Baby Nikwa Jonas, hit by a bullet that went through her father’s kitchen window, or for Alan Wicherly, star forward on my school’s basketball team, shot by a cop when he was putting a hand inside his pocket for his driver’s license.

  These deaths create a mountain of grief that presses down on me. There are days when it scarcely seems possible to rise from my bed, because the grief mountain grew another hundred feet higher in the night.

  Family and neighbors call on Jesus for help or faith, but I always remember my grandmother, kneeling next to my Uncle Ty. She called him “my baby.” It had never occurred to me that my big laughing uncle had ever been my grandma’s baby, but when he died, he was, in her eyes, no bigger than Baby Nikwa.

  “Why, Jesus?” she cried. “Why did you bring him safe home from Iraq only to let him die in front of me? Are you the God of mercy or God of mirth, laughing at the contortions of the human heart?”

  I sat for a long time when I’d finished reading, staring at nothing. The pain of lives like Keisha Dunne’s seemed almost beyond bearing. And now her cousin’s high mountain of grief had just doubled with the loss of a beloved teacher.

  I finally stirred enough to pour myself another glass of wine. Keisha had been six when her uncle was shot. I wondered if her grandmother had really uttered those words—God of mercy or God of mirth. The fireman was carrying Keisha across the street, away from the murder scene. She was in shock. What would she really remember from the moment? Perhaps a poetically inclined teenager had added the words on her own.

  How would Fannie Lou, the shy, studious cousin, feel if her father’s murder catapulted Keisha into international recognition? Betrayed and violated? Or would she be glad that the story reached a wide audience? Those could easily have been the questions on Hana Milcek’s mind when she spoke to Marcena about the competition.

  I went to my laptop and looked up Alan Wicherly, the murdered basketball star. He’d died two years earlier, but she had the details right: shot by a cop, community fury, no action by the city or the department. He’d been a senior forward on the Mirabal High basketball team, with a full ride to the University of Kansas fabled basketball program, when he was killed outside a gas station at Eighty-third and Exchange.

  Mirabal High. Keisha didn’t go to school there, but Fannie Lou did. I shook my head. Fannie Lou’s murdered father, her high school’s murdered basketball star. To an outsider, it looked as though Keisha needed to take her cousin’s experiences and make them her own. Of course, Keisha lived on the South Side. If Wicherly was a star at her cousin’s school, she might have known him.

  Even so, I found the card for the Mirabal principal, Albertine Diaz, and called her cell.

  “Ms. Warshawski! Have you learned something about Hana’s murder?”

  “I’m wondering if I’ve learned what questions she wanted to ask about Keisha Dunne’s essay,” I said. “Have you read it?”

  Diaz apologized. “I just got home ten minutes ago. I wanted to break the news of Hana’s death to Fannie Lou Elgar myself, and she was every bit as distraught as I anticipated. I got her home and sat with her and her grandmother for an hour. I just hope this doesn’t derail her academics. We have high hopes for her, but losing Hana to a bullet, after a childhood that started with watching her father die—”

  “She was there when Tyrone Elgar died?” I interrupted. “Keisha’s essay doesn’t mention that.”

  Diaz said, “It’s my understanding she was in the car with him when he got shot.”

  “She was? Both girls were there? That sure doesn’t come across in Keisha’s writing.” I asked Diaz about Alan Wicherly.

  “It was a big story in South Chicago. All the kids were affected. Basketball star gets shot, no one is safe: that was how every parent and every child felt. I don’t think it means anything particular that Keisha Dunne wasn’t in the same school as Alan.” Diaz’s tone was sharp.

  “I’m sure you’re right,” I said soothingly. “I was trying to understand what in the essay troubled Hana. If Fannie Lou felt close to her, she might have discussed relations with her cousin. A lot of the events Keisha describe seem to come from Fannie Lou’s direct experience, and I can’t help wondering about rivalry and jealousy between the two girls.”

  “I’ll read the essay and get back to you,” Diaz said grudgingly.

  I wasn’t expecting to hear from her, especially after more than an hour had gone by. I was on my way down the stairs to give my dogs their final outing of the day when Diaz phoned.

  “We have a situation here. Is there any chance you could drive down to Fannie Lou’s grandmother’s place tonight?”

  She started to give me directions, but I cut he
r off. “It’s my briar patch, too, Ms. Diaz: I grew up three blocks away.”

  Chapter 7

  Once I passed the Loop I had the roads almost to myself—few people go to Chicago’s South Side late at night. I was passing the park that covered the old U.S. Steel South Works twenty minutes after I left home.

  Lights were on in all the rooms of Verena Elgar’s bungalow on Brandon. The situation, as Diaz had called it, was so loud that I could hear the shouts as I got out of my car. The noise and lights had drawn neighbors to the street outside. They watched me curiously as I jogged up the walk, but no one spoke to me until I rang the doorbell.

  “They can’t hear you inside but the door’s open,” a woman called helpfully.

  She was right; I pulled on the handle and walked inside to fury. I recognized Fannie Lou Elgar from her chess club photo, a heavy young woman with a wild halo of natural hair, her face swollen from crying. Next to her was an older version of Jasmine Dunne. The grandmother, I presumed. The pair were facing off against Jasmine and Keisha, the girls yelling so loudly I could only make out a handful of individual words, but those were charged: Thief! Liar! Loser! Murderer!

  Albertine Diaz was on the perimeter of the battle zone, watching the combatants, her shoulders hunched with tension. When she saw me, she relaxed noticeably and took me into the narrow hallway.

  “I’ve unleashed a firestorm here. When I read the essay I felt—”

  “I want no more secrets or secret conversations about my granddaughters.” Verena Elgar had left her daughter and was facing us in the doorway, arms akimbo. “Whatever you have to say or think you know, I want it right here in my living room. And you can start by telling me who you are.”

  I obediently introduced myself.

  “I see—you’re the woman Albertine says made her start asking questions about Keisha’s essay.”

  “It’s my essay,” Fannie Lou muttered. “She stole my essay.”