“No, sweetheart, and neither of us is dead, so it all worked out. Let’s get you home so your mama can stop crying her eyes out and give you a bath.”
“What man, Vicki?” Bobby asked—the only person who ever used a nickname that Gabriella hated.
“The man with Uncle Tomasz. I saw them when they—Papa, they gave money to the cop at the intersection and he let them into the park. I took his picture—oh! my camera, he broke the strap and threw my camera away, my special camera you gave me, Papa, I’m sorry, I didn’t look after it like you made me promise.”
Victoria started to cry harder, but Bobby told her to dry her eyes and pay attention. “We need you to help us, Vicki. We need to see if your camera is still here, if no one stole it. So you be a big girl and stop crying and show your Uncle Bobby where you were when this man picked you up.”
“It’s dark,” Tony protested. “She’s all in, Bobby.”
Victoria frowned in the dark. “It was where you come into the golf course. One of the hills where the holes are on the Seventy-first Street side of the park. I know, there was a statue near me, I don’t know whose.”
With this much information, Bobby set up searchlights near the statue of the Lithuanian aviators Darius and Girenas, although none of the cops believed they’d find one small Brownie camera in the detritus left in the park.
When Boom-Boom whispered to his cousin the news that Tomasz was dead and the cops needed to find the man who’d been with him, Victoria found some reserve of energy from childhood’s reservoir. She tried to remember in her body how slowly she’d moved, where she’d twisted and turned on the walking paths, and finally cut across the grass to one of the knolls. Boom-Boom stayed with her; within another five minutes, they’d found the Brownie.
Bobby took custody of it, promising on his honor as a policeman that he’d give the camera back the instant the pictures were developed. The cousins finally got into their fathers’ cars.
At home, they received varying receptions from their mothers: both women frantic, both doting on their only children, each showing it with tears, and then a slap for being foolhardy and disobedient. Gabriella instantly repented of the slap and took her daughter into the bathroom to shampoo her rough mass of curls herself.
“When I was locked in the trunk, Mama, I thought I would die. And then I remembered you hiding in the cave in the mountains, and you made me brave. Stay calm and think, you said that, and be lucky. I stayed calm, and I was lucky.”
Victoria showed her mother the welts in her palm from where she’d tugged on the cable that miraculously released the trunk lock.
Gabriella hugged her more tightly. “I’m happy, I’m happy that I can protect you even when I’m not with you, because I cannot always be with you. But, Carissima, when will you learn to think first, before you run headlong into danger? This Tomasz, this brother of Marie’s, he was a . . . mafioso—un ladro, a thief—he stole from Metzger’s Meats for the Mafia and sold the meat to supper clubs in Wisconsin. He blamed the janitor, who is a Negro man, for losing his job, because the janitor reported seeing him taking all that meat out of the truck.
“But your papa is telling me, Tomasz also cheated his capo in the Mafia, and this was a man also named Antony. It is not such a rare name, Victoria. If you asked me, I would tell you this thing, that your papa is in danger from the calca—the . . . the mob, that is the word—in the park, but not from this brother of Marie, and then you do not get the most biggest frightening of your life. And also, then you are not giving me the same gigantic frightening.”
And, of course, as it turned out, when Bobby got the pictures developed, the man who abducted Victoria, who flung her into the trunk of the Wildcat, which he got several spirited youths to push into the lagoon, was the Tony who worked in Don Pasquale’s organization.
Tomasz had been stealing meat from Metzger’s and selling it in Wisconsin for the mob, but he’d taken more than his share of the profits. Don Pasquale sent Tony in his red Hawaiian shirt to Marquette Park to kill Tomasz under cover of the riots. The Don wasn’t happy with his hit man for letting a little girl with a camera get the best of him: he refused to post his bail.
When Tony Warshawski reported the successful arrest of Tony-the-killer, he brought a red rose to his daughter, to thank her for her share in the rescue.
“No, Antony, no,” Gabriella protested. “I do not want her to think she is a heroine, who can go saving people in danger. She will only be in danger herself, she will be injured, she will break my heart. Victoria, you must promise me: you are going to study at a university, no? You can be a doctor, or—I don’t know, anything, you can do anything in your life that you wish, perhaps you can even become a judge or the first woman president, but do not be putting yourself in front of killers and mafiosi. Promise me this!”
Victoria looked up at the dark eyes, filled with tears and love. She clung to her mother’s thin body. “Of course, Mama, of course I promise you.”
Note
This story was originally published as “A Family Sunday in the Park” in Sisters on the Case (Sara Paretsky, ed.), Obsidian, 2007. It was based on my own experiences as a volunteer in the civil rights movement in Chicago during the summer of 1966. I had grown up in Kansas, where racism took a southern form of discrimination not only in public facilities but also in housing, but I’d never been around the kind of hate that I experienced that summer. My coworkers and I were assigned to spend the summer in a neighborhood near Marquette Park. It was what demographers call “white ethnic.” Our job was to use soft propaganda to change hearts and minds of some eighty children we worked with in a summer day camp. But on that hot August day, when race riots broke out in Marquette Park, we saw our neighbors turn into bestial creatures. The insults, the signs, the insignia I describe in the story are all well-documented parts of those riots. I apologize for repeated use of a horrifically offensive word, but it is there to emphasize the hate that spilled out everywhere on the streets that summer.
While many Catholic sisters and priests were ardent supporters of civil rights, Chicago was also home to the notorious block clubs, which sought to keep African-Americans out of Catholic churches in white neighborhoods. In my neighborhood, rioting parishioners set fire to the rectory after the priests preached that open housing and equal jobs opportunities were Christ-like endeavors.
The story laid the groundwork for my 2009 novel, Hardball, whose backstory lies in the rubble of the 1966 riots.
I rewrote this story and made substantial changes when I published it as an e-book, Wildcat (Morrow, 2017).
Death on the Edge
1
God of Mirth or God of Mercy
I grew up knowing gunshots before I even understood the words “Get down. Shield Baby!” But the bullet that killed Tyrone Elgar was louder, sharper than any I’d heard before.
I was six. I was by no means the youngest child on my street to lose a family member to a bullet: crossfire, gang war, police shooting. It doesn’t matter whether a cop or a gangbanger is firing the weapon. The bullet doesn’t care as it finds the artery, the brain, the liver.
Uncle Ty was driving me home from Pee Wee Soccer. I was a skinny little thing, and he used to tease me.
“You got legs like matchsticks, Keisha. How can those bitty legs kick a soccer ball?”
He had a big laugh, almost as big as he was himself, and when he teased us kids—me and my cousins and our friends—his laugh would rumble in our chests and we couldn’t help laughing along with him.
The bullets hit as we were stopped at a stop sign on the corner of my grandma’s street. I heard the sound, I knew to crouch down in my seat, and then I heard the screaming and above it all the keening of my grandmother. Someone opened my door and unbuckled my seat belt. I shut my eyes tighter and clutched the seat belt, scared someone was going to kidnap me.
“It’s okay, sweetheart. I’m a fireman.”
I opened my eyes and saw the black rubber sleeve with a giant whit
e stripe. The zebras, we used to call firefighters.
Uncle Ty’s head was plopped over on his right shoulder, as if he’d suddenly gone to sleep at the wheel.
I shook his shoulder and my hand came away covered in blood. I started to scream but my fireman lifted me from the seat and carried me across the street, away from the shattered glass and my uncle’s blood. Over his shoulder I saw my grandma kneeling by the car, pulling Uncle Ty’s head toward her own breast.
I never played soccer or any other sport after that day. My matchstick legs grew wide and heavy until all that was left of that six-year-old child was a nickname whose origin no one understands, “Sticky.”
2
“Tell me again why you wanted me down here today?” I demanded.
Marcena Love’s brows were raised in hauteur. “It is exactly what I said to you yesterday: this is your patch; I hoped you could get me past the suspicion one encounters as an outsider.”
When she’d said this to me the day before, I’d replied it hadn’t been my turf for at least thirty years. “I don’t know anyone down here now,” I’d added.
“You went to school with Hana Milcek,” Marcena said.
“Hana Milcek? She’s still down there?”
“Teaching high school English at—” Marcena consulted her notes. “Yes, Mirabal.”
Hana and I had taken AP English and history together. A dreamy girl with a love of poetry, she’d impressed the rest of us with the dozens of poems she knew by heart. She could recite whole passages from Shakespeare.
Even though we’d been among a handful of college-bound kids at our school, Hana and I had never been close. I’d lost track of her when we graduated. She took off for Illinois Normal to do a teaching degree the same fall I left for the University of Chicago. I hadn’t even known Hana had returned to South Chicago to teach until Marcena came to see me yesterday.
Knowing Marcena Love was back in Chicago had not made my heart flutter with joy. The last time I’d seen her had been about five years ago, when she’d been shrouded in gauze to shield her face while skin grafts healed. She’d looked fragile and very nearly contrite—she’d lost skin on a third of her face and arms in an assault she’d endured after she crossed the line between reporting on crime and participating in it.
Contrition had vanished along with the gauze. Her auburn hair had grown in again; she’d swept the curls from her face with a clip. She was dressed in her usual skintight black, with a velveteen fuchsia bomber jacket and puffy faux combat boots that announced she belonged in the front of the fashion line along with any other line she might stand in.
“I’m working for The Edge,” Marcena announced when I buzzed her inside.
“You mean you’re working on an edge and you’re hoping I’ll keep you from falling off.”
“Oh, please, Vic: The Edge. Brand-new. It’s a Salanter venture—he’s put up the seed money. We’re the future of journalism: we’re out on the edge. Streaming, online, audio, everything but print.”
The Edge was based in London, but after the Parkland massacre, when the Guardian newspaper had turned their editorial room over to the Parkland students who were organizing the March for Our Lives, The Edge thought they needed to go one better. Or one different.
Marcena explained that The Edge had put together an essay competition, asking teens to write about gun violence. “My idea, but Chaim loved it and put up the money for the prizes and transport and so on.”
Meaning Chaim Salanter, octogenarian billionaire and Holocaust survivor, who hoped before he died to save everyone in the world, from journalists to children whose lives were damaged by violence.
Marcena and her team had culled a dozen winners from among seven thousand entries. They planned to fly the kids to DC, where they would be filmed reading their essays in the rotunda of the Library of Congress.
“Most of the entries were filled with predictable bromides and calls to action,” Marcena added. “Others were harrowing accounts by survivors of school or mall shootings, but too many of those didn’t read well. And then we got one from a girl named Keisha Dunne here in Chicago that was flat-out amazing. It was about growing up with routine gun violence and how it affected the girl and her family—she was with her uncle when he was collateral damage in gang crossfire. Her story was also a reminder that we media types care more about affluent white kids than we do about people of color in the cities. She’s my number one choice, but I have to vet the story, of course, make sure she didn’t make it up and that the girl wrote it herself, make sure she’s mediagenic—”
“If it’s the best story and she wrote it herself, why does it matter how good she looks on TV?” I demanded.
Marcena smiled puckishly. “Vic, darling, you are so charmingly Victorian. Of course it matters. We’re doing this for the kids, of course, but we’re also doing it to put The Edge on the map. We asked our hundred potential finalists for video clips, but now we need to meet and vet the writers and the stories.
“Anyway, I’d like you to come down to South Chicago with me and help me figure out if there are any issues with the story. The family—mother, I should say; father isn’t in the picture—were eager, but then I got a call from this Hana Milcek, with some questions which she wouldn’t discuss over the phone.”
“She’s Keisha Dunne’s English teacher?” I was trying to follow the story.
“No. Keisha goes to a private school, South Side Preparatory Academy. But the head of the English and Journalism departments at Mirabal High was one of our local judges. I’m guessing he must have shown Keisha’s essay to your friend Hana. She called me this morning and said she had questions before I met with the Dunne girl. She was pretty stiff on the phone, but I remembered that you’d grown up down there. When I asked Milcek if she knew you, she thawed and admitted she follows your cases. She’ll talk more frankly if you’re with me.”
“The last time I let you romp around that high school with me, you dug a pretty big ditch through a lot of people’s lives.”
“It won’t be like that this time.” Marcena looked at me so earnestly that I almost believed her.
3
I tried calling Hana as soon as Marcena left, but she wasn’t answering her phone. I left a message on her voice mail before digging into the Elgar and Dunne family histories. In case Hana’s questions for Marcena had to do with the facts in Keisha Dunne’s essay, I looked up her uncle’s murder. Marcena had given me his name: Tyrone Elgar, but his murder had merited a scant line in a paragraph summarizing all the violent deaths that same week.
He’d been killed ten years ago, apparently caught in gang crossfire at a stop sign on Escanaba and Ninety-sixth. I’d wondered if he might be a banger himself instead of an innocent bystander, but it wasn’t possible to tell from the single sentence.
I didn’t see anything about Elgar’s niece, Keisha Dunne. A Fannie Lou Elgar had been one of the winners of the mayor’s summer reading challenge three years in a row and had also been on the Mirabal chess team when they beat Whitney Young for the city championship—an upset on the David-Goliath metric. Mirabal is a poor, underperforming neighborhood school; Whitney Young, a magnet school, is one of the top five high schools in Illinois. Michelle Obama is among Whitney Young’s graduates. I went to Mirabal High.
The Mirabal website celebrated their chess team hoisting the trophy, a stylized queen about a foot high. Seven guys and Fannie Lou, the lone female on the team, a heavyset girl who stared at the camera with a kind of defiant seriousness.
I dug a little and found Tyrone Elgar’s paid death announcement in the Sun-Times: survived by beloved mother Verena, cherished daughter Fannie Lou, sister Jasmine, niece Keisha.
I wondered why the niece, not the daughter, had written about Elgar’s death, but maybe she could be more detached. Although if it was the niece who’d been with him when he died—maybe it wasn’t detachment but a decade of pent-up fears that made Keisha write. I imagined an uneasy rivalry of grief and fear between the
two girls.
They were both only children; Jasmine Elgar Dunne, older than Tyrone by two years, had divorced Albert Dunne when Keisha was three and never remarried. Her PR firm, Jasmine Speaks Success, with offices on Seventy-first Street, had a small but important client list. She lived in one of the historic condominiums on Sixty-seventh Street that overlook Lake Michigan to the east and one of Olmsted’s parks to the north.
Fannie Lou Elgar lived with her grandmother at Ninety-second and Brandon, only a few streets from where I’d grown up. Looking at the addresses, I thought Elgar must have been taking his niece to the grandmother’s house when he was killed.
I called Lieutenant Conrad Rawlings, the watch commander at the Fourth District. Conrad and I have a Byzantine relationship, meaning I never fully understand the rules that dictate whether we are at odds or BFFs. Today we seemed on a cordial footing: after a few minutes on why I cared, he looked up the file on Tyrone Elgar. The cops made an arrest about eight months after his murder, when the same gun was used in another gang shooting. Dirtbag was doing twenty-five-to-life in Pontiac.
“Is there any suggestion that Elgar was involved with the shooters? Rival gang, anything?”
“I know you wouldn’t assume a black man who got shot had it coming,” Conrad said stiffly.
“Thank you; I don’t. Merely I don’t want to get blindsided tomorrow when I meet with the niece and her mother down at Mirabal. There’s some issue around the essay that’s making the English teacher uneasy.”
I heard Conrad typing and then he assured me that Elgar had led a blameless existence—bachelor’s in environmental studies at Illinois-Chicago, a stint with the navy in the Persian Gulf, and then home to a job with the South Chicago Re-Development Foundation.
Love & Other Crimes Page 27