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. The words could have sounded like blasphemy to a bystander; they would have been repeated in a shocked or titillated voice. They would have become part of what Keisha was sure she remembered from that day.
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. 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’s 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 local star, she could easily have known him and been affected by his death.
Even so. 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. “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 her off. “It’s my briar patch, too, Ms. Diaz: I grew up three blocks away.”
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.”
“You can’t prove that!” Keisha said. “You think you’ve got the only brain in the family. I’m tired of ‘Fannie Lou won the reading competition,’ ‘Fannie Lou is doing summer math camp, Fannie Lou this, Fannie Lou that.’”
“I’m tired of ‘Keisha is such a gifted singer and dancer. Must be hard to have a cousin like her when you’re so fat yourself,’” Fannie Lou blurted, on the verge of tears.
“You didn’t even know about the competition until I told you.”
“Liar!” Fannie Lou said. “Ms. Milcek told me about it. I wrote about my daddy and she said it was brilliant and I should make it into a whole essay for the competition.”
“And then you’d send in your video clip and Ms. Love would swoon over your fat ass and put you on national television. I don’t think so,” Keisha sneered.
“Fannie Lou, are you sure Ms. Milcek submitted your essay?” Diaz asked. “Even the most dedicated teacher can drop the ball now and again.”
“Not Ms. Milcek,” Fannie Lou said. “When she said she’d do a thing, she’d do that thing.”
“Fannie Lou—Ms. Elgar—” I said. “Did you watch Ms. Milcek submit your essay?”
She nodded, choking back a sob. “I sat with her as she filled out the form, because some of the information was about me. My birth date and other things that Ms. Milcek wouldn’t know off the top of her head. Two other kids in my class wrote essays and she sent them all in on the same day. So it wasn’t that she was treating me special,” she added fiercely to her cousin. “Everyone mattered to her if we did the work.”
“And you, Ms. Dunne,” I said quickly before Keisha could fire back. “How did you submit your essay?”
“Mom helped me, but we took it to my high school counselor.”
I asked the girls for the dates they’d made their submissions, but they couldn’t remember—it had been back in the spring, before the end of the school year, and it was late September now.
I felt a bit like King Solomon with the baby—who was really the mother of the essay? I called Marcena.
“Your winning student has a rival for the same essay. Can you check your files at The Edge for a submission by Fannie Lou Elgar?”
“I’m in the middle of something ri
ght now, Vic. Can’t it wait?”
“I’m not sure how you’d handle a public outcry if your winner was found to be guilty either of theft or plagiarism. That’s where this is heading, though.”
“What are you talking about?” Marcena demanded.
“Your winning essay, your mediagenic kid. It’s possible she stole her cousin’s work. I’m trying to figure that out.”
Marcena wanted to know where I was, how I knew this, damn it, I should have called her as soon as I heard about the problem—did I think I was God Almighty on a throne dispensing justice to the rest of the human race?
“We can sort out later who I think I am and who I think you are, but in the meantime, can you get that information from your paper’s database?” I said.
I heard a man’s voice in the background, a smothered noise of annoyance, and then Marcena said she’d call me back in ten. It was actually a bit under that when she phoned to say she’d gotten The Edge’s nightshift tech department to do a search. Nothing from Fannie Lou, nothing from Mirabal High, sorry, Vic.
“But that can’t be,” Fannie Lou protested. “I watched her, and so did Jordan and Artiya.”
“You just can’t admit you or your precious teacher made a mistake,” Keisha said. “Did you even do your video? Maybe your teacher didn’t know how to upload that.”
“Just because I don’t go to a fancy school doesn’t mean we all crawl around in the dirt down here,” Fanny Lou said.
“Girls!” Verena’s voice was a whip. “I will not have you turn yourselves into a public spectacle. That’s enough of this for tonight. You, Ms. Detective, do you have any advice on how to find out what happened to Fannie Lou’s essay?”
“Did Ms. Milcek do this at a school computer or on your laptop?” I asked Fannie Lou.
“At the school, in the computer lab, but I have my essay on my machine, and it has the date stamp on it. That will prove I wrote mine before Keisha wrote hers!”
“Only if Keisha’s date stamp is later than yours, Missy,” Jasmine said. “Why can’t you let Keisha have a little glory for once in your life, Fannie Lou? You get your name in the paper every five minutes for some competition or other.”
Fannie Lou said, “She’s in the choir, she got a solo at the Youth Orchestra, she was an extra in Chi. Why can’t she let me be best at this one thing?”
“Go get your computer, Fannie Lou,” her grandmother said. “At least we can find out what date you put your essay in your machine.”
Fannie Lou turned to go to the hall and up the narrow stairs to the second floor. Keisha was watching her, hands on hips, biting her lips.
“Sticky!” I called.
Fannie Lou stopped with her foot on the first step. She turned to look at me, but Keisha didn’t move.
“I’m pretty sure that answers the authorship question,” I said dryly. “We can get the computers and find Hana’s and check all the dates, but I think we’ll find that Fannie Lou wrote the original essay.”
Principal Diaz and the grandmother both looked bewildered. “Why? What does ‘Sticky’ have to do with it?” the principal said.
“The start of the essay,” I said. “The writer says the only remaining piece of the girl with ‘matchstick legs’ who was with Tyrone Elgar when he died is the nickname. Keisha went through the essay and found every reference to Mr. Elgar as ‘Daddy,’ or ‘my father,’ and changed them to ‘Uncle Ty,’ or ‘my uncle.’ But she forgot the rest of the context. Why, though?”
When Keisha didn’t say anything, Verena Elgar demanded that she answer the question.
“Fannie Lou was, like, preening herself. ‘My essay’s so good, I’m going to win the big prize.’ I couldn’t take her boasting on herself.”
“What big prize?” I asked.
“The scholarship money,” Keisha whispered. “The winners all get scholarships to the college of their choice. I want to go to a real music conservatory, in New York or Boston, and it seemed like—I read Fannie Lou’s essay and I thought, she’ll win this competition just like she wins everything. But even without this, she’ll get a scholarship to Stanford or Harvard or someplace, why can’t I have this one chance?”
“But why, baby?” Verena went to Keisha and took her in her arms. “You know I would help you, you know I’ve saved my pennies and dimes so that you and Fannie Lou could both go to college.”
“We don’t know that, Mama.” Jasmine’s voice was like a whip. “The whole time I was growing up, everything was ‘Ty, Ty, Ty.’ He was so special, it was like I didn’t even exist. And then after he died, you were the same with Fannie Lou. Keisha’s accomplishments never mattered to you the way Fannie Lou’s do. I work hard, but the money isn’t there for the New England Conservatory or Cincinnati.”
Albertine Diaz’s jaw dropped in horror. “But, Ms. Dunne—surely you didn’t encourage your daughter to steal her cousin’s work!”
“No. But when she told me what she’d done, I thought, okay, why not? After all, Ty was my brother, but my grief never counted for anything. And he was like a second father to Keisha—her daddy left us when she was a baby. But it was always Fannie Lou’s grief, Mama’s grief, never what happened to us.”
“You must have known this would come out if Keisha won,” I said. “Didn’t you have a plan?”
“If she won, I figured she’d be in Washington and on TV before anyone at Mirabal High knew about it.”
“Oh, Jasmine.” Her mother’s voice crackled with misery. “I always said God was a god of mirth more than mercy. He and his angels laugh at the way we contort ourselves. Albertine, and you, Ms. Detective, I need to be alone with my family. You leave now.”
I nodded and said to the principal, “Can you get me into the school? I know it’s almost midnight, but I’d like to get to the computers before some wiseass decides to wipe the server.”
8
Mirabal High was built like a giant E, but missing the middle prong. The computer lab was on the second floor of the far wing. When we reached the end of the long hall and turned left, we saw the light from the lab at once.
The lab door was locked, but Albertine had a master key. The room was filled with rows of monitor-covered countertops; it took a moment before we saw Dexter Vamor at a machine by the windows. Marcena was standing behind him.
I raced across the room to him, shoving Marcena out of the way. I leapt onto Dexter, knocking his hand from the keyboard. He rolled back in his chair, pushing me off-balance, and reached for an ankle holster.
I lunged forward, hands around his neck, fingers digging into his larynx. He still managed to fire twice before he lost consciousness.
Black hands covered mine, pulling me away from Vamor. “Ms. W, didn’t I specifically order you to keep me in the loop and not to hotdog?”
9
Marcena and I sat with Albertine Diaz in the principal’s office.
“Thank you for alerting the police,” Diaz said formally to Marcena. “It was a big help to have Lieutenant Rawlings see Dex actually trying to shoot us. And thank you, Vic, for figuring things out quickly enough to stop him before he erased Hana’s files.”
It was two days after the shoot-out in the lab. I’d spent most of the previous afternoon with the Elgar family. Verena was mourning her granddaughter Keisha’s theft of Fannie Lou’s work, but more than that, she was upset with herself for not seeing how her daughter, Jasmine, was hurting.
“After Ty died, I wanted to weave this cocoon around Fannie Lou, and I didn’t see how I was cutting Jasmine and Keisha out. They were always here, Sunday dinner, girls playing together, going to swim lessons together, but I read the story wrong. Jasmine put Keisha in a private school and I thought she was cutting herself away from me, from us and the neighborhood. I didn’t see the world of hurt she was living in.”
Jasmine and her mother agreed that Keisha needed a meaningful penalty for stealing Fannie Lou’s work, but no one wanted to see her publicly shamed. She was sixteen, and sixteen-year-olds ac
t without thinking about consequences ten times a day. We didn’t want a mark on her record that would add another barrier to any education or jobs she would want in a few years. When I left, they were deciding on a combination of community service—Keisha coaching neighborhood kids one afternoon a week—and curtailing of Keisha’s own social life.
“And Fannie Lou is going to join Keisha in coaching,” Verena said. “I’m distressed if she was boasting on herself and making Keisha feel like a lesser girl.”
What I didn’t understand was Dexter Vamor’s role in the story, but Marcena explained that.
“He saw the video clips the girls sent in. He knew the essays were identical, but he knew Keisha had the winning presence, and he wanted a win. He wanted a job on cable and he figured if he ingratiated himself with ‘the lady from London’ and had a beautiful poised girl like Keisha to be the face of Chicago’s South Side, he’d have a chance to make himself known internationally. So he deleted Fannie Lou’s submission.”
“And then Hana read Keisha’s essay,” I said. “She instantly recognized the language from Fannie Lou’s work; she called Marcena to say she had questions about the essay, but she wanted to talk to Vamor first, I guess.”
Marcena nodded. “That’s how I reconstruct it, too. She confronted him, and he shot her. And then he tried to romance me. I suppose he thought he could dazzle me into not questioning his role in the essays, but I’m forty-five; when good-looking thirty-year-olds try to dazzle me, I always wonder what’s really going on with them.”
She looked at me with a smile half guilty, half mischievous: she would never apologize for the havoc she’d wreaked five years ago, but she wanted me to know she’d learned from it.
“And the prizes?” the principal asked. “I hope you’re going to readmit Fannie Lou’s essay. She may not be the most mediagenic girl in your database, but she did write the essay. She is a gifted student in a community without very many of them.”
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