The Kills

20

"Is he under arrest?" I asked the cop who was standing outside the door of Sarah's office, guarding the wiry young man who sat inside.

"Not exactly. We didn't know what to charge him with."

"Burglary?"

"He's got a key, ma'am. Says he knows the tenant."

"The tenant's dead."

"Yeah, but he claims she gave him permission to be in the apartment."

"Not lately, I don't imagine," I said.

"That's why we brought him down here. You guys can decide whether or not to charge him."

"Was the crime scene tape still over the door?"

"Yes, ma'am. He just lifted it and went inside, apparently."

"Didn't your sergeant think that's enough for a trespass?"

"He says the city don't pay him to think. That's why they got lawyers."

I waited for Chapman and then entered Sarah's small office. "My name is Alexandra Cooper," I said. "This is Mike Chapman. He's a detective and I'm an assistant district attorney."

"I'm Spike Logan." He had been resting his head on his crossed arms, on a corner of Sarah's desk. He stretched and yawned. "Wanna tell me what this is about?"

"Happy to," Mike said. "Then we got a few questions for you."

"Am I in custody?"

Mike looked to me for a decision.

"No," I said.

"Or do you mean not yet?" Logan said. "I'm free to leave?" He stood up, as though to challenge my response.

I stepped back to let him pass.

"That's fair," he said, reseating himself.

"We'd like to talk to you about McQueen Ransome," I said, "maybe starting with what you were doing in her apartment this morning."

"She invited me there. I had an appointment with her. Eleven o'clock."

"What kind of appointment and when did you make it?"

"Every third Monday of the month. Been doing it since the beginning of the year. Look, these cops told me Queenie's dead. Somebody killed her. I've probably got more questions for you than you've got for me."

Mike pulled two chairs from the anteroom outside Sarah's office and we settled in for our conversation with Spike Logan. I couldn't fathom why Queenie would have any standing engagements to meet with young men in her home, but Mike was ready to take over the questioning from me.

"You saying you didn't know Ms. Ransome was dead when you went in there today?"

"Uh-uh. Nope. I haven't been in town since last month. Just drove in last night. You gotta tell me what happened to her, man."

"Didn't you see the tape outside her door?" I asked.

"Lady, crime scene tape on a stoop in Harlem ain't quite the odd thing it might be on the front steps in Beverly Hills."

"Let's back up a bit," Mike said. "Why don't you tell us about yourself? Who you are, how you know Ms. Ransome, what the purpose of these meetings were."

Logan leaned back and stretched his legs in front of him. Lean and slight, he was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. He was a dark-skinned black man, with a mustache and goatee, dark-framed eyeglasses, and several piercings in both ears.

"Me? I'm thirty years old. Born here in the city, went to Martin Luther King High School. College at NYU. I'm in graduate school now."

"Where?"

"Harvard. African-American studies program."

"You got any ID on you?"

"It's in my car, uptown. In the glove compartment. Just my driver's license."

"No student ID?"

"I'm not enrolled this semester. I'm on leave."

"Where do you live? Where'd you come in from last night?"

"Massachusetts. Oak Bluffs."

Logan must have noticed my reaction. I looked over at Mike to see whether the name had registered with him. Oak Bluffs was one of the six towns on Martha's Vineyard. It had an unusual history, and for more than a century had been a summer community and home to an African-American population of professionals, scholars, and intellectuals.

"Who do you live with?"

"Alone. It's my uncle's home. I'm house-sitting for the winter."

"Ever been arrested?"

Logan hesitated for a moment, looking back and forth between Mike and me. "Couple of times."

"What for?"

"Protests, demonstrations on campus. You're gonna run me anyway, right?"

"Bank on it."

"Once for robbery. But it was mistaken identity. The prosecutor in Boston dismissed the case. My lawyer told me I was allowed to answer no if cops ever asked whether I was arrested for that charge, 'cause it was supposedly wiped off my record. I'm just telling you in case it shows up, so you know I didn't try to lie."

"How long ago?"

"Five, six years. No trouble since then."

"How do you support yourself?"

"I've got a fellowship for grad school."

"You just told me you're not there this semester."

"Yeah, well, my mother helps me out. I've got no rent to pay and some money I've saved up from my last job. Don't be getting hostile now, bro. I may be the only friend Queenie had," Logan said, pointing a finger at Mike and pushing himself up in his chair.

"How'd you meet her?"

Logan folded his arms across his chest and looked at the ceiling. "It was sometime late last fall. I'd been doing a research project up at school. My father was killed in a car accident about twenty years ago, and I always had this idea to go back and trace the history of his family. How his grandfather came up North, got educated, started his own business. Just find out everything I could about the man and the people I came from.

"So I'm doing all this stuff in the archives at the Schomburg Center," Logan said, referring to the research facility for black culture on Malcolm X Boulevard. "They had lots of documents about my grandparents, and photographs from the schools and clubs and professional societies in Harlem, with my father and some of his kin in 'em."

"You related to Queenie?"

"I kind of wished I was after I met her. I tried to find people who used to know my dad. My mom had all these pictures of him as a little boy, before they hooked up. In a lot of the shots he was with another kid she said was his best friend. Looked like a little white boy. On the back of the pictures was the other kid's name, Fabian Ransome."

I thought of the photo we had seen in Queenie's apartment, in which she had posed with her child. Mike had learned from neighborhood talk that her son had died before his tenth birthday.

"I always wanted to meet the boy in the photographs-Fabian. Find out about my dad's childhood from him. So at the Schomburg, I came across these clippings from the 1940s and 1950s, with pictures of McQueen Ransome. Her name caught my attention, and four or five of her photographs had Fabian in them, too. I recognized him from my dad's album."

"How'd you locate her?"

"Pounding the pavement," he said. "She wasn't listed in the book, and there weren't many people around who remembered her from her glory days, but I eventually got word of the old lady who liked to dance for the kids who ran her errands."

"What'd she do when you showed up at her door?"

Logan smiled and stroked at his goatee with his hand. "Man, she just came alive. I think she was so hungry for a bit of family, so happy to have a connection to her son, she just embraced me like I was her own blood."

"She remembered your father?"

"Told me the best stories about him. Things I never would have known if I hadn't come across her. I'd drive down here from the Vineyard once a month, she'd put the music on-wouldn't have none of my tapes or CDs, just her old vinyl. I'd bring her favorite things-gumbo, rice and beans, monkey bread, key lime pie. We'd go on talking for hours, then she'd heat up the food and we'd have a long meal with more conversating, as she liked to call it."

"You write your paper? Your family history?" Mike asked. "Is it something we can get a copy of?"

"The one about my father? I never finished it. Queenie got me off on a tangent."

"About what?"

Logan looked at Mike. "I fell in love."

"With?"

"With her, man," Logan said, sitting back and slapping his knees with both hands. "These meetings? I convinced her to do a history with me. An oral history for the Schomburg, and then I could use some of it for my dissertation at school. Not her personal stuff-but things I learned that related to my own family-"

"Why? What about her did you like?" Mike asked, while I thought of the photographs in Queenie Ransome's bedroom, those of her in costume as well as the nudes.

"Queenie? Now that girl had a life." Logan became animated, gesturing with his hands as he told us what he knew about her childhood in Alabama, and how she ran away from home to come to New York City to become a dancer.

"In the legitimate theater?" Mike asked.

"That was her dream. But it didn't happen, Detective. There weren't a whole lot of roles on Broadway for colored girls in the forties."

"She knew Josephine Baker, though."

"Yeah, you've checked out those pictures in her apartment? I've never seen a more beautiful woman in my life. Somebody brought her to the attention of Baker, right at the beginning of the Second World War. Josephine was staging a revival of Chocolate Dandies, the revue that made her famous in the 1920s. She came to New York for auditions. Queenie tried out just hoping to be part of the chorus line, but she had real star quality. Rose right to the top."

Mike remembered the photographs that we had seen together. "She performed for the troops during the war?"

"Yeah. Went everywhere that Josephine Baker did at first, till she spread her own wings a little later on. You know about De Gaulle giving them each the Legion of Honor?"

"Nope. I'd like to hear it."

"I got it all on tape, the stories she told me. Queenie and Baker both worked as intelligence agents during the war. Celebrities were able to move around much more freely than anybody else. Claims she even carried secret military reports from England to Portugal that were written on her sheet music in invisible ink. She was a hot ticket."

"What did you say about De Gaulle?"

"Baker worked with the French Red Cross. She was very active in the Resistance. She got Queenie involved, too. They were especially good at using their various-let me say, 'charms'-to convince foreign dignitaries to issue visas to some of the young women who needed to get out of Eastern Europe. Between the two of them, they saved a lot of lives."

"That sounds fairly dangerous," Mike said.

"She seemed to thrive on hazardous duty. There wasn't much that scared her. That was probably the second most dangerous thing Queenie did."

"I'll bite. What was the first?"

"Gathering intelligence for the American government."

"Spying?"

"You got it."

"On whom?"

"The king of Egypt."

"Farouk?" I asked, sitting bolt upright.

"Yes, ma'am, Farouk. The Night Crawler-that's what she called him. McQueen Ransome was King Farouk's mistress, Ms. Cooper."

Josephine Baker, the Revue Nègre, the French Resistance, and General Charles de Gaulle. I thought of the letters R du R, the old Parisian label in the mink coat that Tiffany Gatts had stolen from the apartment, and I traced them with my fingertip against the green desk blotter.

"Ransome du Roi,"I said to Mike Chapman. "The King's Ransome."