The Kills (26 page)

"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."