hair.
'Well, Queenie Ransome was pretty light-skinned herself. Maybe his father was Caucasian.'
'Check this one out,' Mike said. 'She's in uniform.'
It was another picture of Ransome on a stage, dressed in khakis designed to look like an army uniform. She was tap-dancing, it appeared, and her hand was about to salute someone with a touch of her cap. A USO flag hung from the bunting behind her. I took the photo off the wall and turned it over.
'Same year as those nightclub photos you brought to the office yesterday, 1942. This one looks like she was entertaining the troops.'
'Here's another James Van Derzee portrait,' Mike said. 'Pretty spectacular.'
It was a studio shot of the stunning young woman, again signed by the photographer, and probably taken after the Second World War, when she was still in her twenties.
Set against the faux backdrop typical of the period, she was dressed in a satin evening gown, her hair coiffed in a large bun atop her head, reclining against a marble column.
The gallery stopped at the far wall, which had a small bookcase across its end. Every book had been pulled off the shelf and strewn on the floor. I stooped to pick up a few-popular novels of the fifties and sixties-flipped through their pages but found nothing loose or stuck inside.
'What do you give me for a first-edition Hemingway?' Mike asked. '
'Nineteen forty. That fetches a sweet number today.' He knew I collected rare books. 'I think the last one went at auction for about twenty-five thousand.'
'Does his signature add value?'
'You're joking. Let me see.' I took the book from his hand. The dust jacket was pristine, but whoever dumped it on the floor had cracked its spine by throwing it there. ''For Queenie-who is, herself, a moveable feast-Papa.' Take this one with you and voucher it. Let's look over all the books before we're done.'
'Guess she didn't only kick up her heels for the boys in the 'hood. Don't you wish you'd had a chance to meet her?' said Mike, changing the record. 'Just sit in this room and listen to her stories? She must have been something.'
I turned the corner into the bedroom, flipping on the light. 'Any reason I can't touch things in here?'
'Everything's been processed,' Mike said, following me in.
The dresser drawers were all ajar, contents spilled out, as Mike had told me. The black fingerprint powder covered Queenie's old pink leather jewelry case. 'Was there anything in this when you found it?'
'Just what you see.'
There was a long strand of fake pearls, knotted the way that flappers once wore them. There were several large brooches that seemed to be made of colored glass, and lots of dangling earrings in bright colors, made of Bakelite or plastic. Some flea market vendor would relish this stuff, but none of it had any street value, and even the pettiest of thieves would have left it behind.
I opened the closet doors and separated the hangers.
'So much for those gowns and tiaras. Wear 'em while you can, Coop. This is what it all comes down to in the end,' Mike said. There was an assortment of checked and flowered housedresses, and a couple of outfits that looked suitable for church-or burial. 'The ME asked me to have you pick out a dress for Queenie to be buried in.'
'Is there actually a funeral?'
'The squad's doing one. Nobody's been able to locate the nieces in Georgia, and all the guys want to arrange something for her. It'll be next week-I'll let you know what day.'
It was an unspoken tradition among the elite homicide detectives that if there was no family to put a victim to rest with dignity, they often did it themselves. Queenie would go in a plot near the still-unidentified toddler known to the squad as Baby Hope, and the homeless man dubbed Elvis who played his guitar in the 125th Street subway station, slain for the few bucks he had picked up panhandling.
'What's on the floor?' I asked.
'Bastards even dumped out all her shoe and hatboxes. Took whatever cash she had left. That's just the pocket change you're playing with.'
The dark closet floor was littered with silver coins, which gleamed against the wooden background. I kneeled again and scooped up a handful. 'This must be the stash she used to tip the kids who bought her groceries.'
I let the coins run through my fingers and clink against each other as they fell. Both Mike and I knew victims who had been killed for far less money than was sitting on the floor of Queenie's closet.
'I want you to promise me that someone's going to do a careful inventory of all these things,' I said. 'It may not look like much of value to you, but there's a lot of memorabilia here that shouldn't be thrown away.'
'What I wanted you to do is look at these photos,' he said, sweeping the bedroom walls with his hand. 'You ever see anything like this? It's like a shrine to herself. I mean, it's a damn good body she had, but could these photos-could her own personal history-have anything to do with her murder?'
I recognized the bed on which her body had been found from the crime scene photos. The detectives believed that's where she had been killed. In addition to the Van Derzee portrait that had been above her head, there were seven other shots-all taken in different locations-which were erotic in nature. They weren't pictures of Queenie dancing, nor were they posed on a stage or in a studio. They were, pure and simple, pornographic.
This was not a situation I had seen before in a criminal case. Although the images' purpose may have been to arouse sexual interest sixty years ago, I couldn't imagine anyone responding to the partially paralyzed octogenarian in the same way today.
There was a dressing table opposite the bed's footboard. To the right of the mirror was another photo of the young Ransome, dancing as Scheherazade, wearing gauzelike harem pants and clasping tiny cymbals above her veiled head.
'Beats me,' I said. 'Can't rule it out.'
To the left of the looking glass was a photo of two women facing each other in profile, both in strapless satin dresses, with trains hanging to the floor and pooling behind them. 'Here's one more you've got to see. It's Queenie, nose to nose with Josephine Baker,' I said, recognizing the American dancer who had lived much of her life in Paris and was considered to be one of the most sensual performers of all times.
'Later for the talent show, Coop. Are you getting anything in here?'
'Like what?'
'Vibes,' Mike said, sitting on the stool at the dressing table and leaning on Queenie's metal walker. 'Sometimes, when I just sit here alone, in the middle of the victim's world, with all his or her belongings around me, I get a sense of who might have come here to hurt them, or what it is they were looking for.'
'How about if it's just random?' I asked.
'Doesn't matter. Sometimes the place and its people speak to me,' he said softly. 'This one's so incongruous. I wanna feel like she's my own grandmother, but this-this scene-'
'The photos bother you?'
'Don't they bother you?' he asked me.
'They're quite beautiful, actually,' I said, tousling his hair. 'It's your parochial school upbringing, Mikey.'
The ringing of my cell phone interrupted the quiet, with only Ellington's tunes playing their scratchy sounds in the background on the old Victrola from the other room.
'Hello?'
'Alex, it's Mercer.'
'Any news?'
'No sightings. But a ray of hope. I just got into work-we had a late night trying to interview everyone who saw the boy yesterday, before he disappeared. Did you hear from Paige?' Mercer asked me.
'No. But she's in the middle of cross. You know she's been instructed not to talk to me.'
'She left a voice mail for me at the office, at about ten o'clock last night. I didn't pick it up until this morning. Dulles Tripping called her after I dropped her off from court. She had given him a slip of paper with her phone number on it, that first morning in the coffee shop. Paige said he sounded fine, just scared and lonely. Have you got a cell number for her?'
'For Paige? No. I've always found her at her office, or at home. Does she know where he is?'
