Kate Allen - Alison Kaine Mystery 4 - Just a Little Lie Read online

  Kate Allen - Alison Kaine Mystery 4 - Just a Little Lie

  Kate Allen

  New Victoria Publishers (1999)

  * * *

  You promised No Dead Bodies! Mistress Anastasia, the lovely leather femme has every right to be irritated with her butch girlfriend, Alison Kaine. A mystery is the last thing she needs at her leather event. On leave from the Denver PD and relegated to driving the airport shuttle, Alison cannot ignore the undercurrent of malice and deception beneath the bantering and blatant sexuality. Can Alison work quickly enough to uncover old feuds and secrets - or will someone go home as cargo?

  Review

  Cool characters, kinky sex and a neat little plot twist. --Boston Gay Paper

  These books function a bit like Bechdel's comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For - messy love affairs, volatile community issues - the basic stuff of dyke drama. --Sojourner

  Good dialogue, believable characters, humor and insight-sounds like a quadruple threat to me. --Bay Area Reporter

  About the Author

  Kate Allen writes about the complexities and contradictions of lesbian life with a unique and wonderful style. The perfect writer for readers who are hungry for something new for something humorous and erotic.

  Just a Little Lie

  Kate Allen

  Chapter One

  Alison Kaine recognized the women as soon as she pulled into the United pickup lane. Five of them this trip—two from California, one from Alabama, and one from Phoenix if she remembered correctly the information her girlfriend, Stacy, had given her. The fifth was from Somewhere On the East Coast, which was the way that people in Denver liked to refer to any city with toll roads and skyscrapers, as if the power of naming was so strong they could make any place past Montana disappear just by withholding it. Westerners were like that.

  The two Alison had pegged as the California girls both had an end-of-the-summer tan and blonde hair that had been helped along by the sun or by somebody good enough to make it look as if it had. Alison took an anxious little glance in the vanity mirror. No tan or charming sprinkling of freckles there. Except for skiers nobody had a tan yet in Denver. It had been an unusually long and overcast winter, which had been hard for a population used to a few sunny days a week no matter how deep the snow on the ground. Even now, a lovely spring day in April, Alison knew that snow was still never far from the fickle mind of the weather goddess. She had lived in Denver all her life and had spent a good many Aprils and Mays shaking snow off her blossoming lilacs.

  She sighed over her pale, indoor skin but cheered up when she checked out her new, butch haircut. She also liked the look of the silver earcuff that Stacy had given her for her thirty-sixth birthday. She looked just fine, she told herself sternly, and she didn't need to let any surfer girls make her feel inferior before they even said a word. There was plenty of time for them to make her feel inferior later. Everybody's got baggage; part of Alison's was the occasional attack of insecurity.

  She sat for a moment behind the wheel of the van, waiting for first contact and then finally realized that even though she had picked them right out of the crowd and they had presumably picked each other out of the crowd, none of them had picked her out of the crowd, even though there was a card with the Wildfire logo stuck up in the corner of the windshield.

  She opened the driver's door and stepped out, ignoring some idiot in a Honda who wanted to jockey a few feet closer to the United sign and thought the whole world should get out of his way so he could do it. She stood for a moment, just testing to see if the leather gaydar was going to kick in without a signal and then pulled her heavy leather jacket after her, slipping her arms into the sleeves with the ease of long practice.

  Ding-ding-ding-ding! All four heads snapped to full attention, eyes bright, chins up. The response couldn't have been better. Alison felt as if she'd slapped the blue and red bubble gum machine from her patrol car on top of her head and let it rip. She knew it was childish, but she couldn't help but get a little chuckle out of the way leatherwomen were able to turn the blinders on. You weren't anybody unless you had the jacket.

  There was a lot of baggage (the Samsonite kind, not the emotional kind) which was not a surprise. This was her fifth run to the airport today and every one of the women headed for Wildfire, the Denver leatherwomen's conference, had arrived with luggage in both hands and a stack on the sidewalk.

  At dinner the night before with Stacy and Stacy's best friend, Liz, Alison had tried to blame the femmes, but Stacy had hooted that one down. "Excuse me? I don't think so, girlfriend! It's those butch women who are bringing a different pair of boots for every event and bullwhips and chain mail besides! I can pack for a whole weekend in an overnight bag and make a flogger out of an old bicycle tire and some duct tape when I get there if I have to!"

  This was a lie of such O.J. Simpson proportions—except for the part about the flogger—that Alison and Liz had just given one another a quick look agreeing on silence and gone back to eating sushi. Stacy required more bearers for a week in San Francisco than Fanny Bullock Workman had taken to the Himalayas. She needed a separate bag on wheels just for her heels.

  Stacy, however, had twisted herself into such a knot over the conference that she was ticking like a time bomb and neither Alison nor Liz wanted to be within sight when she went off. Stacy on a tear was like one of Macy's balloons springing a leak, breaking its rope and ripping down Park Avenue at full, unfettered speed, mowing down the little people, tearing chunks out of cars and buildings without a backward glance. They had both seen it before and thought it would be really nice if someone else—preferably someone from out of town with whom they did not want to be buddies—got a chance to see it this time. Liz, who was the world's highest recognized authority on Stacy tears, had been trying for a week to set her off on strangers like dynamite in front of a forest fire. Her preferred target would have been Alison's best friend, Michelle, but since Michelle loathed Liz she had not been able to arrange an innocent meeting.

  Butch and femme aside, the travelers were going to have to squeeze to get everything in, even though the van, borrowed from Stacy's femme friend Beth, who used it for transporting her Irish wolfhounds, was good-sized.

  Alison gave a brief group greeting... "Here for Wildfire? Glad to see you!" ...and then went around to open the double doors at the back of the van. She was all too aware of the eyes on her back, sizing her up, making predictions, creating fantasies. She was a tall, butch dyke, which meant that she was used to a quick once-over from other tall, butch dykes. That had happened all her life, and even more so in the past three years since she had been dating Stacy. Stacy liked butch women and what Stacy liked Stacy pretty much got, so Alison had bowed before her desire. Not that it had been a stretch—Alison, in her olive drab, flannel plaid and Birkenstocks had been a butch explosion waiting to happen. Just add water. Or, in this case, just add Stacy.

  So, silly girl that she was, Alison had thought she would be totally prepared for the butch women flying into Denver for the four days of Wildfire. She thought they'd look at one another with quick glances calculating weight and height to the centimeter, play a little bone crunch while shaking hands, make a few macho job and hobby references, and then go their separate ways like dogs who have done a little obligatory growling and sniffing.

  But she'd based that plan on the real world and just one day of doing airport pickup—and that was before the conference even started—had taught her a few things, the main one being that they weren't in the real world anymore. In the real world one couldn't go wrong with a friendly offer to help carry baggage. But, as
Alison had discovered the day before, in the leather world there were a hundred different ways one could offend with that same offer and she had already been on the wrong side of every one of them. There had been butch gals who had been ticked that she had even asked and femme gals who had been ticked that she hadn't asked quickly enough. There had been women traveling with slaves who felt her offer out of line, femmes who had thought she was insinuating they were weak and incapable, and women who did need help but thought she should have been a bit more circumspect asking. Alison was a very bright woman; she didn't need to be taught the same lesson more than a couple of times. Less if there was beating involved.

  "Welcome to Denver," she said, giving the four of them her biggest Mile High smile. "My back is bothering me, so I'm going to ask everyone to take care of their own luggage." She put her hand on her hip and stood, still smiling, by the door while the four of them sorted everything out among themselves. It was the coward's way out and she knew it and didn't care. She simply didn't have the energy to negotiate every little thing and besides, her back did hurt. For that matter, so did her hips and her right arm and both hands, which were swollen as well, all effects of her chronic fibromyalgia syndrome, which she found so boring and annoying she could barely stand to think of it, let alone discuss it with anyone else. She was already going to have to do ice packs and extra meds tonight; she didn't need to see who could piss higher on the tree before they even left the airport.

  There was about five minutes of milling around. Some of the women loaded their own bags and some women helped or were helped. There was some commenting on the storage space, which smelled of wolfhound even though Alison had vacuumed and put a sheet down. But finally everyone was buckled in and Alison went back to lock the doors, congratulating herself. She hadn't been scolded even once. She wondered for a moment where the fifth passenger was, but she wasn't going to wait.

  "Wildfire?" asked a new voice literally at her elbow. Alison was confused a moment, until she realized the woman speaking, a butch type wearing glasses, was in a wheelchair. Her skin was that color Americans call black, though it was closer really to a deep brown with an almost golden glow. Her hair was at that point where black and grey are struggling for dominance and cut close to her head. She was wearing a very old, very weathered leather jacket over her jeans and in her lap was a tank of oxygen, attached to a tube, which was clipped beneath her nose.

  "Yeah," Alison answered, trying to think quickly. Stacy hadn't said anything about a wheelchair pickup. There had been only one wheelchair pre-registration and since Beth herself had been scheduled for that pickup she hadn't shown Alison how it was done. Oh, dear, she was going to be ignorant and possibly offensive.

  The woman must have sensed her panic.

  "Oh, this is just a ride," she said, waving back toward the miles of corridors. Denver International Airport was bigger than a lot of towns in Colorado. "I just can't walk that far. Not unless I stay in a motel on the way!" She stood slowly and turned to the attendant, a woman wearing a United uniform, holding a five-dollar tip in her hand as she gave up the chair.

  "I'm Bernie. From Phoenix. Sorry I'm late." The woman offered Alison a frail hand. The skin on it and her forearms was puppy-ear soft and loose, as if she had recently lost a lot of weight. Despite this she gave the old butch squeeze. "I think they're bringing the baggage. Oh, here it is."

  Another tip and Bernie climbed into the van with a hand from one of the California girls while Alison stacked her bags in the back most seat. The wolfhound area was full with the grate pulled across it. There was room for one woman beside the luggage and one beside Alison. The other three squeezed together in the middle.

  "Ah am so excited to be he-ya!" One of the blonde girls Alison had pegged as Californian claimed the front passenger seat, although the moment she opened her mouth it was obvious that she was actually the Alabama passenger. There I go again with stereotypes, thought Alison, who scolded herself every chance she got. There were many—it was a full time job. "I missed Powersurge last year. Did any of you all go to Powersurge last ye-ah?" She twisted around in the seat, waiting for an answer.

  Powersurge, which Alison had not attended last year, though Stacy and Liz had been twice, was kind of the mother of lesbian leather conferences. Oh, it had been done before and it had been done sooner and it had even been done in Denver, but nobody had done it quite like the girls in Seattle, who three times running had produced an event that really had it all. Powersurge had play space and dress up dinners and workshops and dungeon space and vendors and if the Denver girls had been smart, thought Alison, looking in the side mirror while the rest of them told stories, they would have just been content to go to Seattle every two years and say thank-you nicely to the women who produced it. But could dykes ever, ever pass up an opportunity for controversy? No, of course they couldn't, and that was the reason Alison was driving back from D.I.A. for the fifteenth time in two days and Stacy had her knickers in a twist.

  At the last Powersurge there had been a big old hassle, meetings, boycotting and the whole nine yards over the issue of transsexuals and who really was a woman and who wasn't and so who should be allowed to attend and who shouldn't. Alison, who had heard all about it second hand, had never quite identified all the factions. It was all very confusing. What she did know was that a direct consequence of that brouhaha had been the formation of several splinter groups which had agreed to produce a rotating leatherwomen's conference in their home towns on the years there was no Powersurge. And that was why Stacy and Liz with about fifteen other local leatherwomen formed the Wildfire Committee and got involved right up to their eyeballs. Which was, of course, the reason Alison was driving Beth's van and also the reason Stacy had been strung tighter than catgut for about three weeks.

  There was just so much that could go wrong when you packed two hundred leatherwomen into the same space for four days, and for Stacy, who could make a great big deal out of almost anything, this had been just too much fuel for the imagination. Usually Stacy's imagination was a big plus, but for the past twenty-one days it had been turned only toward catastrophe. There had been no sex and Alison had pretty much resigned herself to the fact that everyone was going to get laid this weekend but her. Stacy had been way too occupied with predicting disasters—the work crews weren't going to show, the caterers were going to cancel, there were going to be knock-down drag-out fights and, most important of all, some empty-headed femme was going to look prettier than she did—to even think about doing the nasty herself. Alison had tried to initiate over the weekend—nothing elaborate, just a little McSex before The X-Files—but the whole mission had been aborted when Stacy sat bolt upright in the middle of foreplay, exclaiming, "Toilet paper! Are they supposed to supply toilet paper, or are we?"

  The 'they' of Stacy's question were the two delightful gay boys from whom the Wildfire group was renting the three-story Victorian mansion they called Tara in which the conference—dungeons, workshops, leather mall and all—was being held. Tara was a prize. From the Seattle gals the Wildfire collective knew it was hard to find a place for this type of event. Well, what was hard was not so much finding someone who would rent to them, but someone who would rent to them a second time.

  But the gay boys, friends of Stacy's cleaning faggot, Lawrence, had been thrilled to rent the house for four days. They had started the renovation of Tara by transforming the servants' quarters on the third floor into a lovely little apartment in which they were now residing themselves, but had agreed to stay with friends during the conference, which was not too much to ask considering the price they were charging. They were fine with anything the leatherwomen did as long as it stayed behind closed doors and no lube got on the wallpaper. What the neighbors thought was not an issue. The area of town in which the Tara was located was not a nice one. The only place you'd really want to go was the Mercury Cafe or Muddy's bar. The boys were hoping that one day soon it would become a nice area, reclaimed by renovation and gay money, b
ut they were the first kids on the block to have sunk any money, and in general, nice tenants who wouldn't tear down the chandeliers were a way down the road.

  "I was at Powersurge last year," volunteered the other blonde behind Alison. She was a handsome, sturdy butch whom Alison had sized up in that brief moment of touching hands as being both a little shorter and weighing a little less than Alison. Her name, Alison recalled from the intros, was Pat. Or at least that was the name she was using this weekend. Alison had met a lot of women in the past two days and she hadn't heard so many made-up names since she'd been kicked off womyn's land. The difference was that rather than being called Star and Bear the leatherwomen were called things like Master Mad Dog and Leatherbaby. "It was fabulous! The whole—"

  "I guess you were at Powersurge! Why don't you just tell everyone what you were doing at Powersurge? And you don't even have the common courtesy to keep it at Powersurge! Do you think I can ever go back there? You've destroyed it for me! I can never go again! But do you have the decency to at least stay away from this conference, just so I can have some place I can go without seeing you and her? Oh, no, of course not! That would involve morals, wouldn't it? That would involve some show of decency and conscience, and we all know you don't have those things, don't we?"

  The outburst from the rear seat was so ugly and unexpected that Alison, jerking as if she'd been sprayed with vomit, almost drove right through the lowered arm of the airport parking tollbooth. She hit the brake just in time. She glanced in her mirror. The woman who had saturated the car with anger was a mildly pretty femme of about Alison's height, though she was so thin that the words 'eating disorder' sprung to mind immediately. She was obviously aware that her thick, chestnut hair was her crowning glory, for it was twisted up in an elaborate knot that would have been more suitable for a cocktail party than a plane ride. Her outfit, short skirt and high heels, was a bit much for five in the afternoon too. Alison guessed that she and both blondes were early thirty-somethings, which she felt was old enough to know better than to cause public scenes. They obviously knew one another, so were probably the two from California.