Booked for Murder (5 page)

“I appreciate you coming,” Meredith said. “I didn't know if you would.”

Lindsay felt a pang of guilt that she'd even considered refusing. “Yeah, well, we've been friends a while now.”

“I haven't behaved much like a friend since Penny and I split up. I didn't return your calls, I didn't come round.”

Lindsay shrugged. “I assumed you weren't ready to talk about it. I wasn't offended.”

Meredith sighed. “It wasn't just that I wasn't ready. I knew Penny was seeing Sophie. I saw Sophie pick her up one night around dinnertime and drop her off a couple of hours later. I figured you'd have heard Penny's side of it. Which would not have been a pretty story. I didn't expect you'd be too bothered about the case for the defense.”

“You should know me better than that.”

Meredith acknowledged her reproach with a sad smile. “I know. But I haven't been thinking too straight.”

“That's what I'm here for now. But if you're serious about wanting me to investigate this, you're going to have to give me a free hand.”

Meredith nodded, cradling her coffee in her hands as if it were precious and fragile. “You got it,” she said.

Lindsay nodded, her lips tight in anticipation of awkwardness. She pushed her hair back from her face and said, “It means I have to ask difficult questions. You probably aren't going to want to answer some of them, but it's important that you tell me the truth, okay? Even if it's something that makes it look bad for you, you have to tell me. I'm not going to misunderstand the way your lawyer might, because I
know
you couldn't have killed Penny.” Well, not like that, she added mentally. Not with that degree of premeditation.

Meredith stared into her coffee. “I don't have anything to hide,” she
said, her voice flat as a synthesized answering machine. She looked up, her eyes blank. “I didn't kill Penny. I don't know who did. That's what I need you to find out.”

“I'll do my best. So, when did Penny actually arrive in Britain?”

“She'd been here a day or two under three weeks.”

Lindsay jotted a note on the fresh pad she'd dropped into her backpack in Half Moon Bay. “I knew she was coming over, of course, I just wasn't sure exactly when she'd left. It was Sophie who spoke to her last. And you were due to come too, is that right?”

“I guess you remember how carefully she liked to plan things, and she'd been organizing us both for this trip for months.” Meredith sighed. “Originally, the plan was that I was going to join her for a couple of weeks near the beginning of her stay, then I was coming back towards the end for another ten days. After we split up, she decided it would be good for her to go ahead with the trip anyway, only alone.”

Lindsay nodded. “But you decided to come regardless?”

“I couldn't leave it be. It meant too much for us to walk away from it. Hell, you know how much we loved each other. You and Sophie, you were there right from the start. Ruby's birthday dinner at Green's. The lights shining on the bay, only all I had eyes for was Penny . . .” Meredith's voice tailed off and two fat tears spilled down her pale cheeks.

Lindsay leaned forward and put an awkward hand on Meredith's arm. “I remember. She was the same. I couldn't get a word of sense out of either of you. If there hadn't been a table between you, you'd have been arrested for indecency in a public place.”

A sad smile curled the edges of Meredith's lips. “Yeah. Feels like ancient history now, though.” She rubbed the tears away with an impatient hand. “That said, I still cared about Penny too much to want to let her go. I figured I had a chance if I could only get her to listen to me. So I came on after her. I'd already booked the vacation time, it was just a matter of arranging a base for myself.”

“And when did you get in?”

“Exactly a week ago.”

Lindsay gave the room a quick scrutiny. “You dropped lucky with your digs.”

“Pardon me?” Meredith looked puzzled.

“Sorry. Soon as I get back on British soil, I become more idiomatic than the natives. I was saying, you lucked out with the apartment.”

Meredith looked round her vaguely. “This place? The company has a deal with the management here. This is where we always stay when we're over on business. It's easier to be private for meetings and stuff in an apartment like this than in a hotel. I just asked our travel department to book me a place and bill me direct.”

Lindsay leaned back, relieved that her ploy had loosened Meredith up a little. “Going back a bit,” she said casually. “To when you split up. That was about five, six weeks ago, am I right?”

Meredith's eyes went back to her coffee cup. “I guess,” she said.

“I'm not entirely clear what went wrong.”

Meredith made a choking sound that Lindsay translated as a bitter laugh. “The chapter and verse is clear enough. But why it escalated the way it did, that's the obscure part.” She stood up abruptly and walked across to the window to stare out at the canopy of trees. “Do you have a cigarette?” she demanded, turning back into the room.

“Meredith, you know I quit years ago,” Lindsay protested.

“I know, I just figured you might have brought some in tax-free for somebody. Friend, family, I don't know.”

“You quit too. About six months after me. Don't do it, Meredith. Don't let the bastard kill you as well as Penny,” Lindsay said passionately.

With an impatient gesture, Meredith freed her hair from the elastic band and let it fall around her face in a limp curtain. “Oh, fuck it!”

“You going to tell me what happened?” Lindsay said quietly, not taking her eyes off Meredith's face.

She threw herself into a large wing chair opposite Lindsay. “It all started with Penny deciding it was time she got out of the closet on her own terms before some smartass decided to out her.”

“Was that likely?”

“You better believe it. There are a lot of militants out there who think that people like Penny owe it to the lesbian sisterhood to be out and proud. No compromises accepted. Never mind that Penny's been doing more good by keeping her sexuality to herself and providing positive images in her books. The politically correct know there's only
one way to be and that's in people's faces.” Meredith shook her head angrily. “Don't they understand that when you out somebody like Penny, all it means is that every right-wing parent in the country stops buying her books? As long as she looks as straight as a Midwest momma, they're never going to look inside the covers to see what their kids are reading. Soon as she's out, they'll be burning her books regardless, because she's a dangerous dyke poisoning the minds of their children.”

Meredith's tirade left Lindsay momentarily without words. Compulsory outing was one of the few subjects on which she didn't have definite and strong views. She was for it when it came to hypocrites who abused their power over the lives of others, like politicians who failed to support gay rights issues and churchmen who preached one thing and practiced another. But when it came to people who merely happened to have become celebrities, she was considerably less certain. She'd heard all the arguments about role models, but what message was being sent by a role model who had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the daylight? Clearly not one Meredith relished. “Mmm,” Lindsay eventually muttered. “And Penny thought it was going to happen to her?”

“She'd already been threatened. We were at a party about three months back at Samoa Brand's house. Samoa has this new baby dyke lover, just graduated from college. And since she's twenty years younger than Samoa, she gets indulged all she wants. So this moron comes up to Penny and starts in on her with, ‘My kid sister's read all your books. Don't you think it's time to pay back? People like you should be outed, don't you think? Shouldn't we show the world we've got a middle class too?'”

Lindsay raised her eyebrows. “That's just one motor-mouth kid, though,” she said. “Surely Penny wasn't getting herself in a state over that?”

“She didn't think the kid was going to do anything, but it made her start to wonder how long it would be before somebody did. So she decided the best way to deal with the fallout was to take control and out herself. She knew there would be a lot of publicity round the new book, with it being her first adult novel. She figured that would be a
good time to spread the word.” Meredith rubbed the palms of her hands over her face.

“And you didn't think it was a good idea?”

Meredith sighed. “This is really difficult for me. No, I didn't think it was a good idea. I knew it would hurt her sales, but that would've been her price for her choice. That wasn't what it was about for me. I told Penny she was forgetting something important. She was forgetting there were two people in this relationship.”

“But her coming out wouldn't automatically implicate you, would it? You didn't technically live together. You have separate postal addresses, separate front doors. Your lives are legally detached,” Lindsay protested.

Meredith shook her head. “You don't understand the kind of job I do. Every damn year, I get vetted. That's why you never see me the second half of March and the first half of April. That's when it's my turn, so I have to look like Little Miss Prim around then. I
need
top security clearance to do my job. Soon as it became public knowledge that the person who lives in the other half of the house is a lesbian, they'd start to look a lot more carefully at me. If you know what you're looking for, you'll find it. Besides, you know what it was like for Pen. She wasn't some literary writer that nobody's ever heard of. She was a celeb. There isn't a literate teenager in America who hasn't read a Penny Varnavides Darkliners novel. She comes out and there's going to be media interest. And they're going to want to know exactly who her lover is. I had no chance of surviving if she came out.”

Lindsay closed her eyes momentarily. “I'd avoid saying that to the police, if I was you,” she sighed. “So, Penny was talking about coming out and you were trying to dissuade her. That about the size of it?”

“I guess.”

“So how did you get from there to splitting up?”

Meredith looked away. “The whole thing was so dumb.” Her voice was bitter.

“It usually is,” Lindsay said.

“We were fighting a lot. That's something we'd never done before. Things never used to escalate like that between us. But it seemed like every time we were together we ended up fighting about whether
she should come out.” Meredith ran her hands through her hair in a gesture of frustration. “It was driving me crazy. I need to be clear-headed at work, I need to be able to think straight. And Penny was making me nuts. She just wouldn't be logical about the situation.”

Lindsay waited. Eventually she said, “It's a lot of pressure, when things start going wrong between you and your lover. Something's got to give.”

Meredith nodded. “It did. I slept with somebody else. I was out of town, we had dinner together. She was all the things Penny used to be with me—warm, funny, sympathetic. And I slept with her. I didn't even need a few drinks to get me there, I went sober and willing.”

Lindsay thought back to a time when infidelity had been something infinitely casual to her. It was so alien to her relationship with Sophie, it felt like a past life experience. But memory helped her construct a glimmer of what that urge to betrayal felt like. “You're not the first and you're not going to be the last. There are other kinds of treachery that cause just as much damage. I take it Penny found out and confronted you?”

“I told her,” Meredith said bleakly.

Oh, great, thought Lindsay. Why couldn't she have been a Catholic and off-loaded the guilt to a silent priest? “You didn't think she'd take it badly?”

“I knew she'd take it badly. That's why I told her. I figured it would make her realize how upset I was about her plan to come out. I guess I thought she'd realize that if I felt backed into a corner so far that I had to do something that went so fundamentally against everything our relationship was about, it was real serious and she should think again about what she was doing.”

“And that's not what happened.”

Meredith snorted ironically. “You got it. She could not see past her own concerns. All she could see was that I'd been unfaithful to her. She didn't stop to think why I might have felt driven to do that. She just didn't get it. Far as she was concerned, I'd committed one of the cardinal sins against the relationship. She was judge and jury and there was only one sentence she could pass. Had to be the death sentence. No mitigation.”

“Didn't you try and explain?”

Meredith leaned forward, elbows on knees, hands clasped. “What do you think?”

Lindsay gave a wry smile. “I think you showered her with flowers and cards, filled her answering-machine tape with messages and kept a constant watch on the deck so that if she so much as stuck her nose out the door of an evening, you'd be able to saunter casually up to her and throw yourself at her feet and beg for mercy. That's what I think.”

“Not far off the mark.”

“And she ignored all your messages, dumped the flowers on your doorstep and didn't set foot outside from the moment you came home from work to the minute you left again in the morning?”

“She tell you all this?” Meredith asked, resigned to embarrassment.

“She didn't have to. Like you said earlier, I've known the pair of you right from the start. So you followed her over here to try and change her mind?”