Ashes To Ashes: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (8 page)

Me: "Sorry, I didn't know. I would have
rushed right back. Uh, did we have an appointment?"

She: "Don't get cute. This is no time for
cute. I want to know where you've been."

Me: "Not that it is any of
your business, but purely because I have nothing to conceal, I have
been with my client. Karen is my client. She is the sole
reason—"

She: "Everything that goes on in this house
is my business. Karen is my business. That girl is sick. Sick,
sick. She's just so much raw meat for bastards like you. I want you
out of here. And damned quick."

Me: "There seems to be a conflict here. Your
husband has ordered me to stay for dinner. And I have been retained
by the lady of the—"

She, furiously: "That bastard! Can't you see
what he's doing? He's setting you up, asshole! Setting you up!"

I got back to the door and opened it,
pointedly. "Let's continue this at dinner."

She hit the door with a straight arm to send
it banging shut again. "We'll continue it right here! Did Terry
offer you a contract?"

I was getting steamed. I
went to the bar, found and lit a cigarette, only then noticed the
half-empty fifth of Jim Beam and equally half-empty tumbler of
booze-rocks. Hers, no doubt. The lady was deep into the cups, which
perhaps explained her behavior.

I turned to her with a new try at patience
only to find her pelvis riding my hip, and the balance of the
conversation took place in that attitude.

Me: "You're right. It's no time for cute.
Terry did not offer me a contract, no, he conferred one upon me. I
gather it is the same type of indentured service conferred upon
everyone who stumbles into this spiderweb. I'll bet that you are
under a marital contract with identical provisions. How much free
and clear per day are you getting, Marcia?"

She: "Not nearly enough. But that is all
going to come tumbling down next week, so don't lose any sleep over
it. I still want you out of here."

Me: "Not nearly as much as I want me out of
here, lady. So don't you lose any sleep over that. Why will it
tumble down?"

She: "The ride is over, that's all, the end
is here. And I say thank God to that. But I'll still scratch your
eyes out if you try moving in on that girl."

Me: "Look again, Marcia, that girl is no
longer a girl. She's a bona fide woman, certifiably so, with a
right to choose her own company. But if your concern is real, then
that makes us allies, sort of. What sort of sick is she?"

She: 'The sort of sick that makes her a
natural for con men like you. Sick between the thighs, or hadn't
you noticed, and don't try to say you haven't."

Me: "What you call sick others would call a
basic human need—or don't you have those kinds of needs too?"

She: "Sure I have that kind of need. So what
are you—a superjock? Big lover? Think you can handle eight to ten
tussles a day?"

Me: "Do it right the first time, Marcia, who
needs the other seven to nine?"

She: "I don't know. When do you want to show
me?"

Me: "Well, there probably would not be time
before dinner."

She: "Keep your dance card open, lover. Meet
you back here at ten."

She snared her drink and headed for the
door, opened it, turned back to say, "I can hardly wait."

I asked her, at that distance, "What is he
setting me up for, Marcia?"

She giggled, waved the drink at me, and
replied in departure, "Tell you at ten."

It would have been a great seduction routine
if she had been wearing leather and dragging a whip—and certainly
there had been an element of seduction to that entire encounter—but
I had to vote for it as only a secondary motive for that visit to
my bedroom.

The whole thing was
beginning to spin around in my head, but without any clear vortex.
Oh, sure, you are way ahead of me and thinking how obvious it ought
to be by now. There have been forty thousand B-movies and God only
knows how many television melodramas built around identical
situations. We all must surely know, at this point, that Kalinsky
has been looting the estate and milking the trusts for all they are
worth and that, with Karen about to come into her own, she is
probably also coming into mortal danger.

But I was immersed in a real-life situation
and I have discovered that real life is not as malleable as
fiction.

No one is that much in charge here. There's
no script to follow and no director shouting instructions to a cast
that is willing to blindly follow. Real life is not scripted, it is
usually played by ear, and few of us ever know exactly why we do
what we do or say what we say.

Fiction is economical, has to be, everything
pointed toward a desired effect. Real life is luxurious, no matter
what your station; the options are endless and occurring moment by
moment, and very damned few things in the individual lifestream
seem pointed toward anything in particular.

I cannot approach real life with fictional
devices and neither can you.

So bear with me, here, and do not leap ahead
to a synthetic conclusion. I could not afford to, even though
everything inside of me was yelling at me to get the hell out.

What was the real reason behind Marcia's
visit?

Was she really concerned for Karen or was
that just a smoke screen—and, if a smoke screen, why would she feel
it important to lay one around me?

Did she let it slip that big changes were
arriving in the coming week, or had it been her intention all along
to drop that information on me?

Had she really been trying
to drive me away—or had she merely been manipulating me into a
challenge to stay?

What was the personal relationship with her
husband—and was the sexplay just another smoke screen of some
type, or was she really all that contemptuous of her marriage?

What, exactly, was "sick" about Karen—and,
to whatever extent she may be so, how much of that was being
deliberately engineered into her by this very strange
household?

Why had a shrink been brought aboard? Out of
genuine concern for an ailing heiress?—or as part of an elaborate
plan to certify her as mentally incompetent and thus forestall a
turnover of power?

And, if I could take Marcia at face value,
exactly what was I being "set up" for?

I haul all of this out for inspection here
so that you may consider the same puzzles that I had to consider at
that moment and so that you may understand the frame of my mind
while I was getting into a tuxedo that had been tailored for me
during the hour or so before that moment, upon the orders of a man
whom I had first met maybe two hours earlier and who, ironically
enough, was married to a lady who had just metaphorically invited
me to screw her brains out immediately after dinner.

I also give it to you here lest it all be
lost sight of in the rapidly cascading developments of that evening
at the Highland estate.

It was only about twenty
minutes past seven, but I dressed early to check the fit. I was
standing at the mirror inspecting same when I suddenly became aware
of eyes upon me. My gaze went straight to the French doors. The sun
had set and the balcony outside was cloaked in deep shadows, but I
saw her as clearly as if she had been dipped in luminous
paint.

It was Karen's ethereal companion and the
expression on that tormented face was clearly pleading with me for
something.

The apparition turned, showing itself in
clear three-dimensional profile, to gaze down upon the patio, back
to me, then once again onto the patio, as though summoning my
attention to something there.

I did not give it a second thought nor a
moment's hesitation but moved quickly to the balcony. The
apparition had winked out with my first step forward, but I could
still sense presence out there.

That particular presence, however, was not
now the focus of my attention.

The focus was immediately below. Two men
stood at the patio bar in twilight, a woman in an evening dress was
walking toward the pool—and in the pool, submerged in deep water, a
nude female figure floated facedown.

There are moments in the stream when the
thinking mind stands aside and something deeply human yet more
than human takes over the motor nerves to send a living creature
sprawling into personal peril with no thought whatever for the
self. I believe that such moments explain those singular, selfless
acts of human heroism.

Of course I was thinking
no such thoughts at that moment, and I am laying no claim to
heroism. Quite the reverse, I am merely explaining a really stupid
action. I have never been big on watersports, naval experience
notwithstanding, and had never shown any particular form as a
diver. I do not recall gauging the distance or extrapolating angle
for depth; I remember only pushing with all the leg I had against
the railing of that second-story balcony and launching myself
headlong toward that floating body, the initial shock of
penetration and a weird wandering apology to God knows who for
immersing the tux, then the warm-cold naked flesh of Marcia
Kalinsky as I fought the limp form toward a living
environment.

Chapter Nine: Mirror
Image

A woman was screaming and the patio area was
filling rapidly with excited people in formal attire.

The guys in dinner jackets were standing by
at poolside with hands outstretched to offer help at a distance and
a third, whom I recognized a moment later as one who had been
stocking the inside bar when I went through earlier that day,
jumped in with more direct assistance. He groaned, "Oh no, it's
Mrs. Kalinsky," as we hoisted her onto the deck.

The guy just stood there, fully clothed in
waist-deep water, and watched with horror as I pulled myself out
and went to work on the victim.

Someone brought a stack of towels and
someone else yelled, "Get Powell—get the doctor!"

I had cleared Marcia's
throat and produced a gush of water from the air tract when I
became aware of the arrival of Kalinsky on the scene. I guess I
half expected the guy to start moving among the guests and
reassuring them because I was really surprised by his reaction. He
came totally unglued, trying to get into the action and fighting me
for position on the body.

I growled, "Cool it, Terry, she's okay!"

Someone wrestled him away, but still he lay
there beside her, stroking her forehead while she coughed and
gasped into the resurrection.

Carl Powell made the scene then, and
smoothly took over. I was impressed by the guy's professionalism
and situation management. He had her blanketed and stretchered and
moving away from there before I could get my breathing under
control.

Someone handed me a lighted cigarette and
someone else put a glass of whiskey in my hand. There was a lot of
crowding around and congratulating and slaps on the back, and I
overheard one awed voice exclaim, "Yeah, they say he dove off of
that balcony over there!"

I looked, myself, at the balcony under
discussion and shuddered at the height and distance.

It was at about that moment that I became
aware of a pain in the leg and a burning sensation inside the
sodden dinner jacket. The tux was a disaster, split and scraped at
several points; it was then I realized that I hadn't gotten off
quite as cleanly as I'd thought. A finger was beginning to throb
like hell and a warmth inside the trouser leg told me I was oozing
blood somewhere.

Then Karen appeared,
calmly beautiful in a chiffon-and-lace dinner gown. She took my
hand without a word and led me through the crowd and into the house
and up the stairs to her apartment, quietly and carefully undressed
me to the skin and toweled me dry, applied stinging antiseptics to
what turned out to be minor scrapes—apparently I had either touched
bottom or grazed the side of the pool as I went in—then she put me
to bed, pulled the sheet up over my chest, gently kissed me on the
lips, and went away.

Without a single word between us, all
that.

But, at the risk of sounding nerdy, words
had not been necessary. Some sort of nonverbal communication had
been passing between us all that while—from which I received
sympathy, gratitude, admiration, concern, love—all of that.

I had felt neither the need nor the desire
to resist the sweet ministrations. Actually, I felt like hell.
There had been damned little sleep the night before, the day had
begun early and with a bang, and it had been constant stress
without letup ever since. I had eaten, during the preceding
twenty-four hours or so, a raisin Danish and two cold chicken legs,
and I guess I had used all the steam I had left on that twilight
dunk in the Highland pool.

So I am not overly ashamed to admit that I
simply let it all go and went to sleep in Karen's bed. I learned
later that she had gone below and rescued the dinner party—which
may seem a bit coldblooded but, what the hell, that's the way
things are done in high society—the show must go on, and all
that.

Besides which, Marcia was apparently none
too much the worse for her misadventure. She was "doing fine" and
"resting comfortably," or so I was advised by Carl Powell when he
roused me from my nap at about nine-thirty.

"You undoubtedly saved her life, though, you
know," he told me soberly. "It was a real stroke of luck that you
spotted her from your window. The lights had not been turned on yet
in the pool area, so fifty people could have been standing around
down there and never noticed her. Actually I understand that
several guests were on the patio and thought it was just some kind
of stunt when you came sailing overhead fully clothed. That was a
hell of a nervy thing to do, I have to tell you."