Ashes To Ashes: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (16 page)

—
Me
: "They didn't have the
will."

—
Kalinsky:
"Who did,
then?"

—
Me
: "JQ still had
it."

—
He
: "Don't get you, there,
Ash."

—
Me:
"You wouldn't, so let it
slide. I'd like—"

—
Kalinsky
: "No, I want to know
what you meant by that."

"You want to know who have me the will?"

"Yeah."

"JQ handed it to me."

Kalinsky
, about thirty seconds later: "Aw ... Don't play games. You
mean ...?"

—
Me:
"Literally, yeah. Only his hand
was like an energy wave. It imbedded the hiding place and ejected
the will. Fell at my feet. Pure energy. I could feel the heat from
it."

—
He
: "I never believed in this
shit. So don't think I'm calling you a liar. It's just
..."

—
Me
: "Doesn't matter. Why did
JQ oppose the Marriage?"

"What marriage?"

"Elana to his son. Was that before or after
Bruno and Tony—?"

—
Kalinsky
: "No, after Elena
brought them here with her. She worked for JQ at first, personal
secretary. That was before me. I came along a few years later. Way
I got it, JQ didn't oppose the marriage. I believe he engineered
it. Maybe a last desperate stab at making a man out of ...
"

—
Me
: "TJ?"

—
He
: "Yeah. Guy had problems, I
guess. I used to hear stories, some of the staff snickering about
him. I shut that off damn quick."

"What kind of stories?"

—
Kalinsky
: "Listen, if you're
really on the level ... I mean, do you—are you sincere about that?
That energy wave thing?"

—
Me
: "Yep."

—
He:
"Well, the implications
of that are just absolutely mind-boggling. Don't you
think?"

—
Me
: "It used to boggle my
mind. Still does, sometimes. What kind of stories?"

"You mean this kind of stuff is routine with
you? Really?"

"More or less."

—
Kalinsky:
"So what you are
saying—what this really means—if JQ could—shit, he's still living,
somewhere. He's still aware, he knows what is ..."

—
Me:
"Seems that way, doesn't
it."

—
He
: "Do you believe
that?"

—
Me:
"Is there some reason I should
disbelieve it?"

—
He:
"Well, I mean ..."

—
Me:
"The wisest men who have ever
lived have almost with a single voice declared that the human soul
is immortal. The problem, as I see it, is that a living soul needs
to imbed itself into the energy universe before it can be made
manifest in our reality. Since that normally occurs only during
the phenomenon of sexual conception and parturition—the
involvement with matter on this plane, I mean—we have come to think
that any other method must be impossible. But how the hell do we
know what is possible and what is not?"

—
Kalinsky
: "Well, Jesus
..."

—
Me:
"Are you deliberately
evading the stories about TJ?"

—
He:
"Well ... it's
embarrassing. I'd rather Karen never hear this."

—
Me
: "This is all in
confidence, isn't it?"

—
Kalinsky
: "Oh, well, okay. Some of
the staff claimed to have seen TJ strolling the grounds at night
dressed like a woman."

—
Me
: "That, uh, by itself,
doesn't mean a hell of a lot."

—
Kalinsky
: "JQ thought he might be
queer."

—
Me:
"He actually voiced that
to you?"

—
He:
"Not in so many words,
no, but I could tell."

—
Me:
"Did you think that
too?"

—
Kalinsky
: "I don't know what
to think. TJ was not the kind of guy you ever got close to. Hardly
knew him, yet I shared the same roof with him for about ten years.
Yeah, ten years. Karen was three or four when I came on board ...
they died ... 'bout ten years later."

—
Me
: "How did they
die?"

—
He
: "Is that a test
question?"

—
Me:
"I'd be interested in
your version."

—
Kalinsky
: "Carl told me that
Karen thinks she killed them."

—
Me:
"How do you feel about
that?"

—
He:
"All in her head, of
course. Guilt, probably. She probably wanted Elena dead. When it
happened that way, she translated it as—in her mind, she did
it."

—
Me
: "She hasn't told me
that."

—
He:
"She didn't tell me that,
either. I'm telling you what Carl told me. Look ... The official
investigation said that gasoline vapors had collected inside the
engine compartment and seeped into the main cabin, and that they
ignited a few seconds after the engine was started. That's good
enough for me. I accept that version."

—
Me:
"Have you shared that
version with Karen?"

—
Kalinsky
: "Well, shit, it's
general knowledge. I'm sure she has heard that version, sure she
heard it at the time. I only just heard this thing from Carl a few
weeks ago."

"Elena worked for JQ, you say? How long
after she came here did she and TJ get together?"

"Less than a year, I think."

"Is all of this tied in with Carl's
psychiatric profile of Karen? This family history thing?"

—
Kalinsky
: "Well, sure has to
be. Elena was obviously highly unstable. Her brothers were, uh,
well I hate to say it, but they were subintelligent."

—
Me:
"The thing, too, about
TJ's little idiosyncrasies?"

—
H
e: "I think it's mentioned
in there."

—
Me:
"
I would like to have a copy of
that."

—
He
: "Sure. Get it for you
tomorrow."

—
Me:
"I'd like to have it
today."

—
Kalinsky
: "Sorry. The court
has it. Only other copy is in the vault. Time-locked. Can't get to
it until tomorrow."

—
Me:
"Why is JQ so disturbed
about Elena?"

—
He
: "What?"

—
Me:
"The letter to Karen ...
he did Elena some terrible wrong. What was it?"

—
He
: "Christ, I don't know.
Sounds that way, though, doesn't it?"

"How did Elena come this way in the first
place?"

"I, uh ... she was
European ... Castilian Spanish, I believe, yeah, spoke with an
accent. But I ... "

—
Me:
"She did have the power
of speech, then."

—
He
: "Oh yeah, she wasn't
affected by that. I forget what—seems like—I believe this defect
shows up only in males but is transmitted by the mother. What do
they call ...?"

"Did you get to know her? Before...?"

"Not a lot, no. Very unstable. In and out of
hospitals all that time. Threw some fits here, I remember, I mean
real screamers. She got very violent."

—
Me
: "I'd like a look at her
medical history too."

—
He:
"Shit, I wouldn't know
where to look for it. JQ handled all that himself, personally, like
he was ashamed of it, and I ... "

—
Me:
"I guess he died ashamed
of it. What if Elena was not, uh, unstable, TK?"

—
Kalinsky:
"Oh, shit, no, not
that. He wouldn't do that. Not to Karen's mother."

—
Me
: "It would be a terribly
heinous thing to do."

—
He
: "Absolutely. He would not
be capable of that. Look, JQ had his peculiarities and he was a
hard businessman, but he was not an evil man."

—
Me
: "That would take an evil
man."

—
He
: "Yes, it would,
absolutely."

—
Me:
"Are you an evil man,
TK?"

—
Kalinsky:
"I swear to you, Ash, I am
not. I am not an evil man. I could not do a thing like
that."

—
Me:
"Not for all the money at
Highlandville?"

—
He:
"How could I get that? I'm just
a manager here. That's all I could ever be. The Highland money
belongs to Karen. It will always belong to Karen, for as long as
she's alive, anyway. Nobody can take it away from her. I sure as
hell cannot take it away from her, and furthermore I do not want
to. Look, I want out of it. I want out. And I am quite content to
take my rightful share, my hard-earned share—which isn't shabby,
believe me—and go be my own person. So if you think ..."

Hell, I did not know what to think.

Or, I guess, maybe I just did not want to
think what had to be thought about, at this point. But the
dimensions of Karen's reality were beginning to fall more and more
into a classic pattern. Obviously I would just have to climb in
there with her and have a look around, for myself. And that,
believe me, could be literally disastrous for both of us.

I told Kalinsky, "I want unrestricted access
to Karen for the next twenty-four hours."

He said, "Okay, you got it."

I said, "I also want the
psychiatric workup. And don't tell me you can't defeat the
time-lock. Get it. I absolutely have to have it, and right
away."

He said, "Okay. You'll have it if I have to
blow the damn doors. What else do you need?"

"An angel, maybe," I replied.

He grinned and told me, "Well it sounds like
you've already found that."

And maybe I had. Yeah. Maybe so. Depending,
of course, upon which dimension I was exploring.

Chapter Twenty:
Operating

It was quite an impressive package, that
psychiatric workup, put together with a professional skill that had
one foot in medicine and the other in law. Powell had done his
homework quite thoroughly, and he even had two consenting opinions
from outside shrinks "based on an exhaustive review of all
pertinent data."

He had her principally
diagnosed as a progressive paranoid schizophrenic with
complications "ranging from dissociative tendencies toward multiple
personality to latent nymphomania coupled to an Electra
complex."

He cited family medical history, with great
emphasis on Elena but only a passing ambiguity in reference to TJ
and a single paragraph on Karen's uncles, whom he characterized as
"constitutional inferiors."

And, yeah, the doc has
been using hypnoanalysis with Karen. That could explain her
vagueness about the relationship with her analyst, the suggestion
that they were "just friends" and a denial that she had ever been
"in analysis." Close bonding is a characteristic feature of the
hypnoanalytic relationship; furthermore, it is a simple procedure
to remove all conscious memory of such a session and, in fact, such
a procedure is often used as a therapeutic feature.

The hypnosis angle could explain a lot of
other troubling stuff too.

I sat at Powell's desk with the workup until
I became aware of the dawn light edging the windows, then I shoved
it aside with a sigh and just sat there with a blank mind and gazed
out upon the lightening landscape for ten or fifteen minutes. I say
"blank mind" because that is about what I was left with, at this
point.

I frankly did not know what the hell to
think. Emotion seemed to be working at me more strongly than
intellectual reasoning—besides which the intellectual centers were
becoming numb with fatigue and fuzzy with a growing anxiety.

So I sat there for ten or fifteen minutes
and cooled the mind, turned up the right brain and dampened the
left, gave the whole machine a little rest.