Heart to Heart: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (6 page)

Sloane said, "My guess says Hank Gibson is
sponsoring it."

I asked, "Who is Hank Gibson and what is his
interest?"

The lawyer stared at me
for a moment, as though reflecting on that, then told me: "Gibson
is the latest and greatest boy entrepreneur financial genius of
Orange County. Real estate speculator. As you must know,
ocean-front property is hard to come by in this area and therefore
it comes at a heavy premium. Gibson was in contact with my father
last year shortly before the state filed its action—hounded the
hell out of him in fact, trying to get in touch with Medici. I
don't know what kind of a deal he was brokering, but you can bet
your ass it would have been highly profitable for the boy wonder.
Anyway, his efforts failed. The state began its move a few weeks
after Gibson bowed out. But I have had to wonder if he actually did
give it up. There are all sorts of stories about Gibson's influence
at Sacramento."

Sure, that was interesting. I asked Sloane,
"Are you suggesting that this guy expects to buy the property from
the state if it is confiscated?"

He replied, "No, I'm suggesting that the
deal may

already be set. Gibson is not a developer,
he's a broker. However the property may ultimately find its way
into a developer's hands, it could mean a fat fee for the boy
wonder."

I said, "I detect some personal animosity
between you two. Am I right?"

The lawyer flash-smiled, picked up his
briefcase, and went to the door; turned back to say in parting,
"You bet there is."

It was about five o'clock that afternoon when
I invaded Francesca's studio in a search of some light on the
goings-on at Pointe House. But she wasn't there, so I browsed her
art instead and found it quite good. I am no judge of fine art but
I know what I like, and I liked most of her stuff, though I would
have a tough time describing her style to a critic.
Representational rather than abstract certainly, but even her
seascapes revealed abstract symbols at close look; romantic, rather
than baroque, but there were definite baroque touches, even in a
couple of portraits; more coloristic in style than linear, but also
highly perspective with deep shifts and flowing currents of color
in, say, a background sky or sea.

The colors were what
really got to me, I guess, so I would have to say that color was
the most distinctive characteristic of her work. And yet,
something else leaped out from some of the stuff—some quality of
feeling or emotion—I mean some special
grabbing
but totally ethereal
representation; such as in a compelling study of a mother whale and
her baby, the juxtaposition of mother and offspring in a way that
spoke to me of mother-love and childlike-faith, of nurturing and
being nurtured.

The lady was good. Damned good.

As for her sculptures, what could I say
except to note the startling realism, the total imprint of
character upon a lump of clay, the projection of personality frozen
like a single frame of movie film, yet containing all the inner
attributes of the subject. Like, you could look at this sculpted
head and know what makes the subject laugh and what makes him cry.
I knew Valentinius better from one of those clay busts than from
the eyeball confrontation in Malibu.

And I think I was getting to know a little
something about the artist, too, much more than our personal
meeting had provided. Art is like that, sometimes, whatever the
medium, the artist revealing more of self than anything else in the
work.

I spent about ten minutes
becoming abstractly acquainted with Francesca Amalie, then I
wandered to a telescope at the window and peered at a couple of
sailboats, inspected the mountains of Catalina Island thirty or so
miles offshore, watched a seal slither off a rock into the sea just
below—at which time Francesca herself strolled into the focal
field. Took my breath away. She was nude, on the beach, yet close
as my eyeball and as immediate as the air I inhaled. I shamelessly
watched her cross to a blanket on the sands and lie down, then I
abandoned the telescope and went searching for Hai Tsu.

I found my hostess in a
tidy apartment behind the kitchen. It was small but as luxurious
from the doorway as anything else I'd seen at the mansion. She did
not invite me in but greeted me with her usual restrained joy, then
asked, "How may we serve you?"

I replied, "Any way you wish, ma'am," but
she did not react to that, so I limped on with: "Uh, I thought I
saw Francesca on the beach. How do I get down there?"

She smiled graciously, said, "I will show,"
and I followed her through the house to the atrium, a garden under
glass which serves as the main entry hall to the mansion. I thought
we were headed outside but she opened a narrow door on the north
wall, smiled, and needlessly pointed out: "Elevator."

I thanked her and she left me there.

It was an open-cage type,
quite old but automated and sturdy enough, as smooth as any modern
elevator I'd ever used. There were only two buttons,
up
and
down
, so there was no
need for a directory. I descended through a shaft of sheer rock
walls, like coming down off the top of a fifteen-or twenty-story
building, and emerged into muted sunshine on a south-facing ledge
some twenty-five feet above the ocean. Steps scooped from the rock
took me the rest of the way to the beach of a small cove facing
Laguna. Mean high tide be damned, this beach was totally private by
virtue of its inaccessibility except by boat or elevator. No more
than fifty feet wide by twenty feet deep, it was carved out of
coastal rock and isolated by soaring escarpments rising from deep
water to either side. A couple of seals were snoozing in the sun
and a pelican ruffled his wings and checked me out from his perch
on a small rock at the center of the beach; otherwise it was just
she and me and the deep blue sea, the roar of the surf breaking on
the rocks that formed this cove.

She looked at me and I
looked at she for quite a long moment before she decorously covered
herself with a short robe and made me welcome. I dropped to the
blanket beside her and lay back to gaze at the sky as I quietly
inquired, "How'd you know I'd come?"

She laughed lightly, not exactly a giggle
but with a touch of nervousness, then asked, "How do you know I
wanted you to come?"

I said, "You sent the elevator back topside
for me."

She said, "Boy, what is that? Egotism or
self-assurance? How do you know someone else wasn't down here
before you, and he left the elevator topside?"

I said, "Valentinius would not need the
elevator."

She said, "I guess not."

My arrival had disturbed
the seals. I heard them slithering away. Then Francesca slithered
aboard me. She'd left the robe behind, and my startled hands
instantly became aware of that.

Love at first sight?

Well... lust, anyway. For damned sure
lust.

Chapter Seven: Déjà What?

You can find love without
sex and sex without love. The two together are nice, very nice; but
even if you find ei-ther, without the other, life is usually
enhanced because you did. With neither life would be a terribly
gray affair, and I am not sure I would want it.

But what the hell is love,
exactly, and what is sex?

Try to consider the
question from the God viewpoint. You're considering building a
world out of matter and infusing the matter, here and there, with
some subtle essence of yourself. Not from vanity: you are God,
after all; what is there to be vain about when you are everything?
No; you want to build because of an innate need for self-expression
and there is no way to express yourself except to create. But what
the hell to create? You're an artist without oils or canvas, a poet
without words, a novelist with no heroic tales to tell, a composer
without music.

Eureka! That's it! You
will project all these creative aspects of yourself into an energy
universe of space and time in which all the creative tools and
circumstances may be developed for a full expression of your
self!

But wait, wait...this is
likely to become troublesome. I mean, we are talking a hell of a
big production here. When we start talking space and time, energy
and matter, creative tools and artful expression...well it's going
to take quite a bang to get something like that started. And once
it's started, what's to control it?
Moi?
Let's think about
this.

You just want a creative expression; you
don't want to be tied down to governing and policing, housework and
all that crap! So who's going to be the executive in charge of
production of this big bang?

Aha! Okay. You are God so you have the
answer within yourself. It's so obvious. You will deputize and
delegate authority—sort of like hands-off management.

But wait. There is no deputy material here,
nothing to delegate authority to.

But why not? If you can create a big bang,
then surely you can create deputies and delegates. All you have to
do....

Well see, try it this way:
just start the damned thing going; something will pop out of all
that chaos, some aspect of your creative self that was projected
into the bang will just naturally begin to stir sooner or later,
and start to take charge. I mean, it will
assume
authority because you will
project an authority aspect into the bang; just thinking it will
make it so; so
think
creative authority.

Simple, isn't it.

Well it
seems
simple,
but...

No sweat. Trust me. I'm your higher-self
aspect, and I know.

But...with all that
creative authority
running around

loose out there....Aren't
we asking for sheer chaos, all

manner of conflict, maybe even anarchy and
revolution?

That's the risk you take. But...

Yes?

Well...as a control... why don't you try
projecting a bit of love aspect into the bang.

Surely you jest! Come on
now. Love? You want me to give my
love
to this project?

Why not? You have plenty to go around.

But... you are giving me
palpitations. I mean you don't know what you're saying!
Love is Godly
! If I put
love in there...oh I think I see what you're getting at. Yes. But
uh...that's a lot of power. How can we be sure that one of those
deputies won't just keep it all to himself? I mean, you know, hoard
the aspect and refuse to share it with the other
delegates.

Give them sex.

Oh come on now! We can't
give them sex! Creative I could allow, okay but not
pro
creative!

Why not? That makes mortality part of the
package, so it minimizes the power plays and keeps love flowing
along. I'm your higher-self aspect; trust me.

So God gave love and sex to his
creation.

So why is it so damned hard to find a little
sometimes?

You tell me why.

I am sure that everyone
who may read this report has encountered the term déjà vu, and
most have probably had the experience; many however do not fully
understand what may be happening there, so let me take a moment to
discuss it. Translated literally from the French, it means "already
seen." But what the term was designed to describe is a phenomenon
involving seeing, hearing, or even thinking something—often
accompanied by a shivery feeling—that has already happened and
appears to be happening again in the precisely same way.

Say that you are on the streets of a strange
city and you approach an intersection where you know you have never
walked before; you round a corner, and in the split second before
you can see around the comer, you already know what lies beyond.
Everything you then see comes at you with a rush of
familiarity—perhaps even the odors and sounds peculiar to that
particular street scene.

Or you may be seated in your own home in
casual conversation with old friends (or new acquaintances); one
person makes a statement, and as another replies you suddenly know
that you had heard the reply before it was uttered; that moreover,
you have been through this entire experience before and it all
seems to be happening again.

That is déjà vu. It is
really a very common human experience in its simpler forms, but
there are also deeply complex forms of déjà vu, which we shall see
later.

These simple déjà vus are
explained in various ways

depending upon who is
pontificating at the moment. A view popular in psychology would
explain the phenomenon as a trick played on us by the brain. In
this argument it is theorized that sensory stimuli scattering
through the gray matter at light-speed and organized into a
perceptive bundle at some point is sometimes organized twice and
therefore perceived twice, the second time almost like an echo
following very closely on the heels of the first. We therefore get
a "double print," the second perception arriving before we have had
time to assimilate the first and blending into it in a most
deceptive way.

To my knowledge no one has
yet demonstrated the echo effect in a laboratory, so the theory is
no more valid than any other.

A parapsychologist would
probably tell you that your déjà vu was a precognitive flash, while
the metaphysician would prefer that you think of it as having
something to do with past-life recall or a momentary hole in the
mystical curtain that separates you from omniscience. None of that
has been demonstrated under wires either, so you can come to your
own conclusions without fear of being soundly
contradicted.