Ashes To Ashes: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (20 page)

It was destroying Kalinsky too. He had sat
unmov- ing, hunched forward in his chair, staring fixedly at Karen
for several minutes.

Marcia, on the other hand, seemed to be
paying more attention to me than to Karen—and that was the
giveaway—it was what I was looking for. And I had seen enough.

I put a hand on Karen's and said a single
word, softly: "Marcia."

Karen turned on her with a fury that
surprised even me, crying "Bitch! You rotten bitch! You did that to
me!"

Marcia staggered to her feet, wary eyes
moving rapidly between Karen and me, finally settling on me as she
croaked, "Cute, really cute." She jerked an earlobe and scratched
her nose at the same time in a rather discoordinated fashion, then
lurched away as Kalinsky came unglued from his chair.

He tried to get a hand on
Marcia, but she jerked away and flung herself across the patio,
almost colliding with the serving cart at which Charlie, the
waiter, had been trying valiantly, amid all that uproar, to prepare
a flambé dish. He had just lit the flame when Marcia brushed
him.

I will not say that I absolutely saw a tiny
energy pulse hit that dish—but I would almost bet my immortality on
it. All I can say for sure is that the whole thing exploded at just
that moment, sending Charlie sprawling into the pool, wreathing
Marcia and the umbrella above the cart in flames.

I did not hear a sound
from Marcia. I doubt that she even knew what hit her. The flaming
umbrella immediately collapsed and wrapped itself around her.
Kalinsky and I both suffered a few minor burns trying to beat the
flames out. We finally pushed the whole blazing pyre into the pool,
but it was too late, entirely too late.

I left Kalinsky weeping in the pool, and led
a zombied young lady to the Maserati, where then and only then I
brought her back to her own true self and took her away from that
terribly unhappy place.

Karen's nightmare had ended.

And, though it may sound a bit harsh, some
sort of cosmic justice had been served.

Epilog: Casefile Wrapup

Ashes to ashes, eh?

Well, maybe so.

And maybe not.

You may recall that I reminded you,
somewhere during the early going, here, that real life is not a
movie script, that things are not always all that
cause-and-effect-related in the obvious sense. That was one of the
problems I had throughout this case, looking for textures and
trying to fit it all, somehow, into a coherent pattern.

But let me assure you that I laid out this
case to you exactly as it laid out for me. I kept no secrets, not
deliberately—none that matter, anyway—and what you know about the
case, right now, is what I knew on that Sunday afternoon when I
drove Karen to my place at Malibu.

Be assured, also, that I was as bothered
then as you may be, now, about various loose ends that were still
flapping in the breeze. I tried to pull it all together before it
drove me nuts—I talked to Kalinsky by telephone later that same
day, and I went down to Marina Del Rey the next day to talk to the
forensics people who investigated the boat disaster that killed TJ
and Elena Highland. I did some leisurely snooping in Doc Powell's
study, though quite a bit later, and I had some rather exhaustive
and sometimes interesting interviews with everyone I could find
who had worked at the Highland estate over the past quarter
century.

Even after all that, though, I still had to
leap the mind every now and then to fit a pattern around all the
circumstances of this case. I do not know how well I have done
that, but at least I finally satisfied myself that I had all the
truth worth knowing. I offer that to you here, then, for what it
may be worth to you.

First, regarding Marcia: She married young
and naive, expecting glamour and excitement in a millionaire's
playground, but found instead boredom and lack of purpose in a
virtual monastery ruled by an iron-handed, irascible old man who
doted on his granddaughter but seemed to despise virtually
everyone else. There were no weekend parties in those days, hardly
any mingling whatever with the outside world, and it must have been
a grim existence for a young woman of high spirit and sociable
ways.

Even after JQ died, there
seemed to be little relief in that situation. TJ was even more
antisocial and reclusive than his father had been, a strange man
with strange habits, and his wife was hardly more than an invalid,
emerging only now and then for brief periods from her darkened
apartment and even then tending to be withdrawn and
unapproachable.

A reasonable person may ask, why didn't
Marcia simply leave, get out of there, start a new life in a
happier environment? Many of us, in that situation, would do
exactly that. But consider what you would be giving up. Life at the
top, access to billions of dollars, the wildest fantasies
imaginable. And only two miserable, pathetic adults standing
between you and all that.

Marcia had two active options: to leave, and
change her life elsewhere, or to stay, and change her life where
she was. I believe that she exercised one of those options. I
believe that she went down to Marina Del Rey one sunny morning and
tampered with the gas tank on TJ's boat.

After that, she became lady of the house.
She opened it up, brought some life inside, and I believe that she
actually tried to become a mother figure to Karen. Perhaps she even
convinced herself that she had performed a noble service for the
teenager, rescuing her from the gloomy and depressing influence of
her parents and opening the world to her. There is evidence to
suggest this.

It is a sad and tragic web that we weave,
though, once we cross the line into nefarious plots and stealthy
deceits. It is as though somehow the very soul becomes imprinted
with these crimes, the personality changes, and the next time out
is always a shade easier.

Marcia got into a lot of dumb shit across
those years. Among other things, she had an affair with the
operations manager and, with him, succeeded in diverting several
hundred thousand dollars to a Hong Kong bank account. This occurred
before Karen's twentieth birthday, but did not come out until after
Marcia's death. There were various other thieveries, as well, but
none quite so immaculate and ambitious as the opportunity that
presented itself via Carl Powell and his hypnotic tampering with
the heiress to billions.

This was to be her grand
slam—and, again, maybe she told herself that no one would even miss
a few lousy million out of all those riches. Marcia had been
earning ten thousand a year when she met and married Terry
Kalinsky. TK, developing his business mind at JQ's shoulder, so to
speak, made her sign a premarital agreement limiting her community
property share of joint income to that same ten grand per year
plus a "raise" of one percent annually. She'd married young,
remember, and she may have later reflected bitterly on that
financial state of affairs—especially when it became apparent that
her husband was becoming a multi-millionaire in his own
right.

At any rate, Marcia—with the help of her new
lover, Carl Powell, found a way to get even, a way that was just
too slick to pass up.

TK found all this a bit hard to swallow. If
you believe the guy, and I do, his wife never once complained to
him about the financial arrangements.

"If she had," he said miserably, "I would
have torn up the damned premarital agreement and burned it in a
candlelight and wine ceremony. Hell, I just never thought about it.
I doubt that it could have withstood a legal challenge, anyway,
especially after all these years."

You hear a lot about the
value of good communications between husband and wife. So there
you go ... a case in point. TK had really, deeply, been in love
with his wife all those years. He just had a hard time showing
it.

Marcia's remains were cremated on Monday,
completing the grim task that had begun beside the pool on Sunday.
There was a brief service at a Beverly Hills chapel on Tuesday,
which Karen and I both attended, and we had coffee with TK after
the service at a private club on Wilshire. He was distraught. His
eyes watered a lot and his lower lip quivered occasionally as he
told us about Marcia's "indiscretions."

It was during this conversation that I
learned about the episode with the bank in Hong Kong. But there was
more, quite a bit more, and the revelations were being directed
primarily at Karen—perhaps as an apology, but also almost as a
confessional in which TK was assuming most of the blame for all
that had gone wrong.

"I knew she was getting
screwed up. I just didn't know how bad it had become. And I blame
myself for not being sensitive to her concerns." He placed a hand
on Karen's and tried but failed to maintain eye contact with her as
he continued. "I can't believe that she really meant to harm you,
honey. But I have found a number of postdated documents—do you
remember signing...?"

Karen shook her head in a
vague response. "Documents? I don't ... remember ..."

He sighed. "Well, you made her a very rich
woman, or she would have been next Saturday." He glanced at me.
"All perfectly legal, on the surface. Drawn up by a law firm in
Westwood. Could Karen have been made to do something like that
while in one of those trances?"

I said, "Sure. She would stand by them, too,
if—"

Karen's eye flashed and she slapped a palm
against her forehead as she cried, "Oh, those documents. Of course
I remember. No, those are okay, they are okay, I want them to stand
just as they are."

TK was giving her another of those
flabbergasted gazes. I caught his eye and showed him a small jerk
of the head as I quietly commented, "We will remove all this
debris. Don't worry about it."

Karen asked, "What debris?"

I explained, "Marcia and Carl were
manipulating you, Karen, using hypnosis. It will take a while, but
we will comb through all the buried PH's and dispose of them."

She seemed confused, almost agitated.

I told TK, "It's okay, normal response. A PH
takes the form of a compulsion. We just have to find them all and
neutralize them."

He shot Karen an uncomfortable look as he
growled, "Well, I guess that answered my question."

If things had proceeded
apace, Karen would not only have stood by those documents but would
have come up with all manner of rationalizations to explain the
action. In that latter connection, remember the incident in her
bedroom when I had her close out the coming storm.

But things did not proceed apace. They
started going to hell in a basket, maybe because Carl had begun to
realize what havoc he had wrought in Karen's personality—maybe
simply because Carl became afraid of Marcia or afraid of Marcia's
husband; you decide. I do know that Carl was the moving factor in
bringing Karen to my attention.

Karen had never been to Zodiac. Carl had. I
found a copy of my treatise on cosmic sex in his stuff. I do not
know for sure exactly what he had in mind for me, but I suspect
that he may have been genuinely looking for help in his dilemma. I
do know, also, that Carl went to TK several days before I joined
the play and made his peace, there, apologizing for the affair with
Marcia and assuring TK that he was leaving Highlandville
alone—this, after the confrontation between the two reported to me
by the bartender, Ramirez.

I believe that my entrance onto the scene
scared the pee out of Marcia. I have already suggested, earlier,
that she was a believer in psychic power and may have been prepared
to believe that I could "read" her mind. The lady had a lot to
hide.

I believe that she
"operated" Karen into the nude scene at poolside that Saturday
afternoon. Why? Hell, I don't know why. I don't read minds. Maybe
she thought it would scare me away, or lead me astray—who knows?—or
maybe it was just a cutesy trick to liven up a boring afternoon.
Maybe it was just an extension of the movement begun by Powell. He
"sent" Karen to me, in the first place, with a story patently
designed to intrigue and—he thought, I'm sure—guarantee my
attention and involvement with Karen.

Maybe Marcia operated Karen into nothing but
the nude scene; the rest, conceivably—the shocking announcement
that I was there to provide her with orgasms—a carryover from
another PH planted by Powell earlier, working as a rationalization.
Remember that in a PH the operator does not have to write the
script; a staging prompt is quite sufficient. The subject, in
carrying out the prompt, will write his own script.

It seems likely, especially now with the
benefit of some cool aftersight, that Marcia—as of the moment when
I arrived on the scene—knew, or at least suspected, that something
had changed in her relationship with Carl Powell. I doubt that she
would have wanted me there, especially during this final countdown
of days before her grand slam. She was already disturbed and/or
uneasy before I made the scene. My arrival deepened her
anxiety.

I asked TK about that,
during that same conversation over coffee following Marcia's
funeral service. His eyes watered as he thoughtfully replied, "I'm
sure that's true, Ash. I knew about her affair with Carl, of
course. I even discussed it with Carl. A couple of times. Never
with her, though. Hell ... I understood. I just wanted to be sure
that he didn't leave scars on her. And I flat put my foot down when
he told me that he was taking Marcia to Europe with him. I mean,
how did I know he wouldn't get tired of it and dump her somewhere?
What the hell? Yes, I put my foot down. Not to Marcia. To Carl. He
fussed back, made some dumb threats. But then I guess after he had
a chance to think it over he decided he didn't want her that bad,
after all. I doubt that he told her about that, though. Not his
style. He would have just slipped away in the night, left her
holding her packed bags and nowhere to go. But Marcia was not a
dummy. She probably knew. And, yes, you scared hell out of her. I
could read that. She didn't know anything about you until you
showed up at the house. She was in a tizzy, I could
tell."