Eye to Eye
EYE TO EYE
Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective
Don Pendleton
Creator of
The Executioner: Mack Bolan Series
and
Joe Copp, Private Eye Thrillers
Copyright © 1986 by Don Pendleton, All rights reserved.
Published at Smashwords by Linda Pendleton.
Cover design by Linda Pendleton and Judy Bullard.
This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, groups, organizations, or events is not intended and is entirely coincidental.
Smashwords Edition, License Notes:
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Don Pendleton Books
The Ashton Ford novels
Ashes to Ashes
Eye to Eye
Mind to Mind
Life to Life
Heart to Heart
Time to Time
The Joe Copp novels by Don Pendleton
Copp for Hire
Copp on Fire
Copp in Deep
Copp in the Dark
Copp in Shock
The Executioner: Mack Bolan Series
Fiction written with Linda Pendleton
Roulette
Executioner: War Against the Mafia, Comic
Nonfiction
A Search for Meaning
Nonfiction with Linda Pendleton
To Dance With Angels
Whispers From the Soul
Metaphysics of the Novel
The Cosmic Breath: Metaphysical Essays
For Ernest Holmes...wherever. I hope he would have liked this book. I hope he still would.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
—Shakespeare, Hamlet
Author’s Note
To My Readers:
Ashton Ford will come as something of a surprise to those of you who have been with me over the years. This is not the same type of fiction that established my success as a novelist; Ford is not a gutbuster and he is not trying to save the world from anything but its own confusion. There are no grenade launchers or rockets to solve his problems and he is more of a lover than a fighter.
Some have wondered why I was silent for so many years; some will now also wonder why I have returned in such altered form. The truth is that I had said all I had to say about that other aspect of life. I have grown, I hope, both as a person and as a writer, and I needed another vehicle to carry the creative quest. Ashton Ford is that vehicle. Through this character I attempt to understand more fully and to give better meaning to my perceptions of what is going on here on Planet Earth, and the greatest mystery of all the mysteries: the why of existence itself.
Through Ford I use everything I can reach in the total knowledge of mankind to elaborate this mystery and to arm my characters for the quest. I try to entertain myself with their adventures, hoping that what entertains me may also entertain others—so these books, like life itself, are not all grim purpose and trembling truths. They are fun to write; for some they will be fun to read. To each of those I dedicate the work.
~Don Pendleton
EYE TO EYE
Chapter One: A Certain Perception
There is something about the stilled presence of a dead human body that is downright unsettling, especially if the corpse has ripened a bit and begun to decompose, because the first thing to then hit you is the odor—and it is an odor unlike anything else you may ever encounter. Once you get past the odor, a sensitive person might next be struck by the apparent incongruity of the scene—a disresonance, if you will, as though everything is out of whack here, inharmonious, something hideously wrong or evil—especially if the corpse is that of a once beautiful woman—and this perception may then well lead you into a morbid apperception that death is an unlovely and unnatural state of being.
I was experiencing all of that and more that cool December morning in Griffith Park beside the bloated corpse of Mary Ann Cunningham, a twenty-year-old coed from Pasadena, by all accounts a sweet kid with a very hopeful future in astrophysics until Death overtook her in the observatory parking lot. She had apparently been raped, strangled, and unceremoniously tossed over the wall to slide down the steep hillside like so much litter, discarded when no longer needed, like an empty beer bottle or a sack of trash.
Incongruous, yes, appallingly so, and monstrous when apperception leads the mind to a realization that this beautiful, fragile package of life was callously sacrificed for a fleeting pleasure.
That was my initial reaction, anyway, and it was a rational one. We'd had a lot of these cases in Los Angeles in recent years—the so-called serial killers, sexual psychopaths, etc., who roam our streets like lobos and kill for entertainment. Mary Ann seemed the typical victim—stripped, abused, murdered, carelessly discarded. She had been missing for five days, last seen at the Griffith Park Observatory, where she worked part-time, at about noon on the preceding Monday. It had been a wet and windy day, with the observatory peak cloaked in misty clouds and occasional light rain. Mary Ann had a two o'clock class in Pasadena; she customarily left the observatory at noon on Mondays and picked up a fast-food lunch on her way to Cal Tech. Two co-workers at Griffith witnessed her exit into the parking lot bundled in plastic rain gear. She never got to the class at Cal Tech and did not return home that night. Worried parents began calling hospitals at about midnight and filed a formal police report the next morning but no police action was taken until the following Thursday when Mary Ann's car was found parked at a MacDonald's in Eagle Rock just outside Pasadena.
How did I get into it? Sheer accident, or so it seemed at the time. Greg Souza had called me at the ungodly hour of seven o'clock that Saturday morning and asked me to meet him at the observatory. I'd had no contact with the guy for nearly a year. We did some time together in the navy. Intelligence work. He is now a private eye, doing business in Los Angeles, and he would bring me in occasionally as a consultant. We were never exactly friends. In fact, our personalities really clash. So we sort of avoid each other, while at the same time respecting each other. And he would call me from time to time. I had managed to help him with a couple of baffling cases. I am a psychic. Or something. I don't read minds or prophesy, none of that stuff, but I do get certain insights now and then which cannot be accounted for in ordinary terms. So I am a sort of a psychic. I am also a graduate spy, and so I have learned a little about solving puzzles and developing information.
Greg Souza called me that Saturday morning and told me that he needed my help with a "terrifically important" case on which he had been working for several weeks. He had hit a dead end and was hoping that my "mental gifts" could start him along a fresh track. That is about all he told me on the telephone but I was accustomed to his tight lip and mysterious ways so I did not press for details at the moment; I just looked at the bedside clock and groaned and agreed to meet him at nine o'clock at Griffith Park.
I don't know how you feel about astronomical observatories, but I have to say that the atmosphere in these places always gives me a rush—almost a religious feeling. When you think about it, a look into deep space is really a trip to the past. These things taking shape way out there at the edge of the observable universe are really just ghostly echoes of events that took place long before the human race appeared on this planet. When the astronomer informs you that the object you are
viewing is 400,000,000 light-years away, what he is really saying is that the object is so distant that it takes 400,000,000 years for the light from that object to reach the lens of the telescope—so what you are looking at through the lens could have winked out some 390,000,000 years ago, but we won't know that for another ten million years, when some lucky guy gets to "witness" the death of a galaxy which really has not existed during the life of man on earth.
I get a rush, yeah, just to be reminded of time in such big gobs and to realize that the primordial universe of some ten to twenty billion years ago can still be detected by my senses and dissected by our sciences as though the whole magnificent procession is passing right by our windows right now. Gives me a shiver, and maybe that was what set me up for Mary Ann.
This observatory is mainly a teaching facility now, except for the daily planetarium shows which are open to the public. It was nowhere near showtime and apparently there was not a lot of teaching scheduled for Saturday mornings; the place was just about deserted except for the caretakers and a few staff members. Souza was waiting for me at the check-in desk, conversing casually with a very pretty woman in designer jeans, spike-heeled boots and a lumberjack shirt, who he introduced as Jennifer Harrel and, almost in the same breath, referred to as Dr. Harrel—but I did not get from the introduction any amplification of the lady's identity.
She came across a bit cool but I gave her a ten on my scale anyway. With the spike heels, she was about my height. I would have called her age in the midtwenties but allowed another few years to account for that Dr. before her name plus a mature poise and manner. Can't say that I really liked the lady, right off. I sensed an element of condescension in her manner bordering on rudeness. Souza had introduced me as "my colleague" but she fixed her gaze on a spot several inches above my eyes and asked me, "What do you do, Mr. Ford?"
Not "how"—"what."
I muttered, "Whatever comes up," and added, with a nasty glance at Souza, "Even at seven o'clock on a Saturday morning. What's the problem here, Greg?"
He took the two of us in hand and led us several steps away from the empty desk before telling me in quietened tones why he'd awakened me at 7 a.m. It's one of the things that always bugged me about the guy. He has a basically conspiratorial mind and a flair for the dramatic, one of those guys who could make a routine weather report sound like a vital national secret: Are you cleared for this?—listen, I have it on the very best authority—I mean from an unimpeachable source—I am absolutely positive that it will be fair and warmer today.
So he pulls Jennifer Harrel and me into a tight clutch in an empty room and, in a voice probably worried about hidden microphones and/or concealed cameras, tells me, "The least I say about this for the moment, the better. I don't want to say anything to throw you off. Jennifer, listen to me. This guy is fantastic. I mean, this guy is beyond belief. The things I've seen him do..." Which was a damned lie. He hadn't seen me do a hell of a lot. "I know how you feel about this sort of thing, but what the hell..." Fine, great, he'd set me up with a hostile client. "We're at the point where we just have to say, okay, that's it, kapootie, or we have to dare to try something that some people might think of as kookie; okay, that's where we're at."
Greg Souza is five-foot seven and weighs 210 pounds. He looks like Al Pacino, overweight. But he's hard all over and a tough son of a bitch, let me tell you. Otherwise I would have hauled off and decked him, right there.
Instead, I said, mildly, "Greg, don't sell me. You've hauled my ass out of bed, now tell me why." Before he could get a word in, I said to the lady, "Don't expect Mandrake the Magician and maybe you won't be too disappointed. Let's give it a shot. What's the problem?"
She was giving me a cool appraisal as Souza told me, still barely articulating, "Like I said, I don't want to give you too much—no, belay that—I have to be honest with you, Ash—there's a lid on this thing—I can't give you much. Look, it's a missing person. Male, white, age seventy-two, missing since the middle of October. Walked out of this building in broad daylight and never seen again. Now, you take it. Take it from there."
Like giving a bloodhound a sniff of an old shoe and saying, "Okay, boy, go get 'im."
I said, "You know I need more than that, Greg. Did the man work here?"
The lady looked at the floor and told me in a cool, controlled voice, "'The man' is a senior astrophysicist, one of the world's best. He is largely retired but still takes on graduate students from time to time and he was doing a lecture series here at Griffith for the lay public. He has an office here. Would you like to see it?"
Souza was all smiles as she led us to a small, almost bare office in the rear. She threw the door open, almost defiantly, and stood aside while I entered. I went in and sat at the desk in a creaky swivel chair, lit a cigarette, relaxed. It was not so important that I "see" the office. I wanted the office to "see" me. And something "came" almost instantly. Understand, I have no control over these things. I command nothing, invite everything. And something came. Don't ask what it was; I don't know what it was. I just felt compelled to be up and out of there, and as I passed Dr. Harrel, I casually asked her, "Who is Mary Ann?"
She shook her head and gave me a cold reply. "Pretty good guess, there must be millions of Mary Anns, but it doesn't ring anything here."
"There is no Mary Ann, Ash," Souza said, aggrieved by my apparent strikeout.
I said, "Shut up, Greg," and pushed past him, went on along the back hallway and out a rear door onto the parking lot.
It was heavy on me—some cloistering, wriggling emotion that had my spine dancing and my eyes smarting—moving me out across the mist-enshrouded parking area and along the low rock wall, down the gently curving drive. I must have been walking quite fast; I was vaguely aware of Souza huffing along to the rear. I paused once and looked back, I guess to get my bearings, saw Jennifer Harrel following at a distance. But I could not stop and I could not wait. Something was doing me, and urgently. Let me make it quite clear I did not know where I was going, nor why. This particular type of "psychic" activity is a form of surrender, a total surrender of the will, a willingness by the "psychic" to be influenced. I was not in a trance, and I could have killed the whole thing in an instant by simply taking back the responsibility for my own actions. I do not pretend to know the source or the nature of the influencing force. I know only that it sometimes comes to me and I sometimes accept it.
I was not trying to be cute when I said that I wanted the office to see me. I believe the thing may work both ways; the influencing force, whatever it is, may need a receptive center on which it can focus—and it may need to feel an attraction to that center. I will elaborate on that later. For now, I just want you to know that I was not in some sort of robot mode, out there on that mountaintop. I knew where I was and who I was; I just did not know where I was going, or why.
But of course you must know, by now, where I was going, and why. This is how I found the mortal remains of Mary Ann Cunningham; or, to put it another way, it is how Mary Ann found me.
I could smell her from the roadway, and I am surprised therefore that she had not already been discovered.
Greg Souza knew immediately what that odor meant.
So did Jennifer Harrel, moments later, when she joined us at the scene. "Oh my God, it's that Mary Ann," she moaned sickly.
I felt like crying, and I felt like hitting or kicking something, though I had never known this young lady in the bloom of her life. And I was stuck in the apperception that a death such as this is a monstrosity in a rational universe. Things simply should not happen this way, especially not now when the human mind can straddle the entire universe, not now when the ingenuity of man has allowed him to actually hear the residual echoes of the "big bang" that started it all to going... not now. This sort of death belonged to another place and time.
But then I was reminded that time and place are always relative and that the past just keeps on booming along at the speed of light, looking for a place to lan
d. Maybe there is a planet in a neighboring galaxy where right now furry little animals are beginning to descend from trees and to walk upright—and ten million years from right now, a descendant of one of those may bend his head to a reflecting lens and marvel at the destruction of a galaxy at the edge of the universe. Then he will step outside and another descendant who for whatever reason never evolved sufficiently in his own mind to even wonder about the edge of the universe will bash him over the head, turn out his pockets for a few coins, then trash him.
"Thank God," said Greg Souza.
"Thank God for what?" I growled.
"Well, that it's not the professor."
"It's all of us," I said. "It's every damned one of us."
Souza did not get that. Jennifer Harrel did. She took my hand, and squeezed it tightly, and murmured, "Ask not for whom the bell tolls..."
It takes a certain perception, yeah, but a death like this touches us all. And the bell tolls, maybe, clear to the edge of the universe.
Chapter Two: Point of View
Her beauty is not of the type that leaps across a room at you; it sort of steals over you and takes you by surprise in the close examination—a quiet beauty, deeper, more organic than cosmetic, much of it coming probably from the eyes or from behind the eyes, although the physical angles and planes are pleasingly harmonized, as well, the look of Jane Fonda or Ingrid Bergman in their prime—as opposed to, say, Jane Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe—and you feel comfortable with that kind of beauty, whatever the situation. Having said that, I guess I'm not sure I know what I mean by "comfortable"—though that word certainly describes the feeling— unless I am trying to say that Jennifer Harrel's beauty was not provocative, did not really invite subconscious seduction scenarios or other masculine tensions—which, I guess, is another way of saying that she was not sexy, which is not true, at all; she is a very sexy woman—but maybe, I guess, not at first, not right up front, her sexiness steals over you and surprises you the same way her beauty does.