Ashes To Ashes Read online

  —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?"

  —He: "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.

  After that I felt a lot better—better enough to send to the kitchen for bacon and eggs and a pot of coffee—better yet, enough to tackle the shorthand in Powell's little notebooks while auditing the cassette tapes I'd found earlier.

  The tapes turned out to be music and nothing else—Strauss, I believe—but the notebooks proved to be a code within a code, rambling phrases buried inside systematically abbreviated longhand, similar to the so-called Phillips Code used by Morse telegraphers in the old days to shorten wire time—duck soup, really, for the trained cryptoanalyst, which was one of my navy talents.

  Duck soup, that is, with regard to the abbreviations, per se, but these were notes designed for communication only with the self who wrote them—sort of like memory-joggers—and I did not possess the memories to be jogged.

  K wnts opr I took to mean "Kalinsky wants operator," but what the hell did that tell me?

  Stl Ingst bt cnt frvr hldby I would say is "Stall longest but cannot forever hold at bay"—so what?

  It usually takes a leap of mind to overcome personal codes; you go for a logic system, and it helps to know a little something about the context of reality in which the notes are placed.

  The trouble with leaping the mind is that sometimes you superimpose your own imagined reality upon the contextual reality of the noter to force an improper conclusion. But I was trying, and here is the way I leaped the two notes shown above:

  "Kalinsky wants the operator. I will stall him as long as possib
le but I know that, sooner or later, I will have to give him the operator."

  I will not burden you with the whole process. The above should give insight enough into the problems and uncertainties of such an endeavor—and to indicate that, after struggling for two hours with the Powell notes (this particular set from a notebook dated on the cover at just a few months prior to that moment) I still was left with more conjecture than certainty.

  Even supposing that my construction of the "joggers" given above is accurate, I am still left with the question: what operator? Obviously he was not referring to a telephone operator.

  We leap the mind, though, in a logic system that respects a contextual reality. So we put the above together with something that appears as trbl brch pfsnl etcs and mk rbt KH plus bt wo pys bls?"

  This give us a "terrible breach of professional ethics—make a robot of Karen—but who pays the bills?"

  Thusly a logical movement is formed, a mentality is frameworked, a conjecture takes shape as:

  "Kalinsky has been after me to give him the operator. I will stall him as long as possible, but I know that, sooner or later, I will have to give it to him. And this places me in a hell of a dilemma. Not only is it a terrible breach of professional ethics, but it will make a robot of Karen. But, what the hell, after all, who is paying the bills around here?"

  After that sort of synthesis, it takes no great leap to the "operator."

  I already knew, or thought I knew, what Powell meant by that, but nowhere in the notebooks did this mysterious "operator" stand up and identify itself.

  So I went to the scratch pads and calendars, the doodles, comparing Powell's with Kalinsky's—and that is how I found the operator. It appeared in both sets of doodles—repetitively in Powell's, only once but heavily outlined in truncated form in Kalinsky's.

  I was shaking inside as I went down to the kitchen and personally supervised the putting together of a breakfast tray for Karen. It was now about eight o'clock. I was told that Kalinsky had gone to bed with orders that he not be disturbed until noon.

  Marcia Kalinsky customarily slept until ten or eleven, often later on Sundays after a hard night at poolside; according to the poop in the kitchen, she had retired under sedation at about two o'clock and had left an order for poolside brunch at twelve-thirty.

  I took the tray to Karen's apartment and told the sleepy-eyed watchdog to get lost.

  He replied, "Sorry, sir, I was instructed to cooperate with you, but I am to remain at my post."

  I said, "Move your chair to the hallway, then."

  He was eyeing the breakfast tray with more than casual interest. I asked him, "Have you eaten yet?"

  He said, "No sir, but I'm due to be relieved pretty soon."

  I said, "Okay. Wait outside for him, though. And tell him to stay out there until I say otherwise. You can't expect Miss Highland to get up and move around with you guys lounging about in here."

  He dropped his eyes and said, "Sure, I understand. She's still asleep, though." He glanced at his watch. "I gave her her last medication at four. She's due again."

  I told him, "That's been changed. No more medication unless I say so."

  "Mr. Kalinsky—"

  "Wake him up, if you want to. But no more medication."

  The guard/paramedic replied with eyes only and carried a chair into the hallway. I closed the door and locked it and took the tray into the bedroom.

  The shades were drawn, the room in deep gloom. I opened it up to both light and air, went to the bathroom and dampened a small towel, sat on the bed and sponged her awake.

  She was groggy from God knew what mixture of downer drugs and had a hell of time focusing on me, but I'm the stubborn type and I kept at her until it was obvious that she was functioning properly at the conscious level.

  I forced strong black coffee on her and spoon-fed oatmeal and toast into her, then lit a cigarette and handed it to her. So far, not a word between us. The first ones came with the exhalation of smoke and in a very small voice. "I had a terrible dream."

  "Tell me about it."

  "I was ... walking ... it was night ... somewhere—oh, the trail, the trail to the little meadow. This monster—oh, a horrible monster—leaped out at me from the dark. Had fangs like ... like a werewolf or something, horrible yellow eyes, and it was frothing at the mouth. I hit it ... picked up something and hit it. When I ... did that ... it turned into Carl and ... and there was blood everywhere."

  I took the cigarette from her and dragged on it, gave it back, said, "And then?"

  "I ... don't know. It was all just ... very unpleasant. And endless."

  "Endless, yeah," I said gloomily.

  She sighed. "Yes." She looked about her, asked, "Who put me to bed?"

  "You remember being put to bed?"

  "Vaguely, yes. Or did I dream it? Did you ...?"

  I grinned and shook my head. "Not yet. We have another problem to clear up, first. Do you remember what happened to Marcia last night?"

  The great eyes clouded, fell. She took a thoughtful pull at the cigarette, gave me an oblique gaze and said, "Yes. She thought I did it. Did I do it?"

  I asked, "Did you?"

  She said, "How could ...? I wouldn't even know how to do that."

  "Do you remember being there? At the pool? When she was drowning?"

  "I ... I'm not sure. There is some—I seem to have a picture of that but ... I don't know if I'm remembering what she said or what I actually saw."

  "Or something you dreamed?"

  "I hope so. Is it a dream?"

  I said, "Karen, our only touch with the world is through our minds. But all we ever really see is a shadow play, something that our mind interprets for us from sense excitations. Reality for you and for me, reality for every human being, is always a mental quality. The only way that we ever even know that a real world exists out there beyond the mind is when we compare our mental worlds with each other and find a correspondence. A dream is just another shadow play, except that it does not have its source in the outside world. That is why it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between something physically experienced and something only dreamed. Do you understand what I am saying?"

  She replied, "I think so."

  I continued, "Some dreams are so vivid, seem so real, that we actually store in memory phantom sense perceptions that are every bit as valid as an actual, physical experience. That is, we store odor memories, tactile memories, visual memories, auditory memories, just as though our dream had flesh—and, in remembering the dream, all those memories come flooding back with all the strength of a remembered actual event; sometimes stronger."

  She said, "Yes, I ..."

  I was talking with two goals in mind. One, to stimulate her intellectually, make sure that she was mentally functioning; secondly, to provide a mental framework from which she might view her own confusions.

  But I was leading her, really, into a confrontation with her "operator."

  And I decided that the moment had arrived.

  "For example," I continued, in the same conversational tone, "what if I were to ask you if you remember Elena Magdalena?"

  Her eyes blinked rapidly, twice; a now-familiar expression spread quickly across her face, and she replied, in a normal voice, "Yes, I understand."

  I watched her closely for a moment, then asked her, "What do you understand, Karen?"

  She replied, without pause, "I will see as you say, hear as you say, think as you say, do as you say."

  Son of a gun, as easy as that.

  The girl was in a deep hypnotic trance, somnambulistic level. She was, indeed, a human robot. She would walk around with eyes wide open and all sensory apparatus fully functioning, yet with the objective functions of mind totally set aside, nothing but the receptive web of the subjective mind—or the subconscious—operative and awaiting instructions.

  The "operator," here, was a simple auditory trigger keyed to a posthypnotic suggestion that, in effect, operated not only to return h
er instantly to deep trance but also, apparently, served as a transfer function—a transfer of control, that is, to whomever operated the trigger.

  To test it, I told her in a purely conversational tone of voice, "You will awaken when I tell you to, and you will have no conscious memory that you have been in trance or that you have been given instructions. Nevertheless, after you have awakened and when you hear me say to you, 'Jump, Karen,' you will immediately go to the window and close it. If someone asks why you closed the window, you will explain that a storm is coming and that you do not want the rain to come in. Do you understand?"

  She replied, sounding entirely natural, "Yes, I understand."

  I said, "Wake up, then. Now."

  With no visible alteration of her mood or demeanor, she said to me, "Yes, I have had dreams that seemed so vivid. I could actually smell the flowers and feel the fur on a squirrel."

  She was right back where the earlier conversation had been interrupted. We chatted about dreams for a minute or two, and we both had some coffee and smoked cigarettes.

  Then, very quietly, I said, "Jump, Karen."

  She casually threw back the covers and got out of bed, slipped on a dressing gown, and went and closed all the windows that I had opened when I came in. She returned to the bed, removed the gown, lay down, and again picked up the conversation.

  "Dreams are really neat, though. Sometimes better than..."

  I said, "Why did you do that?"

  "Why did I do what?"

  "Why did you close the windows? Are you cold?"

  She said, "No, but we don't want it raining in here, do we?"

  I said, "Karen, it is not raining."

  She replied, "It will be when the storm arrives."

  I said, "What storm is that?"

  She looked confused, and said, "Oh my. Did I dream that too?"

  You see, there is a correlation there.

  A corroboration, in fact, of the hypothesis I had been forming.

  I quietly said, "Elena Magdalena," and put her back into that other reality.

  Then, damn it, I had to figure the best way to get in there with her.

  Chapter Twenty-One: Hypothesis