Mind to Mind: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective

by Don Pendleton

  I assured him that I would, then followed an impulse to ask him, "What is your daughter's name?"

  He gave me an odd look as he replied, "We call her Vicky Victoria because it means victory and she was the pick of the litter. She's adopted. So's the boy."

  I said, "No need to tell me that, Jim."

  "Plenty of need," he replied. "I caught your notice. The resemblance is almost uncanny, isn't it? I know how that murky mind of yours works. And you're right; I've had to wonder ... Jane Doe was old enough and apparently unrooted enough to ... could be, yeah, it's possible, who the hell knows in this crazy world. Vicky was a doorstep abandonment, hours old. So ... damn, Ash. I couldn't get it out of my mind."

  I said, "Well, do so now, pal. More than five billion people on this planet. Not nearly that many possible facial configurations. There's got to be a lot of coincidental similarities spread around. Have you mentioned this to Georgia?"

  "Christ, no! I was scared to death you would say something."

  I zipped my lip and pushed him clear of the doorway, closed the door and fired the engine, told him, "Rest it. I'll take it for a while. You take care of Vicky Victoria."

  "You'll take it where?" he asked, frowning.

  "Along the synapses of my murky brain."

  I was moving along the driveway, and he was pacing me out. "What the hell does that mean?"

  "Jane gave me a picture," I told him. "I just have to decipher it. Keep you posted. But don't call me, I'll call you."

  "No fee, asshole!" he yelled after me. "Work with me or work for nothing!"

  That was okay with me. But I would not be working for nothing. I was working for Jane Doe.

  And maybe, "crazy world" or no, I would be working for Vicky Victoria.

  Chapter Seven: Right Side Up

  It was past one o'clock when I got back to my place on the beach, but I knew I would not sleep with a burdened mind so I took the burden into my office and fired up the computer for a little cryptographic go. I call it an office purely because that makes what I do sound a little businesslike—and I get a bit sensitive with myself about that from time to time. Actually I have no desire whatever to be "in business" or "in" anything, for that matter. I think I am probably a constitutional bachelor. I know very well that I am lazy. And I make no apology whatever for a love of personal freedom. I am devoted to the idea that each of us inhabits the world of his own making. The personal worlds we build are constructs of our own consciousness, and our consciousness, in turn, is further shaped by the worlds we build with it. There's a constant feedback, to the general effect that I build my world and that world builds me while I am building it. Of course, I have to interface with all the worlds being built by everyone else. Problem with an interface of this nature is that, most usually, it's more of a conglomeration or accretion, sort of like crystals forming. It's like the whole human species constitutes a single organism and everyone is expected to look and act and think and feel exactly like everyone else if we mean to qualify as "human.'' I consider that a rip-off of the human spirit; more, it is a theft of mankind's most precious asset: the mind that knows itself and knows that it knows.

  I doubt very seriously that dogs or cats or mice or turtledoves have any claim to objective reasoning power. A dog does not even "know" that he is a dog, I trust. In the wild state he may form packs and run with his own kind for mutual survival. But as much as I like dogs, I just can't see one ever painting a picture of a sunset or composing a sonata.

  'Course, I know people who swear by their dog's "great intelligence" and can tell you story after story about how the dog responds to this and that. I love that stuff myself; it's all very cute. I had a dog once who could stand alone on her hind legs and dance, as a pup, without ever being trained or even asked to do so; it was a spontaneous talent, but the only tiling she ever danced to was Herb Alpert's recording of Taste of Honey. Turned her on every time, but no other music ever did. And, of course, it does not say a thing as to what came into that pup's head when I put Herb on the turntable. Except that it made me wonder about genetic memory; maybe she had show biz in her bloodline and Herb's music triggered something there. Why couldn't dancing be as instinctive as retrieving a bird?

  Point is, the major difference between man and beast lies not so much in brain size (consider the elephant) or degrees of "intelligence" (whatever that is), but the wiring of the brain itself. You and I, pal, walk around in an upright position and eat with a fork not because we're smarter than the dog but because we are designed to do it—our brains are put together in a different way and for a whole different purpose—and that brain of yours defines the world you live in, the same as the dog's brain defines the world he lives in. A dog screws in the front yard and licks his ass at the dinner table because he lives in his world, not yours, and because such behavior is natural and right for him. That is why he looks at you so oddly when you scold him for breaking the social taboos of your world; your world is an alien world to him, pal, and you are an alien being.

  You're a human. That defines not an organism but beings of a certain class who possess certain shared characteristics.

  I have betrayed my family line because I elected not to assume a certain set of shared characteristics peculiar to my genetic trace. But, see, that is my option as a human. I can either dance or not dance when Alpert toots his brass. I get to choose my own world. Every male Ashton before me, since at least the American Revolution, was a career naval officer. Of course, that's only one side of the trace. Somewhere probably a derelict wino beachcomber who no longer even remembers his name is the repositor on that other side. If my mother ever knew his name, she never shared the secret with anyone. She assigned the name Ford to the record of birth as a humorous footnote to my conception upon the backseat of an automobile but raised me as an Ashton and gave me the name up front, maybe as a token compensation.

  Even so, I allowed myself to become organized to the point of carrying through an appointment to Annapolis and the minimum mandatory service afterward. I earned a B.S. degree and went to work in the mystical, magical maze of naval intelligence, learned some very interesting routines in the wondrous worlds of electronic spying and cryptology, good stuff like that, attended every war college I could find my way into, and got the hell away just as quickly as possible.

  I started off, here, by telling you about my "office" and the reason I call it that, even though I really do not regard myself as a businessman of any kind. I prefer to think that I do not work for money. I am lucky that I am in the position where I can afford to feel that way. I'm a kept man. Kept by my family line. Not in a grand manner, of course, but there is this tidy little trust that provides income enough to handle the essentials and allows me the options I so happily exercise.

  I have a dowager aunt back in South Carolina who refers to me as "the bad seed." She thinks it's terrible that I have never really "committed" to anything. Seems that I had two honorable choices: one, a career in warfare (the U.S. Navy is always in a state of war), which is considered "service"; the other, the pursuit of wealth, regarded as the only sane alternative to service.

  I am not knocking either of those. I just feel very fortunate to be in a position to do the things I enjoy doing. I enjoy tennis, for example, and I do a lot of that. I enjoy learning something new, and I try to do a lot of that too. I enjoy a puzzle or a mystery, and they do me quite a bit. I enjoy people, too, for the most part, those who will allow me the room to build my own world my own way.

  More than anything else I enjoy being alive. And I take the whole bag with that. It's a hell of an adventure. I love it all. And I guess that is why I pretend that I have an office in my home. Maybe I feel like I have to pay for the adventure, and the "office" is my token way of taking care of the tab.

  Well ... it really is an office, I guess. I mean, there's a desk, sort of. An acrylic table, actually. Serves the purpose just fine. The computer, of course. Couldn't live without a computer. This one's nice. I just upgraded to
a hard disk. Tandy 1000 with 640K and ten megs on the disk. Color monitor. Telephone, naturally. Even an answering machine. Couch and a couple of comfortable chairs for clients. Yeah, I get clients in here sometimes. I try to discourage it. Usually, if someone wants to see me, I try to arrange a meeting at my tennis club. Also have a mobile phone in the Maserati, but I think I got a lemon; sometimes it works okay.

  Well, like I said, I got home a little after one o'clock and went straight into the office and fired up the computer. A computer is a wondrous device. It extends the mind, redimensions it, formats it, gives it reach and expression not really found in any other way. Mostly left-brained stuff, but a good graphics program can give wonderful right-brain expression also. And in this application I was working primarily through my right cortex.

  So I loaded in the graphics software and used my left hand on a touch pad, which is like an electronic paintbrush, to try some free association with my paintings from Jane Doe. This is similar to automatic writing, if you know what that is.

  Remember that the right brain is largely nonverbal. But it is really quite superior to the left side in most applications of nonverbal mental activity. That's where intuition comes from. It is where we get our spatial concepts. Most of our emotions live over there. Virtually all creative movements originate on that side. Such mental constructs do not originate as language. Normally we have to involve the left brain's language capabilities before we can express the right brain's creations, and sometimes, as we do that, the left brain overrides the nonverbal right and presents us with something quite different.

  Have you ever been in love and felt so damned tongue-tied trying to express the feeling? Ever wondered why the really deeply emotional ideas are so hard to put into words? It is because the left brain is trying to translate via language a purely right-brain movement of psyche, and something is always lost in any translation.

  Okay. I was trying to outwit the left brain. To use my right hand on the touch pad would be to involve the left brain (which controls the right side of the body, remember) in a purely right-brain exercise. I wanted no translator. I wanted to hook up my right cerebral cortex to the computer as directly as possible. That is what I did. I sat there for twenty minutes or so with my left hand on the touch pad and my left brain occupied with the front page of the Los Angeles Times. I was concentrating very hard on that newspaper, and I guess I read every word on the page several times around. I was only vaguely aware all this time that my left hand was on the touch pad; occasionally I would be aware of movement over there, but I tried to keep the left brain aloof from all that.

  And I got some good stuff.

  I got some remarkable stuff.

  I saved the designs to the disk and ran off a couple of copies on the printer. I still was not sure what I had there, exactly, but at least it was a place to start—like putting together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle; it helps if you have the actual pieces in your hands to work with.

  I give you all this here, mainly, I guess, to show that I was wide awake and rational, despite the late hour and trying day. Remember also that I had come straight into the office upon arrival home. I was in there for about thirty minutes. I stopped off in the kitchen and stood at the open refrigerator to drink a glass of milk.

  I then walked through the dark bedroom and into my bathroom where I took care of the usual bedtime business, brushed my teeth, took a vitamin, the usual routine.

  It is now right around two o'clock. I am still thinking that the mind is too alert to go to sleep, but I am resolved to give it a try. I have removed my clothes and left them in the bathroom. I turn out that light and proceed in the dark to my bed. It is still rumble-tumble from the visit of Alison Saunders. I turn on the bedside light to see what sort of repairs are necessary.

  Suspend disbelief, please, at this point.

  Jane Doe is lying naked upon my rumble-tumble bed. She is a three-dimensional object. I can even see the depression in the mattress from her weight. I have not seen Jane naked before this, but I recognize the cruel marks upon that otherwise flawless body from Alison's description. But this is not exactly the same Jane Doe. This Jane has no paralysis. She giggles softly and reaches for me with both hands. These are real hands, soft and warm loving hands. I am not dreaming. I am wide awake.

  As God is my witness, I made love to an "alive" and ardent woman more than twelve hours after she had been murdered.

  Chapter Eight: Zoned

  You think I'm nuts. That's okay. I had to wonder about that myself. I was also considering various scenarios that would validate the experience as a sane one. My mind leapt to dozens of those, tumbling one after the other.

  I even called Alison Saunders, asked her to verify Jane's death, asked her to locate the body and to verify that indeed it was there where it belonged. I guess she thought I was nuts, too, and I was not about to tell her the reason for my request.

  I woke up Jim Cochran again also. He was not so hospitable this time. I heard Georgia's voice in the background, informing him in no uncertain terms that he was not to leave the bed unless the Russians were invading. I asked him if he had actually seen Jane Doe's corpse. He assured me that he had, and he confirmed Alison's story that Jane's throat had been slashed following cardiac arrest. I insisted that he look in on Vicky Victoria, but don't ask why I did that, and don't ask why I felt better when he reported that she was safe and snug in her bed.

  Jim did not question my sanity. He quit doing that several cases back. He'd become conditioned to my "murky" investigative processes, and I like to think that he respected them. He asked no questions at all, in fact, and evinced no curiosity whatever as to why I rang his phone at three a.m. There was a tension in the voice, however, when he agreed to check on his ten-year-old.

  I apologized for the early-morning wake-up and told him good-bye while taking a mental note to send Georgia some flowers or something. Cops' wives lead lousy lives. I was not unmindful of my trespass into hers, and I wanted her to know that at least I was aware of the trespass.

  Trespasses notwithstanding, I was left with the same puzzle. Maybe I should explain that despite my earlier statement, I also long ago stopped wondering about my own sanity. If this case is the first time you've encountered me, I probably also need to explain that this was not my first bout with the seemingly inexplicable. I was telling you earlier about my views on life and the freedom to exercise options thereof. What I did not tell you, but I guess now I should, is that the free exercise of those "options" has led me into a pursuit of decidedly offbeat experiences. I have long held the conviction that we live in a truly magical universe—magical, that is, from the viewpoint rendered by our human sensory apparatus—so magical that the apperception of it tends to offend the rational (left-brained) interpretations of what we like to call "reality."

  A "reality," we tend to believe, is something solid, textured, colored—something "real" that can be touched, held, beheld, or otherwise grasped and factually analyzed by the mind.

  Trouble is, there is much of "reality" that is neither solid, textured, or colored but remains as "real" as electromagnetism and other undisputed physical properties—and I doubt that there is a scientist or philosopher alive today who would assert that the human mind has already "grasped" and/or analyzed all there is to know about this reality we inhabit. Most, in fact, would probably tell you that we are just beginning to get a handle on this fabulous thing we call existence.

  One of the problems with apprehending "reality" goes to what we have experienced before, and a lot of it has to do with just plain common sense. Of course, the common sense of a few years ago told us that the earth was flat, that what goes up must come down, and that the moon was made of green cheese.

  So we need to keep upgrading the common sense.

  That is what I try to do.

  And that is why, I guess, I've never hung out a shingle proclaiming myself an expert at anything. I don't want to be an expert. Experts are dumb. They are telling you and me tha
t they have it all snockered. That, in itself, is an admission of dumb. It's one of the verities that you can trust: a smart ass is a dumb ass. But that is not necessarily true the other way around. A dumb ass could be and often is a highly intelligent person who does not recognize his own smarts, or does not trust his own smarts, or is afraid to assert his own smarts. He also could be a guy who is smart enough to realize that we are all dumb asses, in the final analysis. A smart ass has never tumbled to that truth, so he is the dumbest of all.

  I don't like to be dumb, not consciously dumb. I hate a snow job too. And I despise being told that my particular apprehension of reality is false merely because it goes against someone's common sense.

  So, as you might imagine—given the freedom I have, the willingness to exercise it, and the way I feel about this thing called reality—I often find myself groping through that state of being that Rod Serling dubbed "the twilight zone." But I have found it generally to be a nicer place than Serling saw it. Wondrous, sure, awesome, and often a little scary, but I have to tell you that all the "evil" I have encountered has been outside that zone, not within it. Evil seems to be a peculiarly human construct.

  Of course, though, I am not a smart ass. Just because I have not encountered something does not mean that I never will. So be assured that I exercise a healthy respect for our reality. Be assured, also, that I shiver and shake like any other normal human being in the presence of the inexplicable.

  I was doing both on that morning in Malibu.

  Not just because of what had gone before.

  I was shivering and shaking, even after the telephone conversations with Alison and Jim, because Jane Doe was still in my bed.