Time to Time: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (Ashton Ford Series) Read online

  I took off my shirt and wrapped Penny in it, then I took her to my place.

  She was a basket case, mentally. Didn't seem to know where she was or who I was or even who she was. She'd become entirely docile, doing whatever I suggested without argument or resistance of any kind.

  I took her in the house and put her to bed, inspected her for physical hurts and found none. She was asleep before I could get her tucked in good.

  I went straight to the telephone and called Ted Bransen. He answered the second ring with a sleepy voice that turned a bit nasty when I asked him if he knew where his wife was.

  He snarled, "I told you, dammit, that you're working this through me!"

  I was too drained and confused to snarl back. I just replied in a very meek voice, "Call me if you are curious about her," and hung up.

  He called back about twenty seconds later and yelled, "She's not in her bed! Do you know where she is?"

  "She's in my bed, pal," I told him, and hung up again. This time I turned off the ringer.

  It was, I figured, about a twenty-minute drive at that time of night from his house to mine.

  Meanwhile I was tired as hell and fading fast. I felt curiously lethargic, drained, spent. I don't get that way often, no matter how long the night.

  So I went to the bar and splashed some bourbon onto an ice cube, took it to the picture window overlooking the Pacific.

  It was damned pretty out there, star-spangled above and phosphorescent below, just enough wind to make some caps atop the surging waters.

  Gradually I became aware that there was just a bit too much glow out there. I'd looked out that window often enough in all kinds of weather to recognize a different quality to this night.

  The glow continued growing until finally it was suspended right out there in front of me along the water line. It was oval-shaped and about twelve feet across. I swear the damned thing waved at me; it sort of wobbled in the air, like a bowl bouncing around when you set it down too hard. And then, maybe just to show me where my graphics had originated, it sent me another golden triangle tumbling gently through my head.

  Then, instantly, it became an identical golden triangle, slowly inverted itself with the point skyward, and shot straight up without a sound.

  I was still staring at the place where it had been when another "shooting star" whizzed across the horizon, far at sea.

  Some things the thinking mind simply refuses to process. Mine was definitely beginning to balk at the whole thing.

  Take away the saucer, even, and there is too much to process.

  I took my bourbon onto the open deck and stretched out with it on a chaise, allowing my eyes to find their own way into those star-spangled depths suspended above my head.

  Nothing was real; that was my illumination of the moment.

  All was illusion.

  But still I was wondering what the hell I'd gotten myself into this time.

  Chapter Four: Etchings

  Either Penny Laker is a master at disinformation or someone around her is. Published background information on this superstar is a beautiful study in contradictions. She has been variously reported as a native of Illinois, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, Canada, and Iceland. Depending upon where she was born, her age might be somewhere between thirty-three and thirty-nine. She got her start as an actress either on Broadway, at Burt Reynolds's theater in Florida, on the London stage, in an Italian movie, or in San Francisco in a porno film.

  She appeared on the Hollywood scene ten years ago with a supporting role in a much ballyhooed picture that was a box-office flop but nevertheless launched Penny Laker with rave reviews, comparing her with the best in the business. She has been one of the "hot properties" in a highly property-conscious town ever since, but that is not the end of disinformation. Perhaps one of the most written-about stars in the modern era, no two stories agree as to the details of that mercurial career.

  It appears that she met Ted Bransen during her third year in Hollywood—but that's not certain—and they were married either in Mexico City or Monte Carlo or Zurich, take your pick. It was the first or third marriage for both, and Penny has either two or three grown kids somewhere in Europe or South America.

  I call all that not sloppy reporting but disinformation. Someone was doing this on purpose, to a calculated effect.

  I am not exactly a babe in the woods in such matters. I am not really a detective and I may not even really be psychic (because I still don't know what "psychic" is) but I do have a pretty good grounding in the informational sciences and I held down a desk in the Pentagon at the Office of Naval Intelligence for several years. My family name is not really Ford but I am an Ashton via my mother. Nobody but Mother ever knew who my father was, and I'm not sure that she knew—but she told me once in a moment of candid humor that I was a "son of the Ford," which is navy talk from a family with all its proudest moments in naval service.

  One of my ancestors was politically influential in the selection of Annapolis as the site of the U.S. Naval Academy, but the naval heritage goes even beyond that. Anyway, "son of a gun" is an old naval term denoting an illegitimate child, and it stems from the early days when civilian women served domestically on vessels of war. Since the guns were always emplaced at the vessel's center of gravity, it was beneath these guns that such women crawled to deliver their misbegotten offspring; thus, children of questionable paternity were referred to as "son of the gun."

  I know that I was not born in my mother's Ford Fairlane so she was undoubtedly referring to my conception therein. It was either an item of delicious memory or ironic humor that the name on my birth certificate is Ford. Don't ask why I was not properly given my legal name, Ashton, at the rear instead of at the front; Mother was sensitive about that and always managed to change the subject when I brought it up. Maybe there was a problem with my grandparents. I wouldn't know; I never met them. My mother never married and I was raised in the Ashton naval tradition, hence Annapolis and the obligated service that followed.

  I give you all that just so you know where I'm coming from when I tell you that it appeared to me that the real Penny Laker was very well concealed behind an entirely effective disinformational cover. It is easier for women than men to get away with something like that because few women die with the name they were born to, and there is traditionally less legal identification of women as they move through life.

  I was thinking about all that, of course, as I waited for Ted Bransen to come claim his naked wife from my bed. And I do not mind admitting that I was feeling a bit defensive about that confrontation with Bransen. He can be a real jerk. And I did not have a really coherent story to give the guy. So how do I explain Penny Laker naked in my bed to her jerk of a husband?

  As it turned out, it was a needless worry.

  Ted Bransen did not come for his wife. He sent another. Quite another. She introduced herself as Julie Marsini and told me that she was Penny's personal secretary. I could buy it because I'd seen her before and wondered about her before. I'd also seen her workout suit, or one like it, in a shop window on Rodeo Drive; she looked like she'd just come from Jane Fonda's body salon or some such. Think of understated beauty, a woman who takes no obvious pains either to enhance or conceal the natural endowments—almost like one of the gray people who are always around yet hardly noticeable, young but not too young, pretty but not dramatically pretty, well built but not seductively displayed, interesting but not overpoweringly so. She had absolutely raven-black hair, worn neatly at less than shoulder length, and the darkest eyes I'd ever seen set into such fair skin. Beautiful mouth. Nice hands—expressive, without exaggerated movements—delicate and artful but also entirely capable. A soft fabric handbag with a silkrope draw was slung casually from one shoulder.

  I also liked her no-nonsense manner, which still managed to be conveyed graciously.

  "Thank you for calling, Mr. Ford. May I see her now?"

  "Wait a minute," I said. Guess I was still hung up on my Ted B
ransen defenses. "Don't you want to know why she's here?"

  "If that is important, I'm sure she'll tell me. She is all right?"

  I rubbed my temple as I replied, "Far as I can tell, physically, yeah, she's fine. But she was totally disoriented when I found her, and we've had absolutely no conversation. Sleeping like a baby for the past hour."

  "Then maybe we shouldn't disturb her." That voice fit the rest of her—understated strength, properly concerned, but unemotional, coolly modulated.

  I said, "She's, uh, in my bed. It's the only bed in the house." I glanced at my watch. "It's three o'clock. I have a big day coming up."

  My shrinking sense of hospitality gave her no pause. "Could you go to a hotel for the rest of the night? Of course we would cover your expenses."

  I said, "No dice. My bed is not for rent. Speaking of which, why didn't Bransen come? Or has this sort of thing become too routine for him?"

  She showed me a briefly disappointed look, then replied, "That could be highly confrontational, couldn't it? Why should he want to embarrass either of you?"

  I shrugged and said, "Well, maybe I've misread the guy. I expected him to come in here breathing fire and screaming accusations."

  She smiled, barely, as she told me, "I can understand your position. Rest assured that there are no suspicions of... romantic indiscretion."

  I asked her, "Do you always talk like that?"

  "Like what?"

  "The perfect executive secretary."

  She laughed lightly, said, "Thank you," and broke eye contact.

  I showed her to the bedroom. I'd left a small bedside lamp on and the lighting in there was sort of mellow. Penny was lying just as I'd left her—flat on her back, head straight on the pillow—but she looked different somehow, almost ghastly pale in the muted light. Totally still, no signs of breathing, she looked like a corpse.

  I had halted just inside the bedroom door. Julie went on to the foot of the bed and spoke a single word so softly that I could not be sure what it was, but I assumed she'd called Penny's name because she responded immediately in an equally soft voice, though without opening her eyes.

  Julie turned to me and said, "We'll be right out."

  I suddenly felt like an ass. I told her, "Hey, I can sleep on the couch if..."

  "No, no," she replied, "it will be fine now. Just give us a minute please."

  "She lost her clothes somewhere," I said.

  "No problem."

  No problem, okay. But can you understand how very strange I was feeling about all this? Forgetting the saucers, even—forget I even mentioned them—does the strangeness translate here? I had chanced upon a Hollywood superstar staggering naked along a deserted road in a remote area in the middle of the night. Other than that bare fact, there was no evidence of foul play or physical harm of any kind—except that the lady was confused and disoriented. So I take her to my home and put her to bed and call her husband, who a short time earlier had evinced a strong concern for her well-being.

  So does the husband come tearing in to collect her naked body from my bed? Hell no. The lady's secretary comes, and then the whole thing is just cool business as usual with "no problem."

  Well it was a hell of a problem for me.

  I skulked around the kitchen for about ten minutes, expecting each moment to bring Julie back out with a semiconscious superstar staggering along beside her draped in a sheet or some such.

  Instead I got two very lively and cheerful—not to mention beautiful—women dressed identically in workout suits. So I guess you can easily conceal one of those things in a woman's handbag, even the ballerina-style shoes.

  Penny stretched up from her toes to plant a moist kiss on my chin. "Thank you, Ashton," she said in a perfectly normal voice, and with about the same emotion one would use to acknowledge a simple courtesy.

  I muttered, "Don't mention it."

  "I'll call you later."

  "Please do that."

  Julie gave me an enigmatic smile and they departed arm in arm.

  I stepped outside and watched the car pull away, half expecting to get another look at a saucer.

  In fact, I stood stock-still for fully two minutes waiting for the saucer. It did not show. Back inside, I saw no evidence of any of it. The bed was neatly made with no appearance of having been occupied that night.

  I didn't know what the hell to think. But I must have been pretty heavily into it, because I realized with a start that I was standing at the big picture window onto the sea with no memory of walking in there. That's where I found the evidence. Not through the window but inside the window itself, in the glass, a peculiar etching or some such, about the size of my fist: a perfect triangle. It's still there. Come see it someday, if you'd like.

  I did not need to look at it all that much.

  The damn thing was already etched into my brain.

  Chapter Five: First Star I See Tonight

  I did not have lunch with Ted Bransen that day. His office awakened me with a nine o'clock call to cancel the appointment without explanation. Suited me fine. I had not gotten to sleep before dawn anyway, so I was in a welcome mood for a few more hours between the sheets.

  Didn't work out that way, though. Couldn't go back to sleep, couldn't get any of it off my mind just lying there, so I got up a few minutes later and hit the shower. I usually listen to News Radio over breakfast via the kitchen radio because they give me the world every morning in capsule form, true to their claim, and because I've found that is about all the world I need on a daily basis.

  So before I even got my coffee I learned that we'd had a full-blown UFO flap during the night, not just in the Los Angeles area but from Baja to the Golden Gate and points inland. That quivered the old antennae, let me tell you.

  Apparently there'd been a hell of a concentration of sightings in my immediate area, and an L.A. County sheriff's deputy had chased a saucer in his patrol car all the way through Malibu Canyon. I had found Penny Laker on the ocean side of that canyon, very close to the spot where the deputy first spotted his saucer, and the time frame was about right.

  So I climbed on the telephone and began running the thing down. My friend Willie Wilson, who strings for AP, told me that the sheriff's office was trying to quieten the thing, but he also told me that a television crew had managed to sneak some tape on the patrol car involved, which had taken quite a beating during the chase. Apparently the vehicle had scraped the canyon wall a couple of times and finally ended up in a field at the north end with two flat tires and an hysterical officer yelling for help via the radio.

  So I postponed breakfast and met Willie in downtown L.A. and we had coffee and doughnuts with the cameraman from the television unit. This guy's name is Joe White and he is black, has a very droll sense of humor, hugely enjoyed his latest assignment. He rolled his eyes at me over his coffee and said, "Hell, I've been telling 'em for years that there's something up there. I reported one myself some years back and I can still remember the way those cops were looking at me—you know, like wondering what my angle was or how much junk I'd been sniffing. Does me good to see they react to it the same way I did. That guy tore his damn car all to hell—I mean, practically totaled. Claims he kept losing power and couldn't steer. Shit. Let me tell you, nobody can steer with the eyes glued to the sky and the foot glued to the accelerator. I been through all that myself."

  But I wanted the officer's name and Joe White did not want to give me that. "Man has been ridiculed enough," he declared quietly. "Leave 'im alone."

  "I saw it, too, Joe," I told him, just as quietly. "I don't want to ridicule the man. Just want to talk to him."

  "Did you file a report?"

  "No."

  "Don't. Let that be my advice from one who did. Don't."

  I said, "I need to talk to the man, Joe."

  "Won't do you no good," he said. "Anyway, he's in the hospital."

  "County General?"

  "Yeah." He smiled suddenly. "You really do have the itch, don't
you."

  "Where it can't be scratched, right."

  Those expressive eyes rolled again. "You haven't talked to me."

  "Right."

  "Ask for Grover Dalton."

  I thanked my media friends, picked up the check, and went straight to County General.

  The man was under no wraps whatsoever. He shared a room with three other men and all four looked perfectly healthy to me. Except that Dalton's eyes were troubled and wary, kept flicking upward in an involuntary reflex. I sat on the edge of his bed with what I hoped was a professional manner and made a big thing of checking his eyes. I'd already checked his chart. He was on a mild anti-anxiety medication, nothing else.

  "Feeling better now, Grover?"

  "Yes, sir. When can I go home?"

  "Soon. The quicker you get fully relaxed about all this, the quicker you'll be home."

  "I'll never get relaxed about all this, sir, until people start believing me. I want a lie detector."

  "I believe you, Grover."

  "Do you?"

  "Sure I do. Saw the damn thing myself, right close to where you saw it."

  "Oh! Well! Did you tell...?"

  "Not yet. But I will. About twelve-foot diameter, waffle-thin, with a dome on top, blue lights."

  "That's it! That's what I saw! And underneath—when it comes up and floats over you—underneath there's these circular revolving lights, the little jets like blowtorches coming out the sides—did you see that?"

  I said, "Well, I didn't keep with it the way you did. Led you a hell of a chase, didn't it."

  "The damned thing was sucking me on. I can see that now. It was maneuvering through that canyon at no more than twenty feet off the ground. Didn't need to do that. Could've just gone up and over, 'cause when it did finally take off, it went straight up like a skyrocket and was clean out of sight before I could even think about it."

  "That was when you were in the open field?"