The Astral

by V. J. Banis

  Today it was the gardens that drew them. The rain had fled, leaving a pale December sunshine, the air brisk and pleasant, the sky a Chamber of Commerce dream.

  There were several gardens to choose from, all meticulously maintained, all worth contemplating: a Shakespeare garden, planted with the various herbs and flowers mentioned in his writings, each with its name plate to say what and where (“I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows,” A Midsummer Night’s Dream). There was a desert garden, a meandering walk that led through large areas planted in cacti and other desert flora; and a little bamboo “forest” as well, and a long neatly clipped lawn lined with statuary.

  They passed these by in silent agreement and took instead the arbor covered walk that led to the Japanese Tea Garden. In spring, clouds of lavender wisteria blossoms would mass overhead, their scent driving bumblebees and hummingbirds into a happy delirium, but for now the naked branches twisted and matted together like sticks dropped in some Giant child’s game.

  At the end of the walk a mother demonstrated a temple gong, a long thick wooden pole suspended by ropes in front of a bronze disc. While her two children watched fascinated, she pulled the pole back and released it. It struck the disc and a deep bass note echoed balefully.

  “Ring it again,” the little girl cried, and “Let me, let me,” shouted the boy.

  “Well, just once, and not too hard.” The mother smiled an apology at the handsome couple strolling her way. Not that they would mind, she supposed. When you were in love like that, everything was wonderful, wasn’t it?

  Just past the temple gong, struck now with a determined ferocity by the little boy, wide steps led down to the postcard-perfect Tea Garden. Even in winter its little rolling hills were a vivid green. A stream, man made to look perfectly natural, meandered through them and in its dark water jewel-colored Koi darted among lotus leaves. A high arch of a bridge in glossy scarlet crossed the stream—for show only, there was a less spectacular span for actual stream-crossing—and on the opposite bank a path led to the farthest hillside where open shoji panels invited the eyes into a reproduction of a classical Japanese home.

  It was an enchanting place that seemed to have been dreamt up and created especially for lovers. Hand in hand, they followed the stream’s path, laughing at the Koi who swam into the shallows of the bank and mouthed their pleas for food, mindless of the signs that forbade their feeding.

  They stopped at the foot of the scarlet bridge, roped off to bar trespassers. Catherine eyed the perilously steep ascent.

  “You have to wonder how the geishas got up and down them in their sandals, don’t you,” she said. “And they did it so gracefully. I think I should have to crawl.”

  “Not exactly how one imagines Madame Butterfly’s entrance,” a voice said at her elbow.

  She turned, and gasped. “What are you...?”

  Roby Chang’s penetrating glance swept over her and to Jack’s puzzled expression, and back to Catherine again.

  “We have to talk,” she said.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  They met by arrangement at a Big Boy restaurant in Burbank. By the time Jack and Catherine got there, Chang had already established claim to a large booth set apart in one corner and was fending off the efforts of the hostess to seat a family of four there instead.

  They ordered breakfast. Just coffee for Catherine and Jack, and an astonishing order of food for Chang: pancakes (a full stack), eggs over easy, both bacon and sausage, and hash browns.

  “All the basic food groups,” Chang said. “Calories, caffeine, sugar, and grease.”

  They made small talk until the food came and the waitress had satisfied herself that these three wanted nothing more.

  “Just a little privacy, if we may,” Chang said, with a smile that took any sting out of the remark.

  “Now,” Chang said when the waitress had gone, “Who’s first?”

  Catherine had already decided on her way there that she would tell Chang everything. She began to talk, in a low voice that, Chang noted approvingly, wouldn’t easily be heard at a neighboring table. Not that anyone appeared to be listening, but you could never be sure. And it wasn’t a story that ought to be overheard.

  The everydayness of their surroundings made Catherine’s recital all the more fantastic. She told of astral spirits that soared through space and fiends that skulked in shadows, while around them a dissonance of voices rose and fell and dishes clattered. The scent of searing flesh, the aroma of fresh baked bread, wafted by them and a ghost of old grease haunted everything. At a nearby table a couple argued in sibilant whispers and at another a trio of children squealed and laughed in carefree delight. A baby cried. Against this backdrop of commonplace, the pages of Catherine’s eerie story turned.

  Chang ate as she listened without comment. She found herself thinking of The King. He would nail her to the cross on this one. Astral projections? Angels with messages? And a pair of killers, molesting a little girl in a dream.

  Yet that much, at least, was not fantasy. Really, none of it appeared to be, however bizarre it sounded. At least, when Catherine Desmond talked of those two, her anger was real, her sincerity evident. Certainly she believed the story she was telling. This was no made-up fantasy hatched in a morbid mind still grieving for a lost child.

  But could she believe it? Grief did strange things to one’s thinking. And why, she wondered, couldn’t I get a nice, normal case with axe murders and incest and nothing bordering on the supernatural?

  Catherine had finished. She sat waiting for the agent to respond. Chang hadn’t interrupted once. Her expression had remained throughout one of guarded neutrality. Catherine and Jack exchanged glances. He shrugged.

  Chang wiped up the last of the syrup and pushed her plate aside.

  “And that’s all of it?” she asked. “I don’t suppose you’d want to give me a demonstration of this, this gift of yours, would you?”

  “It doesn’t work quite like that. Physically, I would still be here, sitting right where I am.”

  “But your—what did you call it—your Ka, would be across town?”

  “Yes, it’s my Ka, my spirit, whatever you want to call it, that travels.

  “But she’d look like she had simply fallen asleep,” Jack said. “And, I have to tell you, I have seen her when she travels. She’s appeared in my office, a couple of times, when she wasn’t physically there.”

  “There is one thing I forgot to mention,” Catherine said. “I don’t know if it will make any sense.”

  “Nothing else has, what difference can it make?” Chang asked dryly. “Go on, let’s hear it.”

  “When they were with that little girl, I heard the one I call The Bear, say, ‘trash can.’ It was such an odd thing to say, wasn’t it?”

  “Trash Can?” Chang’s head came up, her eyes sharp on Catherine’s face.

  “Yes. Does that mean something?”

  Chang smiled. At last something she could sink her teeth into. “Trash Can Paterson,” she said. “I’ve been wanting to catch up to that bastard.”

  She motioned to the waitress for the check, and shook her head when Jack reached for his wallet, “No, this is on the bureau. At the least, my boss is going to find this fascinating. Let me talk to him.”

  And maybe get myself tossed out of his office; and out of a good job while I’m at it, she thought, but did not say aloud.

  * * * *

  To her surprise, The King did not toss her out and did not laugh. He heard her through without a word and leaned so far back in his chair she thought it would surely overturn, his hands folded behind his head, eyes ceiling-ward, unlit cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. The silence was agonizingly long.

  “You believe her?” he asked finally.

  Chang took a deep breath. This was the plunge. She could laugh and tell him she thought Catherine Desmond was a nutcase and she was only passing the story on to keep him totally filled in. Or, she could put several years of hard-earned
respect on the line.

  “I do,” she said. “I don’t pretend to understand it, but I really think she’s telling us the truth. And Trash Can Paterson is no fantasy, certainly. He’s slipped out of two seemingly certain convictions, and has been out of sight since then. And this sounds like his sort of doings.”

  He continued to stare at the ceiling. She resisted an impulse to look up, though it had begun to seem as if she might as easily find her solution there as anywhere else. So far, it was the rare case with no arrows pointing her the direction to go.

  “Gabronski,” The King said after another painful silence.

  “Sir?”

  “Gabronski.” His chair came down with a thud and he looked straight and hard at her, the way he did when he had made up his mind to something. But what, she wondered? “Never heard of him?”

  “I don’t think...oh, you mean Doctor Gabronski? The so-called L.A.P.D. psychic?”

  “He’s really not L.A.P.D., but he did help them with the Boulevard Strangler a couple of years back. Led them right to the scene of the crime, didn’t he? Caught the bastard with his skivvies at half mast and the army at attention, the way I heard it.”

  “Yes, sure, that was the story at the time, though I have to admit I thought the media was hyping it up a bit. But anyway, that’s kind of a marshy area, isn’t it? Isn’t Gabronski, well...?” She faltered.

  “Christ, he’s a fruit loop. That’s no skin off our butts, is it?”

  “No-o-o. But, are you suggesting...well, do you think...?” She picked her words carefully. “Would the Bureau actually use somebody like him in a case?”

  “Has used. And not somebody like him. Him. A couple of times, as a matter of fact.”

  She was genuinely astonished. “I didn’t know. Never heard.”

  He shrugged that off. “It was all very low key, no publicity. He didn’t give us very much, a couple of leads, minor ones that helped a bit. It was kind of a draw for us. Which is why we never gave the story out.”

  “And you’re suggesting,” she said, tentatively, because she didn’t want to come out of this conversation looking like a complete idiot, “maybe I should have him take a look at what we’ve got here.”

  “It couldn’t hurt anything, could it? We’ve got a woman who says she’s shipping herself through space, and landing on top of these bad guys. Right out of a Stephen King movie. Not my bag and not yours either. This Gabronski might have some ideas we can use. And it’s kind of down his alley, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. That’s certainly true.” Her tone of voice was anything but convinced. She had her own reasons for disliking the suggestion but she kept them to herself. If the King noticed her lack of enthusiasm, he took no heed.

  “Anyway, if we keep it quiet and it doesn’t pan out, we’re no worse off than we are now. Why don’t you take this Desmond woman to see the good Doctor? Maybe the two of them together can pinpoint for you where this Paterson is, when he’s not in outer space. And try not to let them both vaporize out of your sight, okay?”

  “Where...?”

  “See Renner, he handled the last case with the Doctor. In the meantime,” he picked up the altered drawing of Trash Can Paterson, “send these pictures to Desmond, and the boyfriend, see how close Phillips came to what she thinks she saw, see if she wants to make any alterations.”

  “Are we going to use them?”

  “I’ll think about that,” he said.

  Chang recognized his tone. The session was over, the issue settled. She got up from her chair but before she could reach the door, he stopped her.

  “You understand, Agent Chang, if you get a location, we’re going to need something more than a psychic vision to convince a judge to sign a warrant.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  “Good. Just keep that in mind.”

  Great, she thought as she walked toward her own office, now I’ve got not one but two ghost chasers to deal with. Crapola.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “I thought you didn’t believe in this stuff?” Jack had to shout to be heard over Bob Segar, singing “Old Time Rock ’n’ Roll” at a considerable volume. They were in Chang’s red Bronco on the freeway, heading at a thrilling speed toward Mission Hills, the roar of the traffic and the wind through the opened windows competing lustily with the music and rendering conversation difficult.

  Chang slowed and aimed the Bronco at an off ramp. “It’s one thing if a guy handles a piece of someone’s clothing and thinks he can sense where that person is, which is what the doctor did with the Boulevard Strangler. It’s a big leap from there to people popping in and out of the woodwork. And I don’t know personally if there’s really anything to this guy or not. I’m just saying, he may be able to give us some advice.”

  Catherine certainly hoped so. She was more convinced than ever that Paterson was stalking her on an astral level, but she knew that Jack was unconvinced. What was the point of arguing? Unless this Doctor Gabronski had something to offer, what on earth could anyone do about Paterson’s stalking? If any help was to be forthcoming, it probably would not be of this earth—and that was as puzzling to her as everything else connected with this business.

  They drove a mile or so on a curving side street, winding for several minutes up into gently rolling hills. Chang turned into a drive with an ivied gate and a sign reading Happy Acres. A button on the gatepost produced a muffled voice. Chang identified herself and after a pause, the gate swung open and closed quickly behind them.

  “A rest home?” Catherine asked.

  “Hospital. Very private, very expensive.” The drive snaked past neatly manicured lawns to a massive faux Tudor house. Gravel crunched beneath their feet as they walked to the wide steps that led to a heavily carved wooden door.

  A white-suited orderly, looking more like a football lineman than a nurse, opened the door a few inches, his thick body blocking the doorway. Chang flashed her badge. He stepped back without glancing at it and swung the door wider to let them in, and closed it carefully behind them, the lock snapping noisily into place. “This way,” he said.

  It might have been a private residence, though certainly a very grand one. The high-ceilinged hallway was a checkerboard of black and white marble. At nearly its midpoint a tall Christmas tree glittered, seemingly trimmed in ice that turned out to be, on closer inspection, scores of crystal ornaments: Bacarrat, Orrefors, Lalique. The landscapes on the walls would not have embarrassed The Huntington, and French tulips languished in ornate vases on mahogany tables, their perfume a vast distance away from the antiseptic smell of the ordinary hospital.

  It all had the look of a stage set. Catherine half expected the actors to make their well rehearsed entrances from the doors on either side, set the drama in motion, but the hallway was empty, their footsteps echoing dully on the marble. Where, she wondered, were the patients?

  Their guide opened a door and stepped aside. “Wait here,” he said, and left them. Again there was the snap of a lock as the door closed. Elegant or not, the hospital was certainly security conscious.

  It was a very pleasant room, at least. A profusion of green plants, hanging spiders and pots of dracaena and philodendron and houseleek softened what otherwise might have been an oppressive grandiosity. A small fire burned on the grate, and a table before it had been set with a silver Georgian tea service and cups Catherine guessed to be Crown Derby. The chairs grouped around the tea table were tufted leather and looked authentically antique and stiffly uncomfortable.

  She walked to the leaded glass window in the far wall. It overlooked a sloping lawn and a perfectly maintained garden abloom, even in this winter season, with flowers. Citrus trees, lemon, she thought, or orange, lined a high wall that sheltered Happy Acres from any curious eyes.

  Chang joined her at the window and noted the security cameras atop the wall. “How the other half lives,” she said dryly.

  They swung around as the door opened again and two men entered. The taller of them, rapier-t
hin, clean-shaven, came forward to shake hands. “I’m Doctor Ederle. And this is Doctor Gabronski,” he said, introducing his companion.

  Doctor Gabronski was a tiny, elfish man with long white sideburns and a beard that gave him a Santa-Claus look, an effect enhanced by the little round belly that strained at a snugly closed vest of red, and the lively, intelligent eyes that sparkled merrily at them through thick glasses.

  “So very delighted you could come,” he said, beaming around at them.

  The introductions done, Doctor Ederle gave them a look, not quite wary, but weighing. He glanced again at Gabronski, and made to go. “I’ll leave you to your chat. You’ll call me, Doctor, if you need me?”

  “Just so, just so, thank you.” Doctor Gabronski’s shiny baldpate bobbed up and down.

  “I’ve had tea prepared,” Doctor Ederle addressed their visitors, “And if you need anything else, or you have any difficulties, the bell is right there by the door.” He nodded briefly once more in Gabronski’s direction. “Doctor,” he said, and took leave of them.

  Gabronski had shown a marked deference for his colleague, but now he grinned with the glee of a child at a party and rubbed his hands together delightedly. “Well, well,” he said. He gestured toward the waiting chairs and the highly polished tea service. “Shall we have some tea?”

  Chang, who felt these days as if she had stumbled down a rabbit-hole, was tempted to ring the bell by the door and ask if she couldn’t have a shot of Jack instead. She dismissed that idea as quickly as it had come, however. This was one case where she most definitely did not want any hints of unprofessionalism to pop up down the road. “Nothing for me,” she said.

  Catherine took tea, and Jack declined, and they sat in a semi-circle near the fire. It was a cozy setting, the chairs more comfortable than they had looked, and Catherine felt quickly at ease with their host, so that, when he grew serious and prompted her with, “Now then, I understand you have rather an unusual story. Suppose you tell it to me from the beginning,” she found herself repeating her strange tale without hesitation.