“Hey, listen Buster, don’t kid yourself — when I was younger I did my share of mixing it up with the bad guys.” He was well into his second beer and pacing again, talking as he paced. “Even worked with the FBI to break a narco ring. That was a mean job, and I got the scars to prove it.”
“So why hire me?”
“I’m like your brother. Gettin’ too old for the rough stuff. Hell, I’ll be sixty-seven next year. I need younger muscle.”
He walked over to a desk, did some quick scribbling, and handed me a check. I looked at the sum, whistled again. It was a fat check.
“This should cover you for awhile. When you want more, give a yell. Money’s no problem.”
“I’ll need that letter,” I said. “It’s the only thing I’ve got to work with.”
He handed it over and we said our good-byes.
Charlene even smiled at me as I walked out the door.
First thing I did was run a computer trace on all of the John Carrolls in the L.A. area. Just in case the name might be legit. I found six John D. Carrolls, but there wasn’t a psycho in the lot. Which proved that the would-be killer was using a phony name.
But sometimes you get lucky.
The creep’s letter talked a lot about past lives — and it mentioned a “Kathleen.” She could possibly be somebody who did regressions... guided people back into past lives.
It was a long shot, because Kathleen might have turned out to be the guy’s wife or mother or girlfriend, even his sister. But my gut said no, that she was someone who did this kind of thing for a living. A long shot, like I said, but I played it out.
And got lucky.
I contacted a professor I knew at UCLA who was into paranormal research and right away he brightened when I asked him if he’d ever heard of anybody named Kathleen who was into the past-life bag.
“Kathleen Jenks,” he said. “She’s done several hundred regressions. A very dedicated woman. And quite friendly. You’ll like Kathleen.”
I nodded. “Where can I find her?”
“She works out of her apartment,” he told me, looking up the address. It was on Harbor Boulevard in Oxnard Shores, which is up the Ventura Freeway a few miles beyond L.A. County.
I drove there after phoning for an appointment. Told her I wanted to find out who I’d been in my last life.
It was dark by the time I arrived.
A tall, rail-thin character was just leaving her place. He gave me a long stare as we passed. Something about the way his eyes looked told me I’d be seeing him again.
I thumbed the buzzer and Kathleen Jenks opened the door of her townhouse unit. One of four apartments in the building. She shook my hand, smiled, and asked me to take off my shoes. “It’s a house rule.”
I followed her inside, carrying my shoes. My bright Irish-green socks made me feel a little silly.
Kathleen was slim and small-boned, with hazel eyes and dark waist-length hair that streamed thickly down her back. In her thirties, I guessed. Wore a long burgundy gown and had a kind of melodic voice, low-pitched and compelling.
She told me she’d been regressing people since 1974, and that she tape-recorded every regression. That interested me a lot.
“Was the guy I passed coming in here one of your clients?”
“That was Sam,” she said. “I’ve regressed him several times. Quiet sort of fellow. But with a fascinating background. He was one of Napoleon’s generals, you know. Died at Waterloo.”
“Sorry to hear that,” I said.
She smiled indulgently. “Death is never a thing to be sorry about; it’s something to look forward to. It allows us to enter the next house in our universal cosmic journey.”
“I never thought of it that way,” I admitted.
Her apartment was jammed with books and seashells and mirrors and colored rocks and oil paintings and stained-glass globes. In the middle of it all was a huddled puffball of white fur with slitted black eyes.
“Her name is Shanti,” said Kathleen, scooping up the cat. “It means ‘peace’ in Sanskrit. Say hello to the gentleman, Shanti.”
The cat hissed at me.
“She’s very tense around males. I’ll put her in the kitchen. She won’t bother us there.” Kathleen moved toward the kitchen. “Why don’t you go upstairs and lie down?”
“Huh?”
“That’s how I conduct my regressions,” she said. “With the subject lying down. There’s a couch up there in the loft. Use that. I’ll join you in a moment.”
I climbed up to the loft, found the couch, and eased onto my back. She turned the lights off downstairs and came up carrying a hooded kerosene lamp and a notebook. “I use this to provide enough light for my notes,” she told me.
She sat down cross-legged on a velvet pillow next to the couch, placing the lamp on the floor. I could smell the faint odor of kerosene. Then she switched on a tape recorder and arranged the open notebook in her lap.
“Would you prefer some white noise?” she asked.
I said “Huh?” again.
“A machine I can turn on. It blocks out the street noises. Some people are bothered by street noises.”
“No, you can skip that. I’m fine.”
“Well, then, are you ready?” she asked.
“I gotta warn you,” I said. “I’m a tough subject to hypnotize.”
“I don’t hypnotize people. I try to induce an aura of inner peace, a kind of light trance state. Just close your eyes and allow my voice to guide you.”
And she began to speak in a lilting flow, telling me how to relax the muscles in each section of my body. Then: “Imagine that you are in a small boat, on your back, under a serene blue sky, drifting endlessly down a wide stream. The sun is on the water, and the day is very peaceful. Your muscles are totally relaxed and your mind is open to the cosmic power of the water, carrying you back... back... back... through time itself, into another state of life, into...”
“It’s no good,” I said, sitting up abruptly. “I have to be straight with you. I’m not here to take a boat trip into yesterday. I came here to get some info. In order to prevent a murder.”
She gave me a penetrating look: “Are you with the police?”
“No, I’m a private investigator. I think you have vital information I need. On one of your subjects.”
She switched off the recorder, stood up calmly. “Maybe we’d better go back downstairs.”
“Yeah, maybe we’d better.”
Like I said, sometimes you get lucky and this turned out to be one of my lucky nights. Yes, she did know a John D. Carroll. He’d told her he worked in a specialty shop, some kind of nostalgia place where they sell old pulp magazines and movie posters. She didn’t know where the shop was located or where Carroll lived. He’d never given her an address or a phone number; he always called her for appointments. He’d come in several months ago for a past-life regression and they’d had maybe half a dozen sessions since then.
“But in all of them, he refused to be regressed beyond his last lifetime,” she told me. “Most people who come to me want to reach back into as many of their past lives as possible. But John was fixated on this one prior life. He kept wanting me to explore more aspects of it. So I did.”
“And what was he?” I asked. “In this other life.”
“An author,” she said. “He wrote thriller stories for the popular magazines of the period. Apparently he was quite successful at it, at least in the early years of his career into the 1940s.”
“Did he write under another name — or did he use John D. Carroll?”
“That’s all on the tapes. I don’t recall the name he wrote under.”