Free Ashes To Ashes: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective by Don Pendleton

to offer help at a distance and
a third, whom I recognized a moment later as one who had been
stocking the inside bar when I went through earlier that day,
jumped in with more direct assistance. He groaned, "Oh no, it's
Mrs. Kalinsky," as we hoisted her onto the deck.
    The guy just stood there, fully clothed in
waist-deep water, and watched with horror as I pulled myself out
and went to work on the victim.
    Someone brought a stack of towels and
someone else yelled, "Get Powell—get the doctor!"
    I had cleared Marcia's
throat and produced a gush of water from the air tract when I
became aware of the arrival of Kalinsky on the scene. I guess I
half expected the guy to start moving among the guests and
reassuring them because I was really surprised by his reaction. He
came totally unglued, trying to get into the action and fighting me
for position on the body.
    I growled, "Cool it, Terry, she's okay!"
    Someone wrestled him away, but still he lay
there beside her, stroking her forehead while she coughed and
gasped into the resurrection.
    Carl Powell made the scene then, and
smoothly took over. I was impressed by the guy's professionalism
and situation management. He had her blanketed and stretchered and
moving away from there before I could get my breathing under
control.
    Someone handed me a lighted cigarette and
someone else put a glass of whiskey in my hand. There was a lot of
crowding around and congratulating and slaps on the back, and I
overheard one awed voice exclaim, "Yeah, they say he dove off of
that balcony over there!"
    I looked, myself, at the balcony under
discussion and shuddered at the height and distance.
    It was at about that moment that I became
aware of a pain in the leg and a burning sensation inside the
sodden dinner jacket. The tux was a disaster, split and scraped at
several points; it was then I realized that I hadn't gotten off
quite as cleanly as I'd thought. A finger was beginning to throb
like hell and a warmth inside the trouser leg told me I was oozing
blood somewhere.
    Then Karen appeared,
calmly beautiful in a chiffon-and-lace dinner gown. She took my
hand without a word and led me through the crowd and into the house
and up the stairs to her apartment, quietly and carefully undressed
me to the skin and toweled me dry, applied stinging antiseptics to
what turned out to be minor scrapes—apparently I had either touched
bottom or grazed the side of the pool as I went in—then she put me
to bed, pulled the sheet up over my chest, gently kissed me on the
lips, and went away.
    Without a single word between us, all
that.
    But, at the risk of sounding nerdy, words
had not been necessary. Some sort of nonverbal communication had
been passing between us all that while—from which I received
sympathy, gratitude, admiration, concern, love—all of that.
    I had felt neither the need nor the desire
to resist the sweet ministrations. Actually, I felt like hell.
There had been damned little sleep the night before, the day had
begun early and with a bang, and it had been constant stress
without letup ever since. I had eaten, during the preceding
twenty-four hours or so, a raisin Danish and two cold chicken legs,
and I guess I had used all the steam I had left on that twilight
dunk in the Highland pool.
    So I am not overly ashamed to admit that I
simply let it all go and went to sleep in Karen's bed. I learned
later that she had gone below and rescued the dinner party—which
may seem a bit coldblooded but, what the hell, that's the way
things are done in high society—the show must go on, and all
that.
    Besides which, Marcia was apparently none
too much the worse for her misadventure. She was "doing fine" and
"resting comfortably," or so I was advised by Carl Powell when he
roused me from my nap at about nine-thirty.
    "You undoubtedly saved her life, though, you
know," he told me soberly. "It was a real stroke of luck that you
spotted her from your window. The lights had not been turned on yet
in the pool