You can access the retain count using -retainCount
or CFGetRetainCount
but it will almost never give you any meaningful or useful information. Objects can be added to autorelease pools, retained by the various internals of the objective-c runtime or Apple frameworks, ARC, etc. You shouldn't really care how many people have retained an object, only whether you need a strong reference to it at any point in time.
Relevant link: whentouseretaincount.com