A Deeper Darkness

by Jamel Cato

  “I’m an outside contractor.”

  “And I’m the Fairy Godmother of the Mummer’s Parade.”

  “I just have a few questions.”

  “I’m going to fax a copy of your fake business card to the Police and HealthUnited’s fraud department.”

  “If you do that, I’ll send Holly’s family detailed information about how your staff gave her Corvigen after she told you she was allergic to NSAIDS during her admissions intake. The allergy is documented in your EMR system and can’t be deleted from the cloud.”

  Aida twisted her chair from side to side. “You’re not an addict. You’re not a cop. You’re big, but you don’t fit the profile of the goons the pharmaceutical companies and street cartels send to intimidate us.”

  “Pharmaceutical companies send goons?”

  “All the time.”

  “What a world.”

  “Since you didn’t know that, you’re not in the game.”

  “The game?”

  “The drug game.”

  I could see that Aida was nobody’s fool, so I decided to save us both some time. “My real name is Preston Tiptree. I’m an investigator looking for Byron Sturdivant.”

  “Ah.”

  “Can you help me out?”

  “His family has already sent two different private investigators here.”

  “Why don’t you tell me what you wouldn’t tell them because you knew it would get back to his family.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because I’m not working for his family.”

  “Who are you working for?”

  “May I call you Aida?”

  “Everybody else does.”

  “Aida, listen, I’m trying to find Byron so I can safely return him to the people who care about him. You can tell by my clothing that I’m not cheap and you can tell from what I’ve told you about Holly that I’m good. There are two ways this can go. One way we both end up helping Byron. The other way ends up with a padlock on the door and you struggling to stay in recovery because you lost everything.”

  Her chair had stopped swaying. “What did you say your name was?”

  “Tiptree. Tree, like a tall tree.”

  She exhaled. “Byron is sweet. I hope he’s okay.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “If I knew, I would go there myself.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “About a month ago.”

  “He’s one of your volunteers?”

  “He’s a board member and one of our main financial sponsors. Actually, his father is the financial sponsor, but By has been a godsend for us.”

  “How so?”

  “He helps us with so much. Nothing is beneath him. He moves boxes, drives the van and sometimes goes to prospective donor meetings with me and talks about the things that only people who vacation on Martha’s Vineyard talk about.”

  “Like how long the line can be at the Back Door Donuts by the Inkwell.”

  “Yes!” she exclaimed. “Just like that.”

  “What do you think happened to him?”

  She hesitated.

  I waited.

  She looked away. “There’s such a thing as being too nice.”

  “Give me a name.”

  “Rodney Simpkins.”

  Later that day, I roughly knocked on the door of a rowhouse in a Philadelphia neighborhood that had been almost solely responsible for my hometown earning the dubious honor of being the nation’s murder capital twice in the previous decade.

  A young African American woman with wild eyes and even wilder hair cracked the door and eyeballed me between the links of three chain locks.

  “I’m looking for Rodney.”

  “He’s around back.”

  I raised my chin. “You sure? I won’t knock if I have to come back.”

  “Uh huh.”

  I walked around the block and into an alley that didn’t have sunlight or a clear view from the street. As I expected, a man with a handgun was waiting there to mug me.

  “Come up off that watch,” the drug addict commanded.

  “You ever heard of Farmer Joe and The Wind?” I asked him.

  “What?”

  My cousin Jason stepped out from a shadow in street clothes and slammed the mugger’s head into a rusted copper pipe hard enough to knock him unconscious.

  We checked the victim’s identification, but it wasn’t Rodney.

  I kicked in the decaying backdoor of the crack house. We followed the woman who had answered the door up the stairs and into the bedroom where Rodney was hiding and coming down from a fix.

  After we turned him right side up again, Rodney directed us to the isolated spot beneath the Falls Bridge where he had taken Byron about a month earlier. Byron went there under the idealistic belief that he could pay off Rodney’s suppliers for the names of the physicians and pharma companies who had been flooding Kensington with prescription opioids.

  No one had heard from him since then.

  It took me about ten minutes to find the symbol that would only be visible to my supernatural sight.

  I called Darlene.

  “Did you find him?” she asked after the second ring.

  “Not yet, but I wanted you to know that he’s alive.”

  She knew enough not to press me for details, especially over the phone.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “You still have that security system?”

  “I turn it on every night, just like you told me.”

  “I’ll call you again when I have him.”

  When Jason and I got back to his house, his wife Tiffany eyed the debris on our clothes that let her know we hadn’t been out Christmas caroling. She hugged and kissed me on the cheek as if we had been.

  “The kids are waiting for you to say goodnight,” she told Jason.

  Sensing the two of them needed to speak privately, I said, “Can I put the kiddies to bed? You know they love my bedtime stories.”

  When their two drowsy toddlers were settled on my knees in their pajamas, I told them a quick tale that my father had written for me when I was their age.

  DO MONSTERS SING?

  Daddy, do monsters sing?

  In my heart I know that they do.

  For every night when the lights go out

  I hear them shoo-b-doo.

  They start off singing softly

  But then slowly crank it up

  Once in a while—if I haven’t yet smiled,

  They really strut their stuff.

  And by strut I mean dance and twirl and shout.

  They take me on parades all through our house.

  The little ones tumble while the big ones bellow,

  there’s one with a stripe who plays a black cello.

  I wish you could see because it’s quite a show.

  But they wag their fingers and say adults can’t know.

  I told them you’re different, a dad with a smile

  I showed them the sax you play with such style.

  They rubbed their chins and told me maybe I’m right,

  because when you were a boy they sung to you too at night.

  They made me a promise that I’m sure they’ll keep.

  They’ll jam with my Dad

  if...I..just..go..to..sleep.

  I placed the children under their covers and then sat in the dark, wishing that the monsters who were after me were only interested in singing.

  CHAPTER 10

  “What do you have for me?” Garrison Peakes asked from my phone’s speaker.

  “Serenity Blakemore is not normal,” I said.

  “Can you be a little more specific?”

  “Not on the phone.”

  “This line is secure.”

  “But my line is not.”

  “Come to Washington. Now.”

  “I can’t.”

  “It wasn’t a request.”

  “I literally cannot come to DC right now beca
use I’m on a plane headed to West Virginia.”

  “You’re calling me from a plane?”

  “An airplane restroom is the only place I could be sure my call wouldn’t be overheard.”

  “Why are you going to West Virginia?”

  “I have a meeting with Ashley Gilbride.”

  The line went quiet while Peakes considered this. “You’ve managed to secure meetings with me, Jasmine Perry and Gilbride all in the same week. Maybe you’re half as good as they say you are. I had my doubts when you were running around under bridges chasing drug addicts. Come see me the moment you leave Carghill.”

  “You’ve got a bigger problem than my social calendar.”

  Peakes chuckled derisively. “And what would that be?”

  “Jasmine Perry is setting up a deal to join the Blakemore campaign. Their strategy is to leverage Perry’s high BBR index in DC to hit the ground running in January after Serenity wins.”

  “What’s your source on that? And don’t give me any bull or I’ll bust through your life like a steel pin through a voodoo doll.”

  “Perry told me herself.”

  “What?”

  “She came to see me right after you did. She wanted me to turn against you and deliver anything I find out about Serenity to her instead of you. I can’t be sure, but my instincts are telling me she wants to use the information to blackmail them into appointing her the new version of you in the Blakemore administration. I told her she would have to do something really special to convince me to do that. To my surprise, she did.”

  “What did she do?”

  “Let’s just say she looks great naked.”

  “I’ll bet. Half the White House staff would sell their souls for a romp with that, including Roman.”

  “Wait until I show you the pictures.”

  “You have pics?”

  “And a video.”

  “Does she know?”

  “She knows about the pics.”

  “You think she suspects you’re really working for me?”

  “Not that I can tell.”

  “Preston, my boy, you just merged into the fast lane to Easy Street.”

  “I better get out of this stall. People are starting to knock.”

  “Get in touch as soon as you can. Great work! Awesome work!”

  I hung up the phone.

  Then I turned to Jasmine, who was on the bed across from me, completely nude. “How was that?”

  She clicked off the cheap fan we’d picked up at Target to mimic the background noise of an airplane cabin. “Perfect.”

  CHAPTER 11

  It was my first time visiting West Virginia. I didn’t know what the rest of the state looked like, but Carghill County was like one big pep rally for Serenity Blakemore. The candidate’s photogenic face was everywhere—on lawn signs, posters and painted in enormous proportions on the road-facing sides of at least five of the grain silos our pickup truck had passed on the way to her national campaign headquarters.

  The only thing I found more interesting than this display of communal affection was the driver the campaign had sent to pick me up from their region’s miniscule airport. I’d taken off my glasses and squinted when I saw him standing outside of the baggage claim holding a placard with my name on it.

  Cleetus McGhee was a six-foot-tall Leprechaun. No one had seemed to notice this but me, which could only mean his supernatural identity was being cloaked to normal eyes by a strong glamour. I initially found it disconcerting to hear a creature from Celtic mythology speaking in an Appalachian dialect, which sounded to my virgin ears like a mixture of a Southern drawl and an Irish lilt. I quickly got over it because Cleet was so personable and gregarious. When locals in the airport impolitely stared at me like they’d never see an African American in person before, Cleetus had stepped in front of me and said, “Quit tincannin’ like ya ain’t neva seen country white bee’ four” or “Skeet, I done come outta dee mine darker than him eh ree day but Sundee.”

  He also knew that I knew what he was.

  “You know dee worse part ‘bout being a country Leprechaun?”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s dang hard to get laid.”

  I was horrified by the mere notion of that. “Why?”

  “Glamour don’t keep no secret when I chuck my pants off. Gals run faster than a possum wit’ a coyote on its tail. Right shame there ‘cause I can work my wee bit like a gumbo stirrer at a country fair.”

  I laughed because Cleetus was funny, but in the back of my mind I worried over his advanced knowledge of my abilities and what this might portend for my trip.

  We drove to a converted tire factory that was brimming with enthusiastic young people wearing t-shirts that read, “Serene for Serenity” and, “Bee-lieve”.

  Serenity’s magazine-friendly biography included co-developing a gene modification that made honeybees resistant to disease and prone to pollinating plant life that absorbed carbon emissions. This new subspecies, which came to be known as Carghill Bees, were extremely popular in industrialized countries dealing with pollution challenges. China was importing them by the millions. Average global temperatures had declined by two degrees in the years since the bees had been introduced. Although Blakemore and her co-inventor Pradeep Ramachandran had generously placed their groundbreaking gene sequences in the public domain, only the hives near Carghill had been able to consistently breed the new bees. In interviews, Serenity would graciously give the credit for the discovery to Ramachandran, claiming that her contribution had mostly been limited to treating the insects humanely. Some observers found it curious then that only her name appeared on the patent application.

  Ramachandran did not give interviews and had left his teaching position at West Virginia University to return to India a few months before Serenity had announced her bid for the Oval Office.

  This incongruity was of little concern to Serenity’s legions of devout supporters or the tens of thousands of people employed in Carghill’s thriving beekeeping industry.

  To me, it was a clue.

  Ashley Gilbride was everyday pretty, but not beautiful, with well-conditioned, shoulder-length brown hair. She had full cheeks and a small nose that plastic surgeons call upturned nasal. She was dressed in an expensive blouse and pants set that was far more likely to be found in a boutique in Tysons Corner than a shopping mall in Coal Country. The campaign website said she was thirty-seven, but she could have easily passed for twenty-seven.

  Three things immediately struck me about her after she introduced herself. First, she had a commanding presence, especially for someone who appeared so young. It was a natural leadership quality that seemed to make people defer to her. Second, she didn’t sound anything like the hundred or so West Virginians I had encountered between the airport and the conference room we were seated in. She spoke the kind of flat, unaccented English that some people call Newscaster Neutral. Third, my supernatural vision could see that she was a normal human.

  She was seated on the opposite side of a laminate conference table between a forty-something white man and a twenty-something blonde.

  “Welcome to Carghill, Dr. Tiptree.”

  “Thanks for having me. And thanks for sending Cleetus to pick me up. He’s a riot.”

  I scrutinized Ashley’s face for a telling reaction, but I saw none.

  “Did he tell you about his gumbo stirrer?”

  She could give tests too. “He sure did.”

  She waived a hand toward her male colleague. “This is Ben Guffin, our Analytics Manager. And this is Sabrina Aniston, our Social Media Coordinator.”

  The three of us exchanged polite greetings.

  “Dr. Tiptree,” Ashley said, “we invited you here to discuss the Temple University poll that your PAC funded.”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s a little unorthodox, don’t you think?”

  “How so?”

  “First of all, it was conducted by the Criminal Justice Depa
rtment instead of the Poli-Sci Department or one of the three Temple-affiliated institutes that historically do polling work.”

  “Did you go to Temple?”

  She frowned like someone had poured tap water into a Perrier bottle. She had graduated with honors from Princeton, Georgetown and the Rhodes Scholar program at Oxford. “No.”

  “You seem to know a lot about it.”

  “The other thing we find interesting is the unusually high click-through rate it achieved on a certain social media platform. It’s almost as if your audience was perfectly targeted with inside analytics data from the platform itself.”

  “Was there a question?”

  She leaned back in her chair. “Ben and Sabrina, would you mind giving us some privacy? I’ll touch base with each of you in a bit.”

  The functionaries departed as silently as they had arrived.

  “Do they talk or are they just accoutrements?” I asked when the door closed behind them.

  “Dr. Tiptree, I have to make stops in five different states in the next three days. My time is very limited. I sent Cleetus to pick you up from the airport because I knew you would instantly see what he really is. I was hoping that would allow us to skip some pleasantries. I’ve allocated fifteen minutes for this meeting. Let’s pretend we’re speed dating and make the most of it.”

  “Call me Tree, or Preston if you’re more comfortable with that.”

  “What is it you really want, Preston?”

  “May I call you Ashley?”

  “As long as you don’t accidentally call me Jasmine when I’m just starting to get into it.”

  My smile was wider than the blast radius of a neutron bomb. “That was way better than the icebreaker I had planned.”

  “Let me hear it anyway.”

  “A politician and a ventriloquist walk into a bar. The bartender goes, ‘Hey, I voted for you.’ The politician says, ‘Thanks!’ The ventriloquist looks at the politician in annoyance and says, ‘He’s talking to me, dummy.’”