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“Don’t call me ‘Adley’. And I’m not judging you, man. Maybe you should think about extending me the same respect.” His calmness infuriates me.
“If you want respect from me you have to earn it. Digging around in my personal life isn’t a good start.”
“Following me is, though?”
Well fuck. That shuts me up.
A silence extends between us, and I decide to face the fire. None of this makes any sense.
“If you knew I was following you, why’d you let me in your car?”
“Mostly curiosity, and you seemed harmless enough.”
I scoff at his reply, but I’m maybe a little surprised. Most people that run in his circles clutch their pearls and do whatever they can not to acknowledge my presence. I’m aware of how my appearance puts people off, and admittedly I lean into it a little, preferring to keep to myself.
“So now you think you know everything there is to know about me, what are you going to do about it?” I try to come across as less defensive, but I’m sure it doesn’t work.
“Well, for starters, I’m going to apologize.”
What? I didn’t expect that.
“As you might have gathered, I have a… tumultuous relationship with my father. I do my best to stay off his radar so I can live my life in peace. I’ve become accustomed to people surrounding me doing so because they’re trying to get to my father, usually to be in his good graces, or they’re feeding information back to my father. I tend to run background checks on anyone I spend any amount of time around. I have my reasons, but it’s been suggested that it might be unhealthy, and uncouth.”
“I could understand that,” I admit warily. I still think it’s fucked though. But then again, he made a good point about me following him, and he’s right that I was trying to get to his father, so I suppose I’m just as fucked…
“Even if it weren’t a habit, I might have done it anyway.” He is honest to a fault, digging himself in deeper. “As soon as I got the impression she might be in danger, I would have needed to eliminate unknown threats.”
I start to open my mouth before he clarifies, “I don’t consider you a threat. Not to her. I would like to know why you were following me, but I get the feeling you aren’t a threat to me either.”
I’m not sure I’m ready to share anything about the research I’ve been doing. It’s not that I don’t find him trustworthy - he might be growing on me a little. But I don’t want him to stop me from digging up the truth if it affects his father. Tumultuous relationship or not, most people will defend their family, especially when they’re already in the public eye.
“I was curious.” I edge the truth, and he knows it. “But I’m no threat to you.”
He nods, accepting that for now. I’m sure he’ll be on his guard around me, but if the last two days taught me anything, it’s that I’m not going to learn much about his father by following him.
“I’m sorry about your mom,” he tells me, surprising me yet again with his compassionate tone. “I was very young when I lost my mother, but I know how much it sucks.”
“I lost my mom when I was young, too. She didn’t raise me.” Bennet’s mouth turns down a little, putting more pieces of my past together. I wonder briefly if he’s digging. He knows about foster care, but I suppose he couldn’t guess about the reasons why or my relationship with my mother.
“I’m sorry about your mom, though,” I add, trying to keep things polite.
“Yeah, thanks.”
As we sit there in companionable silence, I can’t help but run through the last few months. Somehow my mom’s death managed to be a catalyst to my whole life falling apart. I finally had a steady job that I like, and I sort of even like the people I work with. Luckily my boss, whom I jokingly call Uncle Benny, is pretty flexible to work with so when I told him I needed some time off, he didn’t complain much. He gave me the time I needed to deal with my mother’s affairs, which only took me all of ten minutes. There was nothing of value in that apartment, aside from a kitchen drawer full of pills.
I had planned to be in and out, only stopping in to do a quick once over and see if there was anything worth keeping, maybe some old drawings stashed under my mattress. I wasn’t even going to do that, but it felt like something I had to do. I had to stand in that dingy 300 square foot shit hole apartment and stare at the dried pool of vomit she died in. More than once it occurred to me that I had never seen her work, so how she managed to pay rent and keep the lights on was a mystery. I never wanted to think about it too hard, because the reality was that it likely involved some kind of favors, though I never witnessed it myself. I had never seen her with a man aside from the attack. But how else would we even have a place to live, she was always high, and the drugs had to come from somewhere, right?
It was a kitchen drawer that changed everything for me. I opened it, expecting another empty drawer. What I saw instead set me on my current path, the drawer was full of pills. Not just any pills, but bottle after bottle of name-brand prescription pills. There was some of everything; benzos, opioids, things I didn’t even recognize.
There is no good reason that my mother would have a giant stash of name-brand prescription pills. I shoved them all into a bag and walked out with a new resolve. When I turned in the key to the landlord, I asked for any records of who was paying rent. He didn’t have a name, but I did learn that the rent and utilities were being auto drafted from a local bank account.
Benny has been letting me sleep on the sofa at the back of his tattoo shop, where I’ve been working. I sleep there every night, cleaning up the shop and doing odd jobs as payment. When the shop is closed, I’ve been using the computer to try to trace back the bank account that paid the bills and tracking down where the drugs that killed my mother came from.
The bank account is local, which I thought would make things easier. But when I went into the bank to inquire about the account, showing them proof of the payments and explaining that my mother was dead, they wouldn’t help me.
The pill bottles actually gave me the biggest break. When I looked up the name of the prescribing physician, I learned that they weren’t even a practicing doctor. Instead, they were on staff at The Adley Corporation, whose main commerce is pharmaceuticals. This immediately set off alarm bells, because why would a non-practicing employee of a pharmaceutical company be prescribing anything, much less such a hefty and dangerous cocktail of medications. Even more interesting was that they were filled at an on-site employee pharmacy.
That’s how I started looking into The Adley Corporation. At first, I only focused on the pharmacy staff and the prescribing physician, but as I was looking into the employees I came across the bio page for Jackson Adley, Owner and CEO of the whole company. And what set me on an entirely different course of investigation was a picture of the man himself, who happened to have strikingly similar dark green eyes.
