ANDY STILL HAD TO FINISH OUT HIS SHIFT, which went to six. He said he’d head over to JD’s after that, but wasn’t hopeful that Gary, if he showed up at all, would make an appearance before eight. But if he saw any other patrons that he could remember being in Gary’s company in the past, he’d ask where he might be able to find him.
In the meantime, there were others I wanted to talk to. Patty Swain’s mother, for one. A visit to see her seemed long overdue.
I went back into the dealership, wound my way through the showroom of gleaming, tightly packed cars, and dropped into the chair behind my desk. Laura didn’t appear to have found anyone to use it temporarily, so I made myself at home long enough to look up some phone numbers.
I found a Milford address for a Swain. In all the time Syd and Patty had been friends, I’d never actually driven to Patty’s house, never had to drop Sydney off or pick her up there. I made a note of the address and wrote it down.
I was getting up from my chair when I found Laura Cantrell standing in my path.
“A moment?” she asked. I followed her into her office and she asked me to close the door. “What’s going on with you and Andy?”
“That’s between us,” I said.
“Where’s my car?”
By that, she had to mean the one I’d not returned. “The police have it,” I said. “The back end got shot up.”
“Shot up? What do you mean? With bullets?”
“Yeah.”
“Tim,” she said slowly, “I’ve been patient with your situation, I really have. And I get why you want to take a leave. But if that’s what you’re going to do, take it. Because now I find you’re getting company cars damaged, and you keep popping in here to deal with your shit, and it’s getting disruptive.”
“My shit,” I said.
“I’ve got cars to move. I can’t do it if you keep dropping by to harass my salespeople. Promise me you’re not going to bring your troubles around here anymore.”
“Thanks, Laura,” I said. “At the end of the day, you’ve always been there for me.”
I WAS HEADING DOWN ROUTE 1, about to turn into the Just Inn Time to see if anyone had found Milt in the room I’d rented a few nights earlier, when my cell went off.
“What are you doing right now?” It was Arnie Chilton.
“Why?”
“There’s some stuff you should hear.”
“What?”
“Look, I’m at my brother Roy’s restaurant. You know, Dalrymple’s?”
“Yeah.”
“You know where it is?”
“Yeah.”
“Where are you now?” Chilton asked.
“Can you tell me what it’s about, Arnie? Because I’ve kind of got a lot on my plate at the moment.”
“I think Roy’s got something you might find interesting.”
I turned off before I got to the hotel and headed for Dalrymple’s.
MY PHONE HADN’T BEEN BACK IN MY JACKET three minutes when it rang again. Thinking it was Arnie calling back, I didn’t look at the call display.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Hey.”
Kate Wood.
“Hello, Kate,” I said evenly.
“Look,” she said. “I think I might have done something I shouldn’t have.”
“What might that be, Kate?”
“Okay, you’re going to get mad, but I think I need to give you a heads-up about something.”
“Really?”
“The thing is, I was talking to the police, and now I’m starting to think I may have given them the wrong idea.”
“About what, Kate?”
“You know how, sometimes, I kind of overreact a bit to things? How, once in a while, I get carried away a little?”
I paused. “I think I know what you’re talking about.”
“Well, when I was talking to the police, they might have gotten the idea that maybe there really was no call from Seattle. That maybe you were making the whole thing up.”
“Whoa,” I said.
“I think, okay, what I think is, I think maybe when I saw you helping that girl into your house the other night, that made me kinda mad, and got me thinking all sorts of crazy things. So I’m calling to tell you, you might be hearing from the police about this, and I’m really sorry if it causes you any problems.”
I didn’t say anything.
“So I was thinking,” she said, “that maybe there’s some way I could make it up to you? To prove to you I’m sorry? I know the other night, when I brought over Chinese, things kind of went to shit and all, but I was thinking we could try that again, I could bring over-”
I flipped the phone shut and returned it to my jacket.
DALRYMPLE’S WAS A ROADHOUSE with weathered beams and fishermen’s nets out front. Inside, the walls were adorned with paintings of ships sailing the high seas, life buoys, and other bits and bobs of nautical gear. The place was hopping, most of the tables filled, waitstaff busily crisscrossing the floor.
Arnie must have been watching for me, because he appeared out of nowhere, all smiles.
“Hey, great, thanks for coming,” he said, shaking my hand. “Roy’s in his office.”
He led me down a hallway, past the two restroom doors, then opened a third door marked Office.
Seated behind a desk was a large bull of a man, hairless except for a thick mustache.
“This is the guy,” Arnie said.
“Close the door,” Roy said. Arnie did so, and the restaurant din faded away immediately. “You’re Tim Blake?”
“Yes.”
The restaurant décor was carried through to the office. More nautical art and several scale models of sailing ships dressed the shelves. One particularly spectacular one, with magnificent tall sails, sat on Roy Chilton’s desk. He noticed me looking at it.
“The Bluenose,” he said, coming around the desk and shaking my hand. “A schooner from Nova Scotia. A fishing vessel that was also a racing ship.”
Roy Chilton moved his tongue around the inside of his cheek. “So, my brother tells me your daughter’s missing.”
“Yeah. She’s in a lot of trouble, and I need to find her right away.”
“Arnie here thinks I might have something important to tell you, but I don’t know that it’s got anything to do with your daughter.”
“Just tell it,” Arnie said.
“Arnie says he already told you about that Bluestein, what I caught him doing here.”
“Yes.”
“I’d appreciate you not spreading that around. I kind of made a deal with the little shit’s dad to keep the lid on it.”
“Sure,” I said.
“Kid caused me a lot of grief. I’ve still got the credit card companies nosing around. They’ve red-flagged us.”
“Is this about Jeff?” I asked.
Roy shook his head. “Not really.” He cleared his throat. “You get a lot of turnover in this business. People come and go. Worst is when a chef quits on you. Those you can usually hang on to for a while, maybe years, if you’re lucky. But waitstaff, dishwashers, cleaning staff, they come and go. And you gotta be careful who you hire. Illegals, that kind of thing. Some managers, they don’t give a rat’s ass. So what if someone doesn’t have papers or a Social Security number. You pay them dirt cheap under the table, who cares. Truth is, I used to operate that way, but not anymore.”
“Problems?”
“I’ve seen things,” he said.
“What sort of things?”
“For a while there, I was getting workers through a guy. He came by, made a pitch, said he could get me help for less than I was normally paying people, and I thought, great. So he brings in these people, I don’t know where the fuck they were from. One from India, I think, a couple from Thailand or China. Let me tell you something. These people, they worked their fucking asses off. Did any job you told them. But you think they’d talk to you? Have any kind of conversation? I mean, okay, English was not exactly their first fucking language, but they wouldn’t even look you in the eye. They couldn’t wait tables. Didn’t speak English good enough. Had them in the kitchen, and cleaning up. You know what the thing was about them?”
“No. What?”
“They were always scared.”
“Because they were here illegally,” I said.
“Yeah, but it was more than that.” He went back behind his desk, but stood. “This guy supplying them, he’d drop them off at the beginning of their shift and pick them up at the end. I drew up a schedule, so they’d know what days they had off, and the guy says oh, fuck that. You can work ’em seven days a week if you want. And he says, don’t worry about long shifts. You want to work ’em twelve, fifteen hours, that’s okay, too. I tell him, listen, that’s against the law, and he says, you don’t have to worry about that. He says his workers aren’t covered by those laws.”
“Who’d you pay? Him or the workers?”
Roy Chilton cast his eyes down, as though ashamed. He looked back up. “Him. Because it was his agency. So I’d pay him-cash-and then I assumed he’d pay the workers.”
“You think they got the money?”
He shrugged. “So, he’d bring them over at the beginning of a shift, and he’d be here to get them at the end. All these people saw was the inside of that van and the inside of my restaurant. You’d look in their eyes, and I swear to God, they all looked dead. Their eyes were fucking dead. Like they’d all given up. Like they’d lost hope.”
He swallowed, looked down again, took a breath. Like he was gathering strength. “One time, there was a girl working here, Chinese I think she was. Really pretty, or at least she would have been, if she ever smiled. She worked in the kitchen, and I sent somebody to get her, bring her in here. Someone else had called in sick, and this girl, she worked her ass off all day, you know, and I just wanted to tell her, if she could even fucking understand me, that she did a hell of a job and I really appreciated it. So she comes in, and she closes the door, and I start to tell her she’s done good, right? And I can tell she doesn’t get what I’m saying. But she comes around the table here, she gets down on her knees, like she’s getting ready to, you know…”
“I get it.”
“And I tell her, no, get up, I don’t want that. But she just assumed this was part of the job.”
I said nothing.
“One night, he’s picking up one of the girls from the kitchen, it’s like two in the morning, and she was so wrung out, totally fucking exhausted. And she heads out, and I see she’s forgot her jacket. So I run out to the van, and that guy’s holding her head down in his lap, you know?” He sighed. “She had to do anything he asked. She had to put up with that shit. And you know why?”
“Why?”
“Because he owned her,” Roy Chilton said. “He owned all these people. They were goddamn slaves to him. He was just renting them out like they were fishing boats.”
“Human trafficking,” I said, thinking out loud.
“Huh?”
“Human trafficking. You lure people to this country, get them to pay thousands of dollars up front with the promise of living the American dream, and once you get them here, you own them. You control them.”
“I didn’t want any part of it,” Roy said. “Told that guy the next day, no thanks. I’d find people elsewhere.”
“I’m sure he just took them to another restaurant,” I said. “Or turned them into full-time sex-trade workers.” I paused. “But why are you telling me all this?” I looked at Arnie. “Why’d you want me to hear all this?”
“You mentioned a name when I was at your place,” Arnie said. “A weird name, that’s why I remember.”
It wasn’t immediately coming back to me.
“Tripe,” he said. “Randall Tripe. But you never said another thing about him.”
I looked at Roy. He was smiling and nodding. “That’s the guy. I’d been telling Arnie all about this, happened to mention the name-”
“And I go, hey, where’d I hear that before?” Arnie said.
“I’d heard about him since then,” Roy said. “Read about him in the paper couple of weeks ago. Somebody shot him, left him in a Dumpster. You put a guy like that in the garbage, it makes the other trash look good.”