Fear The Worst

“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.”

THIRTY-THREE

DRIVING AWAY FROM DALRYMPLE’S, I felt like I was nibbling around the edges. I knew Randall Tripe was involved in this somehow. His blood was on my daughter’s car. That was definitely a connection.

Had Syd somehow gotten mixed up in his little slave labor business? Had she found out about his involvement in human trafficking? And if so, how? In what circles had Syd been moving to find out about a scumbag like Tripe?

Was it possible he’d tried to make Sydney one of his workers? I could recall a TV documentary on human trafficking, how its victims weren’t just illegal immigrants, that criminals who made their living this way often preyed on people-particularly young ones-who were born right here in the United States. As long as they could find a way to control you, they didn’t care where you’d come from.

I wasn’t quite sure what to do with the information Roy Chilton had given me. I wanted to pass it along to Kip Jennings, but I felt so betrayed by her I wasn’t confident she could help me anymore.

Driving back into Milford, I decided to continue on with what I’d been about to do when Arnie Chilton had phoned. I drove to the Just Inn Time, parked close to the front doors, and went into the lobby.

Today, Veronica Harp was on the front desk with Owen. She smiled warily as I came in. Our last encounter, when she’d offered to make me forget my troubles-at least temporarily-by slipping between the sheets with her, made this meeting feel slightly awkward.