The Traffickers

THREE

All-Nite Diner 6980 Fran

Matt Payne worked his way through the crowd milling in the parking lot and along the sidewalk outside the diner. He noticed that they appeared to be those displaced from the motel, mostly a mix of black and Hispanic males, as well as a few Anglo families. Some wore night clothing, some had on street clothing, and all looked haggard.

These people really were rudely awakened.

Inside, he found the place packed with more of the same, and it took him a minute to find Chad Nesbitt. That was mostly because Chad was slumped down in a booth by one of the front windows and more or less hiding under a red Philadelphia Phillies National League Champions ball cap, the tip of its brim pulled down almost to his nose.

Chad Nesbitt looked very much like Matt Payne, only a little shorter and a little heavier. He wore faded blue jeans, athletic running shoes, and a gray T-shirt with big black letters spelling BRUUUUUCE! The shirt had been bought six years earlier at a Springsteen show. Matt knew because he’d bought one, too, and that made him think of that well-built, very high-maintenance blond Aimee Cullen wearing his-and damn little else-as she left his apartment one Saturday morning, promising to give it back. But their relationship hadn’t lasted long enough for that to happen.

When Matt reached the booth, Chad did not get up or look up. Instead, he stared out the window at the pulsing red and blue lights. Matt slid onto the red-vinyl bench seat opposite him. On the table in front of Chad, next to his cellular phone, was a cold plate of fried eggs and bacon and toast, all of it barely touched. He had his left hand wrapped around a cheap plastic coffee cup that was nearly empty.

Chad finally slowly turned to look at Matt, and Matt could see that he hadn’t shaved and that his eyes were sleep-deprived.

“Thanks for coming, pal,” Chad said in a flat, tired tone. “I wasn’t sure who to call first.”

Matt tried to lighten the mood. “Nice shirt. I miss mine, but I think losing it when Aimee left was worth the price just to see her go before she bankrupted me.”

Chad glanced down and shrugged. “First damn thing I grabbed in the dark-” He stopped when he looked across the street toward the Philly Inn.

Matt Payne glanced around the crowded noisy diner, and when he saw a waitress, a plump black woman in her forties snapping orders to a young Latino busboy, he waved and got her attention, then pointed at Chad’s plate and coffee, then pointed at himself. She curtly nodded her understanding of his order.

“Oh, Christ,” Chad exclaimed.

Matt looked to see what caught his attention.

At the motel, one of the Philly cops was walking to undo from a light pole one end of a length of yellow and black POLICE LINE-DO NOT CROSS crime-scene tape.

Behind the tape, next to a fire department hazardous materials unit, waited a flatbed unit from the Philadelphia Police Department Tow Squad, the doors of its white cab having the same scheme of the police cruisers, bold blue and gold stripes running diagonally up the door with a large blue-and-gold Philadelphia Police Department crest centered on the door. The wrecker’s light bar on its roof was flashing red and blue, as were the wigwag strobes at the front and back of the vehicle. Chained down on the flatbed was a silver Mercedes-Benz SUV, the nose of which showing burned paint, the windshield missing, and the front and rear right-side passenger doors cut completely free, revealing the interior of the vehicle.

“Ouch,” Matt said. “Besides being outrageously expensive, I’ve always thought that that Generalissimo Benz-it looks like something the dictator of some sub-Saharan country would drive-could not get any uglier. Yet it appears that it can.”

“That’s Becca’s,” Chad said.

“ ‘Becca’s’?” Matt parroted, his shocked tone evident. “Becca Benjamin?”

Chad nodded.

“What the hell’s it doing here, Chad? Stolen? What?”

Nesbitt shook his head but didn’t reply. He just watched as the tow truck pulled out of the motel parking lot and onto Frankford, then headed north.

He took a sip of his coffee, then put the cup on the table. “I don’t know where to begin, Matt. There’s a lot I just don’t know myself. Didn’t want to know.”

Matt looked at him and said, “Well, the beginning’s always a good start.”

Chad looked out the window and appeared to be considering that.

The plump waitress appeared with a steaming pot of coffee and a cup for Matt, then wordlessly filled both of their cups as she glanced out the window at the motel before moving on to the next booth.

“Okay,” Chad said, turning and looking at Matt. “You know Skipper.”

“Not really very well, but, yeah, enough to know he could be funny-”

Chad nodded.

Matt went on: “-and a real dipshit.”

Chad cringed.

“You know, Matt, I’ve known you all our lives and sometimes you can be a real asshole, too.” He paused. “Sorry. I’m just upset about this whole thing.”

“Well, you’ve been bailing out the bastard since we were at the academy. ‘No good deed goes unpunished.’ Ever hear that?”

Chad made a face of frustration.

“We were teammates, Matt. And I couldn’t say no to him; he’s just got that kind of personality. Endearing, you know? I should have, but didn’t. You may remember that he had a real tough time with his father, who cut him absolutely no slack, often unfairly. Anyway, I didn’t hear much from him after he put the Audi in the reservoir-”

“The Audi and Becca,” Matt interrupted.

“-and he took off for school in Texas,” Chad went on, nodding his agreement. “But a little more than a year ago, out of the blue, he called me at the office, said he’d be back in Philly that week, and wanted to get lunch. Said he had a business proposition.”

“Tell me you didn’t buy it.”

“No, I didn’t,” Chad said, somewhat smugly. Then he added, “Not what he wanted to start, anyway.”

“Which was?”

Chad Nesbitt looked cautiously around the diner and its patrons, then with a low voice said, “He wanted to supply me with migrant workers.”

“For what? Last I looked, you and Daffy had domestic help. And whatever yard work that needs doing gets done by the building management.”

The Nesbitts lived east of Matt’s Rittenhouse Square place, in Society Hill, at Number 9 Stockton Place, a triplex constructed behind the fa?ades of four of the twelve pre-Revolutionary brownstone buildings.

“No, Matt. Large numbers of laborers. For Nesfoods International. He thought we needed workers for harvesting the vegetables and fruits, and more workers for the processing lines at the plants. He said he could supply as many as we needed, at a price that was unbeatable.”

“And?”

“And I wanted to tell him he was speaking out of ignorance again. He’s the type who gets excited about something, decides it’s the absolute best thing since sliced bread-but then doesn’t think it through.”

Matt was nodding. “Yeah, I remember.”

“But I told him, instead, that I didn’t do that, that Nesfoods didn’t do that. The farms supply their own labor; we simply buy the product to process. And our processing plants, due to the various federal laws, are very careful in strictly hiring only those who were legal, with the proper papers. He said that that wasn’t a problem, that he had it set up. He’d been doing it for years in Texas, running crews building custom houses for his father’s company there, and now bringing them to do it here. I told him I wasn’t interested-my job is sales, expanding the company internationally-but made a few calls and gave Skipper the names of some of the managers of the farms we buy from.”

Nesfoods International had a few manufacturing facilities in the Philadelphia area, but many more Nesfoods establishments elsewhere in the United States-including one in San Antonio that made Tex-Mex salsa, a condiment far hotter in both taste and sales than ketchup-as well as outside the country.

The waitress approached with Matt’s breakfast of bacon and eggs and a fresh pot of coffee.

“Here you are, sweetie,” she said, sliding the food before him.

“Thank you,” Matt said, and moved his cup closer for her to refill it.

She did, topped Chad’s cup, placed the check upside down on the table midway between them, then said, “Let me know if you need anything else,” and left.

Payne picked up two strips of bacon, made them disappear in a few bites, then said: “And that was the first proposal he made?”

“Yeah. The next one was better. It had promise. It made sense. But I couldn’t get involved with anything that might embarrass Nesfoods, even as only an investor. So my lawyers vetted it, said that if it were set up properly in a Limited Liability Corporation, it’d pass the arm’s-length and smell tests and clear some other hurdles. And it required only a fairly small investment on my part. When it started to take off, I mean really generating serious income, I was both happy for him and not unhappy with myself. Not that I was going to get rich from it, but I felt good that Skipper was finally finding himself successful and that I was able to help him do it.”

“What was it?”

“Something he’d started with one location just off his school campus in Texas. ‘Sudsie’s’?”

He looked at Matt, who was polishing off his eggs, to see if that registered.

After chewing and swallowing, Matt said incredulously, “That sports bar with the laundry machines? ‘Get Sloshed With Us’?”

“Actually, for legal purposes it’s technically a laundromat that has been sexed-up with a sports bar-TVs, beer on tap, snacks. But you’re right. That’s the place. And the concept-the LLC had only two here to start-rang all the bells with hitting the target choice demographic of young adults eighteen to thirty-five. It proved to be an unbelievable cash cow.”

Matt raised his eyebrows and shook his head. He said, “Fancy buzzwords, Mr. Corporate Man. You always did talk in tongues, even in preschool.”

Chad shrugged. “I’m in sales. It comes with the territory. Anyway, then Skipper found a package of real estate for sale that had a half-dozen laundromats.” He glanced out the window. “It also had three motels.”

Matt looked out the window, then at Chad. “You own the Philly Inn?”

He nodded. “The LLC does.”

“What the hell are you doing with seedy motels?”

“Hey, don’t be so fast to judge. Ever hear of PEGI?” Chad said, pronouncing the acronym phonetically.

“ ‘Peggy’?” Matt repeated, then shook his head.

“Philadelphia Economic Gentrification Initiative. Big money, both local bonds and fed matching funds. The LLC’s going to put up one hell of an upscale condominium when the Philly Inn’s gone. When it’s time, I’ll get you in on the predevelopment pricing.” He looked at all the emergency vehicles at the back of the inn. “Which now may be sooner than later.”

“So, what’s the problem, Chad?”

He shrugged. “It all just looks so bad. I just don’t know. Skipper called around nine last night, said he was going out of town-”

“So then it was Skipper driving Becca’s Mercedes?”

Chad shrugged again. “Maybe. But he said, ‘Becca and I,’ so she could’ve been with him. Anyway, he wanted to drop off a check, which was my quarterly payment on the LLC investment.”

“Guess ole Skipper hasn’t heard of the United States Postal Service. Or, for that matter, electronic bank transfers.”

“That’s not how Skipper is, Matt. He takes it personally; when he promises to give you something, he wants to hand it to you personally.”

Matt took a sip of coffee, then said, “My recollection is if he hands it to you. I seem to recall he has trouble with following through on things. You just admitted he doesn’t think things through.”

Chad made a face, then said, “True. But his intentions-”

“Intentions my ass. Come on, Chad. You’re covering for him. It’s what the shrinks call ‘enabling.’ ”

Chad sighed, sipped his coffee, then said, “Maybe. Maybe not. Anyway, Daffy put Penny in her crib and then went to read in bed. I clicked on the late-night news, waiting-and promptly fell asleep. When I woke up, it was after one-there was some rerun of a late-night comedy on the TV-so I called his cell phone. He apologized-”

“He’s good at that,” Matt interrupted. “Lots of practice over many years.”

“Are you finished?”

Matt slowly said, “Enabler,” then made a grand gesture for him to continue.

“He apologized, said he was running late, but he’d be over ‘in ten’ with the check. He said it was still in the motel safe. I tried to tell him it was already late and could wait till this morning. But Skipper insisted he wanted it done before he-they-went out of town.”

Chad looked toward the motel office and added, “Who knows when I’ll get in there.”

“So I gather he didn’t show in ten minutes?”

“Or in four hours, when I woke up again, this time from a sore neck from the way I’d fallen asleep in my chair. Then I couldn’t sleep. So, half pissed and half worried, I decided to go see if he was maybe passed out in one of the rooms here. Figured I’d bang on his motel room door and wake him up. What’s good for the goose…”

“But you never found him?”

Chad shook his head, then touched his phone. “And I tried calling at least a half-dozen times.” He paused. “The cops wouldn’t let me near the place, so I came in here, tried to think of who to call-”

“And I won.”

“You’re a cop, Matt. You understand this better than I do, than anyone I know does.”

Matt Payne didn’t say anything.

Chad went on: “Two ambulances, sirens blaring, came out from the back of the motel right before I called you. For Christ’s sake, Matt, did you not see her vehicle?”

Matt suddenly had a mental image of what horror could have happened to the gorgeous Becca, and it was clear from the looks of the right side of the SUV that the rescue crew had had to use a powerful hydraulic Jaws of Life metal cutter to remove the B-pillar and the front and rear doors in order to rescue-or, if dead, to recover-whoever was inside the SUV.

Then Matt’s mind suddenly flashed a Technicolor image of another beautiful young woman who’d suddenly been horribly mutilated-Susan Reynolds, her head grotesquely opened by a.30-caliber carbine round in that diner parking lot, blood and brains blown everywhere.

Matt immediately felt himself get clammy and tasted bile in his throat.

Dammit, not that now!

Don’t lose it.

He took a deep breath, swallowed hard, and drained his coffee cup.

Then he looked out at the motel and all the police activity.

Behind the yellow Police Line tape, he saw a familiar cop, one in plain clothes and his usual well-worn blue blazer. Detective Anthony C. Harris was slight and wiry, not at all imposing, but was, Matt knew, one of the best homicide detectives, right up there with Jason Washington, who was the best of the East Coast’s best, from Maine to Miami.

Jesus, that’s not a good sign.

If Tony is working the job, something big is up.

He looked back at Chad and bluntly said, “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“I’ll do it. Do whatever. But not for Skipper. For you. For Becca.”

“Matt, you can hate him-”

“Dammit, Chad, I don’t hate him,” Matt interrupted with more anger than he expected. He lowered his voice: “However, if he hurt Becca, that is subject to absolute immediate fucking change.” He sighed. “I’ll find out what I can.”

“That’s all I’m asking. Thank you, pal.”

Chad reached out for the check and slid it back to himself.

“I’ll get the tab. The LLC owns this diner, too.”

Matt just shook his head at that as he pulled out his cellular phone, scrolled down its list of phone numbers, and then hit the CALL button.

He looked back out the window as he put the phone to his ear and listened to the sound of ringing. He saw Homicide Detective Anthony C. Harris begin shuffling the pen and notepaper pad he held so that he could reach with his left hand and retrieve his cellular phone from its belt clip.

“Hey, Tony,” Matt said after a moment. “Matt Payne.”

Then: “Yeah, sorry to bother you. I know you’re more than ‘a little busy’ with a job. I’m at the diner next door.”

He saw Harris, still holding the phone to his ear, turn and scan the diner.

Matt went on: “Inside the diner. I can see you. Look, I might be able to give you some information on the scene.”

He listened, then said: “Sure. Of course. But can you answer me one quick question?”

Then: “I know. Did you get a positive ID on who was in the Mercedes?”

Matt saw that Chad was watching him closely for any sign.

Matt met his eyes but remained stone-faced as he said, “Thanks. I’ll be over. Tell ’em to pass me through, will you?”

Then: “Yeah, ‘should’ isn’t the same as ‘would,’ and for all I know rumor in the Roundhouse and around the FOP lodge is that I wimped out and quit a long time ago. See you in a moment.”

Then he hung up and waved for the waitress.

“Well?” Chad said.

Matt watched out the window as Tony Harris signaled for one of the officers standing at the crime-scene tape to come over to him. The cop did, at a half-trot.

The waitress appeared, and Matt told her, “I need a couple large black coffees to go, please.”

After she walked away, Matt looked at Chad and said, “You were right: It was her Mercedes, or at least one leased to Benjamin Securities. And-” He forced back the lump that appeared in his throat, and his tone turned colder. “And it was her driver’s license in the purse. So there’s no reason not to believe it was her in the vehicle. They’ll confirm it at the hospital. But he said it’s hard to tell right now-she got hit pretty badly.”

Matt saw that Chad was on the edge of tears.