Page 17

“ ‘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.”