CHAPTER SIXTEEN B: A WITNESS WITH A PRICE
By noon, the worker center had received four calls from former drivers.
Only one caller agreed to meet anyone in person.
His name was Nolan Price, and he insisted on meeting Jake at a public laundromat instead of the sheriff’s office.
Mara objected to Jake going alone.
“I’m not asking you to confront him,” she said.
“I’m asking you to think about what he might want.”
Jake agreed to meet Nolan with a worker center advocate present.
The advocate, Simone Bell, had spent eight years helping seasonal crews recover unpaid wages.
She arrived carrying a notebook and a paper bag of oranges.
“People talk better when they can eat something,” she said.
Jake remembered the old man’s dinner and almost smiled.
Nolan appeared twenty minutes late.
He wore a stained baseball cap and kept checking the glass door behind him.
“You said nobody from the company would be here,” he told Simone.
“Nobody from the company is here,” she replied.
Nolan looked at Jake.
“He delivered food to the gate.”
“That’s right,” Jake said.
“I remember you because you asked why the workers couldn’t come outside.”
Jake searched his memory.
“I asked where to put the sandwiches,” he said.
“You asked why we had to eat behind the fence,
” Nolan corrected him.
The words brought back an afternoon of heat and a man shouting through the gate.
Jake remembered that he had been carrying a tray too hot to hold without a towel.
He remembered a driver telling him to leave before the supervisor came back.
“I didn’t understand what I was seeing,” Jake admitted.
“Neither did I at first,” Nolan said.
He sat down beside a row of spinning dryers.
Simone offered him an orange.
He refused it.
“Russell hired me to drive people to jobs,” Nolan said.
“He told me there was paperwork I shouldn’t worry about.
”
“What kind of paperwork?” Simone asked.
“Housing charges, transportation charges, equipment charges.”
Nolan rubbed his thumb against the edge of his cap.
“Sometimes a man worked a full week and got twenty dollars because the rest went toward charges nobody had explained.”
“Did you collect identification cards?” Simone asked.
“I carried a box from the office to the van once,” Nolan answered.
“I didn’t open it.”
“Do you know what was inside?”
“I know what Russell told the men when they asked for their cards.”
Nolan’s voice became quiet.
“He said they’d get them when they stopped complaining.”
Jake leaned forward.
“Why are you telling us now?”
“Because I heard about the school bus,” Nolan replied.
“I have a daughter in second grade.”
He looked at the orange in Simone’s hand.
“I can explain away a lot of things I did for money.”
“I can’t explain a man going after a child.”
Simone asked whether he would give a formal statement.
Nolan said he would speak to a lawyer first.
“That’s your decision,” she answered.
“I can give you a number for independent advice.”
Nolan accepted the number.
Then he looked at Jake.
“There’s something else you should know.”
Jake waited.
“Russell wasn’t the only person who knew where those workers slept.”
“Who else knew?” Jake asked.
“People who rented rooms and took cash without asking names,” Nolan answered.
Jake thought of the diner parking lot and Warren’s folded receipts.
“Are you talking about Warren?”
“I’m talking about more than one person,” Nolan replied.
He stood abruptly.
“That’s all I can tell you today.”
Simone did not stop him.
After he left, Jake stared at the orange she had placed on the bench.
“He knows more,” Jake said.
“Probably,” Simone answered.
“You don’t sound frustrated.”
“He came through the door and told us something difficult,
” she replied.
“That’s progress, even if it isn’t enough.”
Jake picked up the orange and carried it outside.
He had begun to understand that the people who had helped Russell were not all the same kind of person.
Some had been frightened.
Some had been careless.
Some had made money.
The difference mattered, but none of it erased what had happened to the workers.
