Betrayed: A Rosato & DiNunzio Novel (Rosato & Associates Book 13) (7 page)

“I know that. I’m not saying that.”

“Then what are you saying?” Judy asked, her tone gentle as they drove into the dark.

“I’m just saying that if I can ask a few more questions, so that I have answers when I put my head down on the pillow tonight, I think it makes sense to do so.”

“I agree, but I think Detective Boone will follow up. It’s police business, and he seemed pretty good.”

“I think he will, too, but I’m not about to sit on my hands. Besides, since when do you care if something is police business? That never stopped you or Mary.”

“Except that she’s getting married.” Judy thought back to the day, when she’d felt like Debbie Downer at the bridal shop. “Our days of excellent adventures might be over. She’s a partner now, too.”

“Don’t worry, you two are thick as thieves. By the way, how are you and Frank doing?”

“Great, fine.” Judy usually confided in her aunt, but didn’t want to burden her any further, with so much already on her plate.

“Thinking about getting married?”

“Maybe.”

“Take your time, there’s no rush. Sometimes when your friends get married, it puts pressure, but it shouldn’t.” Aunt Barb paused, musing. “Though I hated it when your mother got married before me. Everybody knows I’m nicer.”

Judy smiled as they passed a dark barn with a tall blue silo. “But she’s older than you. She would have hated it if you got married before her, wouldn’t she have?”

“Honey, let me tell you. Marriage was
not
on that girl’s mind. She liked the bad boys in high school. You wouldn’t know it to look at her now, but she’s where you get your wild side.”

Judy chuckled, then thought of her mother, waiting for them at home. “Aunt Barb, how long do you expect this will take? I’m trying to decide if we should let her know we’ll be late.”

“Good point, I’ll text her.” Aunt Barb reached for her purse and got the phone.

“What are you going to say?”

“I’ll tell her we’re running late and not to worry, is all.” Aunt Barb texted away, as the light from the phone screen shone upward, illuminating her laugh lines, which bracketed a sly smile. “I can get you out of anything, even ballet lessons. Remember?”

“Of course.” Judy chuckled at the memory, from when she was only six years old. Her mother had decided that her tomboy daughter needed some civilizing and signed her up for ballet lessons, but Judy hated every minute of them. She’d begged to quit after the first recital, in which she starred as a dancing poodle in tiara-kid makeup, a pink tutu, and a puffy pink tail. Her mother had relented and let her quit only because Aunt Barb had prevailed upon her to let Judy take drawing lessons instead, which had led to her lifelong love of art and painting.

Aunt Barb looked over. “I still remember the song from the recital. Isn’t that crazy?”

“I remember it, too.” Judy decided to sing it, to cheer her aunt up. “‘We are little dancing poodles, and we are here to say…’”

Aunt Barb joined in, “‘We come from France, to do our dance…’”

“‘But we only do ballet!’” they sang together, then laughed. Judy’s throat thickened. She loved her aunt and couldn’t imagine losing her, not now or ever. “I can’t believe you remember that.”

“Are you kidding? I still have PTSD.”

Judy chuckled, then turned right and left, following her aunt’s directions through corn and soybean fields and past horses grazing in rolling pastures, their outlines indistinct in the darkness and their whinnying cutting through the night air. The fields gave way to farmhouses and barns, then to trailers and smaller homes, until they spotted a small cast-iron sign that read,
WELCOME TO EAST GROVE.
The town was of colonial vintage like Kennett Square, and quaint brick and clapboard houses lined the road, their wooden porches just steps from the curb. Judy headed for the outskirts of town, past a check-cashing storefront and a shabby Mexican tacqueria.

Finally they came upon a long, low series of square buildings, only one story high, mere cinderblock boxes attached in a row, like railroad cars. They had no windows, so there was no way to tell if anyone was inside, and the only light came from flickering fixtures on the roofs of the buildings, which cast jittery cones of light on the worn asphalt lot.

“Here’s Mike’s.” Aunt Barb gestured at a driveway that had no sign, except for
PRIVATE PROPERTY, NO THRU TRAFFIC.
“That’s the parking lot.”

“Why no sign?” Judy steered into the lot, where there were a few old cars parked in a row.

“Everybody knows where Mike’s is, he’s one of the tiny, independent growers. He owns about ten other growers, all independent. He produces exotics.”

“What’s ‘exotics’?” Judy turned off the ignition and put on the emergency brake, looking through the windshield and noticing for the first time that the buildings had large numbers painted on the cinderblock, in black. The building on the end, closest to them, was number seven.

“Fancier mushrooms. Portabella, mitake, shitake, cremini. But he hires the undocumented.”

“How does he get away with it? What about Immigration?”

“The way the system works is that Immigration stages a raid only if there’s a significant number of complaints, in relation to the size of the workforce. Bottom line, nobody complains.” Aunt Barb picked up her water bottle and took a sip of water. “Immigration isn’t the real problem, anyway, the IRS is. If a grower submits a list of social security numbers and they’re not good, it takes the IRS three months to figure that out. So in three months, after the grower gets the IRS notice, he fires the employees and they go to another grower, or another location of the same grower, like Mike’s.”

“Really?”

“That’s how it worked with Iris. She’s worked at all of his locations for about a year now.” Aunt Barb eyed the buildings. “It’s like a shell game, because even workers with legitimate green cards have only six months in the country, then they have to go back. They worry they can’t get back in, but plenty of them do, and they end up at one of the shadier growers.”

“Was Iris afraid of being caught?”

“She worried about it constantly. She lived in fear of being deported, always looking over her shoulder. You saw her, she was so quiet, she learned to be invisible.” Aunt Barb paused, and her eyes glistened anew. “There are so many undocumented workers here, and everywhere.”

“But that doesn’t make it right.” Judy believed in the law, even if it meant siding with her mother.

“I know, but they’re here, living in a parallel universe. They’re an open secret.”

Judy thought of the undocumented workers she’d seen in the city, the busboys smoking outside the back door of the restaurants, or the men who delivered her takeout pizza by bicycle. “We know and we-don’t-know.”

“Yes, and the interesting thing about an open secret is that people look the other way, literally. Iris became the kind of woman whom people looked away from. Unmemorable and marginalized, even more than the average middle-aged woman.”

Judy could hear the resentment in her aunt’s voice. “Where did she work before Mike’s?”

“She cleaned houses for that service, which is when I met her, as I told you. She also did yard work, and she washed and mended horse blankets. At one point, she worked three jobs.”

Judy slid the keys from the ignition. “Okay. So why are we here?”

“You’ll see. I have a plan. Just follow my lead.” Aunt Barb reached for the door handle.

And Judy wondered when it got to be so hard to keep up with someone almost twice her age.

Chapter Nine

“So what’s your plan?” Judy took her aunt’s arm, but she needed no help, standing straight and tall, her step fueled by a new determination.

“To see the boss and get to the bottom of this, that’s what. Iris works here and she should have been here tonight.” Aunt Barb gestured at the cinderblock buildings. “These are the growing rooms, and the packing area and office are behind them.”

Judy grimaced at the disgusting odor of manure that permeated the air. “They really use manure to grow mushrooms?”

“Yes, horse manure and some chicken, but they call it compost. That’s why there’s always mushroom growers next to horse farms. Chester County produces almost half of all mushrooms grown in the United States.”

“Really? How do you know that?”

“Everybody does. It’s a source of local pride, and Iris used to tell me all about the business, and she gave me the inside track.”

“But how did she work with this
smell
?” Judy couldn’t imagine anyone breathing that stink, twenty-four/seven.

“God knows.” Her aunt wrinkled her nose. “The men pick the mushrooms, and the women pack, but it’s gross in the packing room here, too.”

Judy didn’t know much about how mushrooms grew, except it had been a joke at her old law firm that the partners treated the associates like mushrooms—keep ’em in the dark and feed ’em shit. “How is that sanitary, to grow food in horse manure?”

“They pasteurize it. You’ll see, we’re going inside.” Aunt Barb charged past battered trash cans and broken wooden pallets. “This place is such a dump. I don’t know how they pass inspection.”

“Who inspects?” Judy asked, as they approached the door to the building.

“The state and federal agencies, and the mushroom growers have their own independent council that inspects as well. Someday I’ll figure out how Mike gets away with what he does.” Aunt Barb reached for the metal handle on the battered door, which had a thick spring. “He must pay somebody off.”

“I’ll get the door,” Judy said, but her aunt had already opened it and they entered the building, where the manure stink was stronger, turning Judy’s stomach. They found themselves in a cold, rectangular hallway with a grimy gray utility sink and blue plastic trays scattered on a concrete floor. “It’s so chilly in here.”

“Because we’re close to the growing rooms. Let’s keep going. The office is behind the growing rooms.”

“I got the door.” Judy crossed to another door, also with a metal handle and a spring. Wrinkled paper signs were taped to the door in English and Spanish:
HAIRNETS MUST BE WORN
,
REDECILLA DEBE USARESE EN ESTA AREA
.
NO SMOKING EATING OR DRINKING IN THIS AREA
,
PROHIBIDO FUMAR COMER O BEBER EN ESTA AREA
.

“This is a growing room,” her aunt said, charging through the door into a freezing-cold, dark room that reeked of manure. A mechanical thrumming filled the air, the sound of refrigeration units atop the building.

Judy followed, but the stench of manure overpowered her, triggering her gag reflex. Her step slowed, and she covered her mouth instinctively, trying not to throw up. She could barely see a thing, and the room was dark except for a single bare fluorescent panel on one of the wooden racks of brown mushrooms, which ran the length of the immense room, almost floor to ceiling. Narrow aisles ran between the racks, and as her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she could make out the dim outline of twenty-some figures moving up and down the aisles, hunched over the trays.

She walked past, shuddering against the cold, her eyes tearing from the manure stink. They looked like shadows instead of people, but they were men dressed for the frigid temperature in heavyweight hoodies and bulky jeans, with baseball caps over their puffy white-paper hairnets. None of them looked up, but stayed face-down as they picked small brown mushrooms from trays of thousands, seeming not to see or hear her. She realized that they all had earplugs in against the mechanical noise.

Judy felt so disturbed by what she was seeing that she found her pace quicken. She couldn’t have imagined such awful working conditions, worse than hell itself, because of the manure. She caught up with her aunt, who was at a door in the back wall, with more Spanish and English signs, then one in a language she didn’t recognize:
TOLONG TANGAN HALANGI PINTU! Do not block door!
Judy placed a hand on her aunt’s back. “Go, please, I can’t take this smell.”

Aunt Barb opened the door. “This must be the packing room.”

Judy followed her into another massive cold room, filled with manure smell and mechanical noise. She blinked against the sudden brightness from fluorescent panels suspended from a grimy corrugated ceiling, illuminating twenty-odd women working at a long assembly line, packing mushrooms behind a wall of heavy machinery that had huge rolls of plastic wrap.

Her aunt hurried ahead, but Judy slowed to take it in, imagining poor Iris working here. None of the women looked up, their ears plugged against the refrigeration noise, breathing in the manure smell. They were white, Hispanic, and Asian, all dressed in dark blue smocks over hoodies and wool hats over hairnets, packing mushrooms into light blue containers, positioning them in the wrapping machines, stamping them, and placing them in large, unmarked cardboard boxes. The humans worked like robots, part of the assembly line itself, and the job horrified Judy as much as the growing room. She hurried ahead to keep up with Aunt Barb, past a time clock with yellow cards in trays, and reached a scuffed swinging door, pushed it open, and entered a short hallway leading to some sort of office.

“That was awful.” Judy took a deep breath, but the air was still smelly. She felt vaguely ashamed at herself, for beefing about the asbestos damages cases, but she knew that wouldn’t stop her.

“Finally, the office! Let me do the talking.” Aunt Barb flagged down an overweight man who looked to be in his mid-thirties, lumbering down the paneled hall toward them, a confused frown folding his fleshy face. His hair was a sparse brown, and he had on a light blue oxford shirt, loose tan work pants, and worn black sneakers.

“Ladies?” He waved back at them. “May I help you? The public isn’t allowed in the—”

“I’m sorry, but we’re looking for Julio,” Aunt Barb answered, as they reached the man. “He’s the boss, right? Or is Mike around?”

“They’re not here. I’m Scott Panuc, assistant operations manager. What can I do for you?”

“Scott, my name is Barb Moyer, this is my niece Judy, and I’m a friend of Iris Juarez, who works here—”