Roses Are Red - James Patterson [57]
My very last interview turned out to be the most intriguing. It was with a woman named Hildie Rader. I was bored and distracted, but her opening line perked me right up.
“I think I met one of the kidnappers. He was here in downtown Hartford. I was as close to him as I am to you right now,” she said.
Chapter 77
I TRIED NOT to show too much surprise. “Why didn’t you tell anybody before?” I asked.
“I called in to the hot line MetroHartford set up. I talked to a couple of ding-a-lings. This is the first anyone got back to me.”
“You have my full attention, Hildie,” I told her.
She was a large woman with a pretty, homey smile. She was forty-two years old and had worked as an executive secretary. She was no longer with MetroHartford, which might have been why no one had interviewed her earlier. She had been fired twice by the insurance company. The first time she was let go was during one of the company’s periodic and fairly regular belt-tightenings. Two years later Hildie was rehired, but she had been let go three months ago because of what she described as “bad chemistry” with her boss, the CFO of MetroHartford, Louis Fincher. Fincher’s wife had been one of the tour-bus hostages.
“Tell me about the man you met in Hartford, the one you believe might have been involved with the hostage-taking,” I asked after I’d let her talk.
“Is there any money in this for me?” she asked, eyeballing me suspiciously. “I’m presently unemployed, you know.”
“The company is offering a reward for information that leads to a conviction.”
She shook her head and laughed. “Hah! That sounds like a long, drawn-out affair. Besides, I should trust the word of Metro?”
I couldn’t deny what she’d said. I waited for her to collect her thoughts. I sensed that she was thinking about just how much she wanted to tell me.
“I met him in Tom Quinn’s. That’s a local watering hole on Asylum Street near the Pavilion and the Old State House. We talked, and I liked him okay. He was a little too charming, though, which set off my warning alarms. The charming ones are usually trouble. Married man? Fruitcake?
“Anyway, we talked for a while, and he seemed to enjoy himself, but nothing came of it, if you know what I mean. He left Quinn’s first, actually. Then a couple of nights later, I met him again at Quinn’s. Only now, everything’s changed. See, the bartender is a very good friend of mine. She told me this guy had asked her about me before the night I met him. He knew my name. He knew I had worked for Metro. Out of sheer curiosity, I talked to him the second time.”
“You weren’t afraid of the man?” I asked.
“Not while I was in Tom Quinn’s. They all know me, so I’d get help in a nanosecond if I needed it. I wanted to know what the hell this guy was up to. Then it got pretty clear to me. He wanted to talk about MetroHartford more than about me. He was clever about it, but he definitely wanted to talk about the executives. Who was the most demanding? Who called the shots? Even got into their families. He asked specifically about Mr. Fincher. And Mr. Dooner. Then, just like the other time, he left before I did.”
I nodded as I finished making a few notes. “You never saw him again, never heard from him?”
Hildie Rader shook her head and her eyes narrowed. “I did hear about him, though. I had stayed good friends with Betsy Becton. She’s one of the assistants to Mr. Dooner, the chairman. He calls the shots at MetroHartford.”
I had seen Dooner in action and I agreed with Hildie. He was the boss of bosses at MetroHartford.
“This is interesting,” she said to me. “Betsy had met a fella who looked just like my guy from Quinn’s. Because he was the same guy. He sat down next to her at the coffee bar in the Borders on Main Street. He chatted Betsy up while they sipped