The Pearl Diver (28 page)

“Leave my private life alone. Yours is enough of a mess, okay? You’re going to have to tell Kendall what you did with the money, and why that terrible thing happened to her.”

“Give me twenty-four hours, okay?”

“How can I know you’ll do it?” I asked skeptically.

“Just watch this.” Win stepped out of the car and hurled the vials filled with little chunks at the Dumpster. They hit the edge, and shattered into hundreds of tiny pieces. He’d created a hazard to the general public—but at least nobody could use the crack cocaine to get high.

I expected Win to come back to the car, but he bent over double, almost hugging himself. He was crying openly now.

“Win, I—” I didn’t want to say that I was sorry, because I thought I’d done something necessary. “Come with me. I’ll drive you back to your car.”

He shook his head. “Just go. I’ll find my own way back.”

As I drove away, I began to worry that Win had tricked me with his big show of smashing the container of drugs. My words might have just flowed over him. From what I’d heard about addiction, supposedly someone like Win would have to hit rock bottom before he would want to change.

I was driving along Rock Creek, whose waters would flow into the Potomac, the river where Sadako had disappeared. Because I had nothing better to do, I followed the parkway out of the park itself, passing the Watergate complex and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. I parked illegally just south of the bridge to Theodore Roosevelt Island. There, I stood, looking across the water to Virginia. Almost thirty years ago, Sadako Tsuchiya Norton had left her clothes on the sand and gotten in the water, to drown herself or swim to Washington. She’d have come out within a mile or so from where I was standing. She would have been dripping and bare in the midst of tourists and people who worked in the district.

I shook my head, remembering what she’d written in her diary about missing the water. Had her life really become so circumscribed that she’d ended it by entering this puny stretch of the
Potomac—when, if she’d traveled an hour or two south, she’d have been able to enter the Chesapeake Bay, a substantial body of water?

Sadako didn’t have a car, I reminded myself. She would have had to take a bus or a taxi to get to such an area, and at the time, a striking, young, Asian-looking woman traveling might have been remembered.

Still, the clothing detail bothered me. I had no sense anymore whether she’d put the clothes there, or the men had done it. Men—not necessarily. I shook myself. I’d been so focused on the men whom Sadako had mentioned in her note that I hadn’t thought much about Lorraine. She’d known Robert Norton since high school, and she’d wanted him free to marry her. And Lorraine was a tall, muscular woman—I’d seen her pictures from the time of her wedding. With or without a helper, she could have hauled Sadako’s lanky frame, which the police report said had weighed just 125 pounds. Maybe Lorraine had tricked Sadako into taking a drug that had made her sleep, made it possible to dump her somewhere, not the river, but perhaps an abandoned farm field or a wooded area where she’d decompose and never be found.

Lorraine might even have been driving the car that had picked me up. I had felt sure that it was a man’s arms that had lifted me, but there had been another person, a driver.

I didn’t think much of Win, but somehow, I’d believed him when he’d said so emphatically that the gang he’d owed money to had nothing to do with my kidnapping. There were two much stronger possibilities. Either my abduction was related to the restaurant feud, or to the Nortons. To throw off the police, the whole idea of my kidnapping could have been copied to make it look related to Kendall’s kidnapping.

I stared into the rushing water, thinking about it. Only the siren of a police car whizzing by reminded me that I was parked illegally. I climbed into the Lexus and swung cautiously back into traffic, curving back on the roads that led to the Mall. I didn’t know if the answer to my questions lay there, but it was worth a try.

Senator Harp Snowden’s office was in the Hart Senate Office Building, I remembered Kendall mentioning to me once. Parking near it would be impossible, so I left the car in the Union Station garage. From there, I walked the couple of blocks to the imposing, modern building. I made it through the metal detector and over to a directory, where I learned that Snowden’s office was on the third floor. A crowd of people were waiting at a bank of elevators, but there was still an elevator open that had only one man inside. I hurried forward and stepped in.

Just as I did, someone in the crowd said loudly, “That’s for senators only.”

I caught my breath, but the door had closed and I was riding upward with a dignified, gray-haired man in a pin-striped blue-and-black suit.

“Which floor do you need?” he asked.

“The same as you. Three,” I said, trying to guess who he was. I should have known, but I was so awful at celebrity spotting. “I’m sorry. It’s my first time in this place. I rushed in without really looking, something I do more than I should.”

The mysterious senator nodded, but didn’t reply. I was relieved to get out and dash off to Suite 321. The grand, airy feeling the building had downstairs was missing from the office’s waiting room, which, while fitted with beautiful redwood furniture, was low ceilinged and lit too brightly. A television was going in the corner near the couches and chairs that were meant for the people waiting. There was a high desk behind which sat a young African-American woman with cornrowed hair and wearing a conservative blue suit. Kendall’s words about dressing Republican came back to me.

“Yes?” she asked after I’d finished checking her out.

“Hello, Carla,” I said, after spotting her name on a sign on her desk, “I’m Rei Shimura. I’m a—friend—of the senator.”

From the way she looked at me, I guessed she’d heard that line a few times. “You’re not on the agenda.”

“Well, it’s a matter that came up. Is he really busy?”

“He’s always busy. At the moment, he’s out. We have a policy asking lobbyists to make appointments several days in advance. Which group do you represent?”

“I’m not a lobbyist,” I said. “I’m one of his California constituents and truly, I know him. It’s hard to believe, but I do.”

“You’re welcome to wait for our chief of staff.” Carla again bent her head to her work, which seemed to consist of opening letters, reading them, and placing them in different piles. I turned my attention to the television, which was playing some Snowden propaganda. It looked like a campaign advertisement, I thought, watching a celluloid Harp Snowden wave to a crowd from a stand in what seemed like a New England country village. Then he was striding slowly through an urban neighborhood, stopping to hug children and clap an adolescent boy on his back. In the background, I heard the swelling sounds of Coldplay.

“Is he already running for the Democratic nomination?” I asked after viewing the ad.

“Nope,” the receptionist answered. “This is a sample ad, the one they might run on MTV if the focus group likes it. I like the music, do you? I hope the group will let us use it.”

“Maybe they will,” I said. “Do you mean to say that there are other ads, too?”

“You’ll see them all. It’s on a fifteen-minute loop.”

The next ad was aimed at a more conservative market, and included an old photo of a twenty-something Harp in his military uniform, then in his thirties, with his wife and children, and now, in his fifties, helping a senior citizen across the street, and speaking on a bucolic New England town square. There was something about the picture of Harp in uniform that dogged me, but I was distracted by the appearance of Harp and Martina coming through the door.

I sprang to my feet. “Senator Snowden! I don’t know if you remember me, I’m Kendall Johnson’s cousin—”

“Of course I remember you, Rei Shimura.” The senator beamed
at me. “Have you come to volunteer? That’s done out of our campaign office, which is separate—”

“It relates to that,” I said quickly. “It’ll only take a few minutes.”

“Rei, I’ll be happy to give you the name of the proper person to whom you can report. The senator’s too busy to talk.” Martina was impatiently tapping the toe of her pump against the floor, as if she couldn’t wait to whisk the senator back behind the heavy door leading to the office proper.

“Actually, it’s a matter of some sensitivity—”

“Martina, why don’t you make those calls we were discussing and I’ll take Rei into my office for a few minutes.”

“Not more than five,” Martina said. “You’re very busy this afternoon.”

A moment later, I was in the inner sanctum: a large, rather preppily decorated room, all except for a poster commemorating a wine festival twenty years ago in Sonoma County, which hung on the wall amid an assortment of photos of the senator shaking hands with his friends: Nelson Mandela, Bill Clinton, and more faces I should have recognized but didn’t have the time to ponder. The senator seated himself on one side of an antique mahogany partners desk and motioned for me to take the chair on the other side. It all felt very historic and civilized, but I knew Martina had probably set a timer on the visit and I’d have to rush forward in a twenty-first-century manner.

He beat me to the punch. “How has your recovery been? I couldn’t ask you about that in public the other evening.”

“I’m all right. I didn’t know that you knew I was kidnapped.”

“It was in the paper. Actually, it’s a bit of a coincidence, isn’t it, you seeing me that night, and then the abduction happening just as it happened with your cousin.”

“The thought never occurred to me that you were a factor in either kidnapping.” Though maybe it should have.

“I’m reassured that you feel that way.” He paused. “Kendall told me she was worried it might look bad to the press, the coincidences, I mean—”

“I’m not interested in that. But I did want to talk to you about Kendall. She feels like—well, she’s getting the cold shoulder all of a sudden.”

“Really? I can’t imagine why unless it’s a misunderstanding. Maybe Martina’s keeping her out because of this fear of too much association of me with young women, given some situations with politicians in recent years.”

“She said you didn’t answer her phone calls anymore. And I know that you can screen those calls yourself—”

Harp Snowden sighed. “Yes, I admit to doing that occasionally. I’ve been busy, and I admit I bypass calls from friends if I’m doing something important.”

“You may have realized that there won’t be as many contributors coming from Kendall’s corner as she promised. In fact, there might be a legal problem if she persisted in bringing in those people and their funds. I just wanted to warn you—”

“You don’t need to explain.” Harp put a finger to his lips. “Thanks for the tip. We’ll consider her work done.”

“That’s not what I mean.” I was desperate. “
Please
make sure that Kendall isn’t left on the outside. She’s going through a lot of…trouble…right now. She needs to earn some money, and you know she has good ideas. After viewing the sample commercials in the reception room, I can tell that you followed her advice on music that would appeal to younger voters.”

“The new music. I can’t keep it straight. And of course, my staffers haven’t a clue as to who recorded
L.A. Woman
.”

“The Doors,” I said. “In the late sixties, early seventies, right?”

“The year I got shipped home from Vietnam, 1971.”

“Actually, I wanted to ask you something about Vietnam. Do I have a minute left?”

Harp Snowden glanced at his watch. “You have three. What else do you need to know?”

“I wanted to know more about what happened to you in Vietnam. You said that you’d been injured in a friendly-fire incident.”

“It wasn’t friendly fire, but fragging.” He raised his eyebrows.

“I don’t recognize the word. It sounds like some kind of hazing—”

“The lingo comes from the term for a specific kind of grenade that was the preferred weapon for angry soldiers to use against their own officers.”

I sucked in my breath. “Who did it? And why? I can’t imagine anyone doing that to someone like you.”

“Oh, plenty of people would have loved to see me dead.” He smiled ruefully. “I’d come down extra hard on some of the guys who’d been caught smoking heroin the month before, and of course they thought I’d been too easy in my punishment for another soldier who’d briefly gone AWOL. Not to mention, the platoon had caught on to the fact that I was reluctant to use my own weapon. But to answer your question, I didn’t see who did it. It happened at night. I wouldn’t even have known to react and take cover except for hearing the pop of the spoon on the grenade’s safety lever. Then I knew I had four or five seconds until it exploded. I bolted instead of sticking around to figure out who’d thrown it.”

“I can understand why, and thank God you only lost your foot.” I realized how bad that sounded. “I don’t mean to say only. It’s just that, I mean, after what happened to me…I’m so glad to be alive. It could have been much worse.”

Harp nodded. “I feel the same way. And because I lost my foot, I was sent home, which probably saved my life.”

I knew I’d used up my five minutes, because I heard a sharp knock at the door. But I hadn’t gotten what I really needed yet. “One last question. I’m trying to find out if something like that happened to another former Marine. How could I do the research, if he won’t talk to me?”

Harp looked at me. “The Marine Corps Historical Center, in the Washington Navy Yard, has records from Vietnam. And the information is so old now that it’s no longer classified.”

“Thanks,” I said, just as Martina appeared through the doorway. “You’ve been so helpful.”

“As you’ve been to me. Thanks for the, ah, heads-up on your cousin.”

“What about her cousin? Did I miss something?” Martina demanded.

“Let’s see if we can’t get Kendall on the payroll somehow. And back at my table at dinner. By the way,” he said, turning to me, “will you and your fiancé be there?”

“Hugh’s not my fiancé anymore. I’d come if I could afford it, but I don’t have a trust fund like Kendall. I wish you luck with it.” I realized how disjointed my words sounded. “The dinner, I mean.”

He smiled again. “Thank you. And I’m sorry to hear things didn’t work out with the Scotsman. I liked him.”

I stood there for a moment, feeling strange. Harp Snowden did that to me—one time, he would turn me off with his smoothness, and then another time, he would say something that revealed character in a way that made me want to take a second look. He obviously had the power of a truly magnetic politician, someone who could make it to the White House no matter where his sound track came from.