The Pearl Diver (33 page)

“Which was?” I asked, playing for time.

“If I didn’t say squat, I got released early, medical discharge, and VA benefits for the rest of my life. The others they split up to different places, better places than Vietnam. And afterward, when Robert was at the Pentagon, me and Garcia, we got the idea of how to make a little extra money off those guys. The guys who shot, and got away with it.”

“You turned on your friend,” I said.

“Hey, I helped him out. I even got him a good wife, one he could count on instead of that gook—yeah, I see your face. You don’t like me talking like that, do you? Especially in a restaurant like this, full of gooks. Sneaky. That gook chef was trying to figure
out if I was really legal to work—he almost messed up my VA benefit.”

“That’s a crime,” I said dryly.

“And that VC kid who works the bar, he never brings drinks back for me or anyone else. And you—you’re the worst one of all. Japanese, but not really Japanese, my sister said.”

“She told you to put me away, didn’t she?” I asked, sure of the answer.

“Lorraine’s not stupid. She let me know about the problem, told me to get Garcia to help me put an end to it. She’d been holding Robert in check all those years—and now he’s thinking of spilling. He says he don’t care if he gets court-martialed. But we do.”

So Robert Norton was a good man, fundamentally. Just as I’d thought. Andrea didn’t have to be ashamed of her father. The only one who needed to be ashamed was Lorraine.

“Move.” Mike Neblett hit me in the chest with the brass knuckles. I bent over with the pain, and choked out, “You hit me with those things when you got me in the car trunk. I felt them.”

“And I’ll hit you with them again. Then I’ll drop them back off at your boyfriend’s place. They won’t have his prints, but that don’t even matter. There’s all that bondage crap lying around, and his DNA is gonna be all over you.”

“You were there?” I felt like fainting.

“There’s a fire escape that runs along his bedroom and kitchen wall.” He laughed. “I made it to work late, but the show was worth it. I’ve been following you around for a while, as has my buddy. I lucked on that detail today. And I’m going to luck out tonight.”

“Garcia was the man with the gas can, I bet.” I wanted to keep him talking as long as possible.

“Yeah. You’ve stepped over him a few other times on the street, too. You tend to give money to women and children, you know that? It’s discrimination!”

“So Garcia knew I’d gone to the Marine archives.”

“Yeah. You were carrying stuff that said ‘Marines’ when you were walking down the street. He would’ve got the papers you were carrying and pushed you on the tracks, but there was people around and you were too damn quick. Took the wrong train, he said. But enough about all the misses. Tonight, we’ve scored a direct strike. And before we leave town, you need to chill.”

“My mood’s fine.”

“That’s not what I mean.” He hit me in the back, between the shoulder blades. I stumbled forward across the shards of broken glass from the picture. It gave me an idea. I faked a fall so I could pick up a shard, but as I did that, he kicked me so I really fell across the glass. I lost the shard and was stabbed in half a dozen places, cuts that hurt, but that were nothing as searing as the pain of the miscarriage.

He’d dragged me up and was steering me toward a huge walk-in freezer. He opened the door.

Oh, no. “Why in the world would you leave me in there? It’ll point straight to you, since you were here last. Jiro must have seen you when he was here a few minutes ago.” I was angling to get outside, where I could run somewhere, anywhere. That was the key, putting distance between us. I hadn’t run regularly in a while, but I knew the neighborhood, the Chinatown restaurants that drew big crowds, the place where the parking valets congregated.

“I don’t plan on leaving you in the Sub-Zero for good. Just a little chill-out period while Garcia and I find a car we can hot-wire. There’s a nice piece of land waiting for you in Virginia. You’ll make good vegetarian fertilizer, huh? Will you be organic or whatever that crap is you always talk about?” He laughed shortly.

He wouldn’t have to look for a car for long, because Hugh’s was parked right out back. It was locked, with the alarm on. If he broke into it, the alarm would go off, but would that interest anybody in a city where screeching cars were considered an annoyance rather than a warning? I had to keep my mind on other things. “A human body is not organic fertilizer,” I said. “And it’s
very hard to get away with dumping a body. Though I guess you did that with Sadako. But people know she was killed, it’s become clear. It’s probably just a matter of a few days before they catch you and dig up both our bodies. If I were you, I’d confess and save myself the death penalty for two murders.”

“That’s the one thing that you got wrong,” Neblett said. “We didn’t ice Norton’s first wife.”

“If I’m wrong about it, why were you so worried about what I was finding out? Why did you steal Andrea’s papers?” I would have done almost anything to stall getting in the freezer, but he’d opened the door and was starting to shove me in.

“Yeah, I didn’t know what was going to happen tonight, but it’s all right,” he said, as if to himself. “You got that guy’s DNA all over you. It’ll seem like you got hosed and then dumped. Even the knotted-up ties will help. Guess I’ll hide those in the apartment, with the brass knuckles. Man, we’ve got a lot to do.”

“But what about Andrea?” I called out just as the door slammed shut on me. Andrea was my last hope, because she was going to call me at the apartment to talk. She might have already, and if Hugh hadn’t been too sleepy to pick up the phone, he might have actually gotten out of bed to look for me and found the note. If I disappeared, Hugh would be suspicious—but I’d taken the paperwork with the names Neblett and Garcia with me, so he wouldn’t know whom to tell the police about. Even the good-bye note I’d left wouldn’t necessarily help, because I hadn’t dated it. The police might believe that it was from days or weeks earlier, or written under duress. If I were found dead, Hugh would be the leading suspect, especially since Kendall, Harp Snowden, and Win—all my Washington contacts, practically—knew we were having relationship problems. And if Andrea kept searching for the truth, she would be snatched up by Neblett and Garcia, too. Yes, I was sure they would like her to join me, along with her mother, in the plot of land Neblett had mentioned.

It was so silent in the freezer. Silent, and freezing. I hugged my hands into my armpits, the warmest part of my body. I had never minded the winter, but I’d had my winters in California and Japan, so mild as to be laughable. I laughed, just to hear that I could still breathe and speak. Oh, Hugh. I spoke to him as if he could hear me. You were so paranoid because you knew something would happen, you had a sixth sense! Standing in the kitchen, you saw the ghost that I would become.

Women were supposed to have a sixth sense, not men. I’d failed my gender. The surface of my watch glowed, and I watched the time tick past. How long would it take for Neblett to line up his friend and steal Hugh’s car? Maybe twenty or thirty minutes, tops.

A grating sound caught my attention, and slowly the door of the freezer opened. I’d been crouched down in the farthest corner, as if that would keep me from being found. But as the door widened, a swath of light cut in. Behind it stood Jiro Takeda.

“So you are with Neblett,” I said. “Well, I am surprised. But I guess it makes sense. You hired him.”

“Get out!” Jiro sounded horrified. “You may be crazy. You may need the hospital. But you will not die in my clean Sub-Zero!”

I moved forward, awkwardly, into the light, and asked, “Jiro, why are you here?”

“I wanted to see what papers you had viewed. Have you seen mine yet? No? If you had found mine, you would see that I was born near Tokyo. I spent most of my life elsewhere, so I have no real Japanese accent and—my confidence.”

“But I don’t care where you were born!” I cried. “Jiro, we’ve got to leave. The man you know as Toro is coming back with his friend to take me away and kill me.”

“
Heh
?” Jiro said. “I saw your bag and the broken picture on the floor. I knew something was wrong. Is it really the case that the dishwasher hurt you? I must tell you that I suspected him all along. He is a bad sort, working for pay when he is supposedly medically disabled—”

“Quick, Jiro!” I whispered. I’d just heard a big bang in the front of the restaurant. “We’ve got to get out, I don’t know, some way.”

“The kitchen door,” Jiro said, grabbing his long knife from the roll next to his workstation. Then he used his empty hand to grab mine and lead me out the back door. But the door wouldn’t budge.

“He must have blocked it,” I said.

“We’ll take the emergency exit, then. It’s near the rest rooms. We must move through the kitchen door out to the dining room.”

We changed direction. I felt reassured by Jiro’s hand, toughened and callused from years of cooking, in mine. I was also glad for his knife. But Jiro was a chef, not a former Marine trained in guerilla combat. It would be two against two—Jiro and me against the two Vietnam vets, who probably understood hand-to-hand combat.

Jiro eased open the swinging door and I was at his side just as the glass in the front door shattered. How blatant did they dare to be? I guessed they didn’t care about smashing up Marshall’s restaurant. Too bad there were no businesses still open nearby, nobody right there to call the cops.

We had crept halfway down the hallway to the emergency exit
when the light came on in the front of the restaurant. I heard the sound of more than one person moving. I rushed toward the emergency exit, but when I pressed against it, it stayed resolutely shut.

“Oh, no!” Jiro said. “The door can’t be locked. Ken Chow’s boys must have done it to get us in trouble with the inspector—”

“Ssshh! We’re just going to have to run for it—”

But before I could do that, the footsteps had crossed the dining room and I was staring at the intruders. Andrea and Hugh.

I shook my head, not understanding it for a moment. Then I realized that Andrea must have called the apartment as planned and spoken to Hugh. So the two of them had come to round me up. They would have saved me, if Jiro hadn’t already.

But Hugh was looking at Jiro with a horrified expression, and then I remembered that the chef had a cleaver in one of his hands.

Hugh raised his cell phone in one hand. “Mr. Takeda, I’m prepared to call 911. And if you must take a hostage, I’ll be the one.”

“Do call 911, Hugh,” I interrupted. “But it’s not Jiro who’s a danger, it’s Neblett and Garcia.”

“Who?” Andrea asked, looking at me as if I was speaking another language.

“Neblett’s Toro, the dishwasher. Lorraine’s brother. And Garcia’s a fake-homeless man who carries around a gas can. I’ll tell you more later, because we’ve got to leave this place very quickly. They’re on their way back—” I cut myself off as I heard a door slam in the kitchen. They must have already opened the freezer and discovered I was gone.

“It might be Marshall,” Andrea whispered. “There’s no way to tell for sure.”

Hugh had already dialed the police. “Emergency,” he said in a low voice. “Send the police to a restaurant called Bento, on H Street.”

“Finish on the way out!” I whispered loudly and motioned toward the front door, trying to coax all of them out. But nobody moved. It was so quiet that you could hear a pin drop, the sound of metal clinking against a floor.

I felt myself go cold as the pin dropping was followed by a
crisp pop. I whirled around to look at the door with the round window that separated the kitchen from the dining room. It was open, and something hard and metal hurled through it.

“Grenade!” I screamed, knowing there was no more time for us. It was too late to do anything but run. All four of us rushed for the front of the restaurant. Jiro, in the lead, was struggling to open the door—all the glass that Hugh and Andrea had broken, getting in, had complicated things. The grenade had rolled by the edge of one of the dining tables. I looked at it, keeping the mental count that I’d started since I’d heard the safety go off. One second had passed, now it was two—

“Come on!” Hugh bellowed as he struggled with the door. At this rate, we’d never all make it out in time.

“Get down!” I screamed at everyone, but they didn’t understand. Nobody backed away from the shattered door, even as I held the grenade in my hand, intending to throw it through. I did the next best thing, which was to aim it as hard as I could through the plate-glass window in the front, which bore Bento’s name.

I fell on top of Andrea, Hugh, and Jiro just as the grenade exploded. There was a thunderclap of noise, and along with it, lots of flying debris. Outside, I heard car alarms going off, and then, the sound of police sirens.

Now, as I lay entangled in bodies, I realized the impact of what I’d done. I’d launched the grenade into the street to keep it from killing us, but I had no idea if anyone was outside. I might have killed without intending to, the way I’d done before. I breathed in air slowly, trying to keep myself calm. War just didn’t work, as Harp Snowden said. And like him, I was a lucky one: a survivor.

“Who taught you to throw like that?” Hugh asked me the next morning at breakfast. We’d gone out to Urban Grounds after spending much of the night in the hospital. He’d had a Christmas tree’s worth of glass icicles pulled from the front of his body, as had Jiro, who’d been on the bottom, close to the broken glass from the door as well. Andrea had been in the middle, so all she’d gotten was a ripped-up dress and a ton of bruises. I’d suffered just a few lacerations on my back, and a nasty bump on the back of my head from a flying plate.

“Well, I did play some softball during my junior high years. I never formally joined a team, but in school, I did like to pitch.”

“Well, pardon me for thinking that you needed protection,” Hugh said. “One of the cops at the hospital said the grenade went off by the entrance to the vacant building next door. Nobody was hurt. It was the very best possible place, in such a difficult situation.”

“It’s hard to believe that, seeing how the restaurant fell apart,” I said. The force of the grenade had blown the huge plate-glass window inward, knocking over tables, chairs, and everything else in its path. “Not only Marshall, but the cranky old owner of the place next door, could probably sue me if they wanted.”

“Not if I have anything to do with it,” Hugh said. “Besides, I’m sure they’ll be delighted with the insurance payouts. Marshall will have enough money to redecorate, which you were saying was a plan of his anyway.”

“It was, and I don’t really care to be involved.” I sighed heavily. “I’m just grateful to you and Andrea and Jiro for coming into the restaurant and saving me from another car ride to hell.”

“I didn’t do anything but bollocks up the getaway,” Hugh said ruefully. “But we pulled together, like a regular bunch of troupers. Oh, look, the girl at the counter’s waving at us. The toads must be ready. I don’t suppose you could—”

“Of course.” I got up to bring our two breakfast plates over to our table. Hugh’s hands were so injured that he couldn’t pick up most objects or use a keyboard. I’d be the one to button up his shirts in the morning, and knot his ties. I’d have to learn the Windsor knot, and some other knots, too. After that, I could have Hugh where I wanted him. I smiled to myself, thinking about the possibilities.

“You look as if you’re daydreaming,” Hugh said while I cut up his toast and egg.

“I am,” I said. “I was just thinking that this whole business—people taking care of each other—is rather fun. Maybe it’s the right thing to do.”

“Yes,” he said, and his eyes lingered on me. “I’m never going to propose again, though. The ball’s in your court, darling.”

“That’s fine with me,” I said.

“Well, then,” Hugh said. “I’m looking forward to receiving your pitch—whenever it comes.”

But there was a lot more to life than playing catch-up with Hugh. The police managed to locate Mike Neblett and Leon Garcia leaving Washington, D.C., on Interstate 295 in a stolen car that contained rope, like I remembered, and several firearms and extra grenades that, it turned out, they’d gotten from a friend assigned to guard weapons in Quantico. They also had a map of Virginia,
with a small, remote state park circled. The place I was going to die, I knew. Perhaps the place where Sadako died.

But although the police had no trouble charging the two men on four counts of attempted murder, they were still reluctant to charge them in the disappearance of Sadako Norton. Mike Neblett, who’d admitted to kidnapping me and burglarizing Andrea’s apartment, steadfastly denied he’d killed Sadako. His comrade Garcia didn’t say anything, but he wasn’t talking at all, not even to his public defender. Garcia was presenting the perfect picture of a catatonic, drug-addicted Vietnam veteran, although I remembered so well how he’d talked a mile a minute the day he’d followed me to the Navy Yard.

Other ends remained untied as well. Win was in a rehab center, Kendall said, and while it was supposed to be one of the nation’s finest, there was no guarantee that it would change someone ambivalent about giving up drugs. And even though Kendall now understood the reason for her kidnapping, she wasn’t going to tell the police about the drug lords in her husband’s life. It would be too much scandal, she said, especially since she had been given a paying job as Harp Snowden’s special-events planner. It was her dream job, she said, and every woman should have a chance in her life to get exactly what she wanted.

The only one who had
not
gotten what she wanted was Andrea. Even though the men who’d forced her mother to run were behind bars, she still didn’t have a body to mourn. She had no closure. I brooded about this during the week I nursed Hugh, and then, when he was finally ready to go back to work, I told him about my idea. To my surprise, he had no arguments. He gave me the car keys and wished me Godspeed.

And so it came to pass that on a fine Wednesday morning, I was driving across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge headed for Kent Island, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Andrea sat in the passenger seat with a tourist map on her lap. She’d figured out the route to Stevensville, the town where Sadako’s last letters had been postmarked.

I squinted in the sun and started across the bridge, wincing a little at the feel of my back against the car seat. There were still a few sore patches on my back.

“Where do you think we should make the first stop?” I asked Andrea as we approached the turnoff sign for Stevensville. She had been fiddling with the radio for the last half hour, switching from station to station. She’d wanted a commercial pop music station, but I refused to budge from the local station I’d discovered, a public radio station operated by students at Kent County High School. KCHS played a fascinating mix of music ranging from Led Zeppelin to Lucinda Williams. Between these wide-ranging songs, the teen announcers tripped over the delivery of the nation’s, and their high school’s, news.

Andrea was looking out the window, as if she was lost in thought. She hadn’t become closer to her father since the unraveling of the past; ironically, he wasn’t upset about being court-martialed, but he was devastated that Lorraine was being considered as an accessory to the crimes against me. Already, she’d admitted to the police that she’d always thought her brother and Garcia had been behind Sadako’s disappearance, and she’d warned them about me, in order to keep her life with Robert and Davon from changing forever.

I lowered the radio and repeated my question again about where Andrea thought I should stop.

“We could go to a seafood restaurant and find out about the oyster-diving scene. A really good seafood restaurant, serving the local catch.”

“Great idea. I’ll pull into the next gas station to ask for a recommendation.”

The wiry young station attendant recommended Morrison’s, which had the best crab cakes, with no filler. I wasn’t sure we should take the recommendation of such a thin young person as gospel, so I made a second stop at the Main Tamer, a pet grooming and accessories shop on Main Street. The dog groomer who greeted us, a leathery-skinned blonde in her fifties, also recom
mended Morrison’s, but for the fried oysters. So Morrison’s it would be.

Morrison’s was in the next hamlet over, a place called Leeville, which we reached by driving along a pretty, twisting road where farm fields were interspersed with marine service shops, a firehouse, and old, inexpensive-looking farmhouses that Hugh would have become very excited about. We’d come back some other time, I promised myself.

The restaurant was a neat, modern clapboard-sided structure built on ten-foot stilts, protection from the occasional surges of the bay, which kissed the edge of a dock behind the restaurant. On either side of the restaurant were seafood processing and packing buildings. The parking lot surrounding Morrison’s empire was filled with trucks, mostly.

“Look at all those trucks. Florida, California,” Andrea said, reading the plates. “The packing house must be a really good one, to ship to all these places.”

“That, or they’re selling seafood from those states to the restaurant,” I said. “Remember the oyster shortage?”

It turned out that we were both right. The waitress who took our order vouched for the crabs and lobster being local, but the oysters came from the Pacific Northwest. Workers in the packing plant shucked, rinsed, and packed these Pacific oysters, just as they continued to steam, pick, and pack the local crab. Morrison’s was the only seafood business left in Leeville. There had been many more places twenty years ago, Dottie said, when the bay was healthy and its marine population bountiful. Morrison’s had survived because the family who owned it had been in the oyster-and-crabbing business for four generations and simply wouldn’t give up. They had the infrastructure of the packing plant, and plenty of crab pickers and oyster shuckers, now that the watermen didn’t have much to do on the bay.

“I find it amazing that this lobster really was caught in the bay,” I said to our waitress when a two-pound lobster came out fifteen minutes later on a platter with a little butter and lemon on
the side. I’d gone for broke when I’d heard they served lobster for less than $30. It was a bargain compared to Washington restaurants.

“Yep. The bay’s kind of screwed up these days. The oysters are gone, and the crabs are fading, but the lobsters have swum in. When life gives you lemons, huh?”

“Actually, that sounds a lot like our lives,” Andrea began, but the woman had already moved on to the next table. So we looked at each other and laughed.

“When life gives you lemons—” I began.

“Squeeze them over a lobster,” Andrea said. “Speaking of which, did I tell you I’m applying to cooking school?”

“I had no idea! Is it because you want to do something at Marshall’s new place?” Marshall had bought the building next to Bento, and was knocking down the wall between them to make one large restaurant. My heart had sunk when I’d learned he was scrapping the Japanese menu for Low Country cooking—a combination of North Carolina barbecue, grits, greens, mashed potatoes, corn pudding, and the like. But I couldn’t be too angry. Marshall was grateful I’d thrown the grenade outside the restaurant instead of allowing his place to blow to pieces—so grateful that he’d finally paid me in full. I was flush again, so flush that I’d even bought myself a ticket to the Harp Snowden fund-raiser taking place in two weeks at Harp Snowden’s own Kalorama residence. It would be a true
kaiseki ryoori
menu catered by Jiro with Andrea at his side, helping.

“I don’t want to work for Marshall much longer,” Andrea said, reminding me of what we’d been talking about. “Besides, I’ve got a really cool new option.”

“Oh?”

“Did you hear where Jiro’s going?”

“Sure. To Japan.” Jiro had told Hugh and me over
mojitos
at El Rincon that he needed to face his demons back in the land of his birth. He was going to part ways with Marshall to create his own American seafood restaurant on a beach. I had already told Norie
about it—and also about Jiro’s true Japanese identity, and how he’d saved my life.

Andrea continued, “Because I want to see my Japanese relatives, I figured that maybe I could work while I was over there to pay for my trip. Jiro will need Japanese servers and hosts, but he could use a real American cook. And even if the thing with my Japanese aunt doesn’t work out, I can just kick back with Jiro and drink saketinis.”

“That sounds like fun,” I said wistfully. “I wish I could go with you.”

“I could use the help,” Andrea said, taking a sip of iced tea. “This is really good tea. Presugared tea, the way restaurants are usually afraid to do it.”

“Since when have you had a sweet tooth?” I demanded. “You used to look at me stirring sugar as if I was killing myself.”

“I’m getting to like sugar more and more. I might even become a pastry chef. There are a lot of brilliant women in pastry.”

After we’d paid our bill, we asked if there was an old-timer in the area who knew marine divers. We heard the whole spiel again about the scarcity of oysters, to which we nodded sympathetically. But in the end, we were sent over to the packing plant, where a red-faced man in overalls with a shock of white hair listened to our query.

Andrea had asked me to do the talking because she thought she’d get too nervous, blow the thing. So, trying to avoid having to tell the whole story, I asked if he remembered hearing anything about a Japanese woman who’d lived nearby in the 1970s. I thought she might have dived, but I wasn’t sure. She probably had moved away and we were family, trying to get in touch.

He looked doubtfully from half-black Andrea to half-white me. I thought about telling him that race was about as impossible to define as the last remaining rock where the surviving oysters were hiding. I’d thought Mike Neblett was white, when he’d been black. Garcia had seemed African-American, but he’d turned out to be Puerto Rican. Norie had thought Jiro wasn’t Japanese.

“There aren’t many women oyster divers,” he said. “There was one a long time ago, but she retired. And folks said that she was Korean.”

That made sense, because Korean women were known for marine diving. There was a chance, maybe, that the two women, alone and Asian on a tiny American island, had bonded.

“What was her name?” I asked.

“I can’t recall, but like I said, she retired. The oysters have got so scarce, there’s not much business. The guys who’d been here before, well, they kept at it longer. She went in to work on land, I think. First grading oysters in the packing plant, and then she had enough money to take some college classes.”

“Who knew her?” I was not going to give up on this woman.

He shrugged. “Polly Westerbrook—she’s my cousin’s wife—was friends with her. She said something about having dinner with her in Centerville a few months back. So this gal’s still around, somewhere.”

Centerville was one of the bigger towns on the Eastern Shore; it would take about a half hour to get there on Route 50. But I wanted to talk to Polly Westerbrook first, so we wound our way back to the place where she was said to work: the pet store we’d stopped at on our way into town. Polly was in fact the dog groomer we’d talked to earlier. At the moment, she was shearing a bored-looking poodle.