Murder on the Cliff

by Stefanie Matteson

  Spalding stood nearby, Connie at his side. He was giving a mild dressing down to a young Japanese man named Kenzako (Just-call-me-Ken) Mori, who was on the staff of the Japanese consul general’s office in Boston and was a member of the Black Ships Festival Committee as well. He had been responsible for extending an invitation to the last speaker.

  “What could I do?” he was saying to Spalding in self-defense.

  Charlotte had met him earlier at Connie and Spalding’s. He was an energetic man with a bouncy step and a taste for American living. He wore a sleek gray double-breasted suit and sporty aviator glasses. He also drove a baby blue Cadillac, which Charlotte found amusing, especially in light of the last speaker’s remarks. “American cars have the best design,” Mori had told her.

  Connie explained to Charlotte what was going on. The last speaker, whose name was Hiroshi Tanaka, was president of a privately held Japanese electronics company and one of the richest men in the world. He was also the head of a Japanese trade organization which had recently purchased one of Newport’s mansions.

  “They plan to use it as a corporate retreat and for entertaining American clients,” Connie said. “Newport was up in arms about it for a while, but as far as I’m concerned, the Japanese are no more foreign to Newport than the Texans.”

  Tanaka had volunteered the mansion, a huge Gothic pile of red sandstone called Edgecliff, for the Black Ships Festival Mikado Ball. Which was why Just-call-me-Ken had invited him to speak. That, and pressure from the governor. Tanaka’s company owned a factory which employed close to a thousand Rhode Islanders.

  Little had Mori known that Tanaka would use the opportunity to vent his spleen about what was wrong with the good old U.S. of A.

  “It really wasn’t his fault, poor man,” said Connie as she looked over at Mori, who was about half her husband’s size. “I hope Spalding isn’t too hard on him. He’s worked so hard on the festival.”

  As Charlotte headed over to the refreshment table to refill her glass of lemonade, she could hear Spalding ordering Mori to keep a muzzle on Tanaka for the remainder of the festival.

  Meanwhile, Tanaka stood at the center of a knot of adulatory Japanese, smiling broadly and bobbing his snow-white head in acknowledgment of their compliments. Apparently he had said what they all had been wanting to say for a long time: which was “Go to hell, America.”

  As Charlotte stood talking with Connie, her daughter, Marianne, came drifting over, or rather, clacking over. On her feet she wore the four-inch platform sandals the Japanese called geta. They were made of black lacquer.

  “You remember Marianne,” said Connie.

  “Of course,” said Charlotte as Marianne pecked the air on either side of her face. How could she forget. Marianne Montgomery was a well-known fashion designer. Well-known for her sex life as well as her fashions. Charlotte and Connie might have tallied up four and three marriages respectively, but they had nothing on Marianne, who at fifty or so—she looked at least fifteen years younger—had been married half a dozen times, the last time, which was seven or eight years ago, to a twenty-year-old Italian prince.

  “I like your outfit,” said Charlotte.

  She was wearing a voluminous kimono-like orange silk robe over a long, heavily textured silk skirt. The robe was tied with an obi-like sash of a metallic gold fabric. Against her white face, which was framed by shiny black hair cut in a Cleopatra style, the effect of the brightly colored masses of fabric was highly dramatic.

  “Thank you,” she replied. “It’s from my new collection—‘Geisha.’ We’re having a charity show at the casino on Saturday in honor of Okichi Day. I hope you’ll be able to come. It’s only fitting that the most famous geisha of the American screen should be there.”

  Charlotte smiled. “Of course I’ll be there,” she replied. “I read the reviews last week. You’ve made quite a splash.”

  “Thank God,” she said with a grin.

  “I never thought about it before, but I guess a good review is as important to a fashion collection as it is to a Broadway show,” said Charlotte.

  “With one big difference. In the theatre, a hit show usually means a long run, the sale of movie rights, sweatshirts, posters; in fashion, a hit collection means that you’re expected to repeat the same success again next season.” She shook her head. “It’s a bitch of a business.”

  “But she loves it,” said Connie.

  “I’m hooked,” Marianne agreed.

  Marianne’s story was a familiar one in the fashion world. She had started out in a basement with two sewing machines, and twenty years later, she was a millionaire. Of course, her family connections had helped—Connie’s Hollywood friends and Spalding’s society friends had lots of money to spend on clothes. But connections were no good if you didn’t have talent too. Her new collection was eliciting raves from the fashion magazines. She had taken the kimono-inspired shapes popularized by the Japanese designers and done them one better, replacing their dark, somber tones (one fashion magazine had dubbed it “the Hiroshima bag lady look”) with bright, vibrant ones.

  “Even the Japanese are raving about it,” said Connie. “Spalding says that Marianne is going to single-handedly rectify the balance of trade.”

  Several times a year Marianne unveiled a new collection, each more stunning than the last. Each collection had a theme—Egypt, the Old West, Russia. Many of the themes were tied in to her romances: the Egyptian statesman, the rodeo star, the Russian ballet dancer. Not in recent years, however. For the last five or six years she had confounded all expectations by remaining with the same man, with only an occasional lapse from the straight and narrow path of monogamy. Nor had her collections suffered as a result. If anything, they had become more complex and sophisticated.

  Her boyfriend was a freewheeling Texas tycoon named Lester Frame who loved her for her keen business acumen and her offbeat personality. She in turn loved him for his buccaneering spirit. Most of the time, she was faithful to him, but there was the occasional slip. If an analogy could be drawn between Marianne’s addiction to sex and a drunkard’s to alcohol, Marianne belonged in the periodic binge category. After months of sobriety, she was off on a bender.

  Lester was not a favorite of Connie and Spalding’s—it was probably Lester to whom Connie was referring when she had made her cutting remark about Texans. He was vulgar and rude, especially when he was drunk, which wasn’t infrequently. He was also a convicted felon, who had DONE TIME: eighteen months in a Federal minimum security prison for white-collar criminals. His crime was insider trading. Although it had been a big scandal at the time, it was small potatoes by comparison with the insider trading scandals that were to follow. He had passed along to a golfing buddy a tip about the takeover plans of a company whose board he sat on. The golfing buddy in turn had passed the tip along to his girlfriend and a dozen others. The golfing buddy and his girlfriend and the others had all made a pile of money as a result, but Lester himself hadn’t made a cent. Many felt he’d been betrayed by his friends and unfairly penalized by a judge who was out to prove that bigwigs weren’t outside the law. Dozens of influential friends had testified as to his patriotism, integrity, honesty, and so on. But whether or not he deserved his punishment was immaterial to Connie and Spalding. In their eyes, he was a criminal, period. Especially to Spalding, who came from a family with impeccable social credentials. But even a criminal was preferable to the parade of dark-skinned foreigners whom Marianne had been dragging through their living room for years. At one point, Spalding was convinced that she was taking her cues for her choice of lovers from the covers of National Geographic: in March, it had been the Spanish bullfighter; in April, the Nicaraguan freedom fighter; in May, the Indian filmmaker. Lester may have been a criminal, but at least he was a) an American criminal; b) a white Anglo-Saxon criminal; c) a rich, successful, and politically conservative criminal; d) a criminal who could be charming when he wanted to be; e) a criminal of a suitable age for Marianne; and f) a criminal who
genuinely loved her. None of which meant they had to like him.

  Charlotte could see him chatting with Tanaka on the other side of the porch—one tycoon to another. No one would ever doubt he was a Texan. He wore a wide-brimmed felt hat and cowboy boots with two-inch heels made of some kind of exotic reptile skin. Not known for mincing words himself, he’d probably enjoyed Tanaka’s provocative speech.

  As Charlotte looked on, Marianne surveyed the gathering, her gaze sweeping the porch like a klieg light. She had the practiced eye of the entrepreneur who depends on self-promotion to bring in business: she was always on the lookout for someone to have her picture taken with, someone to buy her fashions, someone to give her a good write-up.

  Finally her sharp brown eyes fixed on Nadine, who was talking animatedly with one of Spalding’s cronies in Newport’s old guard.

  “I see the gold digger of the year is here,” she said to her mother. Resting her chin on her hand, she carefully took in every detail of Nadine’s appearance, from her elegant spectator pumps to the expensive scarf around her long, white neck to her neat French twist. “She’s wearing a new Chanel,” she observed. “Paul must have handed over his charge card again. Chanel—how boring. I would have expected the mistress of a rich man to have more imagination, wouldn’t you, Mother? A jacket with four pockets, a straight skirt, and a bunch of pearls. She might as well be wearing a uniform.”

  Charlotte thought Nadine looked terrific.

  The rivalry between Marianne and Paul’s mistress was of long standing. They hated one another, and for good reason: each was what the other was not but wanted to be. Marianne had sometimes been called the ugly daughter of a beautiful mother. She had oodles of style, but at the price of hours of slavish attention to her appearance. Nadine came effortlessly by the glamor that Marianne labored so hard to achieve, but she had no worldly status. She was the widow of a wealthy man from a prominent family who had given most of his fortune away to noble causes and then died suddenly, leaving her with two little boys, a sprawling old Victorian cottage on Bellevue Avenue, and no money to speak of.

  “You should be nice to her, dear,” said Connie with a mischievous little smile. “Maybe she’ll give you a good write-up in the Newport Daily News.”

  Marianne snorted in contempt. Her face had a hint of innocent malice about it that Charlotte found intriguing. Her eyes were a little too close together, the corners of her mouth given to devilish little quivers.

  Nadine made a living of sorts as the society reporter for the local paper, which allowed her to attend the right parties and mingle with the social set, but it was sorry compensation for someone whose aspiration was to marry Paul Harris and become the doyenne of Newport society. As Connie put it: “First she had the name and no money; now she has the money [Paul’s] and no name. She wants the name and the money.” But Paul wasn’t cooperating. After five years, he’d still made no move toward marriage. To the contrary, he seemed to delight in his role as wealthy bachelor. Having a beautiful French mistress enhanced his man-about-town image; having her as a wife would only detract from it. It was getting to be a desperate situation for Nadine, who was faced with the choice of sticking with Paul in hopes that he would eventually marry her, or seeking her fortune elsewhere before time took too great a toll on her looks. A man who wanted a woman as an ornament generally wanted a bright and shiny one.

  Marianne was surveying the gathering again. This time, her sharp brown eyes alighted on a tall, muscular, and very handsome man in a navy blue kimono, on the other side of the porch. His dark brown hair was slicked back and fastened in a topknot, the traditional hair style of the sumo wrestler.

  Connie followed her daughter’s gaze and then looked over at Charlotte with dismay. They had both seen that look before. It was not unlike that of a bird dog in pursuit. Marianne’s jaw stuck out, her nose pointed at her quarry, and her nostrils quivered with anticipation. Had she possessed a tail, it would have stuck straight out in excited agitation. It was a look that was reserved for something that she had to possess, usually a man. The last time Charlotte had seen it was when Marianne had spotted the handsome young Italian prince at a party at her stepfather’s palazzo in Venice.

  “Following in Mother’s footsteps,” Marianne had said of the Italian prince. But there was a difference. When Connie had married Cornelio, a. k. a. Count Brandolini, she had been forty-five, the count fifty-one. When Marianne had married her Italian prince, she had been forty-five, the prince twenty. It had provoked quite a scandal. Though she denied it had been a motive, the marriage had also been good publicity for her “Palazzo” collection. She had no regrets, Marianne had told the gossip columnists when she split up with her young prince six months later. She claimed to have been in love with all the men she had relations with. Each of the men in her life was a point of light on her path to artistic enlightenment.

  Now another point of light was beaming its signal across the room, and Marianne was responding like a moth to a flame.

  “Mother, who is that gorgeous man?”

  “Shawn Hendrickson,” Connie replied. “He’s a sumo wrestler. He’s wrestling in the Black Ships exhibition tournament. One of the first Americans to reach the top division. A graduate of Yale, I think. An Ivy League wrestling champion who took up sumo. An Asian studies major; speaks fluent Japanese. Spalding’s followed his career pretty closely. He can tell you all about him.”

  “A sumo wrestler.” Marianne resumed her fixed stare.

  Charlotte could see the wheels spinning. An American sumo champion. What good publicity for her “Geisha” collection!

  “What did you say his name was, Mother?”

  “Shawn Hendrickson.”

  Hendrickson looked over in their direction and caught Marianne’s eye.

  “Excuse me.” Lowering her chin like a predator that’s spotted its prey, Marianne clattered off across the porch. Geta weren’t supposed to be worn indoors, but geta etiquette was a nicety that was lost on Marianne. Actually she didn’t do too badly for someone who wasn’t accustomed to walking in them. It had taken Charlotte a lot of practice to get it right for Soiled Dove.

  “I shouldn’t have said anything about him,” said Connie, berating herself. “She always goes on the prowl like this after a successful show; it’s as if success fires up her sex hormones. She can’t calm down until she’s seduced someone. At least it’s a man this time—if you can call twenty-five a man—and not a boy.” She rolled her pale blue eyes to the heavens and shook her head. “Oh Lordy, where did I go wrong.”

  Charlotte smiled. She was was familiar with the syndrome; it was common enough in Hollywood. But in her experience, it was usually the man who craved sex after nailing down the big deal or delivering the unforgettable performance. She remembered reading a study somewhere which reported that men’s testosterone levels surged after being awarded their M.D. degrees.

  The same was probably true of women; it was just that they’d never had the arena in which to assert their social dominance. It was certainly true of Marianne. She was simply exercising the sexual prerogatives of power, like the studio chief who has sex with the starlet on the casting couch.

  “Lester is not going to like this,” Connie predicted.

  Lester had also spotted Marianne and was watching her as intently as her mother was. Like her, his look of perturbation revealed that he was anticipating another slip.

  “Besides,” Connie added, “she’s not going to get anywhere with him.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I should have told her.” Connie giggled guiltily. “But she ran off so fast, I didn’t have a chance. She’ll find out soon enough. Oh, it’s a big scandal in Japan. It’s been on the front pages of the newspapers for a week. Are you familiar with the geishas’ patron system?”

  Charlotte nodded. She had learned a lot about geisha life in researching the role of Okichi. Although many prostitutes called themselves geishas, the true geisha was a skilled artist, talented in such traditio
nal arts as singing, dancing, and flower arranging. A businessman hired a geisha to entertain himself and his friends for the evening. “Pillow service” was not part of the deal. Except for the patron, or hanna. The patron was a rich businessman who offered the geisha financial support—often setting her up as proprietress of her own teahouse—in exchange for her becoming his mistress. She was free to carry on with her geisha activities, but she was expected to have sexual relations only with him. Being a patron was a status symbol among wealthy businessmen. It was a very cut and dried arrangement: often a business contact was drawn up.

  Connie nodded at Tanaka. “Tanaka is Okichi-mago’s patron. He set her up in her own teahouse six years ago. With his backing, she’s become the most well-known hostess in Kyoto, and her teahouse has become the most fashionable. It’s called the ‘American Tea House.’ People seek it out the way they might a restaurant owned by a movie star here.”

  “And?” prompted Charlotte.

  “Last week, she threw him over. Announced that she was breaking her contract. The Japanese are outraged. They’re calling her every name in the book. There are even editorials bemoaning the national decline of honor. Humiliating one of their leading citizens for …” Connie’s gaze shifted to the other side of the porch, where Marianne was flirting outrageously with Shawn.

  Charlotte completed the sentence: “An American sumo wrestler.”

  If body language could be X-rated, Marianne’s was. From across the room, Lester stared at her, his forehead creased in a frown. He had seen her through several of these flirtations—most recently with a college sophomore—and would probably see her through several more, but he clearly wasn’t happy about it.

  “If you ask me, that’s why Tanaka was so nasty. Getting back at the Americans for Shawn’s stealing his geisha. He’s probably mad at him for his success in sumo too. Spalding says the Japanese have really given Shawn a hard time. A lot of Japanese hate to see a foreigner succeed at their national sport, and to succeed so quickly.”