Murder on the Cliff

by Stefanie Matteson

  “He’s beautiful,” said Charlotte, reaching out to pet the dog. He was similar to a cocker spaniel, with a short muzzle, a mane around his neck, and a long, silky coat; but he was more exotic-looking. It struck Charlotte that he bore more than a slight resemblance to his master: he was small, spruce, and proud, with large, dark, protuberant eyes and an alert, intelligent bearing, but he also possessed the effete quality that goes with being overbred.

  The dog wagged his tail vigorously in response to Charlotte’s attentions.

  “They’re related to the King Charles spaniel. Of course, Perry was the first to own one in the West. Quite a few descendants of Perry’s dogs are still around Newport, as well as quite a few descendants of Perry himself.”

  “Kind of like Harrises,” joked Charlotte.

  “Yes, I guess you could say that,” Paul replied, his brown eyes smiling. “Well, are you ready for the Cook’s tour?”

  “Yes,” Charlotte replied. “I’m honored.”

  She was also curious. Not so much about the art, though she always liked to look at Japanese prints, but about the appointments. She had once seen articles on Shimoda in two decorating magazines in the same month: one had featured Paul’s rooms, the other Marianne’s. They had been vastly different.

  As Paul led her across the red-and-black-tiled floor of the foyer, he filled her in on the family dispute. She was already familiar with much of it from Connie, but he gave her his side of the story. At the back of his effort to break the trust by buying the house and donating it to the Preservation Society was his fear that Marianne or Dede would some day sell the property to a real estate developer. The fear was a real one: huge mansions on small lots were typical of Newport; Shimoda was a small house (by comparison) on a huge lot, a forty-acre promontory of tableland jutting out into the Atlantic with unsurpassed views of the ocean on three sides.

  “Marianne doesn’t need the money, but she isn’t very attached to the house, either,” Paul explained as they entered a parlor. “To her, it’s just a stage-set for her lavish parties, and keeping it up is a lot of work. If somebody offered her the right price, I’m sure she’d sell in a minute. If I’d already gone to my final reward, that is.”

  Charlotte recognized the room from the magazine: it was decorated with heavy, dark Gothic furniture, tall built-in Gothic-arched bookcases, and Japanese paintings and antiques.

  “Most of the furnishings are original to the house,” Paul explained.

  From the floor-to-ceiling windows the view was of smooth green lawn stretching out to the sea. Perched on a knoll at the edge of the cliff was a Japanese temple surrounded by pines whose limbs had been contorted like bonsai by the driving winds off the ocean.

  “The Temple of the Great Repose,” said Charlotte.

  The cliff-top temple was a replica of the temple in which Townsend Harris had lived with Okichi. It was a simple rectangular building with a low, hipped roof with overhanging eaves surrounded by a wooden gallery. But its simplicity was deceiving: the balance of its proportions and the beauty of the natural materials used in its construction gave it tremendous power and elegance.

  “Does it look familiar?”

  “Very.” Seeing the temple brought back vivid memories of filming Soiled Dove on location in Japan. “If we’d made Soiled Dove thirty years later, we could have used it as a set.”

  Paul smiled. “The Old Tycoon had it built here. Once the memories of his isolation faded, he started remembering the place fondly. After Lavinia died, it was boarded up. I pulled it out of the ocean five years ago. The hurricanes had nearly destroyed it. Part of the cliff washed away in the hurricane of 1938 and the rest in the hurricane of 1954. I had it completely restored.”

  “It must have been very expensive.”

  “Almost as much as restoring the house. It had been essentially without maintenance for years. The sun, the wind, and the salt air had really taken their toll. Nothing remained of the gallery and very little of the roof. The interior was covered with graffiti. Fortunately Lavinia had saved every document relating to its construction: plans, photos, bills—you name it. But it still took two years. I had to import all the workmen from Japan.”

  “I remember seeing it years ago from the Cliff Walk,” Charlotte said. “I used to wish that someone would take the trouble to restore it. Though I didn’t realize then that it was a replica of the Temple of the Great Repose; it was hard to tell what it was in that condition.”

  “It was a mess,” said Paul. He stared out at the temple, which looked as if it were suspended in the air above the glittering sea. “Fortunately, it’s one part of the property that my dear cousin once-removed and her low-life friends can’t defile,” he said. “The court has barred her from the premises.”

  “Though she’ll be there tonight.”

  “But that’s by invitation.” Turning away from the window, Paul led Charlotte back through the parlor, the frisky Miako at his heels. “Now for the rear parlor, her parlor. Are you ready?” he asked, as he paused next to a pocket door leading to the adjoining room.

  As Charlotte nodded, he ceremoniously rolled back the door.

  The room was identical to the first, but instead of antiques, it was decorated with an eclectic riot of furniture and objects d’art: New Guinea fertility masks, an Egyptian mummy portrait, a Tibetan thangka painting, huge blowups of models wearing Marianne’s fashions, a gigantic stuffed gorilla—the hide-away horde of a slightly mad and grossly acquisitive personality.

  “Do you believe this?” he asked. “Michael Rockefeller meets Lawrence of Arabia meets Dr. Livingston meets the Dalai Lama. This is the place where she stores her possessions before she gets rid of them.” His voice had taken on a complaining tone. “She goes through her African phase and her Egyptian phase and her Tibetan phase, and I have to live with the consequences.”

  Charlotte didn’t quite believe it. “It’s like those decorator show houses in which one room is decorated like a Moorish palace and the next like an English country house, except that it’s all in one room.”

  Paul shook his head in disgust. “I think she does it just to annoy me. Now she’s taking me to court again. She’s trying to prevent me from giving house tours.” He explained that he sometimes opened the house to house tours to raise money for charitable organizations. He continued: “She wants to prevent me from giving house tours, but she hasn’t the least compunction about giving a party for four hundred people in honor of a rock star.”

  “Rock star?”

  “Some British drummer. She says her parties are okay because the trust reserves the house for the private use of the family, and the house tours aren’t, because they’re attended by strangers. As if the people who attend her parties aren’t strangers.” He pointedly picked up a glass that had left a white ring on the glossy surface of a table. “She also objected when I allowed the filming of a historical documentary about the life of Townsend Harris.”

  His comments about the family made Charlotte think of Marianne’s brother Billy, who was ten years younger than Marianne. As Connie’s son, he should also have been entitled to the use of the house, but Charlotte had never heard Connie say anything about him in connection with it. “What about Billy?” she asked. “Does the trust entitle him to use the house, or is he just not interested?”

  “Both of the above. Marianne got him to sign away his rights for a million dollars eight or ten years ago. She said the house and property were worth ten million, which meant that his half of their half was worth two-and-a-half. In her eyes, a million was a fair price—it was a cash deal. But even then, I’d been offered thirty million, and I’ve been offered much more since.”

  “She deliberately cheated him?”

  Paul shrugged. “She says she was doing him a favor. He wanted the money to buy a boat. He’s since gone through that and a lot more. Do you know Billy?”

  Charlotte shook her head.

  “He’s boat-crazy. Anyway, this boat that he wanted came up for sa
le—a classic yacht. I don’t know the first thing about boats myself. He wanted the money to buy it and he wanted it now. Marianne took advantage of the situation. I don’t blame her completely. Billy should have known better. He’s the kind of guy who people take advantage of. Including his ex-wife. He lost the boat in a divorce settlement a few years ago.”

  “Does he resent Marianne for taking advantage of him?”

  “Oh no. They get along fine; they always have. He was grateful to her for coming up with the money. He’ll be here tonight; you’ll get to meet him. He has his own peculiar brand of charm—of the ‘I’ll never grow up’ variety. People like Billy are a common type in the never-never land of Newport. They have two goals in life: party as much as they can and work as little as they can. He’s succeeded pretty well at both.”

  From the rear parlor, Paul led her into the dining room, Miako nipping at his heels. “Here it is,” he said with a wave of his arm as they entered the room. “Court-dictated schizophrenia.”

  The room was divided into Paul’s section and Marianne’s section. Over the intricately carved Gothic mantel on the north side of the room (Paul’s) was a trompe l’oeil fresco of fruits, vegetables, and wild game, above which were painted the words of the doxology: “Praise God from whom all blessings flow …”

  “The fresco is original to the house,” Paul said. “It’s considered a superb example of American naive art.”

  On the south side of the room (Marianne’s) was a gigantic spatter painting à la Jackson Pollack.

  “Ridiculous, isn’t it?”

  It was, but it was also fascinating. And, although Charlotte never would have said so to Paul, it kind of worked.

  “Last spring, the surrogate judge ordered us to stop engaging in brinksmanship and to launch a new era of cooperation. Quote, unquote. When you see this dining room, you can see what a tall order that was.”

  “Like demanding an end to the Cold War,” commented Charlotte.

  “I wish it were as easy as that,” he replied as he led her through the dining room into the service wing. “Here’s what I wanted you to see,” he announced as they entered.

  The room was a memorial to Townsend Harris. A huge, ornately framed portrait of him hung on one wall. He’d been a handsome man with a fleshy face and a bushy mustache and sideburns. Around the room were mementos of Harris’s years in Japan. At first glance, Charlotte took in a campaign trunk, a telescope, and a collection of lacquerware.

  “Aunt Vinnie’s shrine to the Old Tycoon,” Paul announced. “No one’s allowed to make any changes in this room except for the addition of new historical materials.” He carefully straightened the portrait. “It’s a good thing too. Otherwise the Old Tycoon would probably be hanging next to a portrait of Marilyn Monroe or some other artistic monstrosity.”

  Charlotte wandered around the room, looking at the mementos: a pencil sketch of the Temple of the Great Repose; a set of pipes on a pipe rack; a woodcut of two Japanese spaniels; a worn and tattered American flag, the first foreign flag to fly on Japanese soil. Each exhibit bore a label with an explanation carefully printed in an old-fashioned hand.

  “I’m fascinated,” said Charlotte. “I wish I’d seen this before we filmed Soiled Dove.” Although she had studied the history books for her role, Aunt Vinnie’s display made history come alive.

  She was especially taken by a mannequin wearing the impressive gold-embroidered uniform that Harris had worn on his visit to the shogun’s palace. Linc Crawford had worn an identical costume in the movie, right down to the cockaded hat with the gold tassels. She remembered their laughing about how funny he looked in it. Lillian was right: he should have stuck to Westerns.

  “Wait until you see what’s next.”

  “The surprise?”

  “This is it,” he said, opening the door into an adjoining room.

  Entering, Charlotte found herself facing a faded sepia-toned photograph of a young Japanese woman. She was elegant and dignified, with dark, limpid eyes, and a long, oval face. Although she wore a kimono, she didn’t look Japanese. In fact, she might have been a young Victorian beauty. The label next to the picture read, “Okichi at twenty-eight.” Charlotte was spellbound. Although she had played Okichi, she had never seen a photograph of her. In her hair, she wore the camellias that were her symbol. They were tinted a deep red.

  “She was very beautiful, wasn’t she?” said Paul.

  “Yes,” Charlotte replied. “I hadn’t expected it.”

  “You believed the historians.”

  She nodded. The historians had written Okichi off as little more than a street prostitute. If she had really been the geisha of beauty and talent portrayed in the legend, they argued, she would have left Shimoda to seek her fortune in the nearby capital of Edo.

  “Historians are always trying to shatter legends,” said Paul. “But they always find out in the end that the legends have a basis in fact. Okichi-mago looks very much like her, as you’ll see when you meet. She’s still resting upstairs; otherwise I’d introduce you to her now.”

  From the photo, Charlotte’s attention shifted to a glass-topped mahogany case of the kind used by the Victorians for displaying collections of butterflies and minerals. Inside was a shallow, wide-mouthed sake cup, fired with a luminous sea-green glaze. “The cup!” Charlotte exclaimed. She looked up at Paul. “There really was a cup.”

  He smiled. “Yes, there really was.”

  It was the sake cup that Harris had given Okichi. The cup from which she had drunk for the rest of her life. The cup that she had left at the edge of the cliff when she had plunged into the ocean exactly a hundred years ago.

  “I always thought it was a screenwriter’s invention,” she said. Next to the cup was a yellowed, half-burned calling card. She could just make out the words ‘Harris. Consul and Plenipotentiary.’ “The calling card too!”

  Before taking her life, Okichi had built a fire at the edge of the cliff and burned all her papers. Found among the charred remains after her death was Harris’s half-burned calling card. Like the cup, Charlotte had thought the calling card was the product of a screenwriter’s imagination.

  “There’s more,” said Paul, directing her attention to another case.

  Inside were an ornamental comb and a round hand-mirror. Both were made of gold lacquer inlaid with mother-of-pearl in an intricate camellia pattern; both were exquisitely beautiful. Okichi had also left the comb and mirror at the edge of the cliff before taking her life.

  “Where did you get these things?”

  “Aunt Vinnie picked them up in Japan. She’s the one who set up these rooms. The keeper of the flame. She went over to Shimoda after Okichi died. Someone must have given them to her there.” He turned to the wall. “Here’s something else I thought you’d be interested in.”

  Hanging on the wall was a framed piece of paper on which a text was written in Japanese characters. The label said simply “Raven at Dawn.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Charlotte said, shaking her head in amazement. “The screenwriter must have been here.”

  Okichi had been famed as a strolling singer of shinnai, or love ballads. She was especially renowned for her rendition of “Raven at Dawn,” a bittersweet ballad about the ill-fated love between a courtesan and a young man. Charlotte had sung the song in Soiled Dove.

  “Shall I translate it for you?”

  She shook her head. “I think I remember the words.” Fragments drifted out of her memory: “… of last night’s vows of love, of lately whispered tales of tears and sighs, of a dear lover from the past …” And then, the refrain. She sang the words softly: “Sleeves wet with weeping, bosom torn with cares and sad regrets. The past will ne’er return: will drinking bring forgetfulness? Forget and drink—besides that, only to pluck the samisen with muffled fingertips. Once more I hear the raven’s cry at dawn: that memory … Night deepens on Shimoda’s waterfront. Tears falling, drop like red camellias.”

  For a moment, there was sile
nce. A lump rose in Charlotte’s throat as she thought of Line, her own “lover from the past.” It was as if the opaque screen that shielded those memories from her consciousness had been rolled back on the runners of her mind, just as their old Japanese housekeeper had rolled back the sliding wood-and-paper walls of their little villa overlooking the seaside village, to let in the morning air. Indeed, it was the mornings of those idyllic weeks in Japan that she remembered best: waking up in Linc’s arms on their silk futon under the gauze mosquito netting, golden threads of light seeping through the bamboo blinds; the sound of the cocks crowing and the wavering falsetto of the housekeeper’s voice as she chanted her monotonous incantations to the Shinto spirits; and, once the screens had been rolled back, the magnificent view of Mt. Fuji across the bay, serene and gleaming.

  Paul broke the silence, smiling with his warm brown eyes. “That was lovely,” he said. “Would you like to see the prints now?”

  “Yes, I would,” she replied, following him into an adjacent room.

  The room was a gallery of woodblock prints. Charlotte wandered from print to print: lovers, courtesans, actors, sumo wrestlers—the denizens of the floating world. Each a triumph of two dimensions, relying solely on line and color to create a sense of movement and form. In their avoidance of perspective and shading, the Japanese had anticipated the modernists by two centuries.

  “I’m stunned,” said Charlotte. “This is a collection worthy of a great museum.” It must also have been very valuable. Although ukiyo-e now cost a lot more than they once had, they had never been cheap. They had been in fashion since the end of the last century. Even Van Gogh and Degas had been collectors.

  “I’ve been collecting for years,” Paul said proudly. “It’s my hobby, or rather, my obsession.”

  On the far wall, she stopped to admire an Utamaro print of a young couple drinking tea. She loved the tall, willowy figures, the delicate features of the elongated faces, the brilliant colors of the elegant silk robes, the sensual curves of the folds in the fabric.