Murder on the Cliff

by Stefanie Matteson

  It didn’t take Charlotte as long as usual to travel the length of Bellevue Avenue. She was driving her own car, an ordinary Oldsmobile. When it came to cars, she was in Spalding’s camp: pretentious cars weren’t her style. At the end, she turned onto Ledge Road and from there onto the private road leading to The Waves. The house was built in the form of a U surrounding a walled inner courtyard. Inside the courtyard, apple trees flourished and flower beds bloomed, protected by the building from the driving winds off the ocean. As she entered the courtyard through a low door in the wall, she saw a gardener working in a rose bed, and asked him where she could find the sumo wrestlers. “The important sumo wrestlers, or the rest of them?” he asked. “The important sumo wrestlers,” she replied. The gardener directed her to a door opening off the courtyard. She should have been able to figure it out for herself: outside the door was a simple pair of rope thongs.

  Shawn answered the door and bowed, Japanese style. He was wearing only a mawashi, a practice mawashi made of heavy canvas, rather than silk. In texture and size, it resembled a fire hose. He was shining with sweat.

  “I thought you were Lani,” he said, apologizing for his appearance. “Won’t you come in?” He gestured toward the interior.

  Once she had removed her shoes, Shawn ushered her into a huge wood-paneled room with giant windows overlooking the ocean. The oversized modern furniture had been moved aside to make room for futons that had been rolled up for the day. Shawn maneuvered a chair into position for her. “Why don’t you sit here?” he said. “I’m just going to put on a kimono. I’ll be right back.”

  The room was immaculately neat. Apart from the rolled-up futons and a couple of lacquered wickerware trunks, the only sign of the sumo wrestlers’ residency was a small shrine that had been set up at the side of the room. Above the shrine hung a scroll that was decorated with ink-wash calligraphy.

  Shawn returned a minute later wearing a summer kimono in shades of green that emphasized the deep green of his eyes.

  “I’m staying here with Lani,” he explained. “In Japan, we usually stay at temples when we’re on tour so we can practice on the grounds. Most of the rikishi are staying in condos in the mansions for the same reason.”

  “It’s beautiful,” said Charlotte, but she didn’t really mean it. The setting was beautiful, but the ultramodern furnishings seemed out of place, more suited to a New York penthouse than a vacation retreat by the sea.

  “Too luxurious for me,” he said. “Are you familiar with the Japanese idea of wabi? The rough translation is refined poverty.”

  Charlotte shook her head.

  “It means the absence of excess. Not wanting what’s lacking. Making do with what’s at hand. Enjoying simple austerity. It’s a concept that’s always appealed to me.” He smiled. “But I guess I can live with excess for a while.”

  “For the bachelor residence of two men, it’s very neat,” she commented.

  “It’s part of the sumo way of life,” said Shawn. “Always keep your surroundings neat so that you won’t be ashamed if you die while you’re away.”

  Charlotte raised an eyebrow in surprise.

  “Readiness for death is one of the pillars of the code of the samurai. It’s recommended that you meditate on death every morning and every evening. If you die every day in your mind, you won’t fear death. Death sharpens life, just as discipline sharpens pleasure.”

  Despite a hefty dose of native New England common sense, Charlotte had a superstitious belief in the power of mental images; to her way of thinking, if you imagined something powerfully enough, it might come true.

  “It’s a hard concept for Westerners to understand,” Shawn continued. “Most Westerners think it’s morbid, but actually it’s the opposite. By dying every day in your mind, you’re freeing yourself to live in the moment.”

  “I don’t think it’s morbid. I think it’s dangerous: by dying every day in your mind, aren’t you opening the door to death?”

  “Aha! That’s another difference between East and West. To the Oriental, tempting fate is impossible because your fate is preordained.”

  “Karma?” said Charlotte.

  Shawn nodded and leaned against the back of a chair. “I saw you at the match yesterday,” he said. “How did you like it?”

  “I loved it,” she replied. “I didn’t really expect to. I’m not a very sports-minded person. But I liked the swiftness of it. The immutability. It’s like acting in that respect: you only get a few minutes for your big scene; if you flub it, there’s no second chance.”

  “That’s what I like about it, too. Only one chance to win or lose. It’s very Eastern, very Zen-like. Of course, you need a certain amount of strength and size, but the important thing is concentration: to me, it’s more like ink-wash painting than wrestling.”

  Charlotte nodded at the calligraphy above the shrine. “One of your paintings?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Ink-wash painting is very much like sumo: the inspiration has to be transferred to the paper in the quickest possible time; you have to be entirely in the moment. If you hesitate, you’ll tear the paper. There’s no deliberation, no retouching, no repetition. Once executed, it’s irrevocable.”

  He gestured to French doors leading out to a grassy terrace where a canvas mat with a green circle outlined on it—a practice sumo mat—was spread out on the grass. A long black mawashi was draped out over a makeshift clothesline. “Would you like to sit outside?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she replied.

  On the way out, her eye was caught by an object sitting on a small table beneath the shrine. It was a chommage in a Plexiglas box, just like the one Lani had showed her the photo of. “Is this Lani’s chommage?” she asked.

  “No,” Shawn replied. “It’s mine.”

  Charlotte glanced up at Shawn’s hair, but his chommage was still intact.

  “Someone sends me one before every tournament. It’s their way of saying that it’s time I should retire. It’s a subtle form of harassment, one of many that I’ve had to put up with.”

  “Do you know who sends them?” she asked as she looked again at the chommage. It looked like the shiny pelt of a dead muskrat.

  “No. I have some ideas. But it doesn’t really matter—I look forward to getting them now. I use them in my meditations as a reminder of death, a memento mori. For a rikishi, retirement is a form of death.”

  He led her through the French doors to the terrace.

  As she followed, Charlotte noticed his peculiar gait: it was almost as if he were ice skating. Then she remembered something Spalding had said about sumo wrestlers sliding their feet to prevent stepping accidentally out of the ring. The gait must have become as habitual as a ballet dancer’s turnout.

  “This is where I practice; it’s also where I meditate,” said Shawn, as they reached the center of the grassy terrace. “It’s totally private. In Japan, we like to have sumo fans watch us practice. But outside of Japan, people stare at us as if we were freaks.”

  As many times as she had walked by The Waves, Charlotte had never noticed this terrace. From below, the wall surrounding it looked like part of the huge stone foundation that anchored the sprawling mansion on its rocky promontory. She said as much to Shawn.

  “I know,” he said. “I like that about it. We can see them, but they can’t see us,” he explained, looking out at the tourists who were picking their way across the rocks below. “Unless they’re looking directly at us.”

  Charlotte looked out, too. At the end of Ledge Road, a police scooter was ticketing illegally parked cars. The rocky ledges at the end of the road were a popular spot for fishing, diving, and rock-combing, and a problem with too many cars had led to the no-parking ordinance.

  “Did you ever notice the stairs?” asked Shawn.

  “No,” said Charlotte. “What stairs?”

  He led her over to a gap in the wall where stairs led down to an overgrown path that meandered across the rocks to join the Cliff Walk. “Eve
ry once in a while, a tourist strays off the Cliff Walk and ends up here. They’re always very surprised. Suddenly they’re practically in someone’s living room.”

  “They’d be very surprised indeed if they happened upon a couple of sumo wrestlers,” said Charlotte. “Especially in your skimpy mawashi.”

  Shawn smiled. “I’m used to wearing a mawashi,” he said, “but I forget that other people aren’t. Someone once told me it looked like a diaper.”

  Charlotte laughed.

  For a moment, they looked out at the ocean, where the surf surged against the rocks, sending plumes of spray into the sky. In the distance, an excursion boat was rounding the point, beginning its tour of the Cliff Walk from the sea.

  “I’m here about Okichi-mago,” said Charlotte, as they turned back toward a pair of lawn chairs that sat side by side, facing the sea. She explained about Lew Farrell asking her to look into the geisha’s death.

  “May I ask you a question?” Shawn said hesitantly as they sat down. The sumo creed dictated that he not show emotion, but there was a heaviness in his manner and a dullness in his deep green eyes that betrayed his grief.

  “Certainly.”

  “Did you see her?”

  Charlotte knew immediately what he meant. It was the survivor’s craving for the details of death, the details that were needed to fix the final picture of the dead person in the mind, to grasp the awful reality.

  “How did she look?” he asked.

  “She looked beautiful,” Charlotte replied. She described how, except for her broken ankles, there were no signs of injury. “Even the camellias in her hair were still in place,” she said.

  “Thank you,” he said. He leaned back, his tense shoulders sinking with relief. “I know it would have meant a lot to her not to have looked”—he paused to think—“ugly, grotesque. The police couldn’t tell me. They tried, but …”

  “I’m sorry,” said Charlotte.

  “The camellias. The symbol of premature death.” He smiled bitterly at the irony. “The police were here this morning,” he continued. “I couldn’t tell them anything. I don’t think I can do any better for you, but I’ll try.”

  “I remember the kouta you sang at the geisha party.”

  “‘Evening Rain’? Are you asking if I was making an appointment to meet Kichi after everyone had gone home?”

  Charlotte nodded.

  “Yes, I was. Kouta are known for their hidden meanings, but the hidden meaning in that one isn’t all that subtle. Paul Harris gave me a ride home; after he dropped me off, I turned right around and came back.”

  “You walked?”

  Shawn nodded. “It’s only a mile and half. It was about eleven forty-five when I got back to the temple. I was supposed to meet Kichi at the rendezvous tree—the pine at the corner of the gallery. But she wasn’t there, so I left.”

  “Did you see anyone?”

  “Not at the house. But when I was standing at the railing, I saw a man in a kimono on the Cliff Walk. He was walking away from the temple, in the direction of The Breakers. It looked like Tanaka—he was short and slight, with white hair—but I couldn’t say for sure.”

  “Did you look down? If you looked down and didn’t see the body, it would help us pinpoint the time of death.”

  “I really don’t remember.” He shook his head in uncertainty. “I remember looking out: that’s when I saw Tanaka, but I don’t remember looking down.”

  “Do you know of anyone who might have wanted to kill her?”

  “No. The only person I can think of is Tanaka. But I don’t think he would have killed her. He wasn’t that upset by our relationship. In a way, I think he actually liked it. He considered it a status symbol, that his geisha was having an affair with a sumo wrestler.”

  “Reflected glory?”

  “Something like that. A liaison with a geisha has more to do with manners than it does romance or sex; it comes from the ambition to be known as a gentleman. It would be comparable to a gentleman’s owning a fine collection of leather-bound books or a renowned painting.”

  It was the same observation Keiko had made.

  “It’s not uncommon for a geisha who has a patron to have an affair with an actor or a sumo wrestler,” Shawn continued. “To use the same analogy: it would be the equivalent of a gentleman’s loaning out his famous painting to be put on display at a prestigious museum.”

  “Except that your relationship with Okichi-mago wasn’t just a casual affair. At least, I didn’t think it was.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” Shawn agreed.

  “Which meant that the painting wasn’t going to be returned.”

  Below, a scraggly-haired tourist in a yellow windbreaker and navy blue baseball cap, with a pair of field glasses hanging from around his neck, had lost the Cliff Walk and was wandering up the path toward the house.

  “A wandering tourist,” said Shawn. “The path is hard to follow across the rocks.” He ice-skated across the grass to the head of the stairs, and hailed the tourist. “Excuse me, sir,” he shouted. “This is private property.” He pointed over at the rocks. “The Cliff Walk is over there.”

  The man raised his field glasses to look at Shawn. Then he looked down at a piece of paper in his hand, probably a map. Waving an arm in acknowledgment, he headed back down the path.

  Shawn ice-skated back to his chair. “The man who owns this condo told me that a tourist once walked right into his living room, and said, ‘Nice place you’ve got here.’ Where were we? Oh, Tanaka. Yes, he could have done it, I suppose. In anger over his painting not being returned. But I don’t think so.”

  “Did you know that Paul was planning to make Okichi-mago his heir?”

  “No,” he replied with surprise. “She never said anything about it.”

  “I guess he didn’t have a chance to talk with her about it before she died. But it does provide a motive—several other Harris relatives have a stake in inheriting Shimoda.”

  Shawn stared out at the shining sea. “I’m sorry,” he said as he caught Charlotte waiting for a response. “It seems so inconsequential to me—who did it. In the face of her being gone. I think about other things: like whether she died well—dying well is important to the Japanese—but I don’t think about who did it.”

  “I understand,” said Charlotte. “Just one more question.”

  “Sure,” said Shawn.

  “What about Takafuji as the murderer?” Admittedly it was farfetched, but why not ask as long as she was here?

  “What would be his motive?”

  “He hates you.”

  “Yes, he hates me, but I don’t think he’d kill Kichi on account of that. If he were, going to kill anyone, he’d kill me. I’ve always suspected him of sending the chommages. He’s going to hate me even more if I win the fall tournament and become the first foreign yokozuna in the history of sumo.”

  “Are you going to win?”

  For a moment, the fighting spirit flashed in his dull green eyes. “Yes,” he replied softly. “For Kichi.”

  The next event on the busy Black Ships Festival program was a reenactment of Perry’s landing at Shimoda. A black-hulled steamship similar to Perry’s flagship, the Susquehanna, had been borrowed from Mystic Seaport for the occasion. Drama students from the University of Rhode Island would be reenacting Perry’s presentation of the letter from U.S. President Millard Fillmore to the shogun’s representatives. The reenactment would be followed by a Dixieland jazz concert and a display of Japanese fireworks. But Charlotte decided to skip this event and visit Aunt Lillian. Her brief exchange with Aunt Lillian that afternoon had left her curious: what had she meant by saying that Paul had known Okichi-mago for years? And if this were so, why had he gone to such great lengths to make the point that he had met her just last year? He had said so when he’d spoken with Connie at the geisha party, and had reiterated the point in the speech she had just delivered. Then again, Aunt Lillian was nearly a hundred years old. Maybe she was mistaken. But it wa
s worth a visit to find out. After leaving The Waves—it had been a long shot anyway, but she was now convinced that Shawn had nothing to do with Okichi-mago’s death—she returned to Briarcote, and called Aunt Lillian. She was in, and she would be delighted to have a visitor. Connie gave Charlotte directions.

  A few minutes later, Charlotte was headed down Bellevue Avenue once again. Aunt Lillian’s house was located at the other end of town, near the Newport Bridge. It was the un-chic end, but it was also the oldest part of town. Her house, which was called Old Trees (did every house in Newport have a name? Charlotte wondered), was a gracious old Greek Revival mansion dating from the early nineteenth century. “One of the finest examples of Greek Revival architecture in America,” Connie had said. Rather than rattling around in the big old columned mansion, however, Aunt Lillian rented it out, and lived instead in a former porter’s lodge at the rear. Driving down the driveway to the rear of the mansion, Charlotte caught her breath at the sight of the porter’s lodge. It was the most perfect little house she had ever seen: a single-story Greek temple in miniature, encircled by a colonnade of Corinthian columns. The house had an air of weathered antiquity that went with, its owner: the paint was peeling and the property, as the name implied, was studded with huge old trees.