Murder on the Cliff

by Stefanie Matteson

  She was awakened by a voice in her ear, a voice with a Cockney accent. “There’s someone here who says he’d like to speak with you. He says it’s urgent. Shall I show him in?”

  She opened her eyes: it was the club manager. Clubs like this always had British staff. An infatuation with the Mother Country was part of the picture. Never mind that it was a Cockney accent, as long as it was British. “Did he give his name?”

  “Yes,” the manager replied. “A Mr. Lewis Farrell.”

  “Yes, please,” she replied.

  In a minute, Lew, accompanied by the manager, emerged from the corridor leading to the clubhouse. She could see from his expression that something was wrong. “What is it?” she asked.

  “It’s Shawn. He’s been murdered. Chief Kilkenny called me a few minutes ago. I stopped off at Briarcote, and the maid told me you were here. It happened at The Waves. Do you want to head over there?”

  “Of course,” said Charlotte, half in shock. She quickly threw a beach dress over her bathing suit, and headed out with Lew.

  “When did it happen?” she asked as they passed through the lobby.

  “Sometime late this morning. Lani discovered the body when he got back just a short while ago.”

  “How was he killed?”

  “Knifed. I don’t know any more than that.”

  Charlotte was puzzled. How could anyone have knifed someone as strong as Shawn? An aikido expert, a champion sumo wrestler. He was probably one of the strongest men in the world.

  11

  In a few minutes, they had arrived at The Waves, whose entrance courtyard was filled with police cars, gumballs flashing. As with Okichi-mago’s death, the crime area had been cordoned off with yellow plastic tape. After talking with Lew, a policeman let them pass into the inner courtyard. The murder had taken place at the condo where Charlotte had met with Shawn just the day before. Or more precisely, as they found out once they were inside, on the terrace of the cohdo. After being admonished by a guard not to touch anything, they passed through the paneled living room and out to the terrace. It was swarming with police; crime scene investigators armed with cameras, calipers, and plastic bags were busy photographing and measuring everything in sight. At first, Charlotte couldn’t see the body; her view was blocked. But when she did get a glimpse of it, she knew why the killer had succeeded in killing Shawn. He sat cross-legged on a pillow at the center of the canvas practice ring, facing the ocean. Only his back was visible, a huge red blotch staining the indigo-on-white pattern of his kimono. His head hung forward over his crossed legs. The pillow, originally a cream color, was also stained with blood, as was the canvas mat. The killer must have sneaked up on him from behind and stabbed him while he was meditating.

  Following Lew, she moved closer. As they came around to the side of the corpse, she got a look at Shawn’s face and she felt her stomach contract into a tight knot. Okichi-mago’s death hadn’t seemed quite real. The kimono, the makeup, the hairstyle, had all made her look like a doll. Apart from her feet, there weren’t even any signs of injury. But this was a disturbingly real corpse.

  “Jesus,” said Lew, turning his head away.

  Charlotte thought again of her conversation with Shawn. “If you die every day in your mind,” he had said, “you won’t fear death.” Maybe it was just the awkward angle at which his cheek pressed against his crossed leg—it was supposedly a myth that corpses bore any expression at all—but it certainly looked like fear on his waxen yellow face.

  Miller crouched over the body, notebook in hand. As before, he was dressed in starched khakis and a button-down blue-and-white striped shirt with a cheery red bow tie. “Another interesting case,” he said. “Guess this is my lucky week.”

  Lew grimaced. “Doesn’t it get depressing, dealing with dead bodies all the time, Doc?” he asked.

  “Sometimes boring. Unattended deaths. Drug overdoses. The same old thing. But never depressing. It’s the live bodies that I find depressing. I’m much too soft to take care of the living. With the dead, I don’t care about them and they don’t care about me. I don’t even recognize them. That happened with old Bill Kramer; drowned last year. I’d known him for thirty years, but it wasn’t until I looked at his toe tag that I realized who the body belonged to.” He looked down at Shawn’s body. “Stabbed through the heart. Looks like a professional job to me, Lew.”

  “A professional job? But he wasn’t a Mafioso or a drug dealer. At least, it seems highly unlikely.”

  The medical examiner shrugged. “I’m just telling you what I think. The thrust would have to have been made with considerable force to get through the muscle. Also, it would have to have been aimed just right. Which is why I think it was a professional job.” He continued: “You know, this isn’t the first murder at The Waves. There was a murder here in the thirties. Guy blew his wife’s head clean off with a Springfield .30/06. Interesting case …”

  “Excuse me, Doc,” said Lew. He explained to Charlotte: “If I don’t interrupt him now, he’ll go on all day. Instead of mansions and historic landmarks, Doc has this whole town mapped out in terms of death: a murder in this mansion, a suicide in that apartment house …”

  Miller grinned his goofy grin.

  Lew turned back to the doctor: “How long has he been dead, Doc?”

  “Not too long,” Miller replied. He slid a hand under Shawn’s kimono. “He’s still warm. Not even much postmortem lividity yet,” indicating the purplish hue that had started to discolor the skin on the undersides of Shawn’s legs. “A couple of hours at the most.”

  “What about the weapon?” asked Charlotte, who had noticed several policemen combing the rocks below.

  “An ordinary hunting knife would be my guess. With a long blade, at least six inches. Sharp point. One edge. But I doubt we’ll find it. Our murderer probably tossed it into the drink. I figure he either came through the living room or up the stairs from the Cliff Walk.”

  “Any witnesses?” asked Lew.

  “The detective-captain can tell you better than I can.”

  Sullivan had joined them by the corpse.

  “None that we’ve located so far,” Sullivan said. “His roommate was out. He’s the one who discovered the body. The other sumos were over in the other condo.” He looked down at the body with a baffled expression. “I can’t figure out why he was in this position.”

  “He was meditating,” Charlotte told him. “He told me that he often meditated out here. Meditation is part of a sumo wrestler’s daily workout,” she explained in response to his perplexed expression.

  He nodded. “Psyching himself up,” he said.

  “In a way,” said Charlotte. That wasn’t it, but she wasn’t going to bother explaining to a former jock whose yardstick of understanding was probably limited to the pre-game pep talk.

  Now that the initial shock had passed, Charlotte was struck by something peculiar about the body. The crown of Shawn’s head had been shaved, and his thick, dark brown hair hung loosely down. She thought of his topknot, and then realized what had happened. “His topknot has been cut off,” she announced.

  “Topknot?” said Sullivan.

  “Sumo wrestlers wear their hair in a topknot. It’s the symbol of the sumo wrestler’s way of life. Somebody’s cut off his topknot.”

  “Is that significant?” he asked.

  “Maybe,” she replied. Who would have wanted to cut off Shawn’s topknot? she wondered as she explained about the topknot to Sullivan. Shawn’s rival, Takafuji? Someone who didn’t want to see him become a yokozuna? Or someone who wanted to make the murder look like it was related to sumo when it was really related to something else.

  Like Okichi-mago’s murder.

  Charlotte sat at the, kitchen table at Briarcote and watched Mimi work, chopping onions, toasting bread, opening a can of tunafish. She was making a sandwich for Charlotte, who had missed her lunch with Connie at Bailey’s. A few minutes later, she served Charlotte on a chipped plate in the small di
ning room. As she ate, she stared at the collection of china that lined the wall opposite her and reviewed recent events in her mind, trying to make sense of it all. She didn’t know what to think. Not only had she made no progress with Okichi-mago’s murder, there was now another murder to solve. The perfect lovers, Okichi-mago and Shawn, both dead. She thought of the puppet play. Neither death had been a suicide, but the outcome was the same. Unable to become husband and wife in this life, they would be united in the next, reborn on the same lotus before Buddha’s throne.

  The removal of Shawn’s topknot pointed to professional jealousy as the motive, but Charlotte’s intuition still told her that his death was linked to Okichi-mago’s. If the murderer was the same, he had given up on the niceties. No more elaborate stagings: Shawn’s murder had been down and dirty. In her thoughts, she kept coming back to Tanaka. Shawn said he had seen someone who he thought was Tanaka on the Cliff Walk on the night of Okichi-mago’s murder. Tanaka had reason to kill Okichi-mago and he had reason to kill Shawn: not only had Shawn stolen his geisha, he was probably going to defeat Takafuji in the next sumo tournament. Tanaka’s presence on the Cliff Walk wasn’t much to go on, but it was something. And something was better than nothing. Murder would seem to be out of character for a man of Tanaka’s stature. But then … She thought of something that Spalding had once said about the Japanese—an observation based on his years as deputy chief of mission in Tokyo. “The Japanese are motivated by three things: pride, nationalism, and downright irrationality. In other words, you never know when they’ll go ape.” Maybe Tanaka had gone ape.

  After lunch, she set out for Edgecliff. Again, she parked the car under the porte-cochère next to the giant urn. Again, the Japanese butler escorted her through the Great Hall into the morning room. As she waited, Charlotte scanned a Japanese English-language magazine that was lying on a table. Tanaka was pictured on the cover. The caption was “Leader of the Japanese neo-nationalists?” If there was anyone who wouldn’t want to see an American attain yokozuna status, it would be a Japanese neo-nationalist. Within a few minutes the butler returned with Hayashi, who bowed in greeting and then announced that Tanaka-san was in, and that he would be happy to see her. Charlotte was pleasantly surprised: she had thought he might be playing golf in the Black Ships Festival tournament. She followed Hayashi up the red-carpeted marble staircase to a second-floor landing decorated with a ten-foot-high stained glass window depicting the Crusaders conquering Jerusalem. From there, they climbed a few more stairs to the arcaded gallery overlooking the Great Hall. Tanaka’s office was located at the end of a woodrpaneled corridor, at the rear of the mansion. A brass plaque mounted on the wall bore the name of the Yoshino Electronics Corporation, and an engraving of the corporate logo of a cherry branch in flower. After inviting her to take a seat in a sparsely furnished anteroom, Hayashi disappeared into the adjoining office. He emerged a few seconds later and invited her to follow him into the inner office.

  The office was surprisingly Spartan for one of the world’s richest men, but then, Tanaka was known for living modestly. Like many other successful Japanese executives, his origins were humble. He had started work at age nine as a messenger boy in an electronics factory. As a young man, he had supposedly pawned his wife’s antique kimono (Charlotte was reminded of Okichi-mago’s seashell kimono) to raise the capital to realize his dream of founding a company to manufacture an improved wall switch. His company had gone on to become one of the world’s biggest suppliers of electrical products. Although the Newport office was just a remote outpost of his empire, Charlotte suspected that his offices in New York and Tokyo were similarly austere. The American executive’s taste for luxury was disdained by the Japanese executive, who considered it one reason for America’s economic decline. The Japanese had little respect for an economic culture that rewarded ineffective executives with enormous salaries and fancy perks. If a Japanese executive didn’t deliver, he took a cut in pay. Even successful executives like Tanaka considered luxurious lifestyles an affront to their workers. The furnishings of his office were ordinary: a sleek black lacquered desk, a low couch, and a few chrome-and-leather chairs. What was interesting about it was the decorations: it was a virtual shrine to Takafuji. A huge photograph on one wall showed Tanaka and some other businessmen clustering around Takafuji, who was seated in front of a silver punch bowl into which they were pouring bottles of sake. An enlargement of Takafuji’s tegata, the handprints signed with a sumo wrestler’s name; which were sold or given away as souvenirs, occupied another wall. On a side table was a photo of Tanaka and Takafuji playing golf. Charlotte hadn’t realized Tanaka’s depth of commitment to Takafuji; she had thought of his sponsorship more in terms of his sending off an annual check.

  Coming from behind the black desk, which overlooked the Cliff Walk and the flint-gray Atlantic, Tanaka stepped forward to shake her hand. “I’m very pleased to see you again, Miss Graham. I am a great fan of yours.” In keeping with the retreat status of the Newport office and the fact that this was a Sunday, he was wearing a gray sweatsuit instead of a business suit.

  “Thank you,” she said, returning his handshake. Despite his slight build—his white head only came up to her shoulder—he had a strong grip and an eager, self-assured smile. As she sat down on the couch, she could see waves breaking on the offshore ledges; it was from these waves that The Breakers took its name.

  “What can I do for you today?” he asked as he returned to his seat. As at the opening ceremonies, he spoke excellent English. He was known for his skill with the language and for the crafty ease with which he dealt with Americans.

  Charlotte told him about Shawn’s death, but he’d already heard. From whom? she wondered. Then she explained that she’d been asked to look into the recent murders by a member of city government.

  “Two murders in one week,” he said, shaking his snow-white head. “It is a terrible thing, for both our countries. The United States is a violent country: something like this would never have happened in Japan.”

  Charlotte agreed with him that it was a violent country, but she wasn’t about to join in his America-bashing. “I see that you’re a sumo fan,” she said, nodding at the pictures on the wall.

  “Yes,” said Tanaka. “My company sponsors Takafuji.”

  “What does being a sponsor entail?” she asked.

  “The sumo stable is very expensive to operate. Most rikishi have sponsors who help pay their expenses.” He nodded at the photograph of Takafuji at the silver punch bowl. “That picture was taken at a party on the occasion of Takafuji’s promotion to the rank of junior champion two years ago.” He turned back to Charlotte. “I noticed you at the sumo match. Did you enjoy it?”

  “Very much,” she replied.

  “I am glad. We were very disappointed when Takafuji lost. As Mr. Smith no doubt told you, Takafuji was hoping to break Akanohana’s winning streak. There is no doubt that Akanohana is—or rather, was—a great rikishi. His death will be a great loss to the sport, but the Japanese are very nationalistic; we hate to see a foreigner excel at our national sport.”

  Hate it enough to commit murder? was her unspoken question.

  “Of course, Akanohana’s tragic death means that we no longer have that worry,” he added with an ironic little smile.

  “I wanted to ask you some questions about the evening of the geisha party,” said Charlotte.

  Tanaka nodded.

  “As you know, your card was found in the brazier. Someone appeared to be trying to make it look as if Okichi-mago committed suicide because she felt she had gone back on her word in severing her relationship with you.”

  “Yes. It wasn’t very clever of them. I don’t think Okichi-mago had many regrets about severing our relationship.”

  “What about your regrets?”

  “I had regrets, but not regrets enough to kill her.”

  Charlotte nodded. “I spoke with Shawn yesterday. He told me he returned to the temple after the party to meet Okichi-
mago.” She waited for his reaction, but there was none. “He said he saw you on the Cliff Walk. I’d like to know why you were there and whether you saw anything unusual.”

  “I’ve already gone over the answers to those questions with Detective-Captain Sullivan from the Newport Police Department,” he said. His voice carried a hint of irritation.

  Charlotte took it that he was annoyed at having his time wasted; his tone of voice seemed to imply that Americans were so disorganized that they had to do everything twice. “I understand,” she replied. “But I’d appreciate it if you would repeat for me what you told them.”

  “Gladly,” he replied with a little nod of his head. “After the party, my aide, Mr. Hayashi, and I returned here to Edgecliff. But I was restless; I was thinking about an impending business deal. I decided to take a walk on the Cliff Walk. I often take walks late at night.”

  “Did you go back out right away?”

  “I changed into more comfortable shoes first: I had been wearing geta. But that only took a few minutes. I got back out to the Cliff Walk at about eleven forty-five. I walked down to The Breakers and back. I was only gone about twenty minutes, maybe twenty-five.”