Murder on the Cliff

by Stefanie Matteson

  “Oh, yes,” she said, answering Charlotte’s unspoken question. “I’ve seen them. People tend to think of old ladies as being shocked by such things, but the truth is that if you’ve lived long enough, you’re too old to be shocked by anything much, especially by something as silly as spicy pictures.”

  Charlotte smiled. “He showed them to me the other day.”

  “You should be very honored. He doesn’t show them to everyone. I think they’re quite amusing myself. I especially liked the one called ‘The Phallic Contest,’” she said, her eyes twinkling. “I tend to think of it in the oddest places, like lawyers’ offices and public meetings.”

  Charlotte threw back her head and laughed. The print was one of the earliest of the shunga. It showed a group of men with enormously enlarged penises sitting in a semicircle; it was a competition for who had the largest, the judges being the delighted women.

  “I’d add producers’ offices to the list.”

  For a minute, they giggled together at the joke.

  “I’ve helped him keep his secret all these years, but I suppose it doesn’t matter anymore now that she’s committed suicide,” Aunt Lillian continued, once they had stopped laughing. “I really don’t know what prompted me to tell you about it at the reception.” She shrugged. “Just my contrariness, I guess.”

  “She didn’t commit suicide. At least, the police are quite sure she didn’t commit suicide.”

  “I see.” Aunt Lillian nodded her kerchiefed head. “That’s why you’re here. I wondered. I thought maybe I’d forgotten, why you were here. My mind is getting to the point where it plays tricks on me sometimes. I have to be twice as sharp to keep up with it.”

  “Did you know Paul planned to make Okichi-mago his heir?”

  “No, I didn’t,” she replied. “But it would make sense.” Her blue eyes squinted in concentration.

  “What is it?”

  “That’s why he called the family together for the geisha party! I wondered what he was up to. He hasn’t gotten the family together in fifteen years. If Okichi-mago was his Eliza Doolittle, then the geisha party was her debut at the ambassador’s garden party, the place where he would announce to the relatives that he was making her his heir.”

  Marianne had been right after all. He was going to blow them all up—figuratively, of course. By telling them he had made Okichi-mago his heir. “But he didn’t make any such announcement,” Charlotte said.

  “No, he didn’t. Maybe she turned him down. Maybe she was tired of having him manage every last detail of her life. I know I would have been, under the same circumstances. She was a modern young woman, after all.”

  “‘I’m a slave now, for all my fine clothes,’” said Charlotte.

  “What?”

  “It’s a line from Pygmalion. Eliza’s line.”

  It was a motive, a strong motive, Charlotte thought as she headed back to Briarcote. Yes, Tanaka could have killed Okichi-mago, but why commit murder over a severed contract? Yes, Marianne could have killed Okichi-mago, but as a way of eliminating a competing heir, it was a risky move. And, as Marianne herself had pointed out, with Okichi-mago dead, the chances that Paul would make Nadine’s sons his heirs were all the greater. And yes, Nadine could have killed Okichi-mago. Of the three, she had the strongest motive, but it struck Charlotte as highly unlikely that this petite doll of a woman would have been able to muster the physical temerity to commit an act as violent as pushing Okichi-mago over the railing, despite what Lew had said. But Paul was a different matter: Paul had the means: the physical strength; he had the opportunity: at the time of the murder, he was in the house; and now he had a motive. He had spent twenty-five years grooming Okichi-mago to become his heir, and she had rejected his generous offer. Charlotte remembered her impression at the geisha party, that Okichi-mago had somehow failed to live up to Paul’s expectations. Had he killed her because of it? As a result of her chat with Aunt Lillian, Charlotte had begun to develop a picture of Paul that was far from the urbane and charming sophisticate she had thought him to be: a homely man obsessed by beauty, a greedy man bent on possessing anything he thought beautiful, and perhaps a man driven by vengeance to smash his ivory image. Henry Higgins’s bitter words sounded in her memory: “I tell you, I have created the thing out of the squashed cabbage leaves of Covent Garden; and now she pretends to play the fine lady with me.” Like Henry Higgins, Paul may have been too successful. Okichi-mago was a Galatea who would not yield to his control. His ivory image had acquired a mind and a will of her own.

  If she had turned him down, the person in whom she would have been most likely to confide was her little sister, Keiko.

  10

  Keiko was staying with the other geishas at Edgecliff. Since Charlotte had to pass by there on her way back to Briarcote anyway, she decided to drop in. By now, it was going on eight. If Keiko was going to the fireworks, she had probably left already. But maybe she wasn’t going. Japanese fireworks probably weren’t the novelty to her that they were to most Americans.

  She arrived at the red sandstone mansion a few minutes later. After parking under the porte-cochère, she walked up the stairs to the entrance. As she waited, she looked out at the grounds. Framed by an archway in the porte-cochère was a giant antique stone urn—it must have stood six feet tall—mounted on a copper stand. Beyond the urn was a lawn studded with enormous fern-leafed beeches, the bark of their pale gray trunks as gnarled and wrinkled as the leg of an old elephant. After a minute, the door was answered by a Japanese butler who escorted her through the Great Hall into the French morning room where she had talked with Keiko at the ball. The room must have doubled as a music room, she thought as she took a seat in a Louis XV-style armchair next to an ornate marble fireplace. The lunettes above the doors were ornamented with bas-relief sculptures of musical instruments. The whole room—paneling-and all—looked as if it had been imported directly from a French chateau, and it probably was—that’s the way the Newport barons had done things. Never mind that the French décor had nothing to do with the Gothic Great Hall. The designers of Newport’s mansions had given little thought to architectural consistency. A Gothic mansion with a French breakfast room, a Moorish dining room, and a Chinese parlor wasn’t unusual. All that mattered was that it be showy. Many people were enthralled by Newport’s passion for poor taste, but Charlotte was more inclined to be offended by it. She had always had a mania for neatness: she liked her silverware lined up neatly in a drawer, her bankbook regularly balanced. She liked houses in which the style of one room matched the style of the next. She liked all the pieces to fit together.

  The rhythmic clacking of geta on the marble floor of the Great Hall announced Keiko’s presence. Though geta weren’t usually worn indoors, a mansion such as Edgecliff, which was more like a hotel than a house, would be an exception; in this case, Keiko would have removed her geta at the entrance to her room. A few minutes later the butler escorted her into the room, where she bowed in greeting to Charlotte. Although she wasn’t in her full finery—her hair wasn’t formally dressed and she wasn’t wearing white plaster makeup—she was still a model of elegance. It was part of the geisha’s way of life to always look her best in public.

  “I half expected you not to be here,” said Charlotte. “I thought you might have gone to the fireworks.”

  “I’m packing,” she explained. “We leave for Japan tomorrow. What can I do for you?” she asked with a demure nod of her head as she took a seat on the opposite side of the fireplace.

  Charlotte explained about being asked to look into the circumstances of Okichi-mago’s death.

  “Ah, yes,” she said. “A detective was here this morning.” Tears trickled from the corners of her narrow eyes. Pulling a tissue out of the bosom of her kimono, she wiped them away.

  “Keiko, I have learned that Mr. Harris had plans to adopt Okichi-mago as his daughter and to make her his heir. If this is true, it would explain why someone might have wanted to kill her. Did she ever say
anything about his plans to you?”

  Her narrow eyes widened in surprise. “Yes, she did! But I didn’t think Harris-san’s plans were related to her death.” She looked up: “There are people who didn’t want to see her become Harris-san’s heir?”

  Charlotte nodded.

  “I should have told the police,” she said, with a self-reproachful shake of her carefully coiffed head. “But she told me not to tell anyone about it, and I didn’t think it mattered.”

  “That’s all right. I can tell them. What did she say?”

  “It was just as you said. He spoke with her on the evening of the day we arrived, Wednesday. He told her that he wanted to adopt her and make her his heir. She told him that she would think about it.”

  “Do you know what her answer was?”

  She nodded. “She told him no. It was a very difficult decision for her. She agonized over it. He had already changed his will and started the legal proceedings for the adoption.”

  “Do you know why she turned him down?”

  “Yes. She discussed it with me. Being his heir would have entailed a lot of responsibilities: he wanted her to move here and take over the management of Shimoda. But she wanted to stay in Japan with Shawn. Also, she already felt badly about backing out of her agreement with Tanaka-san and she didn’t want to incur another obligation that she wasn’t able to fulfill. Besides, she didn’t know him that well; she only met him last year.”

  Apparently Okichi-mago had never told Keiko that her relationship with Paul was of long standing. “Do you know when she gave him her answer?”

  “Yes. It was on Thursday evening, just before the geisha party. I wondered if that’s why she was crying when she sang ‘Raven at Dawn.’ Because she felt as if she’d let everyone down.”

  Charlotte’s heart was pounding as she got back into her car. “Just before the geisha party,” Keiko had said. In her mind, she went over the pieces of the puzzle again, fitting them together to form a picture. She started with the first piece: the mother whose beauty and graciousness no other woman could match. Faced with the impossibility of ever finding a woman to equal her, Paul creates one of his own. Then, after spending the best part of a lifetime and countless dollars sculpting his ivory image, he concocts a grand plan to unveil his creation. He convinces the Black Ships Festival Committee to add Okichi Day to the program, and to invite Okichi-mago to be mistress of ceremonies. Then he plans a geisha party to introduce his creation to the family and to announce that he is making her his heir. He has already started legal proceedings. Then she tells him she’s not interested. He can’t believe it. The monstrousness of her selfishness, her ingratitude. One of Mrs. Higgins’s lines from Pygmalion popped into her head: “You certainly are a pretty pair of babies,” she tells her son Henry and his friend, “playing with your live doll.” Paul had also been playing with a live doll, a doll that refused to be manipulated. She returned to her mental picture puzzle. His moment of triumph, the geisha party, turns to ash. It’s a terrible experience: he resents his guests’ presence; they wonder why they’re there. After the geisha party, he finds Okichi-mago waiting for Shawn under the rendezvous tree. Overcome with rage, he pushes her over the railing. She remembered what Miller had said about the hardest murderers to catch being those who kill in the heat of the moment. She also remembered the brutality of the later shunga Paul had liked so much. Did his taste for them reveal a predilection for violence? After the murder, he realizes what he has done. He decides to make the murder look like a suicide. Although any one of the suspects would have known about the Okichi legend, it was Paul who was the most familiar with it, and to whom the idea of camouflaging the murder as a suicide complete with Okichi-mago’s comb and mirror would have been most likely to occur. He also had access to the house and could easily have removed the items from their cases. The reason Miako hadn’t barked wasn’t because he wasn’t a barker, but because the intruder was his master. Damn! She had liked Paul. She had even liked the notion of his having a secret life; it made his upstanding public persona more human.

  She had to tell Lew, she thought as she drove down the driveway. At the ornate wrought-iron entrance gates, she stopped the car. Instead of going back to Briarcote, she turned right, and headed back to the shopping center across the street from the casino. After locating a pay phone, she called Briarcote to tell Connie and Spalding she wouldn’t be home for dinner. Their cook, Mimi, wouldn’t mind: she had been with them for many years and had an easygoing attitude toward sudden changes in plans. Then she called Lew.

  A little girl answered the phone. “This is Tiffany,” she said.

  “May I speak with your daddy, please,” asked Charlotte.

  “This is Charlotte,” she said once Lew had answered. “I have to talk to you. I think I’ve figured out who killed Okichi-mago.” Suddenly she realized that she was starving. Except for tea and cinnamon toast at Aunt Lillian’s, she hadn’t eaten since her light lunch at noon. “Do you want to have dinner?”

  Lew consulted for a moment with Toni. “We were planning to leave for the fireworks in a few minutes. But I can have a quick drink with you beforehand and meet Toni and the kids there. I’ll meet you in twenty minutes at the Clarke Cooke House. It’s on Bannister’s Wharf. Do you know where that is?”

  Charlotte did: it was one of several old wharves on the waterfront whose original eighteenth-century buildings had been converted or rebuilt into bars, restaurants, and boutiques.

  She arrived at the wharf a few minutes later and killed the extra time by window-shopping. She felt an enormous sense of relief. The interlocking pieces of the puzzle all fit together; the world was in order once again. She was reminded of the collection of old “Mystery-Jig” puzzles that she and her second husband had once found tucked away in the attic of his family’s rambling old summer home on Long Island Sound. They had had enormous fun with them. “Read Enclosed Short Mystery Novelette, and Solve the Crime Yourself, Then Check Your Solution with This Three-Hundred-Piece Jigsaw Puzzle,” the box cover had said. She had checked her solution of Okichi-mago’s murder against the puzzle, and it had fit. Except for one piece—the piece that was labeled “Paul’s grief.” Paul had seemed genuinely shocked at the news of Okichi-mago’s death, a shock whose magnitude seemed out of keeping with his being the murderer. A flicker of doubt flared up at the back of Charlotte’s mind, but she snuffed it out. He could have been acting. She, of all people, should know how easily emotions could be feigned. But Paul wasn’t an actor, another part of her brain told her. The flicker of doubt flared again. But even people who weren’t actors were capable of dissimulation, she reassured herself.

  In the course of her ruminations, she had wandered over to the adjoining wharf, where she paused to admire an old sailboat that was docked next to a row of shops. Though she didn’t know anything about sailing, even she could see that the boat was a beauty: the golden-hued wood decks glowed, the polished brass of the hardware gleamed, the lines were sleek and elegant. The name painted in gold letters on her bow was Bastet, Palm Beach.

  “She’s a beauty, isn’t she?” said a voice from behind.

  Charlotte turned around; it was Lew. “Oh, hi. She sure is.”

  “A classic Alden schooner, 1924. Past winner of the Newport-to-Bermuda race. She used to be Billy’s boat.”

  “Billy Montgomery?” asked Charlotte. She remembered his talking with Nadine about his classic yacht at the geisha party.

  Lew nodded. “He found her down in Tortola one winter. Like a lot of Newport people, he’s migratory: the islands in the winter, Newport in the summer. She’d crashed onto a reef; she’d almost sunk. He spent two winters fixing her up: recaulking the hull, stripping the decks down to the original wood, replacing the rotted sails.”

  “Paul Harris told me he lost her in a divorce settlement.”

  Lew nodded. “She was put up for auction. She was worth half a million or more, but the city of Baltimore bought her for three hundred thousand. They used her f
or some Outward Bound-type program for inner city kids. The proceeds from the sale were divided between Billy and his ex-wife, but there wasn’t much left by the time the divorce lawyers took their share.”

  “Couldn’t he have bought her back at the auction?”

  Lew shook his head. “He didn’t have the money. What family money he’d once had he pissed away—pardon the expression—a long time ago. I shouldn’t say he pissed it away. He spent a lot on restoring Bastet. But when you don’t have any income, it goes pretty fast, especially when …”

  “When what?” prompted Charlotte.

  “I’m trying to think of how to say this without sounding cruel. My grandmother from down South would have described him as somebody who doesn’t have a lot of hay in his barn.”

  Charlotte laughed. “My grandmother from New York City would have said his elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top.”

  “There you are, the country mouse and the city mouse. He’s never had to have much hay in his barn. Everything’s always been handed to him on a silver platter. Billy’s an innocent; he just wants everybody to like him. He’s the guy who picks up the tab for a round of drinks, he’s the guy who invests in a buddy’s half-assed business scheme.”

  “He’s the guy whose sister buys out his inheritance for a fraction of its value.” She explained what Paul had told her.

  “Exactly,” said Lew. “He planned to go into the charter business. He got his captain’s license and everything. It would have been the perfect job for him: he loves sailing, he loves to party. But when he lost Bastet, that idea was out the window. Newport is full of people like him: people who come from a moneyed background, but don’t have the cash to support that lifestyle anymore, and don’t have wits or ambition enough to earn a real living …”

  “It sounds like you know him pretty well.”

  “We’re old school chums. St. George’s.”

  Charlotte raised an eyebrow. St. George’s School was an exclusive Episcopalian prep school in neighboring Middle-town—not the kind of school someone like Lew would be likely to attend.