Murder on the Cliff (5 page)

At the far end of Narragansett Avenue, the sea glittered in the midday sun. Near the end, Charlotte turned right onto Ochre Point Avenue. Shimoda, as the house was called, was situated on the stretch of shoreline between two of Newport’s biggest mansions: Ochre Court, a replica of a French palace, complete with turrets and gargoyles, and The Breakers, the seventy-room replica of an Italian Renaissance palace that was Newport’s most fabulous summer “cottage.” Shimoda was built by Townsend Harris upon his return from Japan. Before he became consul general, he had been in the China trade. Many of his fellow China traders had retired to Newport, and it was only natural that he would too. He had lived out his years writing his memoirs while his niece, Lavinia, ran his household. Upon his death, he left the property to Lavinia, who lived to be nearly a hundred. As Newport became more fashionable, the early wooden cottages such as Shimoda were replaced by mansions like The Breakers. But Lavinia refused to sell the property, or, for that matter, even a lot. When she died, the property was rescued from the auction block by another Harris relative who left it in trust to Connie and Paul.

Although she had never been in the house before, Charlotte had seen it from the Cliff Walk and had even driven by several times. The house wasn’t grand, but it was architecturally unique, the finest example of early Gothic Revival in Newport. It was also highly picturesque, with its steep, gingerbread-trimmed gables, mullioned windows, balconies, bay windows, and verandas. Unlike its white-elephant neighbors, it was a house to be lived in.

Turning in at the gate in the tall fence of wide wooden palings with a Gothic arch-(painted dark gray to match the house), Charlotte walked up the winding gravel driveway to the front door, which was flanked by ornate cast-iron urns planted with yellow hibiscus.

Paul met her at the door. Again, he bowed slightly. He was wearing a patterned kimono of indigo-dyed cotton of the type the Japanese favor for informal wear in the summer. A frisky red and white spotted spaniel hugged his ankles. “Come in, come in,” he said, ushering her into a foyer whose walls were paneled in dark wood carved in a Gothic motif. Facing the door was a suit of medieval Japanese samurai armor. “A gift from the shogun to Townsend Harris,” he explained. “It’s very valuable, one of the most important examples of medieval Japanese armor in the West.”

Charlotte admired the menacing-looking suit of armor, with its horned iron helmet and leather breastplate stenciled with a fierce-looking monster.

Paul leaned down to pick up the spaniel, which was whining for attention. “Be quiet, Miako,” he said. “Miako is a descendant of one of the two Japanese spaniels that the shogun gave Townsend Harris. Japanese spaniels were always part of an Imperial present. Harris named them Miako and Edo after Japan’s two capitals, Kyoto and Tokyo. Miako and Edo were the feudal names. We used to have an Edo too, but she died last year. Miako misses her very much.” He ruffled the dog’s mane. “Don’t you, Micky?”

“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 sale—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.