Once we’re inside, I lean in and kiss her cheek. Susan says something about how lovely the house is.
“All the warmth of a prison,” Marcie answers, “which it is, literally, in a way.” I already know the history but listen as Marcie explains to Susan. “David’s great-grandfather bought most of the stone for the exterior from a company that had been storing it since the 1860s. The stone had been harvested from a demolished Civil War–era prison in upstate New York. Linwood Hanson thought it was charming that his house was built from prison block.”
Marcie leads us to a drawing room, and we sit on facing couches. Susan and I look around as Marcie pours us coffee from an ornate silver service. The room is cavernous. The ceiling is twenty feet above the floor. Two gigantic candelabras sit on either end of a white-marble fireplace big enough to garage a Mini Cooper. The walls are fitted out in polished, dark woods. Crimson-hued Orientals overlay the parquet flooring. Susan comments again on how lovely everything is.
Marcie ignores her. “So, Mick. What is it you need to tell us?”
I exchange glances with Susan, bite my lower lip, and inhale. “There’s a story that’s going to come out,” I start. “Not a good one. I wanted to give David a heads-up, and you.”
“More women?” Marcie asks matter-of-factly.
“Uh . . .”
“It’s all right. David and I have had some long talks since this all started. Some very long talks. I know what’s out there. I think I do anyway.”
“Okay,” I say. “There’s a townhouse in Manhattan . . .” I proceed to tell Marcie about the call from Patti Cassidy.
When I’m finished, Marcie smiles. “The brownstone on the Upper East Side,” she says. “A lovely place,” she adds, glancing at Susan. “And the three young girls. Yes, I’ve met them, and I can tell you that they’re all very, very sweet.”
Susan and I look at each other. We both exhale.
“So it’s not some Asian love nest?” Susan says.
Marcie smiles. “Certainly not. Not now.”
“Not now?”
“Not since David and I have begun talking. Before then, of course, it had been just that—a place where David stored his strumpets until he wanted to play with them. But the women who are there now are anything but playthings. Each is a gifted musician, here on scholarship at a top music school.”
“How . . . ?”
“It was easy. David simply told the girls who had been living there to leave, and he paid them a good deal of money to do so. Then, with the help of some prominent men in Japan and the People’s Republic of China, we moved in three other girls. College girls. Who, coincidentally, look almost identical to the girls who had been living there before. And although the house was bought by Hanson World Industries, the paperwork will show that it has been leased, for more than three years, to the People’s Republic of China for use as a home for visiting students.”
“The paperwork?” I ask.
“Backdated, naturally. Edwin will be furious when David produces the lease.”
Now I’m completely lost. China? Japan? Edwin? I spread my arms. “I’m afraid all of this is going way over my head.”
Marcie smiles, takes a sip of coffee, puts down her cup, and says, “Let me show you.” She leads us to a door at the end of a long hallway. She puts her thumb on a square metallic box hanging on the wall. The door unlocks and swings opens automatically. Marcie leads us into a space utterly different from the rest of the house. “David’s study,” she says. Though not as large as the sitting room we have just come from, the space is substantial, maybe twenty-by-twenty-five feet. Behind David’s desk, the far wall is all floor-to-ceiling windows that showcase the view beyond of a lush, well-ordered garden full of flowering plants that features a pond and a wooden footbridge. “It’s a Japanese garden,” Marcie says, following my gaze. “David has become a student of ikebana, the art of Japanese flower arranging.”
“Looks like your husband has fallen in love with all things Japanese,” Susan says, looking around the room. “That sword, for example.”
“It’s a katana, a samurai sword. From the thirteenth century and signed by Masamune—Japan’s greatest swordsmith. David refuses to say how he came to possess it, but I suspect a major bribe was involved.”
I move closer to the glass display case. Beneath the sword is an ornamental sheath. The sheath sits on twin metal holders. The sword, however, does not appear to be mounted on anything; it just hangs in the air. I feel Marcie behind me, watching me study it. “Amazing, isn’t it?” she says. “There’s some kind of electromagnetic field inside the box that keeps the sword in midair like that. The display cost a quarter of a million dollars to set up.”
“Yet all I’d have to do is get a bat and smash the glass, and the sword is mine.”
Marcie laughs. “You’d never get out of this room. Any damage to that case causes the study door to lock automatically.” She follows my eyes to the windows. “That glass is several inches thick.”
Susan and I exchange glances. I wonder if she’s thinking what I am. All this planning to protect a sword, but the guy’s fool enough to get caught with his pants down? Stupid enough to try to clean up a murder scene?
“This is interesting,” Susan says, looking at a painted kimono hanging inside another glass case mounted on a wall.
“It’s an art form called tsujigahana. It’s from the Edo period, late 1800s.”
The sword and kimono are hardly the only things Asian in David’s office. On the third wall hang three striking silk scrolls, each encased in glass. They depict peonies, chrysanthemums, and roses, with dark-blue butterflies hovering over rich pink petals and dark leaves. Marcie tells us they were done in the mid-1700s by Ito Jakuchu. Like the samurai sword, Marcie says, they are priceless.
The furniture also is distinctively elegant—and familiar. “Nakashima?” I ask. George Nakashima was a Japanese American woodworker and architect who became one of America’s premier twentieth-century furniture makers. His original work is extravagantly expensive, when someone is willing to part with it at all.
“Nakashima,” Marcie affirms. “David’s father was a personal friend, and David and Edwin both visited him many times in New Hope, where he had his shop. I sometimes think that David’s love affair with the Asian culture began with Nakashima’s art. Which brings us, in a roundabout way, to why I decided to share this with you.”