The Craigslist Murders (4 page)

Staring out at the Hudson, Charlotte realized how fiercely attached she was to these early morning rides along the river. Maybe it was the fact the water was always flowing, that it never stopped moving, that consoled her. As she sat back, she let her thoughts meander. Philip had been more obnoxious than usual at the museum benefit. Pawing her thigh, for God’s sake. Then there was Pavel, due in from Moscow for his monthly family visit the week after next. She liked Pavel. Maybe too much. Resting her head on the back of the seat, she suddenly felt deliciously drowsy.

The trill of her cell phone woke her from her catnap. Christ. Why had she said hello before checking her caller ID? It was Rita, her most demanding client. She was up in Martha’s Vineyard, shutting her house down for the winter.

“Sorry, Rita. But you say you’re furious about my $100 surcharge for cleaning the curtains?” Charlotte asked, testily.

“Yes, Charlotte,” Rita’s voice was unbearably shrill. Adenoidal. “That’s correct.”

“But you also want to talk about moving the swimming pool ten feet to the right?”

“Correct again, Charlotte. It’s ruining our view of the ocean.”

“It’s flat, Rita. The pool is flat. How is it interfering with your view?” Tapping her fingernails against the seat,
Charlotte worked to keep her temper in check. She couldn’t afford to lose this client.

“And the curtains are Japanese Shibori silk,” she added. “Hand tie-dyed and shot with platinum. I had to take them to Maurice myself and explain how to launder them. As for the pool … You don’t just move a pool ten feet.”

“Why not, Charlotte? The Johnsons did. We were over there for drinks on Saturday night.”

“And did the Johnsons share with you what the cost of moving their pool might have been?”

“We don’t care about the cost,” Rita said. Charlotte silently seethed.

“I’ll tell you what,” Charlotte said in an effort to distract her client while also fantasizing about seeing her liposuctioned, bloated body, floating belly up from the bottom of her cobalt blue pool. “Didn’t you say you’re flying down with Abe next week?”

“Yes, Charlotte. I did. But I’d like the jet to bring you up here this afternoon. We need to talk.”

“Rita, I’d be delighted to talk. I’d also be delighted to cancel the surcharge on the curtains. But I can’t possibly get away today.”

Mollified by the easy win over her $100, Rita settled for Charlotte’s offer to get together the following weekend at her apartment on Fifth.

Charlotte nearly spat when she ended the call.

Haggling over 100 bucks when they’d just spent $300,000 to put in the infinity pool and another $50,000 for the 40-foot gunite “puggle pool” with its own wavelet machine. What the freakin’ hell kind of a dog was a puggle, anyway?
No wonder I have such agonizing cramps and can’t sleep at night
, she thought. Everybody needed more. No one had enough. The whole world was crying poor,
especially
billionaires like Rita, who whined about $100 surcharges for laundering their $55,000 living room curtains.
And what the hell was taking this driver so long
, she groaned, as the cab screeched to a stop.

“We are here,
madam,”
Ali said with a smirk.

Charlotte ignored the insult.
No way I look old enough to be a “madam.”

“Go ahead and keep the change,” she replied. Charlotte prided herself on being a very good tipper.

Running against the light, she crossed 76
^th
Street and approached the restaurant. Before giving the door a small tug, she smiled graciously at the only “papp” polite enough to snap her photo. The rest of the posse was lounging idly nearby. Charlotte knew that most of the ladies who lunched here came to be seen. As if being seen somehow confirmed that they actually existed.
This is why they also craved the blinding light of the paparazzi’s flash
, she thought. For one brief incandescent moment, the light seemed to bring them back to life. Being recognized gave them an illusion of identity.

As Charlotte walked into the narrow crypt-like foyer, she inhaled. “Repressed casual” is how she summed up the Upper East Side uniform of starched jeans and stuffed shirts at this hilariously overpriced bistro. And she’d never liked the room: the low ceilings, all the mauves, the tables too close together. It was as cramped and stiff as the people dining in it.

Anna was standing up and waving as Charles led her to their banquette.

“Ciao! Cara!” she said, kissing her on both cheeks. “What a fabulous suit.”

Charlotte was wearing one of her men’s Armani pinstripes. She’d had ten of them tailored to fit her lanky 5′ 9″ build years ago.

“Thanks,” she said to Anna, turning quickly to Charles. “I’ll have a kir royale, please, the Caesar, and a pesto brushed tilapia.”

“Make that two, if you would,” Anna chimed in.

“Good choice, ladies,” Charles replied, snapping his fingers at a passing busboy. “The tilapia is particularly nice today.”

Settling in, Charlotte gave Anna a big smile and glanced around the room.

“Well, there’s one group that must have come in through the kitchen,” she muttered while nodding towards three women who had obviously just come out from the plastic surgeon’s office. With their faces covered in bandages, they looked more like they’d just been air-lifted in from Basra. Slurping soup through straws; even their fish entrée was pureed in the blender.

“You know the most revolting thing of all?” Anna asked, smothering a laugh. “They go vomit in the bathroom after.”

“I know, Vincenzo told me,” Charlotte said, giving a demure wave to the group.

Vincenzo was their favorite waiter. A native of Milan, he’d recently migrated to Da Albertos, a restaurant downtown.

“Tree tousand a week, I am taking ’ome,” he’d crowed, the last time they chatted. “And tonight, Alberto was in de kitchen wid a rock de size of de Gibralter.”

The rock, of course, was cocaine, not a diamond.

After Charles had returned with her champagne, Charlotte unfolded her napkin and looked at her friend expectantly. “Okay, Anna. This story about Caroline better be good.”

“This, my dear, is better than good,” Anna replied, sliding in closer and lowering her voice.

“You know you missed the Armory show Saturday night.” The Armory show was New York’s most prestigious, carefully-vetted antique show.

“I told you. I had to go to the museum.”

“Oh right. Well … You are not going to believe this: The City Sheriff actually came in and confiscated all of Caroline’s merchandise.”

“No way!!” Charlotte croaked. The scratchy edge of a crouton had caught in her throat.

For years, Caroline had been the mistress of one of the richest old aristos in England. She was so wealthy, she drove her clients around in a 1932 Rolls Royce woodie. (The license plates read “DEKR8.”)

“It seems she forgot to pay her plumbing bills. For that new maisonette on Sutton Place. ‘Forgot,’ as in, for the past
eighteen
months.”

My God! The humiliation. The trade will crucify her
, Charlotte snickered to herself. “Was she there?” she asked, stabbing at her last crouton.

“No, she left her poor daughter at the booth,” Anna said.

“The unholy cruelty of mothers,” Charlotte hissed, pushing her plate away as if signaling a need to change the subject.

For once, Anna refused to take the hint. “Aren’t you tired of being haunted by your mother, Charlotte?”

“You mean hunted not haunted, Anna. She isn’t dead, you know.”

“You have to learn what to ask for from people, cara. Asking for what they can’t give gets you nowhere.”

“I ask for nothing,” Charlotte replied, dabbing the linen napkin over her mouth. “That way I’m not disappointed.”

Smoothing her platinum silver hair back from her face, Anna swished the champagne around in the bottom of her glass. “It’s funny,” she said, closing her eyes. “We Italians call orgasm, the little death. Il piccolo morte. But it isn’t orgasm, it’s disappointment that is the real little death, isn’t it?”

Who the hell had taught Anna these things, anyway?
Charlotte wondered. “I guess you’re right,” she said, craning her neck towards the entrance of the restaurant as Charles rushed towards the door and pecked the cheeks of two extremely well-kept blondes. “Every disappointment kills a little bit more of you.”

“Oh my God!” Anna whispered. “Look who’s here!”

“I know, I know,” Charlotte said grinning. “I thought she was in Rio!”

It was Suzie Katz, three times married, three times divorced, making her first public appearance with Gemitila, her new live-in lover and wellness counselor.

“Have you heard they’re following that crackpot nutritionist?” Charlotte added. “The one who practices breath-arianism?”

Anna leaned in closer. “The guy drinks his own urine, Charlotte. I’m not kidding.”

“Well, I certainly hope that’s Chardonnay,” Charlotte whispered as they watched the blondes touch glasses.

Nibbling her tilapia while the imperious Gemitila summoned Charles with a crook of her index finger, Charlotte shook her head. Whisking their basket of bread off the table, he backed away, bowing. The display of subservience was totally wasted, of course. Gemitila was lost in Suzie’s enraptured gaze.
What was it that made these women so merciless to everyone but their dogs?
Charlotte wondered.

“Penny for your thoughts, Charlotte?” Anna was buttoning up her brown cashmere cardigan. “Senti, I don’t want you to feel cornered. But surely, there must be something you owe your mother; something you are grateful for?”

Charlotte didn’t like answering questions about her mother. Not even when those questions came from Anna. Squirming in the banquette, she fiddled with her spoon. “She taught me how to create and maintain a beautiful façade, Anna.”

“Well, she must have been very good at it, cara. Because nobody in this town is as brilliant as you are at creating beautiful façades.”

“She was a climber. A phony. Kids at school used to ask me why there were no photos in our house. No grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins. My mother didn’t want them around as witnesses while she climbed the ladder, that’s why. So I’d tell them my family was dead.”

Anna patted her hand. “Like I said, learn what to ask for, Charlotte. You’ll be much happier. And this is my treat,” she added, quickly placing her Amex card into the leather folder. “Now I’m going to the ladies room. I want to take a closer look at Gemitila.”

It’s true
, she thought as Anna stopped to speak briefly
with Suzie Katz.
I am grateful for “the eye” that I’ve inherited from my mother
. Even her father’s wealthiest clients (he was an old-fashioned investment banker) had admired what Charlotte’s mother had done with their apartment on Fifth and the house out in hoity-toity Alpine, New Jersey. “She has impeccable instincts, dear,” Bunny Williams, the doyenne of high-class décor, had once said to Charlotte. The implication being, of course, that Charlotte’s mother
had
to rely on instincts. She was shanty Irish. And her husband, Charlotte’s father, was a Jew. Not that anyone ever mentioned it. He dressed like the Duke of Windsor.

All that was left now was the place in Alpine. Her father had blown his entire pension, investing in some tax shelter in the Connecticut woods. Two months after he had found out that it was a scam, he’d died of a stroke. He was sixty-two years old. Her mother had only managed to save the house. Furnished with big comfortable canvas-striped couches, threadbare Orientals from old auctions at Parke Bernet and a few 18
^th
century English pieces, Charlotte still liked the feel of it. It was comfortable. And there was nothing contrived or forced about it. Nothing but the people who’d lived in it, she thought.

“Ecco! Are you ready, cara?”

“Definitely. I’m due at Darryl’s in twenty minutes.”

“I’ve got to have that goddamn belt, do you hear me?” Until Charlotte noticed the Bluetooth blinking in Darryl’s ear, it
looked like her client was bellowing into thin air. She was also wearing a neck brace. “Listen, it was made for tomorrow night’s dress. And I don’t care if it’s in the house in L.A. or fucking London, you better find it!” Using a circular motion with her finger to indicate to Charlotte that she was just “wrapping up,” she dry swallowed a fistful of meds with her other hand and kept right on talking.

“Bundle of nerves” didn’t even begin to describe the tension that propelled this tiny, taut woman back and forth across the foyer. Darryl reminded Charlotte of that “Bodies” exhibition that she’d seen downtown. Chinese corpses that had been stripped of flesh to expose the network of nerves that pulsed beneath the skin.

Her 23-million-dollar apartment, one of the last in the 1920s Candela building to be sold intact, had been gutted to the core. The contractor was getting $40,000 a month to “supervise” the job and the super was getting another $4,000 a month to “facilitate” the process. Darryl’s husband, a venture capitalist, had also placed a million in escrow to cover the co-op’s $4,000-a-day penalty fee for delays. (With the project running four months late, Charlotte estimated that the co-op was already half a million dollars richer.) Darryl’s greatest coup, however, had been the purchase of an $801,000 storage closet in the basement.

“It’s the last one left, Charlotte,” she’d tittered, giddily, on the phone. “And I just can’t believe we got it!” Charlotte couldn’t believe it, either. But hers was not to reason why a family of three with a 12,000 square-foot apartment, seven other houses, and a giga-yacht needed an $801,000 storage closet!

In the meantime, everything upstairs had been ripped out: the old parquet de Versailles floors, the doors, the fixtures in the bathrooms, kitchen, and pantry, the fireplaces, the Sub-Zero appliances. Even the walls had been stripped of their terracotta and plaster. Charlotte sighed as she circled around the shrouded marble staircase. It had taken two weeks to encapsulate the handrail, the posts, the stringers, and the treads in wiggleboard: a plywood that bent into cylinders. She’d seen this so many times before. Women who threw themselves into the frenzy of renovation, as if by tearing down walls, replacing every inch of wiring and plumbing, hiring fancy French painters, and buying millions of dollars’ worth of furniture, they might, somehow, also reinvent themselves. Instead, when the house was finally finished, they often found that they had been gutted to the core themselves—deserted by husbands and on the brink of divorce, with their new showplace homes discreetly placed on the market.