The Craigslist Murders (6 page)

“Two 80-dollar books on Buddhism,” Vicky replied. “From the Home department on 7.”

Charlotte rolled her eyes. “My God! At least, she has a sense of humor, Vicky. I mean, c’mon!
Stealing
books on Buddhism?”

“It’s not funny, Charlotte. She told me they were a thank-you gift for Paris.”

“Well, I guess it’s the thought that counts,” Charlotte said, picking up a pair of clippers from inside her bedside table drawer and clipping a hang nail on her pinkie.

“You don’t have children, Charlotte. You can’t imagine how disturbing all this is.”

Charlotte took a deep breath and exhaled. What if Amex really did cut her off? Maybe she could borrow the
eight grand from Vicky. The two of them never talked about money, of course. It wasn’t that the rich didn’t enjoy talking about money. They did. They talked about it all the time. But only amongst themselves.

“The thing is,” Vicky was saying. “I’d really like to talk to my daughter, that’s all. Not just about the shoplifting. She’s not eating, either. The other night, she was talking about how cool it was to be ‘ano.’ ”

“Ano?” Charlotte queried.

“Anorexic. They abbreviate everything.”

“ ‘JK, Mom, JK,’ she said after. Just kidding. But honestly, Charlotte. I don’t know what to do. We can’t seem to communicate. She tunes me right out.”

Charlotte laughed out loud. “What planet are you living on, Vicky? Nobody her age communicates, anymore. Not face-to-face.”

Moving into the bathroom, she squeezed her tooth-whitening gel on her mouth plate, still cradling the phone next to her ear as Vicky chattered on. It was faster and easier to plug into iPods, log onto Facebook, or IM or blog and compulsively text while chatting on cell phones. The whole experience of communicating had become,
literally
, disembodied. But Charlotte was a visual person, so it didn’t bother her that in moving into this new dimension, language had lost the power of nuance, of gesture. “Wrds” were words no matter how you spelled them. And without this new technology, there’d be no community out there like Craigslist.
My other life
, she thought, reminding herself to visit Kinko’s first thing in the morning.

“Charlotte, you’re not listening,” Vicky said. “I know you’re not listening.”

“Sorry. I’m distracted. And I’ve got to go,” Charlotte replied.” I have a crazy day tomorrow with a new client. I’m exhausted.”

“I wanted you to come down here with Tom. You promised, Charlotte. I need you.”

Charlotte hadn’t promised. They hadn’t even talked about it. But she hesitated. Aspen might be a good place to ask for the money. On second thought, she had too much to do. “I can’t, Vicky. And you’re back the day after tomorrow, anyway. We’ll talk then.”

“Fine,” Vicky said petulantly. “There’s someone on the other line. I’m hanging up.”

Finishing up her treatment in the bathroom, Charlotte recalled a scene outside Vicky’s building. It was right before the kid’s trip to Paris. As the doorman hailed her a cab, one of Vicky’s drivers pulled up to the curb in the daughter’s “school car.” It was a red Mercedes station wagon with her name, ROSE1, on the license plates. The kid, who stepped out of the car, dragging her $750 Bisonte knapsack, weighed about 90 pounds.
Now here was a true crime
, thought Charlotte as she slipped into her La Perla silk pyjamas. (A Christmas gift from Anna.) The child was so thin, she was almost transparent. But still her mother couldn’t see. Twenty pounds lighter than she’d been in college, she couldn’t see herself in this wasted, half-starved, unsexed child.

She liked the privacy of the booths at Kinko’s. This particular branch at 12
^th
Street between University and Fifth was a favorite. Even with the nearby university, it was quiet. The walls of her booth were scribbled with graffiti. “jason loves jenny!” “FUCK PHYSICS!” She’d been commuting between Furniture and Collectibles since 8 a.m. Chewing on a bit of blueberry muffin, she focused on her screen. The Furniture category had been a total waste of time. A blur of postings for TV armoires, entertainment centers, mattresses, storage platforms, more mattresses and recliners.
God! How America’s sedentary minds love recliners
, Charlotte thought.

Her scroll through Collectibles had been even more disappointing. If you are what you collect, Charlotte pondered, what would future anthropologists conclude about a culture that seemed to collect nothing but baseball cards, comics, Elvis Christmas ornaments, Barbie batgirls on motorcycles and Beanie Babies? And what the fuck was a Talking Furby doll? Is this what archeologists would dig up and study a thousand years from now as they sifted through the ashes of what had been known as the greatest city in the world? She stopped and clicked. “A first edition Torah-1962. $150.”
Huh?
Oh, and the Dracula Style Black Coffin for $36. “Never been outta our basemant.” That was a good one, too.

Giving her aching eyes a rest, she blocked out the twinge of a cramp. Anna had finally convinced her to make an appointment with her gynecologist for an ultrasound. She was due at the Diagnostic Labs on 21
^st
and 2
^nd
Avenue at 2 o’clock. Charlotte hated the idea of anyone looking inside
her. But the pain had become more frequent and intense since her afternoon with the “Model Homemaker.” Taking another bite from her blueberry muffin, she washed it down with some orange juice and wondered why there hadn’t been any follow-up in the news after her last murder. Not even in the
Post
. Surely, the police had identified a pattern. Both victims were female, rich and lived on the Upper East Side.

This was the beauty, of course, of choosing her “victims” from Craigslist. In cyberspace, she was a phantom. Just another sexless, anonymous shopper. Tracking her down in the real world would take physical evidence. And Charlotte was certain that she’d left no trace of that. Still … the silence was unsettling.

Bingo!
Charlotte almost knocked over her cup of coffee.

“Three piece, custom-made Vuitton luggage set. $3,000. No best offers. Price firm. Please e-mail.”

She clicked and checked out the photo. The minute she saw the details about location, ‘UES, Obviously,’ she emailed back for an appointment.
Obviously?

This was the kind of arrogance that came with the territory inhabited by her “victims.” The Upper East Side, her kill zone. The richest, greediest 1.8 square miles in the United States.

Other people might think of a world gone to hell in terms of famine in faraway Darfur, genocide in Rwanda, the slums of Mumbai and Manila. Not Charlotte. For her, that world gone to hell stretched from Bergdorf’s on 57
^th
Street and Fifth, north to 96
^th
Street, across Madison to Park. It was a world that mistook trend for truth, fame for faith, and
money (when it applied to marriage) for meaning. It was the land of the professional time-killer where a woman’s only job in life was to amuse herself to death. Oh yeah. And to redecorate.

In targeting this tiny area with its 70-million-dollar penthouses and 50-million-dollar townhouses, some might say that Charlotte was biting the hand that fed her. What did they know about the hands that rarely offered her anything more than a glass of still Badoit water? All they ever saw were photos of smiling faces at parties in the Styles Section of the
New York Times
. Charlotte knew better. Like all those who served the voracious needs of money’s mistresses: building supers, doormen, life coaches, pet psychics, nutritionists, waiters, chauffeurs, housekeepers, nannies, concierges, personal assistants and trainers, Charlotte knew all about the panic and the rage that seethed beneath the glittering surface She dealt with it every day.

Even if she understood it—the loneliness, the frustration in dealing with such tyrannical husbands—there was something about the fury that roiled beneath the façade of such grotesquely over-privileged lives that Charlotte found loathsome. That poverty of the spirit—the purposelessness. It was a kind of moral anarchy. Once upon a time, Charlotte imagined that anger might have triggered social change, even revolution. Now all the rage had turned inward. Women like Vicky, Darryl and Rita preferred to talk about moving their swimming pools or about the weather. (The weather, in fact, had become such a hot topic that Charlotte had sat next to the world’s most famous fog expert at Vicky’s last dinner. After twenty minutes of listening to
details about harnessing water content, electrostatic precipitation, and acid rain, she’d wanted to pull her hair out).

“God is the definition of home.” The line, from an Emily Dickinson poem that Charlotte had read in college, was taped across the top of her office “dream board,” a collage of drawings, photos, swatches and other inspirational fragments. This call-to-action had given birth to her career ambitions. Ambitions that been whittled away and corrupted by her need to submit to her clients’ whims; to compromise and to constantly coddle and cajole. Charlotte was doing the devil’s work now, because nobody actually
lived
in the houses that she spent such obscene sums of money and time decorating. They were designed solely to inspire envy, monstrous amounts of envy. The sterility within these camera-ready homes reflected little more than impotence—the same impotence that prompted the poor to kill.

So Charlotte was cleaning house, so to speak. She was purging herself of that same amorphous, soul-shriveling rage. She was delivering a message, making a point. Greed wasn’t good. And marrying money wasn’t a shortcut. It was a dead end.

She’d arrived at the doctor’s office at exactly 1:45. Anna had begged to keep her company, but Charlotte had turned her down. Asking for comfort was a great deal more difficult for her than giving it. After filling out insurance forms and passing over her $20 co-pay, she’d been waiting for more
than an hour in a dirty, beige lobby. No one had even had the courtesy to apologize or explain the reason for the delay.

Why were these rooms always so drab and depressing?
She asked herself. How much did it cost to water a plant? To slap a fresh coat of paint on the walls? To smile? The sharp nosed, thin-lipped receptionist had barely grunted when Charlotte finally lost her patience and insisted on paging the technician.

When the woman leapt out from behind the lab door, scowling, Charlotte stepped back as if she’d been ambushed.

“Follow me,” the woman barked, as she headed down a long, dark corridor. Opening the door to a small cubicle, she ordered Charlotte to remove all her clothes and put on a paper robe. “Leave the front open,” she added, before slamming the door behind her. Charlotte was shivering as she lay in the dark on an examining table with her knees up. She didn’t dare move for fear of ripping the thin sheet of tissue that lay stretched beneath her.

The excruciating pains had started in college. It was Vicky who had taken her to the local emergency room and explained the symptoms to an intern. After two days of tests and no sleep, the pain had finally subsided.

“There’s nothing
physically
wrong with you,” the inept young doctor had told her.

“Nothing we can find, anyway. But I’d like to recommend the name of a good psychiatrist.”

Charlotte had tightened the belt of her robe, repressing a flash of anger. It wasn’t just the careless arrogance of the doctors. It was the unforgivable fact that her mother hadn’t even bothered to make an appearance at her bedside.
She was down in New Orleans, celebrating some honorary degree that Tulane had given her father. As if he needed another honorary degree. Years later, when Dr. Greene had the gall to suggest that it might be her own rage, twisting up her insides and eating through her stomach lining, Charlotte had wanted to kill him.

A thin shaft of light pierced through the gloom as the technician re-entered the room. Squeezing a jelly lubricant all over the wand-like probe, she then placed a pillow under Charlotte’s hips. Charlotte had never felt so exposed, so out of control. As the cold, plastic probe delved deeper and deeper inside her, her helplessness triggered a spurt of pure terror.

“Stay still!” the woman hissed. “Or we’ll be here all night.”

For forty interminable minutes, she was subjected to the technician’s ruthless intrusions; to the clicking and stopping, clicking and stopping, as she photographed the shadowy depths of her womb.

Charlotte knew there was something in there. She sensed it. It was something ugly and vile. Made of her own hair and muscle, of bits of bone, blood and the tears she had never shed, it clung to her and grew, sapping her energy and sucking the air she breathed. Nothing could expel it. It had always hurt, this thing that grew inside her. It hurt so much that she imagined it was tearing her insides apart. When she smiled and politely asked the technician what she was seeing on the screen, the woman ignored her. It was only when Charlotte closed her legs and threatened to leave that she responded.

“I’m not allowed to answer your questions, ma’am. It’s company policy.”

“So when I will know the results?” Charlotte asked as the woman wiped the wand clean with a white towel.

“We send them to your doctor,” the woman replied coldly, handing her a wad of Kleenex. “But I wouldn’t worry about it
too
much,” she added casually. “Now please wait until I check the film.”

“What the hell did that mean?” Charlotte whispered to herself. “I wouldn’t worry
too
much?” Wiping the lubricant off her belly, she imagined the woman casually gossiping about her cancer with colleagues. When the technician stuck her head in the door and told her she could go, Charlotte struggled like a zombie through the motions of putting on her clothes and trembled.
What if it is a tumor?
she thought.
How will I pay for it all? How will I work?

She was walking so fast towards the News Bar on 3
^rd
Avenue and 23
^rd
Street, she was short of breath. There had been something horrifyingly familiar about the experience of lying on that table; about the helplessness. Slowing down her pace as the first cramp snaked through her gut and the crowd jostled past her, a memory sprang up like a clown coiled up in a jack-in-the-box.