The Craigslist Murders (8 page)

Deafened by the sound of horns, Charlotte caught a glimpse of a cab driver shaking his fist at her and shrieking. “You crazy! You crazy bitch!” She’d been walking so fast, she’d stepped right into the middle of traffic on 23
^rd
Street. Sweat was trickling down her neck.

Damn!
Glancing at her wristwatch, she realized that she was going to be late for the dealer who’d called about the Murano. She’d have to jump on the subway.

Charlotte despised the subway. It wasn’t just the fear of being trapped in a tunnel. It was all those
people
crushed up against her.
Touching her
. Charlotte didn’t like being touched by strangers. And some of them stank. Spritzing herself with a dose of Caleche (“Every girl needs a signature scent,” was one of her mother’s style mottos), Charlotte ran down the stairs of the station, bought a single trip Metro Card and hurried through the turnstile. Gingerly pushing her way into a car on the number 6 train, she sat down, closed her eyes and began to hum, softly, to herself.

When Charlotte had been frightened or uncomfortable
as a child, she’d developed this trick of singing. One of her teachers at Chapin had told her that there were these Aborigines in Australia who believed the whole world, everything in it, from stones and lakes to the seas, mountains, and even man, had been literally sung into existence. It was the most romantic thing Charlotte had ever heard. But when she started singing herself to sleep at night—the only thing that helped console her in those tortuous, lonely, sleepless hours after she went to bed—she had been told to stop.

“Shh! Your father’s working. Keep quiet, Charlotte,” her mother had ordered. “Or I’ll punish you.”

Insisting that Charlotte eat her dinner with two silver napkin rings clenched between her upper arms and torso was one of her mother’s favorite forms of punishment. “It’s to help your posture, dear,” she’d say. “You’ll thank me for your straight back when you’re older.” What kind of parent punishes their own child for sounding happy or for finding a way of fighting off the demons in the dark? That was the thing, you see? By making noise, Charlotte was telling the demons that she was still awake. Not until later did she discover that some demons don’t wait until you’re asleep. Some attack and hurt you, even when you’re wide awake.

Her phone vibrated just as the train was pulling into the 68
^th
Street station. Taking the stairs two at a time, she raced up Lexington, over to Madison, and flipped open her screen. The doctor had left a voice mail.

“Charlotte. I just got your results. And there’s really
nothing to worry about. But I’d like you to schedule an appointment. Please call my secretary and she’ll set it up.”

Her hands were shaking as she punched in his digits. The word “really”… It sounded like he was minimizing something. It wasn’t quite casual enough.

“Good morning. This is Dr. Thorpe’s office.”

“Hi! I’m Charlotte Wolfe. The doctor …”

“Yes, he spoke to me, Ms. Wolfe. We have a cancellation next Thursday at 11:15. Will that work for you?”

Charlotte gulped. “There’s nothing sooner? I’m—”

“Anxious? I’m sure you are, dear. But the doctor’s out of town. May I pencil you in?”

“Forget the pencil,” Charlotte retorted. “Use a pen. I’ll be there.”

“Very good, Ms. Wolfe. See you then.”

Scanning Madison, she zeroed in on her destination. Lamiere was the name of the shop. “It’s supposed to be L
u
miere,” the dealer, Ed, had chuckled years ago. “But the painters spelled it wrong.”

Considering this guy bought most of his stuff from flea markets and jacked up the price thirty times, you’d think he could afford to repaint one letter.

“Charlotte, how lovely to see you!” Ed shouted as he opened the door. Gracefully sidestepping his hug, she smiled instead. Rumor had it, Ed had been wearing the same pair of greasy black pleather pants and matching beanie for twenty years. He even smelled oily. “You too, Ed. I can’t wait to see what you have for me.”

“You are going to LOVE it. I didn’t even bother to put it out in the shop. That’s how sure I am about it.”

Leading the way through his labyrinth of lighting, Ed took her to the back. And there, standing all by itself in a corner of the workroom, was the perfect Murano lamp. “See? The emerald is the same color as your eyes, Charlotte. And it’s genuine 1920s. Even the base is glass.”

“You’re right. It’s gorgeous,” Charlotte said, fondling the five-foot pole of clear emerald, hand-blown glass. The carnival-like stripe of twisted gold inside almost brought tears to her eyes.

“And not a nick on it,” Ed announced.

“Now go ahead, Ed. Knock me out. How much?”

“The net, Charlotte? $13,000.”

“Oh c’mon, Ed. I’ve known you a long time. I want the net net.”

Ed shrugged his shoulders and sighed. “$11,000. Can’t go a penny less. The list is $18,000, Charlotte. And you know damn well, there’s nothing out there like it.”

“Done. And I need it wrapped like the infant Jesus. It’s going abroad.”

“Net” was the friendly discount off the list price that dealers gave all designers. “Net net” was the even friendlier discount given to favorite designers. Depending on the item, the discounts ran anywhere from a conservative 10% or 20% all the way up to 30% and 40%. Charlotte, of course, never settled for less than net net. Occasionally, she would pass on some of the discount to her clients. Other times, considering what she had to put up with servicing these clients, she figured that she was more than entitled to keep the “change.”

After neatly avoiding a farewell hug, Charlotte stood out on the street and hailed a cab. Fastening her seatbelt, she
gave the driver, Ahmed, the address for her home on North Moore and decided to let him find his own way down. As they crawled across 72
^nd
to Fifth (
Bad choice! Bad choice!
she whispered furiously under her breath) she thought about Pavel.

He was the only client she rarely ripped off. You didn’t screw Russians. Except maybe in the biblical sense. Which reminded her … That wasn’t a bad idea. With his wife and kids stuck out in the suburbs of Jersey (“It’s safer for them there,” he’d said), they might make a great couple. Unlike the powerful men in New York for whom money had become an abstract; men whose eyes were as dull as their edge after years of board meetings, distant wives, and charity benefits, Pavel was still sharp. He lived on the cusp of chaos and the brink of collapse. Experiencing that chaos, even vicariously, was a thrill. When she’d been with him that night at Anna’s, the night he’d asked her to redo the dacha, she’d felt both irresistibly alive and afraid.

Charlotte felt her neck snap when the cabdriver slammed on the brakes.

“Asshole,” she screamed as the driver hit the gas and her body bounced back against the seat. They’d been lurching down Fifth Avenue for twenty-five minutes. Traffic was so snarled up, it was nearly at a standstill. She could see the flashing lights and Con Ed truck parked in the middle of the avenue ahead.

“I’m getting out,” she yelled as the cab reached the corner of 23
^rd
Street “Now!”

Pumping the brakes, the driver turned around and flashed her an enormous grin.

“First day!” he said, as proud as if he just announced the birth of a son.

“Well, good luck!” Charlotte replied, flinging him a twenty and pushing the back door open. “You’ll need it!”

Other people were popping up umbrellas. But Charlotte liked the sensation of soft, light rain on her face. Picking up speed and finding her rhythm, she strode west towards the river.

Charlotte refused to use what she called “ear gear” on her walks: no Bluetooths, iPods or cell phones. They interfered with those rare moments of communion that she felt with the city.

Despite efforts to live a life laid out in ruler-straight lines, Charlotte was constantly careening between wild extremes. She knew no middle ground. Here in New York and only here did even street signs speak to her in terms of those extremes:

“Don’t even think of parking here!”

“Get off the grass!”

“Don’t litter. It’s selfish.”

This was language that Charlotte understood. It was intimate and personal. It wasted no time in cutting her, and everyone else in town, down to size.

This was the wonderful thing about New York. It was bigger than Charlotte. And somehow, she found comfort in that. This city was, for her, what religion was to others.
She
believed
in it. No matter how dwarfed or diminished she might occasionally feel by its experience, no matter how her own hopes might have dwindled, she couldn’t abandon it. It was the only place in the world that she’d ever felt she belonged.

Sticking to the pedestrian path along the river, as a blur of bikes and skaters swooshed past her, Charlotte remembered her first night in her loft. There had been a shootout between two Polish antiques dealers across the street. “The sound of gunfire was like Jiffy Pop,” she’d told Vicky later. “When the kernels are so hot, they start exploding up against the tin foil.” It was hard to believe that such an innocuous sound could be so lethal. But one guy was lying under a canopy across from her building, bleeding to death. The other guy had limped to the end of the street and collapsed on the corner of North Moore and Hudson. He’d been shot in the neck and lungs.

“My God! Charlotte,” Vicky had gasped when she heard the story. “How can you possibly stay there another minute? I mean, why don’t you move uptown?”

Unlike Vicky, who ventured downtown even less often than she ventured into her own $500,000 kitchen, Charlotte wouldn’t have dreamed of moving. The murders were just another chapter in the city’s story of extremes; an experience that brought Charlotte closer to the soul of this place—a place that never failed to embrace and console her.

By the time she walked over the bridge and crossed the West Side Highway, the early autumn twilight had turned to dark. She could still hear the creaking of swings in the new children’s park across Washington Street and the
murmur of mothers’ voices as they gave their kids a final push, cajoling them towards home with promises of dinner and bedtime stories.

Charlotte felt herself tumbling into a familiar limbo. The feeling was similar to catching one’s heel on the edge of a rug. She was losing her balance, falling. Caught in the beginnings of that lethargy and listlessness that signaled depression, she felt almost homeless. Turning her key in the lock, she entered the apartment.

For the first time in months, Charlotte didn’t fight it. She simply allowed the void to engulf her. Lying prone on the living room couch as the inertia rolled over her and her muscles and mind went slack, even the impulse to breathe seemed to demand too much effort. When she was younger, much younger, Charlotte had often feared that this oppressively flat and featureless inner landscape would drive her mad. It was a sign of weakness, a shameful secret, that she’d hidden away while practicing her smile in the bathroom mirror.

But even now, she was glad that she’d cut down on her antidepressants. She missed the vertiginous highs after these periods of inertia—a state of being, or non-being—that Charlotte also likened to being buried alive. She was picturing herself at the airport with Amy’s set of custom-made Vuitton when her world went dark.

She still wasn’t used to the new electric toothbrush. Every
time, she switched it on, she felt as if she were brushing with a swarm of mosquitoes or bees in her mouth. After rinsing and tying her hair back in a ponytail, she strode off towards the kitchen. Cleaning was one of Charlotte’s pre-mission rituals. It was also one of her greatest pleasures. She found a certain nobility in the work.

Her supplies were in a closet next to the Sub-Zero refrigerator. Slipping her hands into a pair of pink rubber gloves, she filled a pail with hot, steamy water and vinegar and rolled up her sleeves.
Why is this work so satisfying
, she wondered before getting down on her hands and knees to scrub the grouting between the Italian tiles with an old toothbrush.
Maybe it’s the physical part of it
, she thought.
“Sweat equity.”
Wielding mops, dusting, ironing clothes, and washing floors was a means of claiming a space as one’s own. It created a complicity between the animate and the inanimate. It brought a house alive.

Sitting back with her hands on her hips, she pitied all the women in New York who never touched a broom, a mop, an iron, a sponge. Women who only sweat in spas and private gyms in front of personal trainers. (“Gymnausea,” she called it.)

After mopping the floors and wiping down the window ledges with more hot water and vinegar, she placed two fresh lemon wedges in the dishwasher and reached for the Dustbuster. This one was so powerful, it even sucked up liquids. It had been a Christmas present from her ex-boyfriend, Paul. “How can you stand being such a neat freak?” he’d asked her as she unwrapped the gift. “You’re so neurotically tidy!”

What did slobs like Paul know of such primal,
uncomplicated joys? Of a woman’s deep, unfulfilled longings not just for order but for the dazzle, the spotless promise of new beginnings? This was the pleasure of cleaning house, this aura of promise.