The Craigslist Murders (9 page)

After replacing the Dustbuster in its charger, Charlotte smiled. She could smell the scent of lemon from the dishwasher. She’d reline the cabinets later with a new, hand-waxed paper from Kate’s Paperie. The only job that remained was the poker. Opening up the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink, she pulled out a can of Brasso and her soft chamois cloth. Nothing cleaned better than old-fashioned elbow grease.

Shit!
The prong of the poker was stuck, like the barb of a fish hook in the woman’s skull. “Hard-headed
mother!”
Charlotte snarled as she wriggled the poker around, hoping to cajole it free. Nothing. Spreading her legs while taking a deep, cleansing breath, she focused and gave it one more brutal tug. The poker tore free, flinging a piece of scalp and $600 worth of streaked, blonde hair against a closet door.

Right up until this last little hitch, everything had gone like clockwork. Despite the pouring rain, Charlotte had appeared at the townhouse and rang the bell at 4. She was always punctual. “It isn’t just a question of being polite,” her mother had drummed into her. “It’s a sign of respect for the other person, dear.” Dressed in a Searle parka, black leggings and a leotard, and toting a big black bag with her new
neon pink yoga mat, she looked just like every other Upper East Side trophy wife returning from a workout.

“Yes, yes, who is it?” came the scratchy voice from the intercom.

“It’s Coreen, from Craigslist,” she replied, keeping her head hidden in the hood of her parka.

“Oh all right,” the impatient voice sounded put out. “Just a minute.”

Convinced that the house would be fully staffed, Charlotte was relieved to see only the petite, infuriated blonde, dressed in head-to-toe pink Chanel, who opened the massive black door.

“Everybody, I mean
everybody
, is at the house in Bedford,” she informed Charlotte in a clipped voice. “I’ve had to shut the whole security system down myself.”

“Oh dear! You poor thing,” Charlotte replied, sidling into the foyer before the young woman could change her mind.

“You have no idea how complicated the system is … All the zones and cameras and sirens …”

“Is it off?” Charlotte asked.

“Yes!” Amy said. “But only after I was forced to spend twenty minutes on the phone with some mentally impaired imbecile at the security company.”

“I know just how frustrating that can be,” Charlotte said, inching her way past a fabulous 17
^th
century oak table in the hallway.

“It’s also the biggest gala of the year for the Fashion Group,” the woman huffed and puffed. “I’m on the committee and my personal stylist called in sick.”

“Well, I won’t take long, I promise.” Charlotte said.

“Fine. But I have to be dressed and ready in an hour,” Amy said, turning on her red-soled Louboutins and heading for the marble staircase.

“I’m just curious, Amy. Why do you advertise on Craigslist?” Charlotte asked as the woman click-clacked her way up the stairs. “I mean, you don’t seem like the type.”

“My husband asked me the same question,” Amy said with a laugh. “He said, ‘It’s a bit lowbrow, don’t you think, darling?’ But I told him I was setting an example. I’ll give the money to charity, naturally.”

Naturally
, Charlotte mimicked to herself.

“I call it recycling,” Amy said. “You know, doing my bit for a sustainable world?”

“Well, I think it’s admirable,” Charlotte replied, massaging the tiny woman’s mammoth ego.

Following in Amy’s cushioned footsteps (the museum-quality Persians were priceless), Charlotte swept past a series of cluttered rooms with cathedral ceilings, staid but safe and expensive “brown” or English oak furniture, and chintz. Christ! So much chintz.

Signature Marietta
, Charlotte sniffed, disdainfully thinking of the designer.
The King of Queens
.

“My husband’s first wife had the
worst
taste.” Amy said, as if reading her mind. “But she was still,
you know
, ‘in the picture’ when we first got together, so I haven’t been able to change things as fast as I’ve wanted. Richard says his kids need a slower transition. Anyway, we’re redoing everything this summer,” she added smugly. “I’m working with Stephen and we’re thinking about going totally retro. You know, Hollywood Regency?”

Argh!

The bedroom was a nightmare of pink and red toile de Jouy—window treatments, canopies, even the walls of the 1,500-square foot dressing room were covered with Jouy. The four-piece Vuitton luggage had been dumped into a corner, near one of the closets under a dry cleaner’s rolling rack.

“There it is,” Amy said, pointing with her index finger. “I only used it once, on my honeymoon, two years ago. It’s just been gathering dust up here.”

“It’s exquisite,” Charlotte said, moving in closer to admire the luster of the hand-tooled brown leather and the brass work.

“I see the trunk is locked. Is there a key or …”

“Yes. Obviously there’s a key.”

“For three thousand dollars, I’d like to look at the inside if you don’t mind.”

“Oh, really!” Amy said, expelling an exasperated sigh. “I’ll have to see if it’s in the drawer here.”

Turning her back, she began sorting through a drawer of neatly rolled up, hand pressed, $350 silk underpants.

Charlotte slid the poker out from inside the yoga mat in her bag.

“I’m going to have Vuitton make me …”

Charlotte grinned as the heavy brass poker slid ever so smoothly into the back of Amy’s neatly groomed head. A startled “Oh” of surprise, a whoosh of bad breath, and the woman crumpled to the floor. Charlotte hit her again.

When the jerking stopped, she crouched down on her well-toned haunches and gave the body a quick kick. A
single tear spilled down an implanted cheek. Both eyes were open. Walking into the bathroom, Charlotte removed a Handi Wipe from her bag, turned on the faucet, and rinsed the poker in the tub. She also checked her garments for blood. Certain that she hadn’t touched anything but the poker with her bare hands, she shut off the faucet with the Handi Wipe, and trotted back into the dressing room.

As she crept around the pool of blackened liquid that had begun to soak through the white wall-to-wall carpet, the deep richness of the color reminded her of those luscious old oil-based Dutch enamel paints. You couldn’t even buy them anymore in New York. “People worry about the fumes,” some guy at the Janovic paint store had told her with a shrug of his shoulders. She had to order them from England now. Tugging on the handle of the Vuitton trunk, Charlotte sighed. “What a waste! There’s no way I can heave this home alone.” Instead, Charlotte picked up the vanity case, slung her bag over her shoulder, and casually retraced her steps to the foyer. The phone was ringing.

Within hours, this place would be crawling with cops, gaping at everything from the marble staircase and 16-foot Flemish tapestries to the deserted chintz-filled salons. Cops who, if they were lucky and worked hours of overtime every week, just managed to pay the mortgages on ranch houses in Jersey and on Long Island. As they fumbled through layers of frilly $350 silk underpants, would they think of their own tired, frazzled wives? Wives who could only afford to dream of a long three-day weekend in Cancun? Charlotte imagined the cops going through the motions more meticulously than usual due to the victim’s identity.

Paper bagging her hands, they would hope that she’d fought off her assailant and that her fingernails would reveal traces of blood or hair. They’d check the drains, the traps in the bathroom and run the tapes from the security cameras. All for nothing, Charlotte had left a message on the woman’s cell phone. True. But that was two days ago. Who saves messages for two whole days? And she’d called from a payphone, anyway. They’d dust for nonexistent prints, get a hold of the woman’s land-line phone records, and take a million digital photos of the “crime scene.”

Hell, they might even haul out the tub and rip off the metal section of the door frame downstairs, looking for “ridge detail prints.” She’d read about that in the
Post
after the murder of Linda Stein, the punk rap manager turned Realtor to the stars. She’d been killed by her own personal assistant, news that Charlotte believed had come as a terrible shock to everyone in the city except the thousands of other personal assistants who dreamed, daily, of doing the same thing.

But Charlotte respected these cops. Unlike the rest of humanity, these detectives would spend days trying to get under her skin and inside her head—to walk around in her shoes. If they were smart and dedicated, they would get closer to her than anyone else. Because the toughest, most successful cops were also brilliantly intuitive and empathic.

Using the sleeve of her Searle parka, Charlotte twisted open the front doorknob, glanced out at the empty street, and sauntered off into a torrential downpour.
Rain is good
, Charlotte thought to herself as she pulled up her hood and ducked down low to avoid the eye of the CCTV camera
next door. Usually, Charlotte was uncannily observant and attuned to her surroundings. But in her hurry, she missed the graffiti on the big blue mailbox. “Doom! Gloom! Boom! Soon!” read the anonymous message. She also missed the twitch of a white glass curtain on the first floor of a nearby townhouse.

Charlotte devoted the rest of her weekend to quality personal time. Late Sunday afternoon, she toted her trophies into the bathroom and set them up like a display of wedding gifts on top of her tiger maple cosmetic table. Running the bath with water as hot as she could stand, she stepped in and lay back, gazing at her hard-won acquisitions: the bottle of vintage Dom, the gold charm bracelet and the Vuitton. Her anxiety had given way to a sense of free floating ease, a mild euphoria that seemed to loosen her every muscle. All of the static, the incessant chatter inside her head, had gone as silent as the city after a heavy snowfall.

If only these women had the courage to see their own small, unhappy lives as she did
, Charlotte thought.
They’d be grateful to her
. She was doing them a favor, releasing them from their misery. Reaching over for a neatly creased copy of the
Post
, she reread the feature story.

Charlotte put down the paper and began soaping her
body with a loofah. She thought about how little the world would miss these women. Like Vicky, they were predators, her so-called “victims.” Even more depressing, these same women would give birth to children who would grow up equally delusional. Children, like Charlotte, who would be orphaned by their mother’s hollow-hearted, venomous ambitions.

Finishing up her spa ritual with a Clarins facial and a thirty-minute Klorane hair treatment, she reached for a bath sheet. Unfortunately, her most determined efforts to thwart her own mother’s plan to drop by for afternoon tea had failed miserably. “I’m bringing you a gift,” she’d shouted into the telephone. “Don’t even think of trying to cancel.” Why did deaf people shout, anyway? It wasn’t as if Charlotte was the one who was hard of hearing.

From the minute her mother had set foot in the door, her visit had gone downhill. “What a pity Parke Bernet went out of business, dear,” she’d said, eyeing the bold geometric pattern of Charlotte’s favorite Caucasian carpet. “I mean, I do
so
prefer old Persians, don’t you?”

When the two sat down on her new slipcovered couch, the sniping resumed. “And these pillows, Charlotte. What on earth possessed you?”

Charlotte loved the shock of oversize pink peonies set against black and white striped cotton. They were a stroke of genius. “They’re so unbearably loud,” her mother had added, shifting her body sideways, as if to remove herself from the offensive burst of color. “I’m not really criticizing, darling. We all have different ways of expressing ourselves, don’t we?”

Charlotte twitched and changed the subject. “You look
beautiful, Mother,” she had said, hoping to deflect the insults. And it worked.

Pursing her lips in a semblance of a smile, her mother had no choice but to thank her. The thing is, she
did
look beautiful.

Long before women began to age so disgracefully; before “lethal injections” like Botox, Sculptra, and collagen, her mother was having facials twice a month and shielding her skin from the sun with hats and silk umbrellas. Neither the treasonous betrayals brought about by age or experience had touched her mother. Even at sixty-two years old, her skin remained luminously white and unblemished. So why did she continue to taunt and belittle her daughter? And what is it that made Charlotte so eager to please this woman who gave so little back?

Charlotte had always tried to be the perfect child: obedient, polite, responsible. But this undermining had been going on for as long as she could remember. Even when Charlotte succeeded, she sensed that she was, somehow, slipping. Always slipping.