Darryl still hadn’t stopped talking. “It’s not like I’m doing the whole house with prison toilets, Charlotte. It’s just the library, the master suite and Tim’s room.”
Tim was the couple’s seven-year-old son. “And by the way, for Tim, I’m thinking something along the lines of a dojo, you know? He loves karate. His sensei told me about this old Japanese guy who comes in and hand weaves grass mats, just like in a real tatami room.”
“Right,” Charlotte said. “A dojo, why not?”
“Now, Charlotte. How are you doing on those photographs for the Carlyle?”
“I brought them with me,” she replied. “They’re out in the front hall.”
“Oh! I’m soooo relieved, Charlotte. I want something so hip, it hurts.”
As Charlotte untied the string around her package, Darryl’s Bluetooth blinked.
“Oh My God! Oh My God!” she squealed, wrenching it out, when the three-foot portraits were revealed. “I adore them!”
The workers had huddled around and were staring, goggle-eyed, at the photographs.
“The German artist calls them ‘Delirium,’ ” Charlotte explained, laying out the series of six black and white nude couples. “They were shot exactly three minutes after orgasm.”
“Well, I cannot wait to get them back to the hotel, Charlotte. They’re divine!”
“I knew you’d like them,” Charlotte said, peeking at her watch. “But listen. I’m headed downtown. I have to talk to the architects about visas for your French painters and the Italian mosaic team.”
“Oh, I am just so thrilled, Charlotte. We’re going to make this an absolute dream house.”
Picking up her bag, Charlotte kissed Darryl goodbye and hitched a ride down to the basement in the freight elevator. The visit had left her feeling utterly deflated.
7
Charlotte collapsed on her down-filled couch. Prison toilets … Christ! She thought. What an atrocious waste of a day. No new prospects on Craigslist. No Murano glass for Pavel. And she’d forgotten her cell at Boulud. Charlotte pushed the play button on her answering machine.
“Please, please, Charlotte. Say you’ll come!” It was Vicky. “I’m so stressed out, I’m flying Tom down on the jet. You could come together. Call me.” Tom was an occasional friend of Charlotte’s and one of the best masseurs in town.
“Nobody has hands like him,” Vicky had extolled rapturously, after Charlotte had sent him to the house as a gift.
The thing is, Tom was as good at massaging certain truths as he was knotted muscles. For instance, he was gay. Like totally gay. But somehow, Vicky still didn’t know.
“I have these fantasies,” she’d said over a long lunch at the oh-so-staid but reliable San Domenico. “I can’t help it, Charlotte. I mean, the man is so empathic …”
It was almost funny, that the most selfish people on the planet did nothing but talk about empathy. No way she was flying out to Aspen.
The next message was from her mother. “Hi, dear. You haven’t returned any of my calls, not even on your cell. I’m worried. Are you all right?” Worried? That would be a first.
The last message was from Dr. Greene. “Hello, Charlotte. It’s 5:15. I haven’t heard from you. I know that we’ve discussed ending your therapy. But this will be the second session you’ve missed. I will have to charge you.”
Perfect, Charlotte muttered to herself. Another $450 down the Toto toilet. She was already two months late on her Amex bill. Better to be two months late with her period. Being pregnant would be a joy compared to being cut off by Amex in New York City. What was it that old advertising C.E.O had said to her years ago?
“You’re a member of what we call ‘the experiential generation,’ dear.”
“Meaning what?” Charlotte had asked.
“Meaning you spend all your money now and save nothing for later,” he’d chuckled. “Now how ’bout experiencing a nice glass of $350 Germain-Robin brandy?”
Kicking off her flats and hoisting herself up from the couch, she walked down the narrow hall towards her bedroom. The pink silk sari walls looked as fresh as the day she’d tacked them up. While her clients insisted on spending fortunes and buying only from top notch textile dealers, Charlotte preferred to hunt for saris in the tacky Mom and Pop stores on Lexington Avenue. She loved the strings of garish colored blinking lights strung up inside the windows, the pungent restaurant smells of oily curries and spices, and the cheerful rat-tat-tat of Urdu, the language of Pakistani taxi drivers. Picnicking from the hoods of their cars, the drivers would stand around and gossip as Charlotte sat in one of the shops, drinking tea and haggling as if her life depended on it.
Sometimes, like with the sari on her hallway walls, she’d get lucky. The owner would pat her hand and ask her to wait as he wandered off into a dimly lit backroom. Charlotte would drink her tea and fantasize about discovering some long lost treasure like the Baroda carpet. Seven feet long, the rug was a piece of soft deerskin studded with a million pearls, over 2,000 rose-cut diamonds, and hundreds of rubies and emeralds. It had disappeared in the 1940s during Partition when an Indian maharani had sent it to Switzerland for “safekeeping.”
The sari on her walls may not have been quite as precious as the Baroda carpet. But when the dealer emerged from his backroom, he treated it almost as reverently. Unfolding the yards of heavy silk from a bed of wrinkled white tissue, he’d run his fingers along the hand-embroidered borders. “Real gold filigree, Miss.” he’d boasted. “A wedding sari from long ago.” Two cups of tea and fifteen minutes of bargaining later, the sari was hers.
Then she remembered that it was Paul who had helped her tack it up. Two years, they’d been together. And he’d dumped her for some twenty-three-year-old British party girl with an I.Q. of 4.
“She’s OD’ed on Gs and Es,” he reported the night he called from New York Hospital. As in grams of cocaine and ecstasy. Apparently, the girl’s father sent some lackey from an international concierge service to pick up his own daughter in the emergency room. There was this girl strung out and nearly dead, and all Paul wanted to talk about was the concierge service.
“It’s free, Charlotte. I mean, it’s part of the lifestyle management team at her condo.”
Charlotte assumed that people used these services for booking front row seats at fashion shows and last minute tables at Nobu. Not for picking up comatose daughters. “Uhhuh,” was the only word she’d managed to summon up from the depths of sleep. Did he really think she cared? Who did he think he was, waking her at 2 in the morning to talk about his new girlfriend?
This was the problem with opening yourself up to people; when you were generous and loving and serving, always serving, the needs of others. They turned on you. They exploited you. My whole life is about other people, Charlotte sighed. And I never get any thanks. Neatly folding back the top sheet on her bed and plumping the goose down pillows, Charlotte tried not to think of the shrunken old lady she’d seen shuffling through the checkout line at D’Agostinos. As Charlotte flipped through the pages of the Enquirer and the woman exchanged green points for TV dinners and Bumble Bee tuna fish, Charlotte imagined herself at a similar age, hunched over and hiding the hump on her back with shawls and droopy, oversized clothing.
She could sense the woman’s shame, her humiliation. Years of bending over backwards, of pleasing and appeasing, and this was her reward. But this is what protecting and serving people was all about. Belittling yourself. Making yourself seem insignificant and small. Some people, Charlotte supposed, made themselves small simply to survive and others for the sake of love. That didn’t make them any less “dysfunctional,” as her shrink would say.
Charlotte’s neck stiffened as she pummeled the pillows. Swatting at the blizzard of feathers that tickled her neck and face, she wiped the beads of sweat off her forehead. The pillows looked as if they’d been disemboweled. Enough. Enough feeling sorry for yourself, Charlotte. Dragging the dry cleaning into her closet, she wrenched the plastic she
et off a wool jacket and reached for a padded hanger.
Cry me a river, build me a bridge, and get over it! Isn’t that what Vicky’s daughter had said to her mother the night Vicky complained, yet again, about being so frantically busy and tired?
“Busy doing what, Mom?” the girl had asked, eyes flashing with one exquisitely manicured hand on her hip. “Taking care of yourself? That’s pretty much all you do all day, isn’t it?”
Charlotte was stunned. Even if it were sort of true, that wasn’t the point. With a kid like that, Charlotte herself would also be up and working out at the crack of dawn with a body talk practitioner, a yoga instructor, a Reiki teacher, and a guy who rolled hot rocks across her back. In fact, she’d probably bury the kid in hot rocks.
The phone was ringing. Let it go, Charlotte thought. It’s been a long day. Take a bath. Then it rang again. What if it was Pavel, calling from Moscow? She ran into the bedroom, bumping her shin so hard on the edge of the bed that her eyes watered as she picked up.
“Hey! Charlotte, darling. It’s me.”
“Hi, Vicky. I got your message but …”
“Forget the message, Charlotte. I spoke to my daughter this afternoon, and I’m worried sick.”
“Vicky, you’re always worried sick about Rose.” Rubbing her bruised shin, she sat down on her bed. If only she hadn’t picked up … Vicky’s calls went on forever.
“She was caught shoplifting at Bergdorf’s, okay?”
“Jesus,” Charlotte whispered. The kid had just returned from some chaperone-escorted, Shop-Till-You-Drop tweenie tour of Paris. What the hell was she doing shoplifting?
“So what’d she steal?” Charlotte asked, innocently.
“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.
8
She liked the privacy of the booths at Kinko’s. This particular branch at 12th 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 21st and 2nd 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.
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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 57th Street and Fifth, north to 96th 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).
The Craigslist Murders Page 4
