“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.
17
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.
MANSION MAMA MURDERED!
By Ben Volpone
Sources close to the Manhattan Police Commissioner’s office report that the Friday afternoon murder of 28-year-old Amy Webb, wife of Richard Webb, one of the city’s hottest bond traders, has officials desperately seeking leads.
“The security system, including cameras and motion detectors, was off. There were no signs of forced entry,” the source informed a Post reporter. “But there are distinct similarities between this case and other unsolved female homicides in Manhattan.” When pressured for details, the source refused to elaborate. The police commissioner will speak at a press conference Monday afternoon.
Amy Webb, a small town girl born in the hills of western Pennsylvania, worked briefly as Mr. Webb’s personal assistant prior to their society wedding in Palm Beach, two years ago. The wedding, attended by the famous and infamous alike, made local headlines when Kanye West, the new Mrs. Webb’s favorite rapper, dedi
cated his song about prenups and gold diggers to the blushing bride. According to Palm Beach newspapers, “The groom was not amused.”
Webb’s body was discovered in her dressing room by her husband when he returned home early from a Fashion Group benefit at which his wife had failed to appear. Calls for comments to his office on Wall Street and his home in Bedford were not returned.
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.
Sometimes, it was physical—the sensation. A split second fit of dizziness. A moment when she was unsure of her footing. How dare her mother attack her in such a private, vulnerable place? Somebody had once said that decorating was a form of dreaming out loud. Charlotte agreed. But it was only here, within the safety of her own home, that she had ever permitted herself to fully explore those dreams. Yet still she smiled at her mother. It hurt her face, the smiling.
“Smile! Charlotte! Smile!” her mother would snarl, tugging her by the hand when she was small and looking straight into whatever lens seemed to be pointed in their direction. They were usually leaving Serendipity or Gino’s after an early Sunday night dinner. Only Charlotte seemed to understand that the papps had no interest in them. They were often just blocking the shot of some famous person behind them.
If she didn’t smile quickly enough, or the photographers ignored them, her mother would blame her. “No one likes a sourpuss,” she’d sneer, yanking her by the hair and dragging her towards a dingy maid’s room at home. It was off the kitchen. The bed had been removed and the only light came from a grated vent that overlooked an airshaft. “You can come out when you’ve learned to behave yourself,” she’d say, leaving Charlotte locked in the dark. How she’d dreaded the sound of her mother’s heels fading into the distance.
Any infraction of her mother’s rules, including touching her after she had finished dressing for her evenings out, and Charlotte was exiled to the room. It wasn’t easy, fighting the impulse to caress the yards of creamy silk or satin that her mother wore as lightly as she did the deliriously heavy scent of Joy. At first, the experience in the room was terrifying. But then, she’d close her eyes and begin to sing. Over the years, she’d also furnished the room with things that comforted her: a coarse blue blanket, a bottle of water, her Paddington Bear. She refused to bring in a flashlight or even a book of matches. Instead, Charlotte trained herself to embrace the fear; to become one with the darkness.
As she’d unwrapped her gift, a curious poster-like package, she’d wished that her mother could have read her mind. Why am I always tongue-tied with you? She was asking herself. Why, at thirty-seven years old, haven’t I learned to strike back? Just a glimpse of her gift—of the framed cartoon figure and Charlotte was shaking.
“I found this in the attic out in …”
Her mother was kneading her hands in her lap. “In,” she said again, while rubbing the fabric of the couch.
Charlotte looked at her, puzzled. “In Alpine, Mother?”
“Of course, dear. Where else?” Her mother snapped. “Remember how many of these you used to draw?”
The figure had black stick-like legs, a round, striped body, and a face shaped like the letter C. The inside of the C revealed row after row of sharp, pointed teeth—an open mouth, caught in an enraged, silent howl. Funny how her mother had detested the drawings back then. Now she was pulling them out from the attic and showing them off. But why had she drawn such a strange blank and fumbled for that one word? Alpine had been her home for over twenty years.
“Well, darling … what do you say?” her mother had asked, swinging her thick, chestnut-red hair, with its bold silver streaks, back from her face. “I thought you might be touched by the gesture.”
“I am. Thank you,” Charlotte replied as she tore her eyes away from the cartoon.
Disobeying her mother had never come easily to Charlotte. Her singing, for instance, had been reduced to a barely audible hum after her mother’s order to stop. But she did remember the forbidden trips to the attic that began after her sister died. The hours she’d spent idly talking to snapshots of relatives she’d never met. The one she liked best was of a pudgy, overdressed woman standing on a boardwalk by the sea. There was a giant Ferris wheel behind her. “My sister, Dottie, Orchard Beach, 1952,” it said on the back. Charlotte slipped it into her pants one afternoon and hid it in the pages of a book in her bedroom. The photo now sat in a silver frame next to her bed. It was along with these surreptitious visits to the attic after her sister’s death that Charlotte had also begun drawing the “C men.” Deliberately pushing the memory of that recurring horror with her sister out of her mind, she had dutifully thanked her mother before escorting her to a taxi. “I have a headache,” her mother announced, wearily. “I need to go to sleep.”
Her mother had suffered from migraines all her life. When she’d received the perfunctory rejection letter from Shinnecock Golf Club and the Union League in New York, she’d gone to bed for three days. “She’s in mourning,” her father had said, sarcastically. “Don’t go near her.”
The replay of her mother’s visit during her bath had left her so irritated and impatient, Charlotte decided to walk a few blocks before bed. Lacing up her Nikes and grabbing a Burberry parka, she locked the door and headed for the elevator. A fierce wind was blowing in from the river as she hit the street and walked down to Duane and Washington.
“Hey, Charlotte! Charlotte!” It was John, the homeless man. “Got a dollar? Got a dollar?” Not only
was John accustomed to people looking straight through him, nobody listened to him, either. Maybe this was why he always repeated himself. Shuffling towards her with his shopping bag clutched against his chest, he was dressed in his usual uniform: khaki pants, a cloth coat, and a button-down Oxford shirt. When he put down his shopping bag, she smiled and passed him a ten. There was something positively patrician about John. Even the way he spoke, the way he said “Yah! Yah!” reminded her of George Plimpton.
Twenty-five minutes later, Charlotte snuggled in between her new Pratesi sheets and thought about John. Every day, rain or shine, he took the subway down from a shelter on 118th Street and hung around on the same corner. Why had he chosen this corner? What made it feel like home? Was he simply a creature of habit? The whole neighborhood, everyone who fed him and paid for his coffee and winter boots, wondered what had made him snap and begin living on the streets.
Just before dawn, Charlotte sat bolt upright, shivering, her body slick with sweat. She hadn’t had this nightmare in years. She was leaping over rooftops, her mouth open in a rictus-like O of fear, too scared to even scream. Her mother, dressed to kill in a twin set and pearls, was chasing after her, holding a kitchen knife.
18
The question was right there under “Just Asking” on Page Six of the Post. “Just Asking” was the IQ test of gossip. Salacious snippets of info about the behavior of nameless celebutards, socialites, and players offered in the form of thinly veiled questions. If you were connected, you guessed who among the high (like, very high) and mighty was off to rehab, sleeping around, losing their jobs, whatever. But today’s question deviated from the usual format:
Is there a “web Webb” connection?
How did Amy Webb’s killer gain access to her East Side mansion? Could it have been a chat room encounter gone tragically wrong? Is it some Internet connection that links the murder of this oh-so-well-to-do socialite with other wealthy female victims in Manhattan? We’re just asking …
The Craigslist Murders Page 7
