The Craigslist Murders (16 page)

At the time, Charlotte had thought that the shrine should have a patent pending. No more anger management, Buddhism, Botox, panic rooms, antidepressants, compulsive shopping or painkillers. Just a shrine set aside for her clients to sob or better yet, to laugh.

Flinging the
Times
and her new client’s “brand” identity file on the counter, Charlotte got up to get dressed. There was a new Kinko’s down on Trinity Place. She’d go and do some browsing.

After a brief breakfast talk with Anna, (who was leaving for Italy to stay with her sister for three weeks) Charlotte spent the rest of Monday morning catching up on invoices. Getting money out of Darryl was so deviously complicated, it was practically Byzantine. She was billing some hotel down in Uruguay for work she was doing on their apartment in New York. The hotel was a tax shelter. Darryl’s husband had tried to explain how the system worked. A lot of rich people were doing it, but Charlotte had no interest in understanding how the system worked or even if it was legal. She just wanted to be paid.

Last night at Kinko’s had been interesting. She’d found another potential candidate in Collectibles—a woman selling 12 sterling silver Tiffany place settings. Scrolling down to the posting, she’d clicked, and there it was. In red ink, next to the flagged warning about scams and fraud:

Twisting the emerald ring that Paul had given her in Venice (“Let’s go for the gold,” he’d said with a promising smile as they sipped Camparis on the terrace of the Gritti Palace), Charlotte’s own caution and common sense had led her to the decision to lay low. But there wasn’t any harm in just e-mailing the woman, was there?

On Monday afternoon, Charlotte speedwalked from home up to the Carlyle Hotel on Madison Avenue. Standing alone in the living room with its $85,000 a month view over Central Park, Charlotte glanced at Darryl’s new elliptical
machine. It stood there like some gigantic metal insect, waiting to paralyze its prey. For Charlotte, the elliptical machine was to exercise what puggles were to dogs. Stupid, unnecessary, and phenomenally popular among those who were terminally bored and in constant search of novelty.

Longing to cover or remove the eyesore from the room, Charlotte realized that every minute, every hour, of Darryl’s life was scheduled. She lived like a soldier: the regimen, the discipline, the grueling workouts. But the only thing she was fighting for was her sanity. There was no pleasure in it. No passion. It was just another way of killing time.

Speaking of which … Darryl had called at six in the morning and asked her to return the photos to the gallery in Chelsea.

“Listen, I really am sorry,” she’d said while Charlotte stared, bleary eyed at her digital clock. “But some little brat came over for a playdate with the kids and tattletaled to his parents. The mommy called and said the nudity on our walls was ‘age inappropriate.’ ”

“No problem,” Charlotte had muttered, desperate to go back to sleep. “But what in God’s name are you doing up at six o’clock, Darryl?”

“Working out!” she replied huskily. My trainer’s leaving for L.A. and this was the only time he could squeeze me in.”

“Well, that’s just great, Darryl but I’m still sleeping,” Charlotte said as she began to burrow her head beneath the pillows.

“Charlotte, wait!” Darryl had hollered as Charlotte’s finger was poised on the End Call button. “I need to thank you for something else, too.”

“For what?”

“For the fact that my husband is actually sleeping with me again.”

“Sorry, Darryl. I …” Being forced to listen to the intimate down and dirty details of her clients’ private lives always made Charlotte squirm.

“It’s the bed, Charlotte. He loves the bed …”

“Ohhh! Right. Did the guys deliver it?”

“Last night. And I’m still sore!”

Charlotte laughed weakly. “Well, then I guess it was a small price to pay, huh?” she said.

Darryl giggled. “You’re too much, Charlotte. I adore you!”

Bubble wrapping the photos of the naked couples, Charlotte thought about the “small price” that Darryl had paid for the pleasures of her new bed. It was just under $200,000. The $70,000 mattress had been custom-made by Hästens, the Swedish mattress makers that supplied beds to that country’s royal family. And the frame, a miracle of modern industrial design, had come in at around $130,000.

It wasn’t just any frame, of course. An architect friend of Charlotte’s had done the drawings and created a plasticene model of the bed, which had then been scanned by a computer imaging wand. After approvals, CAD/CAM had laser-carved a life-size model of the king-size bed in Styrofoam, which was delivered to a Brooklyn workshop. There, a team of Irish millworkers had spent three months handcarving the actual bed from teak, matching their work to every sensuous curve and detail of the model. The project had taken a little over five months from start to Darryl’s orgasmic finish.

After carting the package downstairs, she waited while a doorman hailed her a cab. As she buckled herself into the back seat of the taxi, she skimmed through the list of loot in Jerry’s swag bag. How many celebs actually needed a twenty-four-karat gold Shu Uemura eyelash curler, a Tupperware ice cream scooper, and—Charlotte especially loved this—one year’s worth of free burritos from Chipotle? The list also included a Fendi silk shawl, a three-month bicoastal membership to the Sports Club LA (with branches in all major cities, of course), a three-month Vespa rental, and $2,000 towards LASIK vision correction. $15 to $25 million dollars a picture wasn’t enough for these guys? They had to have swag bags, too?
Always un poquito mas! A little more. That was their motto!

Charlotte crumpled the embossed paper into a ball, and threw it on the floor.
Breathe, Charlotte! Breathe!
she said to herself, opening the cab window and feeling the slap of cold wind on her cheeks. God! How she hoped Pavel would like the piece at Max’s. It was her first major purchase for the dacha. She didn’t want to disappoint him.

When her cab pulled up and let her out in front of the shop, she nodded at Pavel’s two bodyguards and quietly pulled open the door. Huddled in the shadows at the front, she watched as Max rubbed the top of an oak chest the way you rub a kid’s stomach when it hurts. Around and around went the hand as he talked.

“Ya gotta pick out the merits of every single piece, Pavel. Somebody asks me, ‘What’s the best piece here?’ Well, that’s like askin’ the mother of eight children to pick her favorite. There’s somethin’ good, even in a bad piece. It’s like bein’ human, ya know?”

Standing perfectly still, she waited to hear where else he might be headed with his conversation.

“See, I want a lunatic like me here in my store. Somebody who feels and sees the character of a piece. That’s where the real value is. It’s got nothing to do with price.”

The hell it doesn’t
, Charlotte thought to herself, reminded of the $550,000 they’d settled on for the cassa panca.

“It’s an instinct. What I hope for is what I call the depth charge feeling, Pavel.”

“Sorry, Max,” Pavel interrupted. “But depth charge?”

“Yeah! Ya get to a certain point down at 800 feet in the ocean and bang!” Max pounded on the chest. “Ya don’t know when it will happen. But you live with a piece long enough and ya get up one night cause ya can’t sleep, and it hits you. Ya see it. Ya feel it.”

“Hey, Charlotte,” Max shouted. “I know you’re there. I see ya. I feel ya.”

Stepping out from the shadows, Charlotte saw Max giving her his impish grin. “Hello, Charlotte. Ready for my tour?” he asked, bouncing on his toes.

Leading them like elves into the gloom, Max switched on an overhead pin spot and stood next to the cassa panca chest. The colors were even brighter than Charlotte remembered. And the men depicted on the bench, in their velvets and beards, looked almost
alive
. Their eyes seemed to follow
Charlotte’s every move. She held her breath as Max began to weave his magical tale about its history.

Pavel was entranced. His hands ran over each figure, touching the folds in the velvet.

“Maybe I am lunatic, Max,” Pavel finally said. “But I believe this piece has character. I feel the depth charge!”

“With what you’re paying, mister,” Max said in a deadpan tone, “you better feel the depth charge!”

She could hear the men laughing as she finally meandered up front. When Pavel reached out and took her hand, she trembled. He looked at her before letting go. “You are shaking, Charlotte. I feel it.”

“It’s the cold,” she answered. “I’m thin-skinned.”

“I’m being too forward, perhaps? I’m sorry.”

Charlotte noticed Max eyeing their exchange.

“No!” she replied, quietly grabbing his hand. It wasn’t the fact that he’d taken her hand, but the warmth of his touch that had made her tremble. Holding hands was such a simple, human gesture. She saw people do it all the time. But she had no memory of anyone ever holding hers. Not even her nanny. The intimacy of the gesture took her breath away. As they walked toward the door, Max picked up the phone. She was certain he was calling Anna. It was almost tribal, the way news traveled in the trade.

“Would you like a ride, Charlotte?” Pavel offered, hopefully, as they closed the door behind them.

“Sure,” said Charlotte. “I have a lot of work but maybe you could drop me off somewhere in midtown.”

“Of course, it would be my pleasure,” Pavel said, inviting her to slide into the limo. “I owe you. Not just for the piece,
but the chance to meet such an extraordinary man.”

“What were you two talking about, anyway?” Charlotte asked, leaning back against the luxuriously soft leather seat.

“Max’s grandfather was a tailor up in the Bronx,” Pavel said, now keeping a polite distance between them. “He said that his mother covered all the furniture in plastic. That’s why he ended up loving a nice patiner.”

“Patin
a,”
Charlotte gently corrected him.

“This is the same thing as what Max calls character?” Pavel asked, genuinely interested.

“Almost the same,” Charlotte said. “Patina is something that evolves over time, Pavel. It’s all the nicks and scrapes, the scars that show that a piece has lived.”

“Is this why you are attracted to this furniture, Charlotte?” Pavel asked, moving across the seat. “Because of its patina?”

“Yes, that’s part of it.” Charlotte, replied, lost, for a minute, in her own passion. “Most people see these signs of life as damage, as something that diminishes the beauty of a piece.”

“And you don’t?” Pavel asked, lowering his window.

“No. These pieces have been around for centuries. The damage is part of their identity. It’s why I hate pieces that are too restored.”

“Can you give me an example, I mean, of too much restored?”

“Well, it’s like people who inject this stuff into their wrinkles, you know, so they look younger?”

Pavel nodded. “In Moscow, they are injecting their own stem cells into their bodies at $20,000 a shot.”

“Right. And this is the problem. Because when a piece is stripped down and comes back all pretty and polished, it
loses the thing that defines its beauty, which is
experience
. This is what makes it so unique.”

“Charlotte, forgive me. But I believe you are quite unique, too. And I wonder, sometimes, if life has damaged you at all. You seem so flawless.”

“Unique, maybe,” she said, running her fingers through her hair and trying to defuse the tension that had sprung up between them. “But definitely not flawless. Now, are we going to eat tomorrow night?”

“Yes, I will spend tonight in Jersey with my family. But I’ve made reservations at Per Se for 8 o’clock. Does this sound good?”

“This sounds marvelous, Pavel,” Charlotte said, giving him a small smile. “Now please ask your driver to stop so I can get out and find something to wear.”

When the limo stopped on 58
^th
Street and Fifth, Charlotte jogged toward 6
^th
Avenue where a new Internet café had been tucked into the ground floor of a high rise office building.
I’ll just do some surfing
, she told herself, waiting in line for a terminal. She was too smart to take any stupid risks, especially now. But after sitting down and scrolling through her e-mail inbox, her heart fluttered. The woman with the silver had actually answered her.

Subj: Tiffany place settings

Date: 10/15/2009

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Dear Kate:

The silver is just taking up space and I’d like to get rid of it. But
I am a little nervous about selling to strangers. Could you tell me a bit about yourself or give me some kind of reference? My cell phone number is 917-865-9806.