The Craigslist Murders (2 page)

Taking a tiny sip from her glass of chilled Stag’s Leap, Charlotte entered the museum’s vast new atrium. The immensity of the space left her breathless, giddy. The ceilings that seemed to soar up forever, the 80-foot sheet of single-pane glass overlooking the gardens, the marble and sea-foam slate floors. It reminded her of the first time she’d ever set foot in a mosque, the glory of all that uninterrupted space. What a spectacular backdrop for tonight’s dinner.

People who say money reeks have never smelled real money
, she thought, while checking out the intimate groupings of snow-white, linen-covered tables. No, the money made by trustees of this museum had been so thoroughly laundered; all that was left was the discreet scent of Creed.
How ironic
, Charlotte sniggered. Most of the men in this room had done such unspeakably dirty things to amass their billions. But they all looked so pristine, so immaculately clean.

They lived clean, too. Smiling coyly at the male waiter and nibbling on a bit of billowy puff pastry, Charlotte thought some more about this generation of freshly-minted money—a generation that did everything but spend and exercise in moderation. They didn’t smoke. They didn’t drink. They barely ate. The women were so self-consumed, there
was nothing left of them but skin and bones. Faux blondes with Sulka-smooth faces and foreheads as shiny as Granny Smith apples, they all looked the same.
More identity theft
, Charlotte thought as she waved to a knot of women clustered near the bar. Some were former clients and others, friends of clients.

Back in the flush of her “brilliant, breakthrough success” (who could forget a rave like that from
Architectural Digest?
) Charlotte had been invited to lunch by a new client.

“I don’t do lunch,” she’d replied, offhandedly. When the woman’s personal assistant phoned the next morning to cancel her contract, Charlotte panicked. The remark could have killed her career. She hadn’t meant to sound haughty. She simply had better things to do. Like work. Now, she lunched twice a week. As Charlotte continued to survey the room, she noticed a guy staring at her, pointing at her shoes. What the hell was his name?

Even at thirty-seven years old, Charlotte knew that she was one of the best-looking women there. It wasn’t just the shoes—satin slippers, actually. She was wearing one red and one black from separate pairs that she’d picked up on sale at the Liwan boutique in Paris. And it wasn’t just her clothes—a beautiful old Beene shrug of hand-sewn red paillettes and a blissfully simple black jersey jumpsuit. It was the pale, creamy skin, emerald green eyes, and shock of fiery red hair that encircled her face like a halo—“the halo from hell,” some hideous ex-business partner had once called it.

Charlotte had a lot of ex-partners.
But this isn’t why women are staring at me tonight
, she thought.
They’re jealous
.
Style, like happiness, can’t be bought. Not real style. And Charlotte had it. “Elle sait faire” she’d overheard Caroline say about her to friends. Considering Caroline was the chicest French dealer in town, this was quite a compliment.

Oh right! Now she recognized the guy. It was the “hedgie” who worked in Greenwich Village.

“That’s short for hedge fund, dear,” the guy had said with a wink when she sat down next to him at some interminable private school auction last year.

“Wow!” Charlotte had replied, her eyes as round as saucers. “I think I’ve heard of those.”

Half her clients were married to hedge fund guys. Where did this moron think she’d been for the past ten years? As she recalled, the auction highlights included a $22,000 winning bid for “A Bedtime Story and Tuck In” by one of the school’s kindergarten teachers and a $42,000 bid for a cute patchwork quilt made by second graders. She couldn’t wait to get home. Christ! And there he was again tonight, bobbing up and down in the crowd, saluting her. What was with the saluting?

“Hi there!” Lunging in to plant a wet kiss on her cheek, the guy spilled half a glass of wine on his pants. “Remember me?”

“The hedgie,” Charlotte replied, politely passing him a cocktail napkin. “Short for hedge fund, right?”

“You got it, baby!” he said, blotting his thigh with one hand while grabbing another glass from a passing waiter. “Name’s Judd.”

For the next fifteen minutes, Judd tore off on a verbal “test drive” in his brand-new, fully-loaded $350,000 Maybach 57s.
Charlotte had only seen these pimped out chauffeur-driven sedans double-parked on the street. She didn’t even have a driver’s license. So by the time, he’d revved his way through twelve cylinder power packs, maximum torque of 1000 nm (whatever the fuck that was), rear aprons, and anthracite Alcantra, she’d felt like a piece of roadkill. He then switched to the subject of his fortieth birthday party.

“Did I tell you I paid for the Stones, Charlotte?” (
Yes, about ninety times
, she’d muttered to herself.)

“Eight million, but I got to sing with Mick!”

“What a treat for Mick,” she said.

“Who says you can’t get no satisfaction, huh?” he added, poking her playfully in the ribs, as she turned to speak with the plump “too-tan-from-a-can-man” sidling in on her left.

“I wouldn’t eat that if I were you,” the man said, snidely, pointing to the slender stalk of spring asparagus on the tip of her toothpick.

“Why not?” she was fool enough to ask. “I love asparagus!”

“Well, I happen to import 80% of America’s asparagus from Peru.”

Do you, now?
Charlotte whispered to herself.
How absolutely fascinating
.

“We fumigate the shit out of it with bleach and fungicide before we ship it. It’s not great for the prostate,” he chuckled, eyeing his private parts.

“Guess I’m glad I don’t have a prostate,” Charlotte answered, swallowing the stalk in a single bite.

Now where the hell was Philip? People were being corralled toward the tables at the back of the atrium. Ah! Finally. Standing on tiptoes, she watched as a sleek silver-haired
man slithered his way through the crowd towards her.
How I pity your wife
, Charlotte thought to herself. Philip, known to all but his wife, Vicky, as “Phil Phil” (the “Philandering Philanthropist”) was heir to one of the city’s biggest real estate fortunes. Charlotte had managed to keep him at arm’s length for years and had come tonight only as favor to his wife.

Vicky, her oldest friend, was off in Aspen, dealing with last minute contract changes for the third condo. That was the other weird thing about the really rich: Money was as meaningless to them as death, or physical death, anyway, was to terrorists. Most of her clients, for instance, didn’t even bother to pay for health insurance. (Who needed the hassle of health insurance with billions in the bank?) But she’d never met a single one who didn’t need just a tiny bit more.

“Un poquito mas! Un poquito mas!” she heard the hedge fund guy shouting over and over again to the befuddled waiter, attempting to nudge his way past with a trayful of empty glasses. The kid wasn’t even Hispanic. “Hielo! Hielo!” he repeated, rattling the ice cubes in his glass. But yeah … Whether it was ice cubes, condos, cows, (beg your pardon,
cattle
), shoes, or money, they always needed just a little more.

“God! Gorgeous bracelet, Charlotte.” She flinched. Philip had somehow drifted in from behind her. With one hand snaked around her waist, he lifted her wrist for a closer look. “Vicky’s been begging for one. I should have known you were the woman to ask. So where did you get it?”

“Craigslist,” she said, giving her wrist a shake.

“You’re kidding,” he replied, utterly dumbfounded. “It’s
eighteen karat,” he spluttered. “And it’s solid. I can hear the clunk.”

“Don’t look so shocked,” Charlotte replied, slipping her arm through his. “It comes with quite a story, too.”

As Philip guided her, oh-so adroitly, toward their table, she fumed.
So typical! Dismissing yet another world he knows nothing about
. Craigslist wasn’t just some secondhand, online shopping bazaar. It was a compulsion; a vital, visceral connection to the city, a connection that was changing people’s lives. But what did Philip know of change? Like most men, he probably hated change. (Unless, of course, the change involved a new wife.)

He was beaming as he pulled out her chair. “Close enough to the dais for you, Charlotte?” Unfolding her napkin, she prepared to endure another profoundly shallow, short, conversation with her host. There was grit in the arugula.

“You have no idea,” Philip said as she rootled through the salad in search of a sun-dried tomato or a pignolia nut, “but new money is ruining, just ruining,
my
Anguilla! I mean, we may have to go to Lyford after Christmas.”

Appearing suitably aghast, Charlotte buttered a roll. Poor Philip. Forced to book a $40,000 week at one of the most luxurious clubs in the Caribbean. But it amused her, how he used the possessive pronoun when referring to Anguilla. As if he owned the entire island. When he turned to his left to chat up some magnificent young Russian, she smirked. A titaness of downtown real estate, Charlotte had recently heard that the girl had bought the biggest piece of beachfront property left on “his” Anguilla.

She was admiring the pale pink fat and flesh of her
tuna—it was so silky, so light, it seemed to evaporate in her mouth—when the man on her left burped into his napkin. Eyes nailed to his plate, he flushed with embarrassment.

“Not exactly Bumble Bee, is it?” she said, rescuing him with her most ravishing smile.
He couldn’t be a day over 23
, she thought.

“No, I guess not.” He shifted his gaze from his plate to somewhere near her neck. “I’ve never tasted anything like it.”

“Forgive me. I haven’t introduced myself,” she said, sticking out her hand. “I’m Charlotte Wolfe.” They shook.

“And I’m Peter Winthrop. Assistant curator in Islamic art.”

Passing him a generous spoonful of her own tuna, she asked herself how an assistant curator had landed so close to the dais. “It’s tuna belly,” she added as the boy forked up another mouthful. “I have a friend who buys it on online from the Philippines. Sixty bucks a can, if you can imagine.”

His eyes bulged. She didn’t mention that Vicky used to have her cook pack it up in sandwiches for her kid’s school lunches.

He grinned. “Nothing’s too good for our trustees.” Pausing for a moment, he picked up a corner of the tablecloth as Charlotte looked at him, curiously.

“I’m not sneaking a look at your legs,” he explained. “It’s your slippers. Everybody loves them.”

“Ah! Two different colored slippers. It’s one of my signatures,” she winked.

While Peter polished off his extra portion of fish and fingerling potatoes, Charlotte crossed her ankles beneath
the table and wondered how Vicky was doing in Aspen. Friendships, like marriages, took years to fall apart. She knew that. But Charlotte liked being precise. She had to be precise. The business of interior design depended as much on precision as it did on the imagination. Measuring the exact dimensions of everything from furniture to oddly-shaped windows, selecting the perfect tint of alabaster white marble from hundreds of samples at the Cararra quarry in Italy, mixing and matching from thousands of different woods, tiles, and shades of paints and fabric. This is why she wished that she could pinpoint, precisely, when it had all started to go so disastrously wrong with Vicky; when her role had switched from that of trusted friend and confidante to something more along the lines of an unpaid personal assistant.

In college, Vicky had inspired an almost childlike sense of awe in Charlotte. Slender and exquisitely feminine (versus savagely female which is what she had now become), there had been a nonchalant grace, a sort of effortless splendor, about her that made her seem both innocent and seductive. Even her awkwardness was alluring.

Startled out of her reverie by a burst of prolonged applause, Charlotte rose to her feet with the crowd. They were cheering the gnome-like giant of finance at the podium. Charlotte could see his spittle as he stammered through the beginning of his speech. Returning, gratefully, to her own musings, she smiled. Vicky’s adoption of her as official best friend had been marked with the gift of two cashmere sweaters. They were hand-me-downs from her father. One was a pale shade of beige, “The color of a baby fawn,” Vicky
had said. And the other, a deep emerald green, “To match your wonderful eyes.”

Charlotte still wore the green one around the house. The sleeves had unraveled and there were gaping holes beneath the armpits. As worn-out and frayed as their friendship, Charlotte had neither the heart nor the courage to throw it out. Throwing it out would imply that she had abandoned her youth; that she’d given up on the pleasures of being needed. This is what Vicky had taught her. That being needed was almost as good as being loved.

The rattle of dinner plates as waiters cleared the table and refilled water glasses jolted her back into the present. Eyeing her nervously, the curator scribbled something on the back of his menu and slid it in her direction. She peered at the tiny, crabbed handwriting.

“May I ask you for a drink later?” it said.

She scribbled back, “Maybe next time!”

Charlotte would never have dreamed of taking the boy up on his offer. But at thirty-seven, she still appreciated the gesture. Waiting for Philip’s cue to leave, (she’d agreed to join him only if he promised that they’d escape before dessert) Charlotte tapped her foot. The cue came in the form of his hand, pawing her thigh. Placing her own hand gently on top of his, as if to stroke it, she proceeded to pinch the flesh so hard between her fingernails, he yelped.

“Ready to go?” Charlotte asked, sweetly.

As the curator stood up and gallantly handed over her sequin clutch, she caught Philip whispering into the ear of the Russian girl while pocketing her business card. Had the man no shame? She wanted to kick him. His secret was
safe with Charlotte, of course. To tell Vicky would wound her pride. As bright and polished as the shiny shell of a ladybug, this thin veneer of pride was all that remained of the girl Charlotte had known in college. It had to be protected. And this was Charlotte’s job. Not just with Vicky but with clients, too.
To protect and to serve
, she muttered to herself as Philip glad-handed his way towards the exit.
That’s my motto. Just like the L.A. cops
.