The Craigslist Murders (5 page)

Maybe this explained why Darryl and all of her clients lived in a state of perpetual panic. They were afraid of losing it all. The problem, Charlotte decided as she wandered away from Darryl’s voice and down the hall, was perspective. They were as panicked at the prospect of missing a comb-out or gaining an extra two pounds as they were of losing their youth, their husbands, and their money. Yet despite the panic, Charlotte was always impressed by their appearance. Like Darryl (who was now barreling towards her like a woman
possessed), it was perfection itself. Every strand of artfully tousled blond hair in place, muscles nicely toned, not even a wrinkle in a linen suit on a summer day.

Gesticulating with one hand, while talking and massaging her shoulder with the other, Darryl signaled for Charlotte to approach. Stepping carefully over floorboards and buckets, her client gave her a kiss. “God almighty!” she said. “My neck!”

“A little tense, huh?” Charlotte said.

“It’s not just that. There was a lot of turbulence coming into Teterboro last night.”

“Ahhh!” Charlotte replied. “Sorry to hear that!” Darryl was suffering from what she and other clients had dubbed P.J.N.S.,
Private Jet Neck Syndrome
. Some of the seats on private jets faced the wrong way for take-offs and landings. Occasionally, the whiplash was so bad, it pinched their nerves.

“So what do you think?” Darryl said, opening her arms as if to embrace the possibilities that surrounded them. They were standing in a library that had been paneled in 19
^th
century French boiserie. “It’s going to be gorgeous!” Charlotte replied. “I hope you like my idea of the Louis XV envelope and the polished concrete floors. But I’m not sure about your request for those prison toilets,” she added, hesitantly.

“Well, they’ll be easy for the help to clean,” Darryl said. “And I love the look of cantilevered, stainless steel.”

“Good. Then I’ll check into it,” Charlotte replied, as
docile as a kitten. “But the flush is louder than a 747, Darryl.” Her palms were sweating and there was a dull throbbing on the right side of her abdomen. As her client pivoted to the right, Charlotte imagined planting a poker in the back of her head.

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.

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 sheet 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.