The Craigslist Murders

by Brenda Cullerton

  Charlotte looked at her caller ID and picked up the phone. It was Anna’s usual Monday morning breakfast call. Ordinarily, after a mission, Charlotte would have been delighted to listen to Anna’s gossip about the murder. She imagined that it was like enjoying a cigarette after sex. But her mother’s Sunday visit and the nightmare had robbed her of even that tiny pleasure. So instead, Charlotte ranted on about her Sunday afternoon.

  “Charlotte. Listen to me, please,” Anna said, cutting her off. “I know I sound like that guy with the ears in Star Wars. What was his name?”

  Charlotte felt a tickle in the back of her throat. She giggled. There had been a particularly depressing night during the summer when Anna had showed up at her door with a bottle of Veuve and forced her to watch the entire Star Wars trilogy. “Yoda. His name was Yoda,” she replied, twisting a strand of hair around her pinkie finger.

  “Yoda, si. But people only have as much power as you give them. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Of course, I understand, Anna. And that’s very wise. But I can’t help it. I feel sorry for her. And I hate her. It’s all mixed up.”

  Anna laughed. “Do you know why your mother is so good at pushing your buttons, Charlotte?”

  “I’m not in the mood for jokes, Anna.”

  “Because she installed them. I read that in a book somewhere.”

  The joke worked. Charlotte felt as if someone had let the air out of her. Her shoulders slumped with the release of tension as she walked over from the table to steam the milk for her cappuccino.

  “There is one more step in my therapy session, Charlotte. You must tell me a funny story about your parents, please …”

  Charlotte gazed, bleakly, at the pale aqua walls and delft blue trim in her kitchen. Humor was not something she associated with her parents. But Anna was one of the most persistent women Charlotte had ever known.

  “I’m not hanging up until you tell me, Charlotte.”

  Racking her brain, Charlotte heaped two spoonfuls of sugar into her coffee. “Okay. I may have one story,” she conceded. “It didn’t seem funny at the time, but now …”

  “Go ahead,” Anna coaxed. “I’m lighting a cigarette. I’m ready.”

  Charlotte wiped the creamy froth from her upper lip with the back of her hand. “I was eight years old,” she said. “I woke up one night and my mother was yelling at my father. ‘Ben! Ben! Wake up!’ When I snuck out of bed, I saw him swinging an invisible golf club at the top of the stairs. He was sleepwalking his way through eighteen holes, Anna.”

  Anna giggled. “You see how it helps?”

  “Sure,” Charlotte replied, burning her tongue on the hot coffee. What she didn’t tell Anna was that the golf incident happened three months after her little sister had died. All Charlotte remembered about that time in her life was her own feelings of rejection. It had hurt her, too. The loss of the baby. After all, she was the one who had gotten up that night to comfort her when she was crying. She’d even turned her over on her stomach and left with her own Paddington Bear for company.

  Her cell phone trilled.

  “I have to go, Anna,” she said, eager to avoid more questions. She loved Anna for asking questions. But she felt guilty about hiding things. Like the fact that she’d had to schedule a doctor’s appointment after the sonogram.

  “Everything’s fine. Just a little indigestion,” she’d lied when her friend asked about the results. Anna had been elated.

  “Don’t forget Max at 1!” she was saying. “I sold my soul to get you that meeting.”

  “I won’t,” Charlotte replied. Max was the city’s most infamous Gothic and Renaissance furniture dealer. For twenty years, he’d refused to allow ‘drekerators’ into his store. Picking up her cell, she swore quietly to herself. It was Rita again.

  “Charlotte? I’m worried about the pool. There’s not a lot of time between now and the beginning of the season.”

  “It’ll be done, Rita. I promise.”

  “Well, you should have called to let me know,” Rita snapped.

  “I’m on my way right now to talk with the landscape architect,” Charlotte lied.

  “I want you to have a chat with our new real estate manager,” Rita replied. Charlotte let out an audible sigh. “He can handle hiring the contractors. And I’ll expect to see the plans when we meet on Saturday.”

  The phone went dead. Rita had fired two real estate managers in the past year. Responsible for maintaining the family yacht, the jet, and the eight homes the Brickmans owned, it was a job from hell, even with five assistants. Busying herself near the stove, Charlotte chopped up heirloom tomatoes and a bit of French gruyere for a breakfast omelet. When the butter sizzled in the pan, she threw in three whisked eggs and flashed backed to her last visit to the Vineyard. It was in the spring.

  Rita had “imported” four “in-help” from the city, all Ecuadorian. They spoke very little English and Rita herself hadn’t yet spent enough time in Cabo to learn even the few words necessary to order them around. When Charlotte arrived from the airport, she’d stood unseen in the foyer while her client reamed out a terrified-looking twenty-year-old girl in the living room.

  “You do not make de-ci-sions!” she screamed at the top of her lungs, pronouncing every syllable. “I make the de-ci-sions here! And we do not ever use this wax in our house!”

  The girl timidly nodded her head up and down in a desperate attempt to appear as if she understood.

  “Go, go!” Rita screamed. “Back to the kitchen. And don’t forget to fill the ice trays with FIJI water!”

  Charlotte was so embarrassed that she was afraid to say hello. But Rita had seen her.

  “Sorry, Charlotte,” she said with a laugh, as she walked over for a hug. “Help just isn’t what it used to be.”

  Folding the tomatoes in with the eggs, that last bit still made Charlotte giggle. How the hell would Rita know anything about what help used to be? Charlotte wondered as she slid the omelet from her pan onto a white Wedgewood plate. The woman had no help till twelve years ago.

  It was her mentor, Harold, who had introduced Charlotte to the Brickmans. “They exhaust me,” he’d said. “So I’ll take on the project, but you do most of the work. You’ll make plenty of money, don’t worry.”

  The fifteen room duplex in a Fifth Avenue building was one of Charlotte’s first projects as a designer. It was also the project that earned her the nickname, “the halo from hell.” Harold’s partner had eventually accused her not just of stealing thousands in kickbacks due to Harold from millworkers and other subcontractors, but of stealing the client, too. Which was ridiculous, Charlotte had protested to Harold.

  It wasn’t her fault if the Brickmans fell in love with her. She’d done everything she possibly could to discourage them from dropping him. Even if Harold had seemed disappointed at the time, he hadn’t gotten angry or refused to speak to her. Not like his partner, Miles. But this was ancient history. As ancient as people’s perceptions that Jews like the Brickmans didn’t live in New York’s toniest buildings or own homes on Nantucket and the Vineyard.

  “Dear God! Charlotte!” one of New York’s newly impoverished Wasps had said to her, as he slurred his way through a third dirty Bombay gin martini at the Brook Club the previous week. “My grandfather would be rotating in his grave at the idea of mezuzahs in Maine and Martha’s Vineyard. I mean, Martha Stewart in Seal Harbor was bad enough … But Jews??? Or how about those gay guys? I’ve heard they’ve bought half of Mt. Desert.”

  Even as a non-practicing half-Jew, Charlotte writhed in her club chair. Addlepated little toad! she’d thought to herself. “You have no idea how forgotten you are.”

  Because the bottom line (metaphorically speaking), was that this generation of new money, Jews or not, didn’t give a damn about Wasps who belonged to the Brook or the Union Club, and lived off their meager interest from ironclad trust funds. They would guffaw all the way to the Caymans at the idea of waiting in a room marked “STRA
NGERS” like the one Charlotte had once sat in at the Park Avenue Racquet and Tennis Club, while a porter went to fetch a member.

  Rinsing the Wedgewood in warm soapy water reminded Charlotte, once again, of Rita and her problems with the pool.

  Christ! The pool! Charlotte shuddered at the prospect of that discussion. Rita had only learned to swim three summers earlier—in the arms of an Olympic swimming coach, of course. This was shortly after they’d finished construction on the 15,000-square-foot “cottage” in Gay Head, the uber exclusive area of the Vineyard where Jackie O once had her place. A neo-Victorian monstrosity with faux Gothic turrets and “trim,” Rita claimed it was a tribute to the island’s whaling widows.

  “More like wailing with an ‘i,’ ” Charlotte had laughed with Anna later. But she couldn’t deny that the project was a huge success.

  Architectural Digest had given the interiors six full pages. The World of Inferiors, as Charlotte had now renamed England’s poshest shelter mag, turned it down. “Not modern enough, dear,” the editor had e-mailed her. Even if Charlotte herself was sick to death of Hitchcock and Shaker chairs and hutches, of authentic colonial grape presses and milk-paint pie cupboards, she couldn’t help but appreciate what they’d done to her bank balance.

  What a travesty! Charlotte thought, as she hurriedly rifled through the hangers in her cedar-lined, 200-square-foot walk-in closet. All these people paying thousands of dollars for stuff designed by the Shakers. How many Shakers depended on lifestyle management teams and personal assistants and concierges and hot-rock massages to get through their day?

  19

  There it was. No sign, of course. The windows were so thick with soot and dust, Charlotte could hardly see inside. Cupping her hands on the side of her face, she peered in at the bizarre mix of trash and treasure: half-chewed dog bones, a ripped tapestry-covered wing chair, and small polychrome angels with wings wide open, suspended in midair.

  “Whatcha doin’?” The voice startled her. It sounded like that old dead actor, Jimmy Cagney, raspy and pure Bronx. Turning around, Charlotte found herself face-to-face with the legendary 5′ 3″ dealer himself.

  “I’m Anna’s friend, Charlotte,” she said, reaching out to shake hands.

  “Yeah! I heard about ya!” he said, returning the handshake. “Another drekerator, right?”

  “Right, Max,” Charlotte said mildly. Bouncing around on the balls of his feet like a boxer in the ring, Max had a head of wavy black hair and the shrewdest pair of brown eyes that she’d ever seen. He was chewing on the stump of a dead cigar. “Least, ya don’t look like one them broads born in the back of a Town Car. And I don’t see no monogram on your canvas tote bag, neither.”

  “No, Max. That’s never been my style,” Charlotte said.

  “Ya gonna buy?” he asked, with an impish grin.

  “Yes, I am!” Charlotte said. “I’ve been waiting to buy from you for fifteen years, Max.”

  Max hoisted up the metal gates, pushed the two-foot-thick wooden door open and gestured her inside.

  Through the gloom, gold glittered. Burnished gold on six-foot pricket sticks, ornate Spanish picture frames, and Venetian mirrors with glass, wavy and pocked with age. The furniture: armoires, prie-dieus, throne-like chairs, gleamed with that dull, polished patina that came only from centuries’ worth of hands gently rubbing the surface.

  Whose hands? Charlotte wondered. There were statues of saints and of the Madonna and more angels than in most cathedrals.

  “I’m in heaven,” Charlotte sighed.

  “You’re in hell,” Max replied. “I haven’t sold a thing in months.”

  This was one of the many mysteries about Max. Anna said that if he sold his inventory at even pennies on the dollar, he’d be a multimillionaire. Instead he lived like a pauper in the back of the storefront with a one-eyed cat and a decrepit golden retriever.

  “I’m warnin’ ya,” Max said. “I don’t want ya in here buyin’ stuff cuz it looks good with the wallpaper, cuz it fits in with the color of the fuckin’ carpet.”

  “Guess we’re not off to a great start, here, huh?” Charlotte countered with a smile. “Fact is, I don’t care how you feel about me or my profession. I’m here to buy for my best client.”

  “Sorry, sorry,” he said. “Guess I’m just not used to customers. Go ahead. Take a walk. There’s more stuff downstairs.”

  “Thanks,” Charlotte said, resisting the impulse to race toward the back and begin exploring. Thirty minutes later, tiptoeing around a painted Venetian chest, its lacquered red Chinoiserie faded pink with age, her eyes lit up at the sight of a ten-foot wooden cassa panca. The back of the Italian bench/chest was painted with figures of Botticelli-like full bodied women and bearded men in velvet robes. It was a fantastic piece. Pavel, her Russian, would love it.

  The lights blinked twice. “Hey!” Max shouted. “Ya still alive?”

  “Sorry, Max. I got lost,” Charlotte answered, taking a last lingering look at the piece. “I’m coming.”

  “So whaddya lookin’ at?” he said with a squint as Charlotte appeared from downstairs, wiping the dust off her hands. Charlotte told him.

  “Well, whaddya know!” he said, “The lady’s got taste.”

  “Don’t bother with the flattery, Max. It’s wasted on me.”

  “Last person looked seriously at that piece was Eye-talian. A Roman dealer buyin’ for some fancy-pants movie actor on Lake Como.”

  George Clooney. Charlotte thought. “Here’s the thing, Max. I’m going to pay you what it’s worth. I’m not even going to haggle.”

  She could see the glee in his eyes. “And all I want in return is the truth. I want to know everything there is to know about the provenance, the whole history, OK? Where you got it, when, from whom, everything.”

  “OK. How’s 600 Gs sound to ya?”

  He was testing her. “Five hundred sounds better.”

  “Jeez. That’s just about right. But you’d pay another hundred if you was buyin’ it in Europe.”

  “So let’s split the difference. I’ll give you an extra fifty,” Charlotte replied, eyeing the bottle of Old Grand-Dad bourbon behind him.

  “Shall we open it? Seal the deal?” asked Max.

  “Sure. But I’m going to have to bring down my client. He’s here next week. And you’ll have to be nice to him, Max.”

  “No problem,” Max said, blowing the dust off the bottle.

  Over the next hour and two neat shots of bourbon, Charlotte listened, raptly, to the story of the chest. It was what Max (and all dealers) euphorically called “a sleeper.” A sleeper was a piece that nobody recognized for what it really was and that could be worth hundreds of times more than what a dealer paid for it. Max had seen the cassa panca at an auction preview up at Sotheby’s in the late ’90s. Part of a collection from the estate of Iris Love, it was listed at an estimate of $10,000 to $15,000.

  “When I first seen it,” he said to Charlotte, rubbing his hands together in delight, “I couldn’t believe it. It was like recognizin’ some long lost relative you thought was dead.” Unlike the experts at Sotheby’s, who were only able to trace the piece back to the 1960s when Love had purchased it from a Paris dealer, Max knew more. Max had a photographic memory.

  “It’s 16th century, Charlotte. It was in the Ruspolli Palazzo in Rome!” He’d seen a photo of the piece in a vintage auction catalogue he was thumbing through on one of his many sleepless nights.

  “I go back to the store that afternoon,” Max said, throwing his head back and swallowing the last shot of bourbon, “And I pray. I wait for the day of the auction, hopin’ to God nobody else recognizes it for what it really is.”

  Sure enough, Max got lucky. “It went for $9,500 plus the 10% buyer’s premium,” he said, raising his fist, triumphantly. “I had some guy from the Getty here to look at it two years ago. But they couldn’t afford it.”

  “Their loss, my gain,” Charlotte said, grinning as the phone rang.

  “I gotta
take this call,” Max said, cupping his hand over the receiver.

  “Let me know when your client’s comin’. I liked meetin’ ya.”

  Riding downtown on the subway, Charlotte didn’t need to close her eyes or hum. She had been totally seduced by the charisma of Max’s experience; by his defiance and his lonely but obsessive love for objects. Charlotte understood this connection. Tracing a relationship over hundreds of years between an object and those who had touched it, lived with it, and lost it meant more to Charlotte than any relationship with a human being ever would.

  Climbing the stairs at Franklin Street she flipped open her phone and sighed. There were three messages from Vicky’s number. She replayed them while walking towards Anna’s shop on Duane Street. Each call was more hysterical than the last.

  “Oh my God! Charlotte!” Vicky howled between sobs. “For Christ’s sake, call me. Please. It’s Phil.”

  Charlotte slowed down as she called back and waited for Vicky to pick up.

  “Vicky, it’s me. What the hell’s the matter? Tell me!”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Vicky wailed.

  “Did Phil get hit by a bus? What?”

  “He’s having an affair, Charlotte. With some fucking Russian tart.”

  “I’m sure he’s not, “Charlotte lied, remembering the titaness at the museum benefit. “Who told you?”

  “He did, Charlotte. But he didn’t know he was telling me.”

  “I don’t get it,” Charlotte said.

  “It was his cell phone. It speed dialed me by accident when the bitch pushed him down on her bed. The phone must have been in his pocket.”

  “Oh my God! You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “I’m not kidding, Charlotte. I’m going to kill him. I invited that woman into my house for dinner last week. And today, I had to listen to them rolling around on the frigging mattress. Every time I slammed down my phone, it called me back. I could hear everything.”