The Craigslist Murders

by Brenda Cullerton

  “Most of life is about loss and leaving,” Anna had said that night at the Temple Bar. It was the only time she had ever talked about her past; about the loss of her only child and her husband and about sharing her family’s country home in Padua with the Nazis during the Second World War.

  “I was only eight years old,” she’d confided, spearing an olive with her toothpick. “And I sat in the back of a courtroom with my mother while a judge sentenced my father to five years in jail.”

  “For what? Why?” Charlotte had whispered.

  “For collaborating with the enemy,” Anna had fumed. “What collaborating? The Germans showed up and took over the house. My father was responsible for his own family and for every farmer on the estate.”

  Tucking her green silk shirt tightly into her skirt, Anna’s words had become rushed. As if by hurrying them, she might distance herself from their meaning, their impact. “When my brother came back from the war, he lost a fortune at the casino in Venice,” she had said. “My father, the oldest brother, had to sign for him. For the honor of the family, you know? It was almost medieval then, the north, the Veneto. When my father died three years later in jail, I began to dream of going to America. And here I am,” she had added before ordering her third and last martini.

  “Lucky for me,” Charlotte had replied, giving her a hug.

  Anna’s jaw dropped.

  “I’m drunk,” Charlotte had said with a smile. “It won’t happen again, I promise.”

  As the doctor scurried across the room towards his office, Charlotte wondered why Anna’s losses hadn’t diminished her spirit or her wisdom. “There is nothing lonelier in life than suffering only one’s own losses,” her friend had murmured to her softly before they parted at the end of that evening. “You should keep that in mind, cara.” Quickly picking up her bag and retrieving her coat from the closet near the receptionist, Charlotte headed for the door.

  “Miss Wolfe, Miss Wolfe,” the woman shouted after her. Charlotte had already disappeared.

  24

  Stooping down to pick up her newspapers in the elevator, she opened Friday morning’s Post. The story was the lead on page two.

  MURDERED MANSION MAMA ROBBED!

  Ben Volpone

  One week after the brutal murder of Amy Webb, wife of Wall Street trader Richard Webb, a source close to the investigation reports that police are following up on a number of promising leads. “Although no arrest is imminent, we now know that the perpetrator removed a brown, leather Louis Vuitton vanity case from the premises and that the victim was killed by the same or similar weapon as that used in other female homicides in Manhattan.”

  The police source didn’t know if the case contained other stolen articles. Meanwhile Mr. Webb, the police and the firm of Goldman Sachs have offered a reward of $50,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the killer. Police ask anyone with information to call (800) 577-TIPS.

  Amy Webb, a prominent socialite, was found dead in the dressing room of her home at 32 E. 65th Street. Active in many New York City charities, Webb was also an amateur equestrienne. The funeral service was private.

  Charlotte chortled. Some way to be remembered: a socialite and an amateur equestrienne. Then she reread the headline and first paragraph, noting the discrepancy between the words “robbed” and “removed.”

  She had to assume the police had now made the connection between Craigslist and the killer. But why were they withholding the information from the media? To avoid the possibility of copycats? Had they perhaps posted an ad themselves? Were they monitoring the site? Whatever the reason, Charlotte was still confident that she was safe.

  It was remarkable, really, how easy it was to get away with murder. The first time: the woman with the Dom. She hadn’t planned it. She’d improvised. The memories of Charlotte’s missions were always fragmented, splintered into shards of sensation. The vision of the woman at the door, for instance. She was shrieking. “The fucking bastard. Thinks he’s cutting me off with $70,000 a month.” Dressed in skintight jeans, a skimpy wifebeater, and four-inch cork platform shoes, she looked like she was dying of Chronic Wasting Disease.

  “So did you bring cash?” she’d asked greedily, while pulling out a gold compact.

  Charlotte had nodded, mute with distaste.

  Then there was the photograph of the woman’s young daughter in the living room. No older than twelve or thirteen, the kid was dressed in the same $400 sprayed-on jeans and wifebeater as her mother. But her eyes, rimmed in thick black kohl, already had the spirit sucked right out of them. Her feeble attempt to match her mother’s smile seemed almost grotesque. Charlotte recognized herself in that smile. She felt as if she should look away, as if it was indecent, seeing the girl’s pain.

  She had imagined the insane rush of adolescent hormones, the pole-vaulting leaps between euphoria, doubt, and despair. How she’d loathed those inconsolably lonely years as a teenager. “Do me a favor, dear. Don’t even look at her!” the woman spat out, dumping a silver tray on the driftwood coffee table and pouring herself a tumbler of champagne. “The two of us were tighter than my jeans,” she said, slapping her own butt. “But she chose to live with her father, if you can believe it. Just up and deserted me. Not even a note. I found out from the lawyers.”

  Charlotte’s head had buzzed. She could still almost feel the heat of adrenaline. When the woman belched and rose unsteadily to her feet, Charlotte had reached around behind her, searching, blindly, for the poker next to the fireplace. It was the third fire tool in. She’d counted.

  Keep her talking, keep her talking, a voice inside had prompted her. “It must be hard, being here alone,” she said to the woman. “I mean, without your daughter or your husband.”

  “Him! I’d like to kill him,” the woman whispered. “Like that woman in Hong Kong who served her husband a nice, cyanide-laced, chocolate milkshake.” As Charlotte’s fingers found a grip on the poker, the tumbler of champagne slid out of the woman’s hand.

  “Shit!” she’d said, leaning over to pick it up from the carpet. Which is when Charlotte swung the poker up from behind her and clubbed her on the head.

  The woman slumped down and gurgled. Blood had spattered across the carpet and the driftwood table. Her skinny martini-legs were doing this weird butterfly kick. And her head was all wobbly. Bending her knees and driving the poker straight down into the crown of the woman’s skull, Charlotte suddenly thought of her nanny pointing out the soft spot on her sister’s head when she first came home from the hospital. And just like that, it was over.

  There had only been a tiny splotch of blood on Charlotte’s jeans. After rolling up the poker in her yoga mat, she’d grabbed a bottle of Dom from the vestibule, buttoned up her slicker, and walked down the fire stairs to the garage in the basement. From then on, the poker had become a talisman, the instrument of Charlotte’s transformation. Like the banners beneath which medieval knights would rally their forces before galloping into battle, it was an extension of herself: straight, strong and true to its purpose.

  Climbing reluctantly out of her bed, she pulled back the heavy damask curtains, put on a pair of red wooly socks, and walked towards the kitchen. Pavel was probably somewhere over Newfoundland by now, she thought. He’d left a message on her cell, promising to be there at six. She was as nervous as a teenager. What would she wear? Something casual but sexy. Maybe the black silk harem pants and a plain white t-shirt. Perfect, she thought. And a pair of old red sequined Converse. She’d devote the rest of the day to pulling together her vision of the dacha. Laying out swipes from magazines, the color palette, her swatches and sketches … This was probably the only step left in the process of decorating that she still looked forward to. Like dreaming out loud, she whispered, picking up the tarnished silver framed photo of her Aunt Dottie before heading off to polish it.

  25

  When Charlotte saw Pavel stabbing at the fire with the poker, she almost dropped the toast points.

&n
bsp; “Russians are good with fire, Charlotte,” he said with a grin. “And this one needs help.”

  She smiled. “I’m pretty good with a poker, too, Pavel. You’d be surprised.”

  “Perhaps,” he said, coaxing a shower of sparks from a log. “But I enjoy this. I do not have time anymore for such ordinary jobs.”

  Setting down the platter of toast on her Indian coffee table, she giggled.

  “What is it?” Pavel asked, putting the poker back in its place. “What is funny?”

  “There’s enough Beluga here for the whole block. And I can’t believe you brought $4,000 worth of caviar over in a Tupperware bowl. There’s something absurd about it.”

  “No more absurd than a once-poor Jew like me eating it,” he said, almost wistfully. “My mother loves Tupperware.”

  “I’m sorry, Pavel. Really. Why don’t you open the Dom?”

  As he prowled around the near the windows, his hands clenched into fists, the room seemed to bristle with repressed energy. Like a giant in a dollhouse, Charlotte thought to herself as she eyed him, warily, from the couch.

  “I am sorry, Charlotte. You see, I have just opened my new hotel.”

  “But that’s great news, Pavel,” Charlotte said. “Congratulations! We should toast your new success!”

  Suddenly, his fist hit the wall and Charlotte shrank into her chair.

  “It is a disaster, Charlotte. It nearly killed me. Getting the money, finding the workers, and now …”

  “What? Nobody came?” Charlotte asked. “You have no guests?”

  “Oh! I have guests,” Pavel retorted, licking his fist, as the cork flew across the room. “They steal everything. They steal the pillows, the sheets, the paintings on the walls.”

  “We call it pilfering, Pavel. It’s a problem in hotels here, too.”

  Pavel grinned. “You call it pilfering when guests check out, carrying off a six-foot gold mirror in my lobby? In front of my people at reception?”

  Charlotte tried to imagine a similar scene taking place in the lobby of the Carlyle. “That’s unbelievable,” she said. “Why didn’t they call the police or try to stop them?”

  “The police are criminals, too, Charlotte. So now my hotel is like a prison. I have bolted the beds and chairs to the floor. I have removed all the rugs and the decorations. It’s …”

  “A catastrophe?” Charlotte offered, touching his sleeve. Did this man ever sit down? She wondered.

  “No. It’s business as usual in Russia, Charlotte. This is what freedom means to us now. Permission to steal just a little bit more. But let’s drink,” he said, filling her glass.

  Charlotte smiled as Pavel passed her the crystal flute of champagne and a toast point with so much caviar on it, she had to cup her hand under her chin to catch the eggs.

  “You are still smiling, Charlotte. Is it the Tupperware?”

  “No. I was thinking of you and the burning building,” she replied.

  Pavel laughed. “The night I break my window and crawl out? When the firemen are all standing around smoking cigarettes?”

  “Yes,” Charlotte said, as she crunched her toast and the first mouthful of pearl-like eggs slid down her throat. “You yelled at them. ‘Why for God’s sake don’t you come in and get me?’ ”

  “We ring your bell and nobody answered,” Pavel said, finishing the story as he attempted to squeeze his 6′ 4″ frame into the confines of a velvet slipper chair. “I am choking on smoke and they wait for me to answer my doorbell.”

  “Pavel, come over here,” Charlotte said, indicating a place for him on the sofa. “It’s making me uncomfortable, just watching you.”

  “Here’s to your beauty,” he said, touching her glass and sitting down next to her.

  “Would you like to hear some more Russian stories?” he asked, taking a slow sip of the Dom.

  “You mean fairytales, Pavel?” she replied, pulling her knees up in front of the fire. “I would love to.”

  “We Russians have always believed in fairytales, Charlotte,” Pavel said. “Because in our country, they come true.”

  Was he being facetious? God knows, the news from Russia was like something straight out of Grimms: gassing theaters, killing schoolchildren, murders and mobsters. There were questions, however, that Charlotte simply didn’t ask Pavel. How he really made his money. Why it was safer for his family to live in New Jersey than Moscow.

  “Let me give you one example of a Russian fairytale, OK?” he suggested, leaning over and stirring the champagne bubbles in her glass. “It is a true story.” Scooping up a spoonful of caviar, he swallowed and began to speak.

  “One weekend last winter, I go cross-country skiing. It is perfect for this, the area around my dacha. I am gone for hours before I realize I am lost. And it is getting dark. Snow is falling, faster and faster. Then I hear these bells. The sound is, how you say, muffled by the snow? I follow the sound. And there in the middle of the forest is a village with a brand new church. This village is still full of old wooden houses, izbahs, we call them. Like gingerbread houses in old books. Except for the church, life is just as it was two centuries ago. There are women lined up at the well, helping each other put pails of water on wooden … on wooden …”

  “Poles,” Charlotte whispered. “I think you mean poles.” She felt as if she’d been cast under a spell; touched in a way that made even her toes tingle. She wasn’t sure she liked it.

  “Are you OK?” Pavel asked, brushing his fingers against her knees.

  “Yes, I’m fine,” Charlotte replied. “Don’t stop.”

  “So the men take me into a home and feed me by candlelight,” Pavel said, quietly resuming his story. “We drink vodka and talk about the church. Then they introduce me to this ninety-five-year-old woman. She saw the church in a dream, Charlotte. The dream went on for weeks. And she understood this was a message. So for three years, she took the train into Moscow every day, all alone, and begged for money to build it. One old poor woman, Charlotte, a widow from the forest made a dream come true. And thanks to her dream, I am saved by the bell! I found my way home. This is ironic, no? And a good fairytale?”

  Charlotte had been so entranced, she’d drunk three glasses of Dom. Her head was spinning.

  “Charlotte?” Pavel said, touching her knee again.

  She blinked.

  “Aha!” laughed Pavel. “You have surrendered to what we Russians call shamanstvo. It is like an enchantment.”

  “I guess so. I mean, yes!” she said, hardly daring to look him in the eye. “I’m not used to drinking so much.”

  Pavel chuckled. “Charlotte, how lucky you are. For us, this Dom is like sipping teardrops.”

  “You’re a poet, Pavel.”

  “No, Charlotte,” Pavel said, with a grimace as he sat suddenly rigid in his chair. “I am most definitely not a poet. There is a dark side to our fairytales, too.”

  “I know. I’ve read …” Charlotte said, gently placing her glass on the table and glancing over at him.

  Pavel shook his head. “I am not speaking of those nightmares that make it onto your televisions here, Charlotte.”

  “So tell me, Pavel.” Charlotte said, gazing intently at his face. “Please.”

  “In the village where I have my dacha, I am like a god. The peasants—and yes, we still call them peasants—love me and fear me. This terror and love is just as it was with the czars and the priests and the communists. They see me arrive in my black Mercedes and hear about my indoor swimming pool and my eight bathrooms. It makes them angry.”

  “Well, of course, it makes them angry,” said Charlotte.

  “It makes them so angry, they kill for a handful of rubles. Perhaps, not in my village, not yet, but in Moscow where poor men know that the rich are also killing for billions of American dollars.”

  “Oligarchs, you mean?” Charlotte said, thinking of the Vanity Fair article she’d read about the guy who owned a yacht with its own submarine.

  “Oligarchs, yes,” Pa
vel confirmed, with a wave of his hand. “And many others, too. The point is, the poor man and the rich man in Russia today are the same, Charlotte. They share the same rage, the same dead eyes, the same hunger. The rich men shop like the starving eat. The shopping is new for us. The killing is not. But we do both with a vengeance, believe me.”

  “It’s not so different here, Pavel,” Charlotte added, eagerly. “The rich and the poor, the hostility.”

  “It is not the same, Charlotte. Can you imagine your government dumping radioactive waste in the middle of New York City? This happened in Moscow. Or going to the market and buying a lovely fat watermelon for your family? Then finding out that it came from the Zone of Exclusion near Chernobyl? No, Charlotte. You know nothing of a Russian’s rage; of our monsters or the bloody, savage birth of hope at a time when even the earth itself is dying.”

  Charlotte sat there, her mouth open. “I’m sorry. I had no idea,” she said, contritely.

  “And now I must go. My wife and children are waiting.”

  Charlotte usually preferred to be first at the door, to preempt other people’s departures. But tonight, she followed meekly after Pavel.

  “We have to talk about work,” she said, pointing towards the sketches and swatches that she’d laid out near the fireplace. Pulling on his coat, Pavel grinned. “Of course. That is why I am here … to talk about furniture.”

  “If you are here Monday during the day, I would like to take you up to meet Max,” Charlotte said, pulling out a leather book. “He has a shop I think you’ll love.”