The Craigslist Murders - Brenda Cullerton [12]
“Bundle of nerves” didn’t even begin to describe the tension that propelled this tiny, taut woman back and forth across the foyer. Darryl reminded Charlotte of that “Bodies” exhibition that she’d seen downtown. Chinese corpses that had been stripped of flesh to expose the network of nerves that pulsed beneath the skin.
Her 23-million-dollar apartment, one of the last in the 1920s Candela building to be sold intact, had been gutted to the core. The contractor was getting $40,000 a month to “supervise” the job and the super was getting another $4,000 a month to “facilitate” the process. Darryl’s husband, a venture capitalist, had also placed a million in escrow to cover the co-op’s $4,000-a-day penalty fee for delays. (With the project running four months late, Charlotte estimated that the co-op was already half a million dollars richer.) Darryl’s greatest coup, however, had been the purchase of an $801,000 storage closet in the basement.
“It’s the last one left, Charlotte,” she’d tittered, giddily, on the phone. “And I just can’t believe we got it!” Charlotte couldn’t believe it, either. But hers was not to reason why a family of three with a 12,000 square-foot apartment, seven other houses, and a giga-yacht needed an $801,000 storage closet!
In the meantime, everything upstairs had been ripped out: the old parquet de Versailles floors, the doors, the fixtures in the bathrooms, kitchen, and pantry, the fireplaces, the Sub-Zero appliances. Even the walls had been stripped of their terracotta and plaster. Charlotte sighed as she circled around the shrouded marble staircase. It had taken two weeks to encapsulate the handrail, the posts, the stringers, and the treads in wiggleboard: a plywood that bent into cylinders. She’d seen this so many times before. Women who threw themselves into the frenzy of renovation, as if by tearing down walls, replacing every inch of wiring and plumbing, hiring fancy French painters, and buying millions of dollars’ worth of furniture, they might, somehow, also reinvent themselves. Instead, when the house was finally finished, they often found that they had been gutted to the core themselves—deserted by husbands and on the brink of divorce, with their new showplace homes discreetly placed on the market.
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