The Craigslist Murders - Brenda Cullerton [17]
“Three piece, custom-made Vuitton luggage set. $3,000. No best offers. Price firm. Please e-mail.”
She clicked and checked out the photo. The minute she saw the details about location, ‘UES, Obviously,’ she emailed back for an appointment. Obviously?
This was the kind of arrogance that came with the territory inhabited by her “victims.” The Upper East Side, her kill zone. The richest, greediest 1.8 square miles in the United States.
Other people might think of a world gone to hell in terms of famine in faraway Darfur, genocide in Rwanda, the slums of Mumbai and Manila. Not Charlotte. For her, that world gone to hell stretched from Bergdorf’s on 57th Street and Fifth, north to 96th Street, across Madison to Park. It was a world that mistook trend for truth, fame for faith, and money (when it applied to marriage) for meaning. It was the land of the professional time-killer where a woman’s only job in life was to amuse herself to death. Oh yeah. And to redecorate.
In targeting this tiny area with its 70-million-dollar penthouses and 50-million-dollar townhouses, some might say that Charlotte was biting the hand that fed her. What did they know about the hands that rarely offered her anything more than a glass of still Badoit water? All they ever saw were photos of smiling faces at parties in the Styles Section of the New York Times. Charlotte knew better. Like all those who served the voracious needs of money’s mistresses: building supers, doormen, life coaches, pet psychics, nutritionists, waiters, chauffeurs, housekeepers, nannies, concierges, personal assistants and trainers, Charlotte knew all about the panic and the rage that seethed beneath the glittering surface She dealt with it every day.
Even if she understood it—the loneliness, the frustration in dealing with such tyrannical husbands—there was something about the fury that roiled beneath the façade of such grotesquely over-privileged lives that Charlotte found loathsome. That poverty of the spirit—the purposelessness. It was a kind of moral anarchy. Once upon a time, Charlotte imagined that anger might have triggered social change, even revolution. Now all the rage had turned inward. Women like Vicky, Darryl and Rita preferred to talk about moving their swimming pools or about the weather. (The weather, in fact, had become such a hot topic that Charlotte had sat next to the world’s most famous fog expert at Vicky’s last dinner. After twenty minutes of listening to details about harnessing water content, electrostatic precipitation, and acid rain, she’d wanted to pull her hair out).
“God is the definition of home.” The line, from an Emily Dickinson poem that Charlotte had read in college, was taped across the top of her office “dream board,” a collage of drawings, photos, swatches and other inspirational fragments. This call-to-action had given birth to her career ambitions. Ambitions that been whittled away and corrupted by her need to submit to her clients’ whims; to compromise and to constantly coddle and cajole. Charlotte was doing the devil’s work now, because nobody actually lived in the houses that she spent such obscene sums of money and time decorating. They were designed solely to inspire envy, monstrous amounts of envy. The sterility within these camera-ready homes reflected little more than impotence—the same impotence that prompted the poor to kill.
So Charlotte was cleaning house, so to speak. She was purging herself of that same amorphous, soul-shriveling rage. She was delivering a message, making a point. Greed wasn’t good. And marrying money wasn’t a shortcut. It was a dead end.
9
She’d arrived at the doctor’s office at exactly 1:45. Anna had begged to keep her company, but Charlotte had turned her down. Asking for comfort was a great deal more difficult for her than giving it. After filling out insurance forms and passing over her $20 co-pay, she’d been waiting for more than an hour in a dirty, beige lobby. No one had even had the courtesy to apologize or explain the reason for the delay.
Why were these rooms always