The Craigslist Murders - Brenda Cullerton [32]
“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