The Craigslist Murders - Brenda Cullerton [50]
Darryl giggled. “You’re too much, Charlotte. I adore you!”
Bubble wrapping the photos of the naked couples, Charlotte thought about the “small price” that Darryl had paid for the pleasures of her new bed. It was just under $200,000. The $70,000 mattress had been custom-made by Hästens, the Swedish mattress makers that supplied beds to that country’s royal family. And the frame, a miracle of modern industrial design, had come in at around $130,000.
It wasn’t just any frame, of course. An architect friend of Charlotte’s had done the drawings and created a plasticene model of the bed, which had then been scanned by a computer imaging wand. After approvals, CAD/CAM had laser-carved a life-size model of the king-size bed in Styrofoam, which was delivered to a Brooklyn workshop. There, a team of Irish millworkers had spent three months handcarving the actual bed from teak, matching their work to every sensuous curve and detail of the model. The project had taken a little over five months from start to Darryl’s orgasmic finish.
After carting the package downstairs, she waited while a doorman hailed her a cab. As she buckled herself into the back seat of the taxi, she skimmed through the list of loot in Jerry’s swag bag. How many celebs actually needed a twenty-four-karat gold Shu Uemura eyelash curler, a Tupperware ice cream scooper, and—Charlotte especially loved this—one year’s worth of free burritos from Chipotle? The list also included a Fendi silk shawl, a three-month bicoastal membership to the Sports Club LA (with branches in all major cities, of course), a three-month Vespa rental, and $2,000 towards LASIK vision correction. $15 to $25 million dollars a picture wasn’t enough for these guys? They had to have swag bags, too? Always un poquito mas! A little more. That was their motto!
Charlotte crumpled the embossed paper into a ball, and threw it on the floor. Breathe, Charlotte! Breathe! she said to herself, opening the cab window and feeling the slap of cold wind on her cheeks. God! How she hoped Pavel would like the piece at Max’s. It was her first major purchase for the dacha. She didn’t want to disappoint him.
30
When her cab pulled up and let her out in front of the shop, she nodded at Pavel’s two bodyguards and quietly pulled open the door. Huddled in the shadows at the front, she watched as Max rubbed the top of an oak chest the way you rub a kid’s stomach when it hurts. Around and around went the hand as he talked.
“Ya gotta pick out the merits of every single piece, Pavel. Somebody asks me, ‘What’s the best piece here?’ Well, that’s like askin’ the mother of eight children to pick her favorite. There’s somethin’ good, even in a bad piece. It’s like bein’ human, ya know?”
Standing perfectly still, she waited to hear where else he might be headed with his conversation.
“See, I want a lunatic like me here in my store. Somebody who feels and sees the character of a piece. That’s where the real value is. It’s got nothing to do with price.”
The hell it doesn’t, Charlotte thought to herself, reminded of the $550,000 they’d settled on for the cassa panca.
“It’s an instinct. What I hope for is what I call the depth charge feeling, Pavel.”
“Sorry, Max,” Pavel interrupted. “But depth charge?”
“Yeah! Ya get to a certain point down at 800 feet in the ocean and bang!” Max pounded on the chest. “Ya don’t know when it will happen. But you live with a piece long enough and ya get up one night cause ya can’t sleep, and it hits you. Ya see it. Ya feel it.”
“Hey, Charlotte,” Max shouted. “I know you’re there. I see ya. I feel ya.”
Stepping out from the shadows, Charlotte saw Max giving her his impish grin. “Hello, Charlotte. Ready for my tour?” he asked, bouncing on his toes.
Leading them like elves into the gloom, Max switched on an overhead pin spot and stood next to the cassa panca chest. The colors were even brighter than Charlotte remembered. And the men depicted on the bench, in their velvets and beards, looked almost alive. Their eyes seemed