The Craigslist Murders - Brenda Cullerton [52]
Subj: Tiffany place settings
Date: 10/15/2009
From: gcraven@gmail.com
To: Kate.cat@hotmail.com
Dear Kate:
The silver is just taking up space and I’d like to get rid of it. But I am a little nervous about selling to strangers. Could you tell me a bit about yourself or give me some kind of reference? My cell phone number is 917-865-9806.
Thanks,
Gina
Charlotte improvised a quick resume and e-mailed back. She wrote down the woman’s number and logged off. Picking up her purse, she decided to walk two blocks to Bergdorf’s on Fifth Avenue. Maybe she’d even call Gina from a payphone and set up a time to meet. Charlotte was good on the phone.
31
Charlotte’s mouth was dry and her neck was itching. What she’d wanted seemed so simple: a three-ply cream silk shirt to go with the velvet shawl that she’d picked up years ago in Rajasthan. The shawl was magnificent. A six-foot piece of burgundy velvet, hand-embroidered with seed pearls and gem-like crystals. But after an hour at Bergdorf’s, she was still searching. God! How she hated shopping for clothing, the sifting through racks and racks of clothing and getting undressed in rooms that were probably wired for everything, including sound.
“It’s part of the process, Charlotte,” Vicky had said the last time Charlotte complained. When had shopping, like grieving, become a process, anyway? Probably at the same time the sales help had become “associates.” And who the hell was Vicky to talk about process? Nobody with Adult Attention Deficit Disorder had the patience for “process.” For Vicky, it was all about evading, not enduring process. When her “associate” Samantha tapped on the dressing room door with yet another armful of suggestions, Charlotte barked, “No more!”
Twenty minutes later, Charlotte was still stuck in a cab on her way downtown. Madly scratching at her neck, she listened to her cell messages: Anna congratulating her on the sale, Darryl’s handlers at the fashion company, and Rita.
Rita was furious. “Call me the minute you get this, Charlotte. That library desk you bought is a FAKE! Do you hear me … $700,000 and it’s a fake!”
Charlotte’s hands were shaking as she drummed her feet on the floor.
“Driver, driver,” she shouted. “You should’ve taken Fifth. It’s sequential lights. I could have been home by now!”
The driver just kept talking into the headset of his cell phone.
“Stop! Stop right now!” she said, banging on the plastic window that separated her from the front seat.
Speed-dialing Rita, she jumped out of the cab and raced across 51st Street toward the Lexington Avenue subway. Ignoring the red light, she nearly knocked a one-legged messenger off his bike. Both of them looked at one another, stunned and angry, then laughed.
“Sorry! I’m so sorry!” Charlotte said, bending down to pick up his bag. “I was in such a hurry, I didn’t look.”
“Yeah! I understand,” the messenger said, rearranging his bag and walkie-talkie. “We’re all in a hurry, ain’t we?”
As the subway rattled through the darkness, Charlotte played her favorite “what if” game. What if Rita knew that every time she invited Charlotte into her house and closed the door, she locked herself in with a murderer? What if she knew that every time she bitched about the height of a bedside table, or the color of a swatch, or the weave of a Dhurri carpet, Charlotte fantasized about smashing her head in with a poker? Just withholding this information from Rita made Charlotte feel powerful and generous. She wasn’t Rita’s lackey, she was a giver and a taker of life. How did Rita’s billions compare to that kind of omnipotence?
32
When you worship appearances, especially your own, it doesn’t pay to skimp on closet space. Which was why Rita, her closet consultant, and a team of Irish mill workers had devoted the same painstaking detail and exorbitant sum of