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Order this writing in the collection book Breaking Silences available for only 1650 |
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This appears in a pre-2010 issue
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Shillings
Pat Dixon
My partner, Felicity Moss, has left me both her small collection of nude figurines, which it amused her to call “my busted statues,” and her huge collection of opera books, LPs, CDs, DVDs, and autographed photos of operatic singers and conductors.
I plan to keep two or three items from each collection as mementos of her—“Morse,” as she called herself when meeting people, adding the unwritten R sound because that was how her Rhode Island people always pronounced their name. She hated her first name and would always sign herself just “Moss” on everything except her health insurance checks and tax returns. At first I called her “Morse” with a smile of amusement and indulgence, but down through the past three decades it became a matter of habit about which I was seldom conscious.
Although my name is Abigail Lewis and am happy to be called by my first name or by “Abby,” right from the first Morse would always address me merely as Lewis. At our little book store in Cambridge, it often happened that new customers from M.I.T. and Harvard would give her the title “Inspector” and call me “Sergeant”—and would think themselves oh-so-original. And Morse and I would smile tolerantly and never tell them that many dozens of others had anticipated their foray into wit during the past quarter century.
Under other circumstances, I would attempt to liquidate the bulk of Morse’s collections via auctions on elBay—something she and I each did with great success when her divorced father and my widowed mother both died a few years ago. Now, however, when I even hear elBay mentioned, I feel both sorrow and personal fear—paralyzing, heavy eye sorrow—deep gut, dry throat fear.
Morse was always the more outgoing of us. She often seemed to me like a bull in search of a china shop when it came to communicating with others. With her figurines, of course, she had a very delicate touch—almost that of a lover—and she would often talk to them in an uncharacteristically soft and gentle tone. Our customers seemed to enjoy this bullishness in her and seemed to consider her a bit of a character. Me, they considered the “detail-oriented” prissy one who could tell them to the penny what every variation of edition and condition was worth in the eastern Massachusetts market.
Her manner was equally bullish in her elBay communications, and I gather that it was often less appreciated by those who received them.
“Lewis,” she said to me on numerous occasions, “come look at what this asshole has written back.” And I would do so, and then would ask Morse what she had written the buyer or seller that “led up to” such a discourteous response. Long ago I knew better than ask what she had done to “provoke” others. In person, Morse was such a dear woman, and I can only speculate that others, when reading her messages, could not picture her wry little smile and twinkling eyes nor hear her lightly ironic Yankee voice as I could do—and still can when I read over the handmade birthday cards and other notes she left out for me.
Indeed. But let me try to collect my thoughts about this.
Three months ago, Morse began bidding on some “bootleg” opera CDs that a person giving his or her address as “Boston area” was selling on elBay. According to Morse, these are CDs that have been made from low-quality tape recordings, which in turn were probably made without the knowledge of the cast or anyone else involved in the performance. They often, she told me, include all the coughings and throat-clearings and seat-squeakings of the theater, along with whatever applause and “bravos” an aria or duet or whatever is granted by the live audience.
When I asked her why she or anyone would pay good money for such CDs, she said, “These are records of unique performances, Lewis”—except she pronounced it “reccuds,” and she meant not phonograph recordings such as LPs or even CDs but something like an official historical document—or a fossil—a “record of the past” so to speak.
“Flawed though they be,” and I can hear her saying “Floored though they be” in my mind’s ear—I will not try to transcribe her pronunciations any further, as I am beginning to feel tightness in my throat and chest again—“Flawed though they be, Lewis, without recordings such as these we would have no idea”—here she said “idear,” and that will be the absolute last phonetic indication her, I promise—“no idea what these great voices of the past did with these roles. The commercially remastered 78s of Conchita Supervia, that wonderful mezzo who died tragically in childbirth, are often terrible lo-fi scratchy things, and yet they are wonders without which our lives would be vastly poorer. And these poor tape recordings, shared by collectors with each other in this computer age—or sold to each other on elBay—enrich us in ways that one cannot begin to quantify.”
Throughout her oration, I politely nodded my silent comprehension and smiled with affectionate amusement at her self-conscious pomposity.
“Lewis, you little snip—let me make a believer of ye of little faith. I’ll play you Supervia singing Rossini’s ‘Una voce poco fa’ from his Barber of Seville. In my not-so-humble estimate, it’s one of the four best recorded versions of that song despite its condition—and I currently own thirty-eight different recordings of it.”
Others might have taken offense at being called a name like this and at being treated like a lowbrow where music is concerned. Lord knows, though, it was two-way banter, and I often inflicted my own musical preferences for Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and Pete Fountain on dear Morse with equal vigor.
A few days thereafter, Morse mentioned that she’d “won” two of her auctions for these bootleg items but had, sadly, “lost” her auction for a Tosca with Pavarotti and Shirley Verrett—“that wonderful diva who looketh down on us all will her blessed smile,” she said, pointing to the framed, autographed photo of Ms. Verrett in a nun’s habit that hung directly over her head behind our checkout counter.
“Bummer,” I said without mockery.
Three days later, Morse called me into her room, asserting, “Lewis—there is a God after all—and She watches over me!”
I half expected Morse to tell me that she had just won the lottery or a sweepstakes of some sort, although we both agreed that all such are merely an extra tax on those who are bad at math.
“She maketh Her face to shine down upon me, Lewis. Look here!” She gestured towards her computer screen.
I adjusted my half glasses and bent forward.
“Second Chance Offer—Buy The Item You Recently Bid On,” I read, followed by a message addressed to her elBay screen name: “Dear gathersnomoss, Good news! The following elBay item on which you placed a bid for US $35.51 is now available for purchase at that price, plus s&h: Tosca With Pavarotti, Verrett . . . . Act Now—This Offer Expires Soon!”
Instructions to click on the “Buy It Now” button followed.
“It’s a flamin’ bargain, Lewis. The other poor bastard paid a dollar more for it by outbidding me! Ha! The Lord taketh, and the Lord giveth. Blessed is the Lord.”
“Maybe you could just e-mail the other buyer and ask her or him to make you a copy for half price, and that way you’d both be better off,” I suggested.
“No can do, Lewis,” she said. “This is a ‘private’ auction. The identities of the other bidders are kept secret from each other from the beginning—maybe to protect the seller and us from the authorities—the CD police or whomever.”
And she clicked on the “Buy” button and then went to the “Pay Now” button.
It’s your money, girlfriend, I thought, and went back to our kitchenette to have my boiled egg and toast.
Something did not seem totally right to me, but it was another two days before I looked into it. I privately checked the bootleg CD seller’s site while Morse was broiling us some scrod for dinner and learned that the other buyers could be located and e-mailed by a small roundabout maneuver: I went to the seller’s “Feedback” page and read twenty-six comments left by his customers. I found that I could click on the blue “iconic” numbers to see what items had been bought from this seller as well as the blue “iconic” screen names of buyers to see their approval ratings and what else they had bought from other sellers. The privacy protection had a few holes in it.
I felt more like Nancy Drew and Jane Marple than Susan Dare, V. I. Warshawski, or the wonderful Kinsey Millhone—even though the original Nancy and Jane of my mother’s day and my childhood years had never heard of computers.
“Dinner in five minutes,” Morse called to me. “Wash your hands if you’re using that filthy computer, Lewis.” I need not transcribe how she pronounced “wash.”
Halfway through our dessert, I casually mentioned I had been looking at the bootleg seller’s elBay site, just out of curiosity.
Morse stopped eating and rested her elbows on the arms of her chair and her chin on her knuckles. She stared at me in silence, unblinking, for a good minute. I sighed and finally continued.
“The long and short of it, Morse, is that he or she seems to sell about two-thirds of the CDs on a second-chance ‘buy now’ basis to people. Or else most of the auction ‘winners’ do not bother to leave feedback about their purchases. This strikes me as a little—odd. And the average price for these ‘buy nows’ is about $35.00, with the ‘winner’ prices being fifteen to twenty dollars less most of the time—which also strikes me a little odd.”
She said nothing and continued to stare at me with no particular expression.
I smiled and said, “It must be because I’m a Capricorn: Capricorn’s tend to be skeptical about things. In fact, I’m so skeptical I don’t believe in astrology.”
“You must be a little nervous, Lewis,” Morse finally said; “you usually tell that old astrology joke better than that.”
She was right, and I told her so. Then I added, “If you feel I’ve crossed the line, Morse, let me apologize now. I probably should mind my own business where your hobbies are concerned.”
“Not at all, Lewis. It’s good to have a friend watching one’s back. I just would have preferred it if you’d waited till I’d finished my slice of chocolate cake before bringing this to my attention.”
“So noted for future reference,” I said. “Good dinnuh. Some time I’d like it if you’d share some of your secret recipes with me.”
“Maybe I’ll give them to you for a Crispness present,” she said. But she never did. Just before Thanksgiving, she was killed—murdered, I think.
Two and a half weeks later, Morse’s three bootleg operas arrived—mailed in a flimsy envelope with no so-called “jewel boxes” from someplace in Great Britain—the handwriting of the return address was illegible. She thought this a bit odd herself, since the seller’s elBay site had stated that Boston was its mailing location.
“Under other circumstances,” Morse told me, “I’d see this as just one more ‘security device’ for sellers and buyers to avoid the scrutiny of those who squash little people while letting the corporate thieves run free. Methinks it be time to look more deeply into this matter. I’m going to e-mail some of the other buyers and compare notes.”
I thought that was a good plan.
Each evening during the next week, I either asked Morse directly if she had any update on this mystery or tilted my head sweetly to one side and smiled in an inquiring manner. For seven straight days she frowned and shook her head, sometimes adding, “No, not a peep from anyone” or some such similar phrase.
On the eighth day she located me in our book stacks, as I helped a customer find a nice copy of a John Dickson Carr book.
“When you’re done here,” she said, grinning, “I have a bit of news back on the CD matter.”
“Ten-four,” I said, holding up my right thumb.
When yet another satisfied customer left to a jingling of the bells over our front door, I hunted Morse down and found her typing away at our store’s computer.
“I hope you’re not mixing store work with hobby play on this computer,” I said a trifle sternly.
“Oh do shut up,” Morse answered in a humorous, theatrical voice that disarmed criticism and objections.
After a long pause she added, “This fellow writes back that he, too, was contacted with a ‘buy it now’ notice—and that he had also been the second-highest bidder on a CD set. He’s one of the few people who’ve left negative feedback at that seller’s site. I sent letters about my suspicions to about fifty-seven other buyers, saying (a) I thought it was a kind of scam that so many of us were getting call-backs after losing an auction, and (b) I suspected that no buyer was competing against us some of the time—that we were being bid up and up and up with a shill of some sort. Either the seller herself/himself was doing it with another screen name to fool elBay, or the seller had a confederate doing this bogus bidding. You know I’m not a compulsive person, right?”
I raised an eyebrow and said nothing.
“Anyway, I’ve surfed around to other merchandise on elBay and have found a dozen other sellers who may be pulling a similar sort of shilling scam—stuff gets bid past a buyer’s upper limit and is then ‘offered’ as a ‘second chance opportunity’ to the poor unsuspecting clunk—who is overjoyed usually to take it. Snick-snack, and the purse strings are cut. Their mottos might be ‘Take care of the shillings, and the dollars take care of themselves.’ I made that up myself. Some day it will be Euros.”
“Do you think you want some prosecutor to investigate this?” I asked, looking at her levelly.
“Not just yet, Lewis. You may be known at the ‘detail person’ here, but I can fiddle with this investigation on my own, in my own way, gathering up more evidence. It may be that this is only the tip of the volcano, just poking up in the middle of the Pacific, and I need to get a few thousand more facts before making my case to anyone else. What’s weird to me is why so many hundreds of buyers haven’t bothered to answer my e-mails to them.”
“Maybe they think you’re investigating them—or you want them to serve as witnesses against somebody—or else they are unwilling to admit they have been fooled—or a hundred other reasons, such as they have real lives outside their computers and their elBay purchases. There’s no way of ever knowing for sure—even if you capture them and look at them face to face and grill them with a polygraph machine attached to their bodies. But I’m a Capricorn.”
Morse shrugged, typed a little more, and then clicked to send. I went back to our front counter to keep an eye on things—and read that day’s Globe.
An hour or so later, a pair of customers came in and asked for books about Beverly Sills. I found them a clean, cheap copy of Bubbles, her autobiography, and as they were paying for it, one of them asked if I might be Ms. Moss, the opera fanatic. I told her no, I was just the jazz-loving co-owner.
“Oh,” she said. “Does Ms. Moss happen to be here now?”
“Where do you know her from?” I said, replying to a question with a question.
“I’m from out of town,” she said, “and one of my opera-loving buddies gave me her name and recommended this book store to me. I think they know each other from way back.”
“And he said to ask for Ms. Moss?” I said.
“She. My friend, she said to ask.”
“Sorry, then. Felicity Moss is out right now. I guess your friend probably called her Felicity—though you might have forgotten.”
“That does sound like it, now you mention it. Sorry to have missed seeing her. Maybe another time.”
When they left—the bland looking man and the woman with the fake blonde hair and dark eyebrows—I went back to find Morse still glued to the store’s computer. I told her what had taken place and expressed concern that some people might be stalking her. Morse looked up at the ceiling for a few seconds, shrugged, and said, “How would the pronunciation of my name prove anything? If they’re from Rhode Island themselves and heard it with the extra R, they’d translate it backwards before saying it—the way my family would all say Moss Code if somebody said—the other word for it.”
Three days later, a different couple came in and bought a copy of Shirley Verrett’s autobiography—and then asked about Ms. Moss also. I gave them the same test and even asked them where from out-of-town they were from. They told me Virginia, so I said, “Isn’t that where they raise a lot of race hosses?”
And they told me no, I must be thinking of Kentucky—that was the state famous for raising horses. So much for them flunking Shibboleth 101.
Again Morse was only mildly interested in this linguistics lesson.
Four days later, she did not return from the fish market. I walked there and was told that she had indeed bought a pound of scrod as usual and, also as usual, had joked around with the clerk about the feds raising the permissible levels of mercury that east coast salmon could contain.
The nice Irish desk sergeant told me he could not accept a missing-person report this soon but suggested I put up some signs on a few telephone poles, the way people do when their dog or cat or budgie is missing.
Three days later, a jogger’s retriever discovered Morse in some bushes next to the Charles River about ten miles away. Her face had been beaten in with a cinder block, and her clothes were torn off. And somebody had violated her both vaginally and rectally with some sharp dead branches.
Despite the sexual aspects of the killing, I immediately thought, Take care of the shillings, and the pounds take care of themselves. I focused chiefly on how her poor face had been pounded with that cement brick and saw the other as a smokescreen.
I tried telling the police about my suspicions that elBay sellers had tracked her down to save themselves trouble. I am also certain in my own mind that many of the buyers she had e-mailed had just turned around and forwarded her missives to the sellers. I gave copies of all her messages to the police and told them of the two pairs of Morse-Moss customers I knew about, adding that there were perhaps others who had come in while Morse was working at the counter, perhaps the very day she didn’t come home. No one scoffed at me, but I got the impression that no one took me seriously. I am pretty good at reading what people think but do not say.
I have considered hiring a private detective agency to try to follow up this angle, but I can see how difficult it would be for any private persons to get anywhere, even if their hearts and minds are committed to the task.
And I am very very afraid now for my own life. I may have to sell our store if I can’t find a way to relax without three or four whiskeys and can’t get a good night’s sleep pretty soon.
Lord, I miss her so much!
