What did surprise Martin was the thought that, less than three hours ago, he had been contemplating bashing in a client’s skull with a lamp. Had he not been so nimble-minded, he might right now be hiding in the wooded area between the Claytons’ house and the nursing home, trying to evade a platoon of policemen carrying flashlights, batons, and Taser guns.
Maybe even dogs.
Had Martin been exceptionally unlucky, it was entirely possible that he could have found himself sitting behind bars at this very minute instead of relishing the orderliness of his garage. With a life built upon predictability and routine, Martin marveled at how quickly his circumstances had changed in the span of a couple hours.
Refocusing on the task at hand, Martin saved his work, shut down his computer, and entered the six-digit combination (randomly generated with dice) that deactivated the state-of-the-art alarm system protecting his home. He had purchased this system within a week after moving back into the house, never understanding why his parents hadn’t made the investment themselves but pleased that they had not.
He might have ended up in a very different career had his parents been more cautious.
Martin returned the hard drive to its hiding place in the basement, first enclosing it in a watertight bag and then placing that bag in a large sack of fertilizer for additional concealment, and then began moving the newly acquired items inside the house to their assigned locations. As he moved through the rooms, he was careful to avoid allowing his pants to touch furniture, walls, or any other part of his body. He was almost counting the seconds until they could be removed.
Martin’s house was a large, two-story Colonial centered on just under a half acre of land in a suburban neighborhood of West Hartford, Connecticut. The downstairs was a large, almost entirely open space consisting of a modern stainless-steel kitchen that opened into a spacious, window-filled family room, with a mudroom connecting the kitchen to the garage. On the west side of the house, beyond a stairway and dividing hallway, was a combined living room and dining room, complete with fireplace and sliding glass doors that opened onto a raised deck.
Upstairs, a total of five rooms wrapped around the staircase, including a full bath off the master bedroom. As a child, Martin had inhabited one of the smaller rooms tucked into the northern corner of the house, but now this room served as his business office, the door always locked when not in use. Upon inheriting the home, he had moved into the master bedroom and kept the other two rooms as guest rooms, leaving them furnished just as they had been the day he moved back in. In fact, one of the guest rooms had yet to be occupied since the day Martin had inherited the home, and so he had yet to change the sheets that his mother had put on the bed sometime before she died.
The garage wasn’t the only place where Martin had made changes to his parents’ original design. Almost immediately upon inheriting the house, Martin re-tiled the kitchen floor and countertops, replacing a hunter green, which his mother had installed just a year before her death, with pristine white surfaces. Martin despised the color green and had found it amusing how often his mother would emphasize the word “hunter” when describing the color of her newly decorated kitchen, as if one word apologized for the other.
More significant than just despising the color, Martin also did not approve of dark colors in the kitchen or bathroom, as they served as effective agents in the hiding of dirt and germs. He believed that if there was a germ festering in the kitchen, it was better to be able to deal with it rather than allowing it to hide in the grout between green tiles.
Though much of the furniture throughout the house remained primarily the same, Martin had removed a great deal, emptying shelves of bric-a-brac, throwing away ornamental chairs that decorated corners of rooms but served no real purpose, and tearing up the carpeting in the family room and master bedroom. An empty shelf was a thing of beauty in Martin’s mind, with its clean, straight lines and absence of useless objects. Carpeting was another household furnishing that Martin deplored because it was impossible to keep clean. Dirt on a hardwood floor or on tile could be seen and removed easily, but carpeting allowed dirt to linger and hide no matter how powerful one’s vacuum cleaner might be. Though it had cost him a considerable sum, one of Martin’s first projects was to hire someone to restore the hardwood floors that his parents had covered with carpeting long ago.
With his newly acquired items stored in their predetermined locations throughout the house, Martin went to the upstairs bathroom to shower, placing his contaminated jeans into a brown paper bag before rolling it closed. Once in the shower, he began scrubbing vigorously, removing any microscopic evidence that he had potentially collected from his clients’ homes, as well as any of the fetid remnants of the toilet water that had once covered Cindy Clayton’s toothbrush. Even in the presence of these germs, Martin smiled when he considered the contrast between this shower and the showers that the Claytons had taken earlier that day. Standing under the nearly scalding water, Martin’s muscles finally began to relax. But just a short time ago, he had been straining to hear the sound of a shower from a nearly unimaginable position.
An incredibly foolish position too, Martin reminded himself. With his years of experience, he wondered how he could’ve been stupid enough to break so many rules in order to help a client.
All that danger over a toothbrush. It was almost impossible to believe.
As he washed his hair for the second time (as prescribed on the bottle of shampoo that had once belonged to Tracy and Bob Michaud of Kensington), Martin began inventorying the litany of errors that he had made in the course of the Clayton incident, his sense of disappointment and disgust growing with each item on the list. But at the same time, that feeling of excitement had returned with the possibility that he might be able to help the Claytons once more without having to break another rule.
The more he thought about it, the more his idea seemed foolproof.
Once cleaned and dressed, Martin went to the front porch to collect his mail. In addition to the usual bills, magazines, and circulars, he found a total of three cardboard boxes and one large, cushioned mailing envelope. Placing the rest of the mail on the kitchen counter for later processing, Martin brought the boxes and envelope to his upstairs office, unlocking the door with a key from a ring that he kept in his pocket at all times while within the house. On this ring were the keys to Martin’s home, his car, his storage unit in Groton, and assorted bike locks, padlocks, etc. No matter where he was or what he was doing, Martin kept his keys with him at all times in case of emergency. If he needed to exit his home quickly, the last thing he wanted to hold him up was searching for keys that he had flung into some conspicuous location in a home full of conspicuous locations.
Though Martin’s business was highly profitable, this hadn’t always been the case. Before venturing into the realm of large-scale acquisitions, the business had for a long time provided him with groceries and common household necessities, but not with the cash required to pay rent, make car payments, and pay utility bills. So for the first ten years that Martin had been on his own, he had held down a variety of jobs in order to generate the funds needed to survive. Working as a part-time barista at Starbucks had been and remained his primary job (its early morning hours fitting in well with his afternoon client visits), with stints as a pizza deliveryman, a McDonald’s cashier, a telemarketer, and an ice-cream vendor filling in the gaps. He hated all these jobs; particularly Starbucks with its corporate brainwashing, pretentiously named coffee sizes, and tattooed-pierced-vegetarian coworkers. But despite the noticeable loathing that he exuded behind the counter each day, Martin’s excessively logical and methodical mind, and his affinity for sequence and order, had allowed him to produce the overpriced lattes and espressos for which Starbucks was famous more quickly and efficiently than anyone else in town. Though his manager, Nadia, was clearly an idiot and did not like Martin, she was at least smart enough to recognize his skills, and was willing to put up with his sour face in exchan
ge for quick service for her customers, all of whom she presumed to know intimately each time they came in. As a result of his business’s profitability, he had been able to reduce the number of hours that he worked at Starbucks considerably, keeping the job only to maintain the excellent health insurance that the company provided its employees.
Martin had his mother to thank for eventually ridding him of the other low-paying jobs that plagued his existence. Though the possibility of large-scale acquisitions had always been in the forefront of Martin’s mind, it was the converting of these items to cash that had always posed the biggest challenge. He had heard the term “fence” before, and understood that in the larger cities thieves could find someone who would exchange cash for stolen goods, but he doubted that Hartford, Connecticut, was teeming with these individuals, nor did he have any desire to associate with such a criminal element. Years went by while Martin missed many, many opportunities for large paydays, until an afternoon in his dead mother’s closet changed everything.
Having inherited everything that his mother owned, Martin had begun packing her clothes in order to send them over to the Salvation Army shortly after moving back home. One afternoon Jim was visiting with his wife, Karen, when she noticed a pile of handbags in a cardboard box by the front door.
“Martin, what are you doing with all of these?”
“Sending them to Goodwill,” he replied with a smile. “You don’t expect me to carry them around myself, do you?” He had been pleased by this witty response.
“Martin,” Karen said, fishing through the box, “you can’t just give these away. Some of these are worth a lot of money. You could probably get a bundle for these.”
“For a bunch of pocketbooks?”
“A bunch of pocketbooks? This one alone is probably worth a couple hundred at least.” She was holding up a Dooney & Bourke bag of yellow leather and brass clasps. “Hell, I’d give you fifty bucks for it right now.”
“Well, besides you, who am I going to sell them to? A consignment store?”
“eBay you idiot.”
Though he had heard of the online auction house before, it had only been a few years old at the time, and Martin had assumed that it was a marketplace primarily for collectibles. While this was certainly the case during its infancy, eBay had exploded by the time Karen mentioned it, developing into an auction house for almost any item one could think of, including handbags. In fact, an online search of Dooney & Bourke handbags that day had yielded over fifty current auctions, with bids as high as $350. Martin quickly realized that not only was he sitting on a gold mine in terms of his mother’s hoard of designer bags, but he might have found a means of moving large-scale acquisitions with relative anonymity.
So began Martin’s four-week study of eBay. For at least three hours a day, he explored the site, noting the types of items being auctioned, the means by which people listed their goods, and the many features offered by the online auction house. He quickly discovered that people who dealt in the merchandise that Martin would also be selling (jewelry crystal, silver, and perhaps even handbags) were primarily women, and so he decided to establish a female identity for himself in order to sell on the site.
Registering under the name Emptynester, Martin assumed the online persona of an upper-class, middle-aged woman from Connecticut named Barbara Teal whose two daughters had recently gone off to college, leaving her behind with an absent-minded husband and a house full of luxuries that she no longer desired (or wanted to trade in for even more luxurious ones). As part of the registration process, Martin was required to provide an address, telephone number, and e-mail address, all of which were easily supplied without sacrificing his prized anonymity. A new address was purchased eight miles away in Simsbury at Mail Boxes Etc. using cash and without having to present identification of any kind. Explaining that he was leasing the mailbox for a mother who was hoping to start an eBay business, he filled out the forms using the alias of Barbara Teal. The e-mail address was a Google account also registered under Barbara Teal’s name, and the phone number was a fake, though he doubted that eBay, Mail Boxes Etc., or Google would ever be calling. Actually, the phone number was assigned to a fax machine at a local Office Depot, so that if they ever did call, they would receive the whining screams of a fax machine answering rather than confirmation of a wrong number.
Within a week of establishing his new persona, Martin was ready to list his first item, an Il Bisonte black leather handbag that he had never seen his mother carry and hardly looked used. His listing read:
Nice MESSENGER bag from IL BISONTE. BLACK LEATHER bag in very excellent condition. Another bag that I just had to have, much to my husband Gerry’s chagrin—and I did use it for a while—but not for very long and the bag is in very excellent condition. I haven’t used it for a long time, and it is time for it to move on to someone who will use it and enjoy it. A bag like this will never go out of style and IL BISONTE just continues to make beautiful and practical handbags, as I’m sure you already know. It opens with a zipper across at the top of the bag and there is a nice zipper compartment inside. The bag was MADE IN ITALY and designed by WANNY DI FILIPPO. My oldest daughter, Emily, thinks I’m crazy to sell it, but I think she’s just making a play for the bag herself! Clever girls I have!
The bag is in excellent condition—no marks, scratches, or any sign of wear at all. Bags like this just get better and better as they get older. A bag like this will give someone a lifetime of pleasure, unlike me who just has to have every new bag in sight. 14” high x 14” wide x 6” deep, 20” with shoulder strap up—plenty of room to wear over your shoulder.
Of course, Martin researched handbags extensively before posting his listing, and much of the language was lifted directly from other listings for bags of similar design. He had learned to capitalize keywords like designer names and country of origin after studying some of the more successful sellers on eBay. In all, Martin found the process remarkably simple and in less than two weeks had a money order in his hand in the amount of $167.00. Even more interesting, Martin had received an email a couple of days into the auction from a woman asking about the bag, and his ensuing response (carefully crafted over a two-hour period) had launched a string of e-mails between the two in which he learned a great deal about the woman, a shopkeeper in Rhinebeck, New York, by the name of Jane. In fact, within a week he had acquired Jane’s address, the name of her business (The Cozy Chair), the ages and occupations of her three children, and many of the sordid details relating to her recent divorce. In return for this torrent of information, Martin provided similar, though fictional, details about Barbara, and eventually the two had struck up an online friendship. How remarkable, he had thought. With relative ease, he had managed to pass himself off as a middle-aged suburban housewife, and this game of false identities thrilled him beyond belief.
Over the next six months, Martin continued to sell off his mother’s collection of handbags, designer dresses and coats, jewelry, and even her shoes. Through his listings, he wove the tale of a middle-aged woman who was learning to enjoy the freedom that her empty nest had suddenly provided. He wrote of Barbara’s travels to Barcelona, Greece, and the Caribbean, all places that Martin had never been but had studied extensively through travel brochures and online research. He waxed lyrical about the romance that was returning to her marriage after years of busy parenthood. He wrote of her love for fashion, a topic about which Martin knew nothing when he began, but one in which he became quite fluent in a short time. Each listing was more personal than the last, a blend of capitalism and personal blogging before blogging had hit the mainstream, and each revealed another nugget about Barbara Teal and her life, friends, and family. He even bid on several auctions himself and won a few in order to reinforce Barbara’s identity, while at the same time acquiring items that he thought he could resell at a higher price later on.
In June, a woman by the name of Rosemary, who had already bought several items from Martin, contacted him about selling
some of her own things; handbags and sweaters to start. He had learned early on in his research that some of the sellers on eBay made a business out of selling items for others, collecting as much as 25 percent of the sale as a commission, and so without much consideration, he agreed. Thanks to Barbara Teal’s unique and personalized listings, the sweaters and bags sold quickly and were followed by Rosemary’s unwanted jewelry shoes, and a collection of Rookwood pottery all of which fetched Martin a handsome profit for serving as the middleman. Before long, he had more than a dozen women for whom he was selling goods, and in some cases Martin was bypassing eBay entirely, simply selling one item to another of his regular clients without the hassle of an online auction. By the time he was ready to make his first large-scale acquisition, a Marc Jacobs bag from Emma Reed’s extensive collection, Martin had firmly established himself on eBay and had business relationships with almost a dozen women. He couldn’t have asked for a better cover under which to move his acquisitions.
Martin also appreciated—adored, really—the way his eBay business fit within his overall business plan. He began to think of the items that he was auctioning for his clients as acquisitions, no different than the tomatoes he routinely acquired from the Reeds’ home each week. He was acquiring items that did not initially belong to him, acquiring them under false pretenses (in the guise of Barbara Teal), and was profiting from their acquisition, just as he had been doing for years on a smaller scale.
This is what economist Jim Collins referred to in his book Good to Great (which Martin had read a dozen times) as a Hedgehog Concept. In his essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” Collins explains how the philosopher Isaiah Berlin divided the world into hedgehogs and foxes, based upon an ancient Greek parable: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing (how to defend itself by rolling up into a ball, presenting its attacker with a nearly impenetrable sphere of spines).” Collins argued that profitable companies have an understanding of the one thing that they can do best, and are therefore like the hedgehog, an animal with one simple but effective defense strategy. Companies like the fox have a diversified approach to business, but this often leaves them diffused and inconsistent. Martin’s Hedgehog Concept was simple: Acquire goods without payment in order to garner profit. This, he knew, was what he did best.
Something Missing: A Novel Page 12