Something Missing_ A Novel - Matthew Dicks [54]
“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