He had a first name, of course, but few people knew what it was. He was just Mr. Morris to everyone at the mortgage company that used his services from time to time.
Almost no one at the company knew what these services entailed. Had an employee noticed the nondescript, blandly dressed man of middle height and regular features on those few occasions when he turned up at the company’s main office on Broad Street and asked what he did for the organization, another employee might answer it involved some kind of support work, whatever that meant. What Morris actually supported was known only to his immediate top-level supervisor, who in turn reported directly to the mortgage company’s president.
One reason Makepeace Morris was so careful not to draw attention to his unusual first name was because he didn’t like to attract personal attention of any kind. What he liked was anonymity in every facet of his life. Most especially in the working parts. ‘Morris The Infinitely Forgettable’ was the way he thought of himself.
The infinitely forgettable Makepeace Morris did much the same things in Philadelphia that Bernie Kahn had done years earlier for Myron Hamish in Boston. He got people to move out of their homes.
There were important difference in their mode of operation, however. Bernie Kahn was an in-your-face move enhancer, working for someone who wanted to re-rent or condoize a housing unit. Morris rarely meet face-to-face those he worked to relocate. He was a behind-the-scenes operative of a large company. And he had the law on his side.
Well, not exactly on his side. If the law did what it was supposed to do than the present occupant of a house would simply be evicted by the county sheriff and Morris’ own services would not be required. It was those gray areas of continued house occupation that required his special talents. Those times when just one last, piddling obstruction to repossession was keeping a worthwhile property that should rightfully be seized, refurbished as needed, and resold at “a decent profit by a mortgage company with a perfect right to make a decent profit, God-damn-it,” in the words of the mortgage company’s president, that Morris was put on the case.
Bernie Kahn’s place on Irving Street fit the profile perfectly. Except for the inordinate difficulty Morris was having completing his work successfully. In fact, this was the most challenging situation Makepeace Morris had ever encountered. As a true professional, he loved it for that very reason.
Unlike his adversary’s operations in Boston, Morris had considerable resources at his disposal. He was able to check out the background of the person who was using a transparently phony though technically legal way to remain in a property that he should have been forced to leave many months earlier. Morris also knew that the house painter who held the mechanics lien on this property had disappeared and was the sort of character who would probably not resurface again until he became a Libertarian candidate for some statewide office in Montana, or shot the foreman of a poultry processing plant where he’d just been fired.
Morris knew one other critical piece of information. He knew that this particular property’s occupant, Bernie Kahn, was skilled in his own craft and fancied himself an intellectual. At least, according to the man’s business card.
I’ve got something very special planned for you now Mr. Bernie Kahn, Morris thought as he prepared to make the call that would set his newest gambit in motion. Something that unfortunately would cause some damage to the property that was to be taken over.
His employer would understand, though. Makepeace Morris had earned his employer’s trust. He was, after all, the very best in his very specialized line of work.
Powelton Village, like Society Hill, is one of those Philadelphia neighborhoods that had no distinct identity of its own until a local real estate maven gave it one. In the case of Powelton, a smallish area in West Philadelphia bounded by Race Street and Lancaster and Hamilton Avenues, a landlord who owned a few rundown houses in the area came up with the name because there was once a large Revolutionary War Powel Estate hereabouts. He added “ton” and “Village” to Powel for extra cache, but dropped the “Estate” because it sounded too much like a British publc housing enclave. A new neighborhood place name was born.
This renaming, occurring sometime during the 1930s, didn’t bring about the
immediate local upgrading that took place on Society Hill. In the following decades Powelton Village remained associated in local mythology with gangs, drugs and murder. It’s a association that holds true to this day, though in a much attenuated form, and in spite of the fact that the area is just a stone’s throw away from the University of Pennsylvania’s main campus and its surrounding commercial satellites. And in spite of the fact that the last half-decade has seen signs of a modest gentrification.
The most famous recent murder to focus attention on this neighborhood was committed by Ira Einhorn, a 1960’s guru who styled himself The Unicorn. Einhorn killed his girlfriend and stuffed her in a trunk of their Powelton apartment. In keeping with his era’s oeuvre, when the police finally discovered the mummified body and asked Einhorn to explain, he replied: “You found what you found.”
Cosmic, man.
Einhorn was subsequently indicted but fled the country before he could be tried and lived a life of relative ease in Europe for almost thirty years until the French finally extradited him in 2002. And then only because the relatively minor disagreement over capital punishment between our country and theirs had not yet widened into the vast schisms separating the two nations over Iraq.
For a new arrival in Philadelphia like Lisa Sankerson, with no knowledge of local history, Powelton seemed like a perfect place to live while launching a career in music. A relatively large number of the 1,600 rental units in the neighborhood are cheap—under $600 a month. The nearby urban campus of an Ivy League university promised exciting cultural and perhaps even dating opportunities. She had also heard of something called the Avenue of the Arts in Philadelphia’s Center City and thought there might be some work there for someone with her undeniable talents with a violin.
The tree-lined streets of Powelton Village, its Victorians, its fraternity houses, its gracious old churches, gave her an initial sense that even a twenty-three year old woman on her own could live here both cheaply and in relative safety. The bars as thick as tow ropes on the fraternity house windows that she noticed only after moving in, and the warnings about muggings, drug dealings and worse she received from the new friends she made quickly, soon had her far less sanguine. As for advancing her career in music—within a few weeks of arrival that dream had devolved into the reality of playing for tips from passersby in the main commuter railroad station under 17th Street, near the city’s financial district.
Then, amazingly, the big break did come along. Or seemed to. A casually dressed man approached her during one of her lunchtime station concerts and instead of simply dropping coins into the wicker basket by her feet as a few culture loving-commuters deigned to do, stopped and actually listened intently to her playing for several minutes.
When she finished her piece he took a twenty dollar bill from his wallet and dropped it into her basket. “I love Vivaldi,” he said.
Lisa was flattered. Grateful, too. “May I offer some Mozart, good sir,” she replied.
“Please do.”
She rendered the promised offering for her benefactor, and performed it so beautifully that a dozen or so other commuters stopped to listen and favored her with a round of applause and some additional bills and coins.
“That was amazing,” the man said when the other listeners had gone their way. Without further niceties he added: “My name’s Hamish. Have you ever considered composing stocks.”
That’s how it started. That’s what brought Lisa to the composer studio in the Bernstein Building where every morning Myron or one of his associates gave her a graph showing the up and down movements of a given stock, along with its trading volume. Lisa was expected to turn these visual chartings into musical notation. The trick was not to be literal in the transformation, but to improvise by adding jazz-like riffs that turned what otherwise would sound like random notes into something akin to something one might hear riding in an elevator in a high rise apartment or office building. At Bernstein Financial they called this market music.
Lisa worked at this offbeat craft with a small group of other musician-composers that Myron Hamish had hired from who knows where and based on who knew what qualifications or whims. In Lisa’s case, after he’d heard her playing in the subway, she thought her musicial talents were the attraction. That was almost certainly part of it. Myron’s teasing kinky side turned out to be the other part.
There was nothing she could do about Myron’s form of harassment. He was too clever to push it beyond the point where it would get him in trouble with his superiors. And when she tried using a different tactic, it only made him laugh.
“You know,” she said one day when he leaned over her so close that she thought his after shave would choke her, “I could take the skills I’ve learned here to any brokerage house in the country. You wouldn’t like that, would you.”
“Naughty girl,” he’d replied, wagging his finger in a way she found vaguely repulsive. “These days courts let companies patent processes and techniques the way they patent products, Bernstein Financial and me hold all the rights to market music. If you ever tried composing markets for another company, my little subway fiddler, or even just for yourself without getting our prior licensing approval, the blood ghouls in our legal department would be drain you forever.
“I like your hair, by the way,” he’d added. “New stylist?”
So Lisa just endured the close encounters of the unpleasant kind that Myron dispensed, saved a good chunk of her salary each week, planned her escape. Except for a boss she hated and work she thought beneath her talents, it was, after all, a great job. All her friends told her so.
It was just that one stupid act of personal revenge against Myron that had her so worried now. Myron thought he was too clever to put the moves on her, even though she knew in her gut he dearly wanted to. So why not do the deed with another top exec? That would show Myron he couldn’t toy with her. That would give him something to think about while he was rolling around alone in bed at night.
Her choice for this act of revenge proved a very easy seduction target. A couple of helpless lost-little-girl looks during chance meetings at work, an invitation to meet after hours to help her get over her work worries, a follow up glass of wine at her place, and the thing was done. As for all those questions she’d been asked that same night about her feelings toward working in a post-Myron Hamish market music department, she naturally assumed that some kind of internal company food fight was afoot, and the questions were part of jockeying for power.
Then, yesterday, Myron was killed. Murdered. Lisa had left Bernstein’s earlier in the day but was almost positive the person who broached the subject of a post-Myron era was still in the building. Could this person be involved in the killing?
Lisa didn’t know what to do. She didn’t want to get mixed up with the police. She had severed her working relationship with Bernstein’s and had enough money to move to New York and live fairly comfortably for the few months she was certain was all the time she need to get a real music job.
Now there was knock on the door of her second floor apartment. Though she wasn’t expecting anyone, the people upstairs were always getting visitors who knocked on the wrong apartment door after coming through a street level entrance whose lock the landlord swore he was going to fix but never did.
This wrong door knocking was a student thing. Lisa was comfortable with it. Sometimes it got her an invite to a good party. Without thinking she opened the door.
“Oh, no. Not you.”
They were the last words she ever uttered. She felt no pain when the heavy
metal pipe came down on her head. Why should there be pain? It killed her instantly. A gloved hand dropped the pipe, which had been picked out from a neighborhood garbage can, and threw down a plastic bag containing a small amount of a controlled substance. Then very gently closed Lisa’s door.
No one in the building noticed the killer enter or leave.
