The Violin Conspiracy(105)

He couldn’t forget her. He’d wanted, so many times, to talk to her, to ask her how she could have done this, how she could have done this to him. He’d thought they were in love; he’d thought they shared intimacy and a real connection. Was any of it real? Was it all, and always, about the violin, and the money?

    Dear Ray,

I’m sorry for everything I put you through. I want you to know that. I really care for you and you need to know your violin was never in any danger. I would have gotten it back to you no matter what. It was all Marcus’s idea, I just went along because he told me to. Please believe me.

The sentencing is coming up next week and it would mean everything to me if you’d just testify on my behalf. Ask the judge for leniency. Please do it. You mean everything to me. I really screwed up and I’m more sorry than you could ever know. Please????

Love,

Nicole



By the time her sentencing rolled around, Ray was back in the United States, playing at a special sold-out exhibition at Berkley.

As Nicole had asked, he wrote a letter to the judge.

    Dear Judge Kastenmeier,

Nicole Sellins spent nine months lying and deceiving me. She pretended to love and support me, all while planning to steal my violin. She almost got away with it. She is heartless and manipulative. She wrote me a couple weeks ago asking for leniency. She planned on cheating me and thousands of other people out of millions of dollars. She stole a violin that meant more to me than all the money in the world. Feel free to give her the maximum sentence.

Sincerely,

Ray McMillian



Both Nicole and Marcus Terry ended up going to jail: eight years and a $1.8 million fine for Nicole, and five years and $950,000 fine for Marcus Terry.

Nicole’s orchestral career was over. She would be lucky to play in a community orchestra. Ray sometimes wondered what she would do when she got out of prison but tried not to think about her too much.

In the meantime, Ray was playing all over the world. As the violin silver medalist with the Tchaikovsky Competition, great stuff happened. After the first year of traveling internationally, he rediscovered his love of chamber music and formed his own group—the BESK Quartet. They traveled all over the United States, South America, and in Europe; their performances of Schubert, Mozart, Haydn, Shostakovich, Dvo?ák, and Brahms garnered them dozens of awards and accolades from every major classical music institution. He recorded for Sony, Naxos, and BMI, and his quartet did the same.

Ray made it a point to highlight music by Black and Latinx composers. After all those years fighting and proving wrong the preconceptions that people who looked like him couldn’t play the music of dead European white men, he dove into the phenomenal music written by those people who indeed did look like him. William Grant Still was his favorite, and Ray popularized his Suite for Violin and Piano; Josephine Reed’s Yellow coming a close second, and Florence Price’s Second Violin Concerto rounding out the top three. Whenever he performed any of these pieces, someone would invariably come up to him and tell him how amazing that piece of music was, as if Ray didn’t know. “I’d never heard of her until I heard you play that,” the audience member would say, and Ray’s reaction was always the same: “You’re welcome.” He said it with a smile, and meant it.

He was a celebrity, and he never got used to it. Whenever he returned to New York and played at Birdland, the crowd stretched down the block. He made guest appearances in musicals on Broadway and concertos in Carnegie Hall, soloed with the best orchestras on the planet, and dated a supermodel for a while.

Ray was living a life he never thought he would have. Once, years later, on the phone with his mother, he asked her if she was still mad at him for not getting that high school job at Popeyes, for not getting his GED and not going to work at the cafeteria hospital with Ricky. She told him that she didn’t know what he was talking about and he should stop this foolishness.

Secretly, Ray was a rotten celebrity. He never got used to it, never learned to take it for granted. The photos and adulation and program signing always made him uncomfortable, and after the theft he never ordered room service again. Every day, no matter where he was, he’d find a busker or someone on the street and leave money or help otherwise when he could. He was making a great deal of money and giving a lot of it away as quickly as he got it. He played charity concerts for several different organizations.

He loved Kelly Hall-Tompkins’s Music Kitchen, a charity that organized musicians to serve food and play in soup kitchens, and he often volunteered—both to play and to serve the guests. Another charity bought instruments for students who couldn’t afford to buy their own: at the inaugural fundraising gala, he played for free, enlisted several musicians—Wynton Marsalis and Trombone Shorty—and donated a hundred thousand dollars to the cause.

Every day, Ray’s routine was the same. As soon as he woke, he’d open the Tonareli case to ensure that his violin—PopPop’s violin—was nestled inside. Every day it would shine up at him, safe, and his heart would swell in his chest. Many times he’d flash back to that Christmas, long ago, and the memory of opening an alligator-skin case with a loose handle, and he’d breathe in the aroma of mildew, old wood, and Good Luck Dust.

Every night before he went to bed, he’d stash the violin case within easy reach. As he fell asleep, he’d think about the day’s events and remember his grandmother’s Thanksgiving words to him, seasoned with love, potato peels, and sliced squash: that he work twice as hard as everyone else, that he stand tall and treat others with respect, and that he stay the same “sweet Ray” that Grandma Nora loved so much. He didn’t know if he’d succeeded, but he never stopped trying. He had to believe that she would be proud.