Two of the bigger cheeses ever to hail from Lynchburg, TN are Mr. Jerry Falwell and Mr. Jack Daniels. I was closing up one night and planning a social call to the one far more interested in pickling my liver than preserving my soul when I was saved – not that I wanted to be – by a dame walking into my office.
“Are you Sam Chaid?” she asked.
I was, and still am, even if the lettering on my front door says The Segmentation Shamus. But most banks won’t let me cash checks under that moniker, even if I do carry a data card.
A veil hid her facial features, but the outfit she wore showed she was the sort of bedroom furniture found only in the naughtiest Ikea catalogs.
“I’m Alisa Montgomery,” she said. “You used to work with my father, Ward.”
I did indeed, back in the days when I barely had two mailing lists to merge/purge. Years ago, I’d relied on her father to explain the subtleties of wholesale catalog marketing to me. That was before children were part of his personal Wish Book. Now his daughter, all grown up and a business school graduate to boot, stood before me.
“How’s your father, kid?” I asked.
“Not good, Mr. Chaid. He’s got a rather incapacitating case of what you might call being dead.”
That caught me off guard. I’d last heard from him a half-decade ago, when he sent me a Christmas card addressed in French – a remnant from a failed overseas venture he’d tried. At the time, I was amused at how he’d translated “The Segmentation Shamus” into the Gallic tongue. The local postmaster was less so, and when the card arrived, shortly after Flag Day, it was polybagged with the nastiest letter every written by a postal official.
So it had been a while, but I still wasn’t prepared to hear that Montgomery had gone to his last forwarding address. I asked Alisa what had cancelled him.
“I think it was Singer’s disease,” she said.
I didn’t think Isaac Bashevis Singer had kicked off from anything so rare it would have been named after him. But what did I know? For enough lettuce you could probably get the naming rights on anything from paper cuts to being trampled by a team of Budweiser Clydesdales.
“Singer’s disease?” I asked.
“Yes. Daddy called one of his retail customers a dirty sew-and-sew, and the retailer shot him.”
“I’m on it,” I said, grabbing my file of retail chain purchasing agents. “I’ll have that sucker’s name before the next update.”
She waved five perfectly manicured fingers at me. “Not necessary,” she said. “It was during a celebrity direct marketer’s poker tournament, and there were dozens of witnesses. The man who shot daddy was later killed by bookies for screwing up the odds on the winner.”
She flashed her baby blues and handed over one of the firm’s order forms. “I need help with this, Sam.”
When I read it, my heart sank so fast I would have needed elevator shoes permanently set to “basement” to catch it. Written on it was an SKU number – LZ 129 — and the notation: 144,000? No name. No address. No order. No dice.
“They said you’re the best – that there’s nobody who can track down a potential customer better than you,” Alisa said. “I can’t figure out who this is, or what they were ordering. I want the cash from that order before I sell off the whole shebang. Find who placed daddy’s last order and I’ll make sure there’s a taste for you.”
I don’t usually work on a pay-per-acquisition basis. It’s a mug’s game, and when you’ve been in direct marketing as long as I have, you’ve got all the mugs you need. Especially if you frequent the trade shows. But her father had been a friend, and sometimes for friends you bend the rules.
I told Alisa I wanted to check out the catalog’s distribution center. She said she’d clear it with Emile Gross, a consultant the company had brought in to handle the business until it could be sold.
When I got to the distribution center the next morning, I met Gross, a stooped, graying man who sported a bushy mustache and gold spectacles. He carried a book of order forms wherever he went, and had an irritating habit of riffling them when he talked.
At my request, he had set out supplier, employee and customer records. I could have saved him the effort. There was no record of an order for 144,000 of anything on any of the records I examined. And there was no item that matched that SKU number.
That quantity – 144,000 — bothered me. One hundred forty four is a dozen dozen. But Montgomery didn’t sell anything by the dozen, according to the product list. Everything down to eggbeaters was sold in round lots, and I was back to square one.
As I pondered the missing product number, I realized I’d made the same mistake as Alisa, with her MBA in marketing: I hadn’t gotten my mitts dirty amid the merchandise. The difference was that I was in a position to correct my mistake. As I walked from the distribution center’s office to the warehouse, I wondered if any MBA had ever disturbed its dust.
Cleanliness aside, Ward Montgomery had always run a tight ship, and finding the aisle where merchandise LZ 129 was didn’t take much looking. But the only box with that SKU number was a nondescript gray container the size of a shoebox. Way too small to hold 144,000 of anything.
Probably because it didn’t. When I jimmied the thing open, I found myself looking at Emile Gross’s face, or at least a representation of it. The box held a pair of gold-framed glasses, a bushy mustache backed with spirit gum, a small jar of graying powder, and a few pieces of identification in Gross’s name.
As it happened, the real McCoy – or Gross, if you will – had come up behind me. “For a man so used to pinpointing prospects by the thousand, not to come up with a single name must have been very frustrating,” he said, the swish of a dozen order forms underscoring his words.
I didn’t turn to face him. His tone suggested that he was wearing a list-eating grin. Had I seen it I would have been tempted to wipe it off his face, and I would not have been as gentle as, say, the average grandmother.
“Perhaps,” I agreed. “But I’ve been looking in the wrong place. Perhaps I should have been looking at the Ms – for Montgomery, as in Ward?”
I’ve always been quick on the draw, both with a peashooter and a cell phone. But Gross was faster than a man of his years should have been, and before I could start punching numbers he teed off on my noggin with the company’s 1999 catalog – a big, heavy book that was likely the last before the Internet supplanted the need for big, heavy catalogs.
I had just enough time to think “paperless office, my segmented tuchas” in the half-second before I blacked out.
I’ve been cold-cocked before – it’s an occupational hazard of the list and database industry – but usually when I come to, I’m either alone or hog-tied. This time, while I was in a position to inventory the dust bunnies under the shelves, I was unbound – and the guy who knocked me prone was still with me.
For a moment I was looking up at two men. Which made sense, given that Gross/Montgomery has been living a double life. But five or six good blinks cleared my vision, and soon only one man remained. “Hello, Ward,” I said. “I know it’s been a long time, but you seem to have aged a lot faster than I have.”
“Hello, Sam,” he said. “Looks like you’ve found your target audience. As usual. Sorry about the bop on the melon, but I wanted to talk to you before you got Alisa on the blower.”
He could have just disconnected the call, but I didn’t point that out. Like most old-school mailers, Montgomery was used to letting his catalog talk for him.
Instead I said, “Good to see you, Ward. Especially now that you’re no longer in duplicate – but then, I never thought you were a two-face. Why’d you decide to take yourself out of the game?”
“Because it was either do that or let my daughter do it for me,” he said. “Alisa came home from business school full of online auctions and direct-to-consumer sales ideas. This is strictly a wholesale operation, Sam, but she wasn’t going to take no for an answer.”
“What about the poor sucker who got aced over taking you out of the poker game?”
“I didn’t know about the bookies,” Montgomery said. “One of my customers was 90 days past due, and I offered him a way to get his account up to date. The gun he used on me held blanks. The one the bookies used on him didn’t. I had no idea they were as heavily into direct marketing poker as they are. Retailing’s a rough trade. My bad.” He brightened. “But I had the company forgive all of his debts once I found out.” His face darkened again. “What happens now?” he asked.
“I’ve found one name, and even though it’s a hell of a name, it’s only one,” I said. “I’m not going to turn it over to Alisa. This one is going into the unfulfilled order file.”
I turned to leave, but called back to him: “And the next time you need an alias, don’t be so damned cute. Emile Gross — a thousand gross? My postmaster ain’t the only guy unimpressed with your French skills.”
To respond to this column, please contact e-mail: [email protected]
Network
