Loose Cannon: The Simple Art of Merge/Purge (A Sam Chaid Mystery)
It had been two weeks since I’d left my hometown. I hadn’t planned on taking take time off, but a set of compiled names I’d rented to a client was somehow used for a sweepstakes mail package – without my consent, of course.
After that mailing went out, I’d been informed by angry recipients that I might have already won a horizontal forwarding address. To postpone becoming a permanent resident on the do-not-promote lists, I decided to take a furlough in San Francisco, at least until the rainy season ended. I’d try to keep my hand in the list business, though.
My name is Sam Chaid, but in the trade I’m known as the Segmentation Shamus. I carry a data card.
My usual hangout when I’m in Frisco is a chow mein chalet called Sam Wo’s. The headwaiter – hell, the only waiter — had the moniker Edsel Fong. As someone who deals in names for a living, it amused me to be served by someone with a handle that would make the average data entry clerk miss a keystroke or two. It doesn’t hurt that the chow at Sam Wo’s is meinly good, too.
The moon was high over the Golden Gate Bridge by the time I climbed the stairs to the restaurant. Supper this night was a surprise: Fong brought me Mongolian beef, which was a far cry what I had ordered.
“I wanted the crispy fish,” I said, looking down at the shredded mess on the plate Edsel had set before me.
“Brain food would be wasted on you, flatfoot,” he smirked, before retreating to a table to read what looked like the Cantonese version of The Forward. When Edsel decides your order is stupid, he brings what he thinks you should eat.
But the beef wasn’t the biggest culinary surprise Sam Wo’s held for me that night. When Edsel bothered to look up from his newspaper long enough to bring my check, it had a fortune cookie serving as a bodyguard.
This was unusual, to say the least. The restaurant’s attitude toward customer-centric niceties is “charm by omission”. People can yammer on about the “experiential environment” of The Rainforest Café, or Chuck E. Cheese, or other culinary/cartoon crossbreeding experiments. Environment at Sam Wo’s means eating under a large posted sign reading No Beer! No Credit Cards! No Fortune Cookies! And since they let you bring your own hooch, that’s always worked for me.
Edsel must have sensed my confusion about the fortune cookie, because he sauntered over to my table and waited expectantly. I had to lay the kind of spinach that doesn’t come with an E. coli scare on him before he would talk.
“Guy came in, gave it to me, told me to make sure you got it. We don’t serve fortune cookies!” This last he barked to another table, which had been looking somewhat expectantly at what passed for my dessert.
The cookie was digestible, although someday somebody is going to get rich mixing antacids into the batter. It was the fortune that caught in my craw. It read: “Confucius say bulimic who toss cookies while changing lanes on US 101 guilty of merge-purge.”
Printed below that were some lucky numbers: 41 5 55 51 21 2. If I could figure out which ponies in which races they corresponded to, I could hang up my net-net arrangements and spend my days with a fishing net instead.
It wasn’t until I’d caught the Powell Street rattler back to my hotel that things clicked. Ten digits that started with 415 – San Francisco’s area code. Somebody wanted me to drop a dime on his behalf. Calling and finding out what he wanted was the least I could do.
A quick reverse-append check revealed the number as belonging to Joshua Norton, a name that was oddly familiar. He certainly was familiar with mine – when I called he answered with “Chaid!” in a voice somewhere between eagerness and desperation. Clearly, he’d been expecting my call – or had been waiting by the phone like a stood-up debutante. “Let’s meet when the Starbucks at Union and Market opens,” Norton said. “I’ll find you.” There was a click, and the line went dead.
If someone wants to be invisible in a big city, meeting at a Starbucks isn’t a bad idea. People go to Starbucks to be left alone. But when I saw Norton, I realized he didn’t have that as an option. He wasn’t just Joshua Norton, he was Congressman Joshua Norton and his mug had been in a newspaper or two. As a legislator, Norton had been disquietingly loud about list industry practices. Data security laws he sponsored were personally responsible for some associates of mine quitting the list game and going legit.
Initially I wasn’t inclined to help him. A few of those associates had been almost friends – not poker buddies, perhaps, but the kind of folks you might jot a handwritten note on your annual Christmas letter to, rather than relying on a mail merge program to provide that custom touch. These former associates weren’t doing too badly since leaving the names ‘n’ places gig, if your idea of not doing too badly involved eating only on odd-numbered days of the month.
But my baked-goods benefactor wasn’t looking all that good himself. Truth be told, he seemed to be coming apart faster than a two-bit suitcase. Judging by the cloud of gin mill perfume that surrounded him, it was pretty clear Norton had been doing next week’s drinking seven days early. In his state, I doubted he’d be able to tell a mail package test from a postcard control.
What tipped the scale was that Norton was a man in trouble, and to my lights he was the best kind of man in trouble: The kind with several thousand green friends named Washington, Lincoln, Hamilton and Jackson available to help him out.
“Let’s hear it,” I said, as we sat down over foam-topped lattes.
“I was testing a new fundraising e-mail effort. Turns out a few 11-year-olds were on my house file, and they got my solicitations.” Norton paused. “That fishwrapper, the Chronicle, did a poll. Did you know that most parents would rather have their preteens receive cigarette coupons than political literature? One of ’em actually said, ‘at least tobacco only rots your lungs.’ I ask ya, what’s this world coming to?
“They haven’t accused me of pedipoliticking yet, but I’m stuck. I can’t roll out a full campaign while there are kids in my file.” Norton looked at me with pleading eyes. “Ya gotta help me, Chaid. I may have done some bad things to your industry, but I got no truck with children. I’m not interested in taking a page from Mark Foley’s book.”
He wasn’t from my preferred political party, but for the bundle he offered me I’d come to any party he was throwing. I’d even bring the funny hats and noisemakers.
“I’ll take the case, Norton, but there’s something I gotta know. How did the kids get on your file in the first place?”
“Near as I can figure, I picked up a few business cards when I visited a middle school a while back. It’s not my fault they got mixed in with my regular constituents – what sort of pre-teen has a business card?”
Talk about being out of touch with your constituents. This close to Silicon Valley, not only did most pre-teens have business cards, a good chunk of ’em had stock portfolios that would make his campaign war chest look thinner than a weekend wedding ring. But I wasn’t about to correct him. Some people spend their lives looking for the third rail on trolley tracks. As long as their checks don’t bounce, I’ll help them with the search as long as they want.
So yeah, I took his case – and his scratch. I figured he needed to see the good the list industry could do – in saving his own worthless bacon, if nothing else. For me, matching back his donor file to kids’ e-mail addresses was easy: When you don’t mind working the wrong side of the law, you’ve got access to files the goody two-shoes might not get their hands on. Without going into any trade secrets, let’s just say that genealogy isn’t the only thing the state of Utah keeps consumer records for.
I was able to rid Norton’s file of underage citizens, but I kept a copy of the original for myself. Call it an insurance policy. I mentioned before that I don’t like to go out without a few data cards in my pocket. But my pockets are big, and there’s always room for an elected official in one of ’em.
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