Holland Taylor Trilogy Read Online Free PDF Page A

got your reasons.”
    â€œI do.”
    â€œBut I want my money and I want it by Friday or I’m gonna send my guys to talk to you.”
    I was so frightened I hung up the phone without saying good-bye.

    Every man and woman in America leaves little threads wherever they go. They leave them in computer databases when they are born, apply for a driver’s license, graduate from school, get married, get divorced, buy on credit, make airline reservations, stay at a hotel, apply for life insurance, order freshwater pearls from the Home Shopping Network—hundreds of little threads that when woven together produce a garment of who and what they are. In fact, it is virtually impossible not to become the subject of a record. The average person is on fifty databases at any one time and nearly all of them are readily available to someone with a personal computer, a modem and a telephone. Like me.
    Most threads of information are stored in public files gathered by the government that I can access simply by signing on as “anonymous” and using “guest” as a password. Much of this information is contained in private databases such as those of credit bureaus that I can access for a fee. It isn’t easy, of course. Locating banks of files that actually contain relevant information often requires as much detective work as investigating a dozen flea markets in Iowa. I often have to drag one database after another until I find the name I’m looking for. Or the Social Security number, our de facto standard universal identifier. Still, given time, I can usually gather enough bits and pieces to assemble a reasonably complete sketch of an individual, everything from date of birth to high school locker number.
    I know PIs who conduct entire investigations by computer, never leaving their offices. There’s a guy in Texas who does nothing but skip traces; he can run one in about ninety seconds. Other agencies specialize in background checks, verifying an individual’s personal history for five hundred bucks a pop. Mostly they run these checks for businesses, pre-employment checks. Yet more and more they run them for single women who want to investigate their male friends and for fathers who worry about their daughters. All in all, it’s a great time to be a private investigator: Nobody trusts anybody.
    Still, I don’t think relying exclusively on a computer is smart. You simply cannot get everything you need on-line and the facts you do generate often come without the nuances that give them true value. For that you need personal contact. You need to interview a witness, conduct physical surveillance, engage in waste retrieval and analysis. Otherwise, it is too easy to be deceived, too easy to come to the wrong conclusion.
    I parked myself in front of my PC and thought it over, trying to decide where to begin. Above the computer hung a newspaper article I had framed in silver. HAVE PC—W ILL TRAVEL, the headline read. Just under the headline was a photograph of me, dressed in a trench coat and fedora and leaning on my PC. The story was all about how I squashed the hostile take-over of a much-loved local firm. It was fairly simple, really. I merely followed the Social Security numbers of the CEO, CFO and president of the hostile company to a series of secret bank accounts in Nevada and Nassau, where they had squirreled away nearly fifty million bucks. My discovery, which generated considerable interest from the FBI, SEC, IRS and several other organizations with impressive-sounding initials, effectively killed the acquisition and earned me a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bonus (still unspent) from a much-relieved board of directors. It also earned me a lot of attention from the local media.
    I made the papers again a few months back, only I haven’t seen them. I was in the hospital at the time. Anne Scalasi saved copies; she assured me they all claimed I was a hero. I took her word for