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• Classic-Fiction

“Okay, I need you to do a numident on that account number,” the caller said.

That was a request for her to read off the basic taxpayer data, and May Linn responded by giving the taxpayer’s place of birth, mother’s maiden name, and father’s name. The caller listened patiently while she also gave him the month and year the card was issued, and the district office it was issued by.

He next asked for a DEQY. (Pronounced “DECK-wee,” it’s short for “detailed earnings query.”)

The DEQY request brought the response, “For what year?” The caller replied, “Year 2001 .”

May Linn said, “The amount was $190,286, the payer was Johnson MicroTech.”

“Any other wages?”

“No.”

“Thanks,” he said. “You’ve been very kind.”

Then he tried to arrange to call her whenever he needed information and couldn’t get to his computer, again using the favorite trick of social engineers of always trying to establish a connection so that he can keep going back to the same person, avoiding the nuisance of having to find a new mark each time.

“Not next week,” she told him, because she was going to Kentucky for her sister’s wedding. Any other time, she’d do whatever she could.

When she put the phone down, May Linn felt good that she had been able to offer a little help to a fellow unappreciated public servant.

Keith Carter’s Story

To judge from the movies and from best-selling crime novels, a private investigator is short on ethics and long on knowledge of how to get the juicy facts on people. They do this by using thoroughly illegal methods, while just barely managing to avoid getting arrested. The truth, of course, is that most PIs run entirely legitimate businesses. Since many of them started their working lives as sworn law enforcement officers, they know perfectly well what’s legal and what isn‘t, and most are not tempted to cross the line.

There are, however, exceptions. Some PIs—more than a few—do indeed fit the mold of the guys in the crime stories. These guys are known in the trade as information brokers, a polite term for people who are willing to break the rules. They know they can get any assignment done a good deal faster and a good deal easier if they take some shortcuts. That these shortcuts happen to be potential felonies that might land them behind bars for a few years doesn’t seem to deter the more unscrupulous ones.

Meanwhile the upscale PIs—the ones who work out of a fancy office suite in a high-rent part of town—don’t do this kind of work themselves. They simply hire some information broker to do it for them.

The guy we’ll call Keith Carter was the kind of private eye unencumbered by ethics.

It was a typical case of “Where’s he hiding the money?” Or sometimes it’s “Where’s she hiding the money?” Sometimes it was a rich lady who wanted to know where her husband had hidden her money (though why a woman with money ever marries a guy without was a riddle Keith Carter wondered about now and then but had never found a good answer for).

In this case the husband, whose name was Joe Johnson, was the one keeping the money on ice. He was a very smart guy who had started a high-tech company with ten thousand dollars he borrowed from his wife’s family and built into a hundred-million dollar firm. According to her divorce lawyer, he had done an impressive job of hiding his assets, and the lawyer wanted a complete rundown.

Keith figured his starting point would be the Social Security Administration, targeting their files on Johnson, which would be packed with highly useful information for a situation like this. Armed with their info, Keith could pretend to be the target and get the banks, brokerage firms, and offshore institutions to tell him everything.

His first phone call was to a local district office, using the same 800-number that any member of the public uses, the number listed in the local phone book. When a clerk came on the line, Keith asked to be connected to someone in Claims. Another