In the Company of Sherlock Holmes

by Leslie S. Klinger

  “No problem,” Bill said, grimacing because he was tapping away at Beethoven’s Ninth with his sneakers and Moriarty had interrupted his rhythm.

  “You can’t even tell your wife and family. And no talking to friends at dinner parties.”

  “Right,” said Bill, who didn’t get invited to dinner parties.

  “How long before you get me some preliminary results?”

  Bill said he didn’t know. He hated estimating, it was imprecise and unscientific. So he threw out some technical jargon and kept tapping. He couldn’t stop until he’d finished the chord progression. Any second now, Moriarty was going to ask what the hell that noise was.

  But Moriarty leaned back in his chair, his eyes glassy and far away.

  “Imagine being able to peer inside people’s souls and tap into their deepest desires. To sell them tons of product almost before they know they need it,” he said. “It would be like finding the Holy Grail.”

  That night, Bill went home with his usual pile of work.

  He’d been putting in extra hours lately, and the new project Moriarty had green-lighted would gobble up even more. It bothered Bill that he saw so little of his family now that they’d outgrown soccer games and Girl Scouts. He missed those rituals. He missed being needed.

  Portia was so self-sufficient it was almost like living with another adult. He’d watched her almost clinically as she grew, always looking for—and fearing to find—signs that she might be like him. But Portia had inherited the best of both of them—his analytical brain and Lisa’s emotional intelligence.

  “Hey Dad,” she said, bounding down the stairs, her long chestnut hair whipping behind her, smelling of lemons and honey. She hugged him and he forced his limbs to relax and hug her back. She’d been a late bloomer, but recently she’d begun to show signs of Lisa’s curves. Bill thought she’d looked good with a few more pounds, but he’d seen her shredding lettuce and cutting tomatoes for school lunches and knew she worried about her figure.

  “More letters came today,” Portia announced, smiling. “Brown, Swarthmore, University of Alabama.”

  Since the PSAT test results had arrived, Portia had been bombarded with brochures from colleges.

  “They all want you, daughter of mine,” Bill said. “Keep up your grades and you can write your own ticket.”

  Bill looked forward to making a cup of tea. He’d sit with Portia at the kitchen table and she’d tell him all about her week.

  But Portia was shrugging into her coat.

  “Got a hot date?” he asked, hiding his disappointment.

  Already, he sensed the emptiness that lay ahead when Portia, then Dos, left for college. Although she never spoke of it, Bill knew this was why Lisa wanted another child.

  “Don’t be silly, Bill,” Lisa said, emerging from the kitchen. “It’s not like when we were growing up. These high-achieving kids travel in packs, they’re too busy to date. I’m dropping her at the mall to see a movie with her friends and you’ve got pick-up duty at midnight.”

  Clutching the car keys, Lisa explained that the pizza was still warm.

  “Where’s Dos?” Bill said.

  Lisa’s nose wrinkled.

  “Upstairs. And isn’t it time you stop calling her that? It’s going to give her an inferiority complex.”

  “But she is daughter number two,” Bill said mildly. “Besides, mathematically speaking, two is double the value of one. So really it’s Portia who should have the inferiority complex.”

  “Oh honestly, Bill,” said Lisa.

  A blast of cold air as the door opened, and they were gone.

  Bill put two slices of pizza on a plate, poured a glass of milk and ambled upstairs, marveling at the maturity and drive of his older daughter. At seventeen, Bill had been ditching school to hang out with a slightly sinister high-school dropout with only eight fingers who shared his love of rocket launchers, muscle cars, and explosive chemicals.

  At Dos’s room, he knocked on the door that said KEEP OUT, waited, then pushed it open.

  Dos wore earbuds and moved sinuously in front of the mirror. She’d tied the tails of her shirt above her midriff and rolled the waistband of her skirt down to her hips to expose her stomach, which was ground zero in a recent war over the installation of a belly ring.

  “That one will bear watching,” Bill’s aunt said with pursed lips when they visited Los Angeles and Dos flirted with all the surfers and begged to visit the cemetery and take a picture at Marilyn Monroe’s grave.

  Suddenly, Dos saw him and gave a startled scream.

  “You could knock, you know.”

  “I did knock.”

  He pointed to her earbuds, then stared at his feet.

  “I’m home,” he mumbled.

  Dos’s face grew soft. She pulled out her buds and ran to him.

  “Silly Daddy,” she said, laying her head against his chest and hugging him. But just as he put his arms around her, she slid out of his grasp like an eel and resumed dancing.

  “When will you and Mom let me date?” she said.

  Bill felt a twinge of panic. He wished Lisa was here. After trying and failing to calculate the right answer, he said:

  “Is this a theoretical question? Or has a boy asked you out?”

  Bill took his glasses off, cleaned them with a chamois cloth he kept especially for that purpose, then put them back on and peered at her.

  “I just want to be prepared,” Dos said.

  Bill let out his breath. “Your mother and I will have to discuss it.”

  Dos scowled.

  “Why does everything have to be a democracy in this house?”

  “Because that’s the best kind of government.”

  “Then why don’t I get a vote?”

  “Because you are not of age,” he said gravely.

  But his mind was already wandering to his work, and Dos had her earbuds back in, dancing to the unheard music.

  Bill backed out of the room and shut the door, filled with the sense of inadequacy and bewilderment he often felt with his younger daughter.

  In the following months, Bill bought reams of data from banks, credit card companies, retailers, e-tailers, mortgage firms and online sites that tracked customer purchases, then he cross-referenced them with Landmart’s data and searched for patterns.

  Because all secret projects need a nickname, Bill and Moriarty christened theirs “Sherlock.” As a kid, Bill had devoured the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle and harbored a secret fantasy that Holmes, with his flat affect, his devotion to logic, and his brusque, sometimes superior manner, might be just like him. Maybe when his creator wasn’t looking, Holmes put down his pipe, fled into the bathroom and flapped his arms madly behind locked doors the way Bill did to relieve the tension brought on by work.

  While psychologists had long believed that most purchases were driven by emotion, Bill’s data-crunching showed they were actually quite logical. Project Sherlock, like its namesake, relied on reason, deduction, data clues, previous patterns of behavior, and inference to winkle out those reasons, then manipulate Landmart’s guests into buying more things.

  It was elementary.

  Moriarty’s first assignment for Bill was a test balloon: Build a database of all Landmart guests with pets who would then receive holiday catalogs crammed with ads for animal-related products. By January when they crunched the figures, pet accessory sales had jumped 17%—even with the weak economy.

  Bill got a modest raise.

  He was pleased, but it was the work that absorbed him.

  All day he swam through streams of pure data, probing, exploring, mapping an entire new universe. With credit card statements, job histories and online activity—he built magic windows to peer inside the hearts and minds of Landmart shoppers. He became an electronic voyeur, dizzy with the power and secret knowledge he wielded over thousands of people he’d never met.

  If Mr. and Mrs. Smith spent $572 on marriage counseling and $350 to appraise their house, Bill k
new they might be headed for divorce. If the Jones family bought a secondhand car, IKEA extra-long Twin sized bedding and SAT workbooks, they might soon send a child off to college. If they lived in Los Angeles and bought a winter coat, that kid was headed to a cold climate and would probably need mittens and thermal underwear too, and plane tickets home for Thanksgiving.

  “You’re like an alchemist, turning raw data into gold,” Moriarty gloated as they settled into a booth at St. Louis’s fanciest steakhouse for their monthly lunch meeting. “For years we’ve searched for a wormhole, a path into people’s brains. And you’re the guy who’s making it happen.”

  Bill muttered something about patterns being easy to spot, and began to shred his napkin into half-inch strips under the table.

  No matter what they ordered, Bill picked at his meal, cutting off all the gristle, slicing everything into precise cubes, then inspecting each one for uniformity of size, color and texture before putting it into his mouth.

  “Picky eater?” Moriarty said, attacking his steak with the same gusto he mustered for Power Point presentations.

  “Not really,” Bill said, squirming.

  Moriarty nodded sagely. “I know. Cholesterol. I only allow myself red meat once a month.”

  “It’s not that . . .” Bill said, scraping mashed potatoes off a green bean. He hated when one food touched another on his plate.

  Moriarty patted his abs. “You can say it. My six-pack needs some work. Gonna hit the gym extra hard tomorrow.”

  Bill put his fork down, put his head in his hands.

  “No, no, no,” he said. “That’s not what I meant at all.”

  The Italian restaurant wasn’t much better, and the Chinese, with all those gloppy sauces and unidentifiable vegetables, made Bill so nervous he ate bowl after bowl of steamed rice.

  “My girlfriend’s favorite restaurant,” Moriarty said, deftly deploying his chopsticks on the kung pao chicken.

  Bill was fishing cashews out of the kung pao and wiping them carefully on his napkin before eating them. They were good that way. Nice and dry. At Moriarty’s words, he looked up, startled.

  “I thought you were married.”

  “I am,” Moriarty said.

  Bill stared at his plate and his face flushed bright red.

  “You really are one of life’s innocents, aren’t you?” Moriarty said.

  Bill was silent. He thought about how to write a program to detect adultery among Landmart guests. He’d look for spikes in purchases of jewelry, florists, hotel rooms, restaurant meals, perfume, Viagra. On secondary credit cards, of course. Whose monthly bill went to a different address.

  Moriarty folded his napkin and tucked it under his plate.

  “You just keep doing your job, and I’ll do mine.”

  Things were going well at work. Moriarty put him on a team with a specialty sales manager, a marketing whiz, a psychologist, and a neuroscientist Landmart had hired away from MIT. They held “blue sky” meetings to talk about ideas.

  One day, Moriarty came in all fired up.

  “If we wanted to find out if a Landmart guest was pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, could you do that?” he asked.

  “I can try,” Bill said.

  “At the hospital, they get coupons for disposable diapers and formula,” Moriarty said. “By that time, the whole world knows they’ve had a baby. We want to find out before our competitors.”

  The specialty sales lady nodded. “We have a baby registry at Landmart, and lots of women sign up for it so friends and family know what to buy.”

  “I like it,” said the psychologist. “In terms of buying patterns, pregnancy is the biggest life change out there. They’re emotional and more open to trying new things. If we can hook them, we have them for life.”

  Moriarty turned to Bill.

  “I want you to crunch the data of every woman on that baby registry, as far back as you can go. Find out what they have in common.”

  Bill’s first move was to analyze what women bought the nine months before they gave birth. He ran analytics for each trimester, then each month, then each two week period. He also ran it for six months prior to conception.

  At the next meeting, Bill brought charts and some answers.

  “Home pregnancy kits are often the first marker,” he said. “By the fourth month, we see purchases of bulk vitamins, unscented lotion, and cocoa butter. By the sixth, it’s area rugs, babycare books, soothing music.”

  “How accurate are these predictors? Forty, fifty percent?” Moriarty asked.

  Even though the answer was seared into his brain, Bill pretended to flip through his notes so he wouldn’t have to meet anyone’s eyes.

  “Eighty-seven percent,” he mumbled.

  The room was silent.

  “Holy cannoli,” the neuroscientist said.

  “That figure does not leave this room,” Moriarty said hoarsely. “If what Bill says is true, it’s going to revolutionize the baby business.”

  Bill slumped in his chair.

  Babies, babies, babies.

  He was surrounded by real and theoretical babies. Thanks to Moriarty, the entire Landmart team was obsessed with conception, gestation, and birth, which was almost unbearable to Bill, considering what was going on at home.

  Each month, the rollercoaster of emotion. Was Lisa pregnant or wasn’t she? And then the inevitable letdown. Last month, Bill had kissed Lisa’s damp face and pulled out some colorful graphs and flow charts he’d drawn up, hoping they would provide solace.

  The charts showed that since the big pregnancy push, Bill’s work efficiency was down 14% and Lisa’s freelance consulting earnings had dropped 28.2%.

  Bill had also written a program to calculate the cost of a baby over eighteen years, including number of calories expended per day, hours of sleep lost, and the cost of clothing, food, extra-curricular activities, medical care, and university education. He’d charted how their own physical prowess, muscle mass, energy level, memory, and endurance would begin to decline exactly when the child reached adolescence.

  Bill was gratified to see that his bright colors and attractive fonts stopped Lisa’s tears. But when he began to explain, Lisa screamed and slapped the graphs away.

  Stunned, Bill fell silent.

  Then to his great relief, Lisa hugged him.

  “I know you mean well, Bill, but not everything can be reduced to charts and numbers. Life doesn’t work that way.”

  Bill stared at the floor and bit the inside of his mouth until it bled.

  But it does.

  I’m proving it day by day with my analytics.

  Instead, he smoothed her hair, dried her tears, and petted her like a cat. Lisa had fine golden hairs on her forearm and he stroked downward, so the hairs lay flat. It was irritating if you did it the other way. Even the cat howled and ran off. He stroked her right arm thirty times, then moved to the left for thirty more, the rhythmic feel of skin on skin soothing them both, until he felt the tension in her body dissolve and she leaned her head into the crook of his neck and said, “Oh Bill, I love you but sometimes I wish you wouldn’t be so damned rational.”

  “I can’t help it,” he mumbled, inhaling the dear, familiar scent of her hair.

  “I know.”

  Recalling this at the meeting, Bill’s shoulders grew heavy. He was tired of not being able to tell anyone at work. Of pretending to the girls that everything was fine, Mom was just tired or having one of her spells. But Lisa wasn’t the only one. Sometimes Bill felt the top of his head might blow off. Several times a day, he locked himself into the handicapped stall to flap his arms madly just to calm down.

  “What if the couple having a baby wants to keep it a secret?” Bill thought, then was horrified to realize he’d spoken aloud.

  Moriarty gave a sinister grin. “Thanks to you, Bill, there are no secrets anymore. Landmark has the ability to peer inside your brain, your bedroom, even your womb.”

  The head of the art departmen
t said:

  “We already send out glossy catalogs targeted to our guests’ needs, so we can certainly create baby-centric ones. Our pregnant guests don’t need to know their neighbor got a different one. All they see is, ‘here’s a coupon for something I can use.’”

  Bill thought of how concerned he and Lisa were about keeping a potential pregnancy private until it proved viable.

  “But won’t women get creeped out if they get a catalog that says ‘congrats on the impending birth of your child’ when they haven’t even told anyone yet? I know Lisa and I would.”

  He reddened, afraid that his colleagues might guess his secret. “I mean . . . it could be a public relations disaster. Corporate big brother breathing down the necks of unsuspecting citizens. And what if a um . . . country like, eh . . . China got a hold of these programs and used it to spy on pregnant women and force them to have abortions?”

  “I don’t give a flying fuck about China,” said Moriarty, “except how to sell them more diapers and car seats.”

  “Bill raises a good point,” the psychologist interjected. “We shouldn’t send pregnant guests catalogs full of baby products. That would freak them out and it might backfire. Subtlety is key here. Let’s scatter baby ads throughout the catalog so they have no clue we’ve got them in our crosshairs.”

  “Bring me a mock-up in two weeks,” Moriarty said. He stood up and held out his hand to Bill. “Well done, man. I’m putting you up for a promotion.”

  Bill forced his face to crease into a smile as they shook. It still wasn’t automatic, but years of practicing in front of the mirror had made it easier. A nod and quick glance at Moriarty, then away, because men don’t sustain eye contact unless they’re after something else.

  He’d learned that the hard way, too.

  After the meeting broke up, Bill went to the bathroom and washed his hands. He did it twenty times. When he caught his reflection in the mirror, he looked away, unable to bear the eyes of the man with thinning hair and a creased brow who stared back.