“They don’t like to call it direct mail anymore,” Bob Ripley told me.
“Don’t ask me why. Nowadays it’s either direct marketing or direct-response advertising. And that’s very nearly the extent of my knowledge of the subject, but I know a guy who can tell you anything you need to know, including why you get six copies of the Lands’ End catalog every goddam month.”
I suppose I should have thought of Bob sooner. I’d seen him less than two months ago, the same night I’d booked Ray Gruliow to speak at St. Paul’s. Bob, like Ray, was a fellow member of the Club of Thirty-one, and a vice president of Fowler & Kresge. I didn’t know what he did in that capacity, but I knew F&K was an advertising agency, and that was enough.
Mark Safran, the fellow he referred me to, was in a meeting, but I left my number and mentioned Bob’s name, and that got me a callback within the hour. “I could tell you a lot about direct marketing,” he said,
“but you’re looking to find a particular guy, is that right?”
“Or to find out that there is no such guy.”
“That’d be tough, because there’s a ton of freelance copy guys out there, and it’d be hard to prove he’s not one of them. It’s not like doctors or lawyers, there’s no single professional organization you have to belong to. No state or municipal licensing bureau, like I guess there is in your field.”
I let that pass.
“The thing is,” he said, “we do almost everything in-house, and when we’re in a hurry and need to go outside, we use somebody we’ve worked with in the past. So we’ve got our own list of six or eight guys, and then there are the big corporate shops, but your guy’s not there because he’s a freelance. You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to put you in touch with one of the guys we use.” He gave me a name and number, and it was easy to believe the guy was a freelance because he actually answered his own phone. “Peter Hochstein,” he said, and when I explained my quest he asked the 64
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name of my quarry. “Never heard of him,” he said, “but that doesn’t prove anything. I don’t go out and meet my colleagues. Mostly I stay home and work. And if I had heard of him, it’s not a name that sticks in your mind.”
“No.”
“He might belong to the DMA, but probably not. Most of the members are corporate, because membership’s expensive. But he could have a free listing in Who’s Charging What. Or he could be the kind of guy who runs small-space ads offering his services in DM News or Direct or Target Marketing. You could check there, and also in the classifieds in Adweek and Advertising Age.”
He was full of suggestions, and I wrote everything down. If David Thompson had won an award or made a speech, he’d probably turn up on a Google search, but that might be tricky because his name was such a common one. “You could find me that way,” he said, “along with the Peter Hochstein who’s serving a life sentence for a contract killing in Nebraska, not to mention Peter Hochstein the German scientist.” There was a good chance, he said, that David Thompson might fly under the radar. “I have a listing in Who’s Charging What,” he said,
“because it’s free, so what could it hurt? But I don’t run classifieds in Ad Age, and I don’t run ads in the direct marketing publications. I don’t think it’s worth the money, and I’m not the only one. Most of us who’ve been doing this for a while seem to feel that way. It’s almost as if we’ve stopped believing in the power of advertising, which is funny, when you think about it. I don’t belong to any trade organizations, either. The business I get is all referrals, and what kind of client is going to pick you because he saw your ad? That’s as unlikely as getting business from a listing in the Yellow Pages.” I thanked him, and the first thing I did was something I should have done earlier. I looked for Thompson in the Yellow Pages—not the consumer book but the business-to-business edition. There was no separate listing for direct marketing copywriters, but there was a section of advertising copywriters, and I wasn’t surprised not to find David Thompson there.
I didn’t find him in the back pages of Advertising Age or Adweek, ei-All the Flowers Are Dying
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ther, which were the two publications he’d mentioned that you could find on the newsstand. I bit the bullet and sat down at Elaine’s computer, and I Googled my way to some of the sites he’d mentioned.
Everybody tells me what a timesaver the Internet is, and how they can’t believe they ever got along without it. And I know what they mean, but every time I use it I wind up wondering what people did with their spare time before computers came along to suck it all up. I sat down at the damn thing in the middle of the afternoon, and I couldn’t get away from it until Elaine was putting dinner on the table.
She said she’d wanted to check her e-mail but hadn’t wanted to disturb me. I told her I’d have welcomed a disturbance, that I’d spent hours without accomplishing much of anything. “I couldn’t find the son of a bitch,” I said, “and I couldn’t find half the websites I was looking for, and I wound up Googling Peter Hochstein, don’t ask me why, and he wasn’t kidding, there really is somebody with the same name doing life in Nebraska for murder for hire. He was sentenced to death originally, and the sentence was changed on appeal, and it was a pretty interesting case, though why I spent the better part of an hour reading about it is something I’d be hard put to explain.”
“You know what I think? I think we should get a second computer.”
“That’s funny,” I said, “because what I think is we should get rid of the one we’ve got.”
New York neighborhoods rarely have sharply delineated boundaries.
They’re formed by a shifting consensus of newspapermen, realtors, and local inhabitants, and it’s not always possible to say with assurance where one leaves off and the next one begins. Kips Bay, where David Thompson lived—or where the man who claimed to be David Thompson claimed to be living—is that area in the immediate vicinity of Kips Bay Plaza, a housing complex that fills the three-block area bounded by Thirtieth and Thirty-third streets and First and Second avenues.
The neighborhood known as Kips Bay probably runs south from Thirty-fourth Street and east from Third Avenue. Bellevue and the NYU Medical Center take up the space between First Avenue and the FDR Drive. The southern edge of Kips Bay is hardest to pinpoint, but 66
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if you occupied an apartment at Twenty-sixth Street and Second Avenue, say, I don’t think you’d tell people you lived in Kips Bay.
The overall area was pretty small no matter how you figured it, and it didn’t take me much more time to cover it on foot than I’d spent learning next to nothing on the Internet the day before. It’s predomi-nantly residential, with a good sprinkling of the service businesses and neighborhood restaurants that cater to local residents, and that’s where I went, showing David Thompson’s photograph in bodegas and delis, dry cleaners and newsstands. “Have you seen this fellow around?” I asked Korean greengrocers and Italian shoe repairmen. “You know this man?” I asked Dominican doormen and Greek waiters. None of them did, nor did a mail carrier in the middle of his rounds, a clerk at a copy shop, or a beat cop who started out thinking that he ought to be the one asking the questions, but who lost the attitude when he found out I’d been on the job myself, especially when it turned out I’d known his father.
“He looks like a lot of guys,” the cop said. “What’s his name?” I told him, and he shook his head and said that was a big help, wasn’t it? His own name was Danaher, and I remembered his father as a backslap-ping gladhander who could have doubled as a ward boss. He was living in Tucson, the son said, and playing golf every day unless it rained.