14
“Where’re your books?” I said from the open doorway.
The man looked up. “We don’t open till Saturday.”
“I’m just wondering where all your books went.”
“Come back Saturday and I’ll tell you.”
A smartass, I thought. I walked into the room and Hennessey came in behind me. I flashed my tin and said, “How about telling me now.”
He looked at the badge, unimpressed. “So you work for me. Big deal. Am I supposed to hyperventilate and lose control of my body functions because you can’t find a real job?”
“Look, pal, I’m not trying to impress you. I’m asking for your cooperation on a murder case.”
“Oh yeah? Who’s been killed?”
“How about letting me ask the questions.”
I knew it was a bad start. I meet a lot of characters like him, cop-haters from the word go, and I never handle them well.
“You can ask all you want,” he said. “There’s nothing that says I have to talk to you.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“I should be. I’m a lawyer.”
Wonderful. So far I was batting a thousand.
“I don’t owe you bastards one goddamn thing,” he said. “I got a ticket coming over here this morning.”
Now the woman looked up. She was in her mid-thirties, five to ten years younger than the man. Pretty she’d be, in a cool dress, relaxing by a pooclass="underline" pretty in the bitchy way of a young Bette Davis, mean and intelligent and all the more interesting because of that. Now she was dirty and hot, doing a job that must seem endless—cataloging and sifting and fi-nally putting a price tag on each of the hundreds of items of a man’s life.
“You have just made the acquaintance of Valentine Fletcher Ballard,” she said. “Charming, isn’t it?”
I didn’t know what to make of the two of them, didn’t know if they were playing it for laughs or if I had come in in the middle of something. The look he gave her seemed to say that they weren’t playing anything.
“You’d think the goddamn mayor of this goddamn city would have better things for the goddamn cops to do than sit in a speed trap with goddamn radar guns harassing the hell out of honest citizens,” he said.
“Don’t even try to talk to him,” the woman said. “You can’t talk to a fool.”
The guy went right on as if she hadn’t said a word. “Have you seen what they did on Montview? Lowered the goddamn speed limit all of a sudden to thirty miles an hour. It’s four lanes in there, for Christ’s sake, it ought to be fifty. You think the mayor gives a rat’s ass about safety? Don’t make me laugh. They bring ten cops in on fucking overtime just to write tickets and generate revenue. When you get your cost-of-living raise this year, copper, remember whose pocket it came out of and how you got it.”
I hate the term copper, but I couldn’t argue much. I’ve never liked the city’s use of cops that way. If you have to bring a cop in on overtime, let him do the legwork on a murder case or chase down a rapist. Let him walk the streets in a high-crime area, where his presence might mean something. Don’t put him in the bushes with a radar gun on a street that’s been deliberately underposted. Don’t make sneaks out of cops. The guy was right, people don’t like that, and that’s how cop-haters are born.
“Goddamn pirates,” he said. “You fuckers are no better than pickpockets.”
All I could do was try to lighten it up. “Hey, I’m doing my part,” I said. “I’m looking for a killer.”
“So I’ll ask you again,” the guy said. “Who’s been killed?”
“The guy you sold these books to.”
He blinked. The woman stood up and looked at me.
“You want to talk to me now?” I said. “Maybe we can get off on a better footing. I’m Detective Janeway. This is Detective Hennessey.”
The guy finally said, “I’m Val Ballard.”
He made no attempt to introduce the woman: wouldn’t even acknowledge her presence. I thought it was strange that neither had spoken directly to the other, but maybe that was just my imagination.
It wasn’t. She said, “I’m Judith Ballard Davis. The klutz you’ve been talking to likes to pretend he’s my brother. Don’t blame me for that.”
He ignored her fairly effectively: all she got for her trouble was a look of slight annoyance. I was beginning to see a pattern emerging in the hostility. He ignored her: she heaped insults upon him, but only through another person.
I said, to anyone who wanted to answer it, “Whose house is this?”
They both began talking at once. Neither showed any willingness to yield, and the words tumbled over themselves in indecipherable disorder.
“Let’s try that again,” I said. “Eeeny meeny miney mo.” Mo came down on her. That was a mistake, for Ballard began immediately to sulk, and in a moment he went back to his work. I’d have to warm him up, if you could call it that, all over again.
“The house belongs… belonged…to my uncle. Stanley Ballard.”
“And he died, right?”
“He died,” she said.
“When did he die?”
“Last month. Early May.”
“What’d he die of?”
“Old age… cancer…I don’t know.” She didn’t seem to care much. “When you’re that old, everything breaks down at once.”
“How old was he?”
“Eighty, I guess… I’m not sure.”
“He was your father’s brother?”
“Older brother. There was almost twenty years between them.”
“Where’s your father?”
“Dead. Killed in an auto accident a long time ago.”
“What about your mother?”
“They’re all dead. If you’re looking for all the living Ballards, I’m it.”
I looked at him. “What about you?”
“I told you what my name is.”
Something was slipping past me. “Are you two brother and sister or what?” I said.
Neither wanted to answer that.
“Come on, people, what’s the story? Do you inherit the old man’s estate?”
“Lock, stock, and barrel,” she said.
“Both of you?”
She gave a loud sigh. At last she said, “Yes, goddammit, both of us.”
“All right,” I said pleasantly. “That wasn’t so hard, was it? You inherit the house and all the contents equally, right?”
“What’s this got to do with anything?” Ballard said. “Whose business is it, anyway, what I inherit and what I do with it?”
“I have to watch every goddamn penny,” Judith said to no one. “If he gets a chance, he’ll screw my eyes out.”
“Gee, but it’s nice to see people get along so well,” I said. “Have you two always been so lovey?”
“I hate his guts,” she said. “No secret about that, mister. The only thing I’m living for is to get this house sold and the money split so I won’t ever have to see his stupid face again.”
“When you decide you want to talk to me, I’ll be in the other room,” Ballard said, and left.
“Son of a bitch,” Judith said before he was quite out of the room.
I had this insane urge to laugh. She knew it, and did laugh.
“We’re some dog and pony show. Is that what you’re thinking?”
“Yeah,” I said. “What’s with you two?”
“Just bad blood. It’s always been there. It’s got nothing to do with anything, and I’d just as soon not talk about it.”
“How do you manage to work together if you don’t even speak?”
“With great difficulty. What can I tell you?”
“What happened to the books?”
“We sold them. You know that.”
“You split the money?”
“You better believe it.”
“Did you know the guy you sold them to?”
“Never saw him before. We were in here working and he just showed up. Walked in on us just like you did. Said he heard we had some books and wondered if we wanted to make a deal for them.”