“Did he say where he’d heard about it?”
“No, and I didn’t ask. The man had cash money, that’s all I care about.”
“Did you go through the books before you sold them?”
“What do I care about a bunch of old books? Besides, I told you we were in a hurry to sell them. I don’t want to stay around him any longer than I have to.”
“So neither of you looked at the books, or had a book dealer look at them, before you sold them?”
“Look,” she said shortly. “There weren’t any old books in there, okay? It was just run-of-the-mill crap. Anybody with half a brain could see that.”
She was angry now. The thought of blowing an opportunity will sometimes do that to people. She said, “Everybody knows books have to be old. Everybody knows that.”
I shook my head.
“What do you know about it?”
“Not much. A little.”
“What could a cop know about books? Don’t come in here and tell me what I should’ve done. You see those bookshelves? They were all full. There are more like this in every room. He had the basement laid out like a fucking library. Do you have any idea how many books were in this house? I haven’t got enough to do, now I’ve got to go through all this crap looking for a few lousy books that might be valuable?“
I shrugged.
“Besides,” she said, “Stan did that.”
“Did what?”
“He had a book dealer come do an appraisal. It was three, four years ago, when he first got the cancer. He had an appraisal done and it was there with his papers when he died.”
“Do you remember the name of the appraiser?”
“I don’t have enough to do without remembering names?”
“I’ll need to see that appraisal.” I made it a demand, not a request. “Do you have a copy?”
“You better believe it. I’ve got a copy of everything. With a son of a bitch like him around, I’d better have a copy.”
Ballard, in the next room, had heard this, and he came in fuming.
“If you want to talk to me, talk,” he said. “I’ve got things to do today.”
I shifted easily from her to him.
“Did you look at the books?”
“Hell no. There wasn’t anything there worth the trouble. Read my lips and believe it, there was nothing there. This joker wanted them, I say let him have the damn things. I told him he could have my half.”
“Is that the way you sold ‘em?”
“I sold him my half,” Ballard said. He still refused to admit that his sister shared the same planet.
“He came here and took all the books,” Judith said. “Is that what you want to know, Detective? The little man came and took all the frigging books, okay? He gave me some money and the rest went…” She jerked her thumb at her brother, who stiffened as if he’d just been slapped.
“Let’s talk for a minute about the man who came and took the books. You say he just showed up one night?”
“We were in here just like we are now. I looked up and he was standing in the doorway. I thought he was full of shit.” She lit a cigarette and blew smoke. “He was wearing this cheap suit that didn’t fit and strutting around like one of the Rockefellers. He came in the night we started and said he wanted to buy the books.”
“Who the hell is telling this?” Ballard shouted. He made sure he talked to me, not her. “God damn it, are you talking to me or what?”
“Oh, I don’t care,” I said wearily.
“I said the only way I’d sell the damn books before the sale started was all in one fell swoop. I didn’t want any damn picking and choosing, you see what I’m saying? Get ‘em all out of here, that’s what I wanted.”
“What did he say to that?”
He gave a sweep of his hand. “They’re gone, ain’t they?”
“I’m not asking you the question, Mr. Ballard, to belabor the obvious. I want to know what the man said when you told him he’d have to buy all the books. Did he act like he wanted to do that or not?”
“He didn’t act any way. He just said put a price on ‘em.”
“And what price did you put on them?”
“In a sale I thought they’d be worth a buck or two apiece. For a guy to take ‘em all, I told him I’d knock something off of that.”
“Could we maybe get to what the final price was?”
“He gave me two thousand dollars. What he did with the other two thousand’s none of my business.”
I looked at Judith, who managed to look quite sexy smoking. “Did you get the other two thousand, Mrs. Davis?” I asked in my best long-suffering voice.
“You better believe it.”
Ballard took me on a tour of the house. Judith followed at a distance, as if she didn’t trust him long out of her sight. I tried to imagine what long-ago rift had ripped them so deeply and permanently apart. I tried to imagine them locked away in here for days on end, divvying up the old man’s loot without speaking. The picture defied me. Only greed could motivate them, greed and hate and the all-powerful ego motive to come out on top.
The basement was impressive, but then, I could see what it had been with all the books in it. It was lined with bookcases, against the walls and in rows, library-style, in the center of the room. I did some quick arithmetic and figured that the shelves here and upstairs might hold as many as nine thousand books.
“The old man really loved his books,” I said with admiration.
“Some guys like sex,” Judith said from the doorway. “Stan liked books.”
“So you sold the books for forty, fifty cents apiece?”
“I wasn’t gonna quibble,” Ballard said. “The guy came back with two grand. Two grand is two grand, and I wanted the crap out of here.”
I took a picture of Bobby Westfall out of my notebook. “Is this the guy?”
“That’s him,” Ballard said. “That a dead picture?”
I nodded and showed it to her. She nodded and looked away.
“Who do you think killed him?” she said.
“We’ll see,” I said.
We talked some more, and it all boiled down to this: They had struck a deal and Bobby had come one night last week and stripped the house of everything that remotely resembled a book. He had worn that same silly suit for the heavy work. They didn’t know anything else about him— where he’d come from, where he’d gone—the only record of the transaction was the receipt that Ballard had written out (copy to her, and you’d better believe it) to keep it straight and legal. Bobby had signed it with an undecipherable scrawl and left his copy on the table. All he wanted was to get the books and get on the road.
He had come for the books in a huge truck, a U-Haul rental. Now we were getting somewhere. Ruby had said that Bobby had no driver’s license: that meant someone else had to have rented the truck. I was hungry for a new name to be thrown into the hopper: I was eager to begin sweating that unseen accomplice. I felt we were one name away from breaking it, and I wanted that name and I wanted it now.
But Bobby had come to Madison Street alone. If someone else had rented the truck, why not ask that buddy to give a hand with the heavy lifting? The obvious answer was that Bobby wanted no one to know what he had really bought from Stanley Ballard’s estate. He had insisted on loading the books himself, which was fine with the two heirs, who had no intention of helping anyway. Bobby had brought hundreds of cardboard boxes and had spent all night packing and loading the books. Ballard and his sister kept after their own work and before they knew it the night slipped away. Bobby loaded the last of the books as dawn broke in the east.
During all of this, Hennessey had not said a word. This is the kind of cop Neal is: he melts into the woodwork; he listens, he looks, he adds two and two, then stares at the number four to see if there’s any broken type. I didn’t notice when he’d stepped away: I found him on the front porch talking with a neighbor.