“Cliff, this is Mr. Greenwald. He and Mr. Ballard were friends for fifty years.”
We stood on Ballard’s front porch and Greenwald stood on his, and we talked easily across the hedge. Ballard was already living here when Greenwald moved in in 1937. They had a great mutual passion—books. In a very different way, they reminded me of Bobby Westfall and Jarvis Jackson—two lonely guys held together by honest affection and one or two deep common denominators. Ballard was an old bachelor: Greenwald’s wife had died in 1975, and the two men took their dinners together at a place they liked, a few blocks away.
Greenwald was a leathery old man, bald with white fringe hair and a white mustache. I could see his books through the window. They had belonged to the book clubs together, Greenwald said: every month they’d get half a dozen books, read them and discuss them. They weren’t collectors in the real sense, though both had accumulated a lot of titles over fifty years. It was a comfort, Greenwald said, to see a copy of a book you loved on the shelf. It didn’t have to be a fine expensive edition. This was how they both felt: books were meant to be read, not hoarded. Both of them gave a lot of books away—to nursing homes, library sales, and other worthy charities. “What’s the use of having a book that’s too good to read?” he said. “Half the fun is giving the books away.”
I could see his point, though I hadn’t agreed with it for years. “Did Mr. Ballard ever have anything that might be called valuable?”
Greenwald looked away and shrugged his shoulders. “I can’t imagine. We didn’t do it for that reason.”
“Still, sometimes people pick up things, sometimes by accident.”
Greenwald shrugged again.
“Did Mr. Ballard ever go to estate sales or junk stores looking for books? Maybe he found something that way.”
“Never, and I can tell you that with absolute certainty. He wasn’t a book hunter, he was a book buyer. He never went to used bookstores. He bought them when they were new and read them all. He was in the Book-of-the-Month for as long as I knew him, maybe longer. I think he started soon after the clubs came in, in the early thirties. You can check on that—he kept all his records from the clubs, all the way back to when he started.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yes. He kept all the flyers and bulletins…I know you’ll find them there in his den, in that big filing cabinet. He used to keep the club flyers and write his notes in the margins. He’d never write in a book, of course, but he’d mark up those advance flyers they sent every month, little notes to himself—which books to buy, which ones to keep, which to give away. I do the same thing, but it’s a habit I picked up from him. I’ve only been doing it about twenty years. His files go back much further.”
“May I come over, sir, and see your books?”
“Certainly.”
We walked across and went into Greenwald’s house. It was like a branch library: row upon row, bookcase after bookcase, all cheap editions of great books. The two old men had fine taste. Anyone could see that.
“We had a lot to talk about, Stan and I. We had been around the world together many times, without ever leaving this block, if you know what I mean.”
“I sure do,” I said. “It’s a wonderful hobby.”
“Oh, it is. It’s harder today, though. You can’t find the good books, like you once could. People don’t read anymore, or when they do read they read things that couldn’t have been published in the old days. I don’t know: my days are all in the past. Everyone I knew is dead, and no one is writing anything worth reading. This is a different world from when I was a boy. I can’t read the stuff they publish today, can you?”
“Some of it,” I said. “Every once in a while it still happens, Mr. Greenwald. I don’t know how it happens, or why, but it still does. Sometimes a great book not only gets published but read, by one helluva lot of people.”
“Stan would’ve liked you,” Greenwald said. “He liked everybody who read and appreciated good things. He was an old gentleman, I’ll tell you that. Not like those two next door, squabbling with their silly silent feud over every last dime. Stan’s turning over in his grave this very minute. Money never came first with Stan. Honor, trust, friendship, those were the qualities he believed in. A great old man. His like will not come this way again.”
We went back to Ballard’s house. I told Judith I would have to see her uncle’s files. The two of them followed us into the den and watched while I went through a great old filing cabinet. It was all there as Greenwald had promised—the entire record of Stan Ballard’s love affair with the Book-of-the-Month Club: receipts, billing statements, flyers so annotated and footnoted that I groaned at the thought of wading through it. But Ballard came from a generation that was taught penmanship: his writing was small but precise and, in the final analysis, beautiful. It looked to me like the old man had kept the economy of Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, going strong since March 1931. He had bought the main selection and six other titles that month. The average price was around a dollar: not much in today’s world of the $20 novel, but in 1931 there were men working a sixty-hour week for less money than Stan Ballard was spending per month on books.
“What did your uncle do for a living?” I asked.
“He was a stockbroker,” Judith said.
“He got into the book club in 1931. That couldn’t‘ve been much of a year for stockbrokers, but he seemed to have plenty of money to spend on books… even in the Depression.”
“He inherited money,” Judith said. “I don’t know how much; he sure didn’t leave much cash in his estate. He probably spent it all on books. It didn’t matter how the times were, he always had money for that.”
I thumbed through the papers. “I’ll have to take these files.”
They didn’t like that. They were on guard now, full of new suspicion. I could almost hear the wheels turning in their heads. Maybe the old man had kept his cash hidden somewhere. Maybe there was a big, juicy stack of thousand-dollar bills tucked into the book file—book money unspent.
“I don’t think you should just walk out of here with that stuff,” Ballard said.
“I can get a court order if I have to, and I think you know that,” I said. “Why don’t we make it easy on ourselves?”
“What is this stuff?” Judith said. “Is there anything in there worth any money?”
“I’d be amazed if there was. You can look for yourself while we pack it up. I’ll give you a receipt and after this is over you’ll get it all back.”
“Who’ll get it back?” Ballard said.
“Whoever the hell wants it.”
We started packing the files. I could see it was going to take some time, because Ballard and Judith wanted to examine each file microscopically as we went.
“This could take all night,” I said. “Let’s try to cut to the chase. Where’s the original copy of that appraisal he had done?”
“The executor has it,” Judith said. “A lawyer named Walter Drey fuss. I think he and Stan were soldiers together in the Revolutionary War.”
“One of us ought to go see him,” I said to Hennessey.
“I’ll go. I’ll have to take a cab.”
“Good. If you hurry you might make it before his office closes. I’ll call and tell him you’re coming.”
It was dark before I was finished at Ballard’s. We packed all the contents of Stanley Ballard’s filing cabinet into six big cardboard boxes and I loaded them into my car. Neither Ballard nor Judith offered to help. I thanked them and left them to their awful job. I hope I never hate anyone the way they hate each other, I thought as I drove downtown to fetch Hennessey. Then I thought of Jackie Newton, and the world was a darker place again.