I did the mental arithmetic. “You must’ve cost them just about what the guy had originally submitted as a total bill.”
“Two thousand, forty dollars. And people say there’s no justice in the world.”
“So what about Ballard?”
“I went through the whole routine with him. Asked him why he wanted the appraisal done, so I could be sure it was a good use of his money. That’s what it’s all about. If you’ve got any ethics, this is the first thing you’ve got to find out.”
“What difference does it make, if you find out and you still do the appraisal?”
She recoiled from the question as if a snake were wrapped around it. Her eyes narrowed in anger. “Don’t sit there and judge me, sir. It makes a hell of a difference.”
“What difference?”
“Are you trying to needle me, or do you really want to know?”
“Like I told you before, it’s none of my business anymore.”
“Fine. Then I’m wasting my time.”
I thought she was going to leave then, but she didn’t. She did the store, looking more carefully now at items that had caught her eye earlier. I went back to my bookkeeping and let her browse. It took more than half an hour for her to work her way around the room.
“Look, I’ll tell you something and then I’ve got to go,” she said. “I don’t care what you think of me or why, but here’s what happened. The man told me he’d been in the clubs for fifty years. In all that time, he had bought only the fiction. I told him my bill would be higher than the whole library was worth. He said he didn’t care about the money, he just wanted a record left for his heirs so everything would be easy after he was gone. I took it from what he said that the heirs don’t get along.”
“That’s the understatement of the year.”
“Well, there you are. He didn’t care about the money, he just wanted them to have one less thing to fight about after he’d gone. God damn it, that is a good use of his money, if that’s how he decides to use it. As long as they know what they’re getting into, who am I to tell them they can’t do it? I still didn’t want to do it. This isn’t the kind of work I usually do, and there are plenty of people in Denver who’d be glad for the job and do it well and for a lot less money. If you want to know the truth, I just can’t get excited about looking at five million book club books, even if I’m getting paid for it; I don’t need the money and I don’t do anything anymore unless it excites me. But this old gentleman wanted me. He wanted a document that wouldn’t be questioned. It may sound arrogant, Mr. Janeway, but he made it sound like a man’s last request.”
“It doesn’t sound arrogant, it’s probably true. He died this summer.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. He was a grand old man and I liked him.”
“Everybody says that.”
She seemed to thaw a little. “He was like… my grandfather… only his taste in reading was better. There were some fantastic titles in there, but they just won’t sell in those cheap editions. What more can I say?”
“You did the appraisal?”
“Yeah; three weeks later I drove down and did it. It didn’t take long and I didn’t charge him much—just enough to keep it on a professional level.”
“How did you do it?”
“What do you mean, how did I do it? I looked at the books and wrote them up. There wasn’t anything in there that needed to be itemized individually. They needed to be counted and we did that: rather, he did it before I got there. I told him to do that. There’s no sense paying an appraiser for something you can do yourself. All I had to do was look at them. There wasn’t a single book that needed to be researched. It took me about four hours to go through it and I was really moving.”
“Was there a chance you might have missed something going that fast?”
“There’s always a chance with a library that large. All I can tell you is, I looked at every book on those bookshelves. It was just what the man said it was, book club fiction top to bottom. Not worth the paper it was printed on.”
“What did your written appraisal say?”
“Just that. No value, except as salvage books. Maybe a decorator might want them, to fill shelves in model homes.”
This was her statement and it was now finished. What she had told me so far was harmless: it was what she would tell Hennessey tomorrow or the next day. This was where the questioning began, for a cop. I wasn’t a cop anymore and I had to be careful of what I said to her. You don’t tell someone what questions the cops are likely to be asking: it sets her on edge, gives her an advantage.
But I couldn’t resist this. “Would it surprise you to know that someone bought that library, Miss McKinley? Thought he was getting a helluva deal.”
I saw the anger again, but this time she kept it in. “Nothing surprises me,” she said. “There’s always someone who’ll buy something, and there’s always someone who’ll pay too much. You’ll find that out when you’ve been in it a while.”
I gave a little shrug. “This guy knew books,” I said, and my alarm went off and that was the last thing I was going to say to Rita McKinley about the Ballard books until she had given her statement to Hennessey.
Her anger simmered to the surface. “Maybe he didn’t know them as well as you think. Maybe he lost his mind, Mr. Jane-way. Maybe I was in cahoots with someone. What do you want me to say?”
“Nothing.”
“Do you think I lowballed the appraisal just so somebody could buy it cheap? Is that what this is all about?”
“It doesn’t matter what 1 think. I’m not the police anymore.”
“I’ve got to go,” she said again. “Show me a couple of things in your glass case first.”
I took the books out and she looked at them carefully. “Let me see those too, please.” She was all business now. I tried to be too. I showed her the books and eventually she put most of them back. What she finally bought were Saul Bellow’s two rare novels, perfect copies I had bought from Peter less than a month ago. Ruby had priced them, high retail I had thought at the time: Dangling Man at $400; The Victim at $250.
She didn’t ask for a discount: money seemed to mean nothing to her. I gave her the usual twenty percent and she wrote a check for $520.
And I fell into the pit of aimless chatter. Suddenly the night looked very long and dark, and I hated to see her go.
“I’m surprised you bought those: an old bookman I know said I’d probably die with them. Bellow’s supposed to be like Mailer and Roth and Henry Miller. Nobody cares enough to collect them.”
“I guess your friend was wrong. At least about these Bellows.”
She was heading for the door. I wanted to grab her by the sleeve and show her something. It didn’t matter what, as long as it was interesting and she hadn’t seen it before.
How would you like to see how a cop really interrogates, Miss McKinley?
What I said, though, was “Look, I didn’t mean to imply anything.”
She turned at the door and gave me a look. I gave up the fight and made my betrayal of the Denver Police Department complete.
“I knew the books weren’t worth anything,” I said. “We saw the statements from the club. He kept them all, a complete record, all the way back to the beginning. I could’ve done that appraisal, just from the records he’d kept.”
“Well, then,” she said crisply. “I guess I won’t go to the electric chair after all.”
She had the door open. Now or never, I thought.