Booked to Die (17 page)

I knew it
was her. I had this vision of her in my head, and she seemed to fit it. Weeks ago I had received a package of photostats from the AB, but they contained straight news articles with no pictures; I had read the material through once and passed it on to Hennessey. It wasn’t my job anymore, and yet, at odd times of the day or night I’d find myself thinking about her. Somehow she was at the crux of what had happened to Bobby Westfall. We had damn few hard facts, but my gut told me that. Almost everything about her fit the picture I’d had: she was damn good-looking, with dark hair and hazel eyes. I had been told that much by those who knew her, but my mind had filled in the blanks with amazing accuracy until the vision formed that now stood there in the flesh. The only thing I hadn’t got right was the wardrobe: I had seen her in furs and jewels and she wore neither. What I could see of her dress under the old and rather plain coat looked common and conservative. She wore a little hat, tilted back on her head. It couldn’t‘ve been much protection against the wind. Her cheeks were rosy from the cold. In her hand she carried a cloth bag (I had pictured her with leather) that opened and closed by a frayed cord that looped through it. She was everything, and nothing, that I had imagined her to be.

“Are you Mr. Janeway?”

I said I was.

“I’m Rita McKinley.”

I felt at once what others had felt in her presence—small and insignificant in the bookseller’s cosmos. I’d like to know how she does that, I thought: I’ll bet it’s a helluvan advantage in certain situations. Then I did know. She projected an aura that was totallv real. You could look in her face and see it: not an ounce of bullshit anywhere. She came to the counter and said, “That was a blunt message you left on my machine a while back.”

“I tend to get blunt when I don’t seem to be having any effect. Don’t you ever return calls?”

“I’m very good about returning calls. This time there was a mix-up. I’ve been out of town.”

“You’ve been out of town a long time.”

“I’ve been out of touch almost six months. I’m supposed to be able to get my messages when I call in, but it didn’t work.”

“What’d you do, take a world cruise?”

I didn’t expect an answer to that, and I didn’t get one. She went right to the point. “What can I do for you?”

“Nothing, now.”

“The phone said something about a murder.”

“I thought you didn’t get the message.”

“My machine recorded it, I just didn’t get it when I called in. Now what’s this about a murder?”

“I’m not in the murder business anymore.”

“So I see.”

She looked around at the store, and again I felt small and insignificant. I felt irritated too, for reasons I only half understood.

“Don’t pay any attention to this place,” I said. “This is just something to while away my golden years.”

“You’ve done a nice job.”

I looked at her for traces of sarcasm, but I couldn’t see any. She browsed her way around the room, glancing into the back as she passed the open doors. “You seem to know what you’re doing,” she said.

“Does that surprise you?”

“Sure. It’s not something I’d expect a policeman to know.”

“Don’t worry, I know how to beat up people too. There’s a good deal more to me than pure intellect.”

My sense of humor was lost on her. “This is very nice stuff,” she said without a hint of a smile.

“Thank you,” I said.

“You must’ve been putting it away for a long time.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You have very good taste.”

“For a cop,” I said. I grinned to blunt the mockery and turned my palms up.

“I guess it proves that a good bookman can come from anywhere. Even a librarian has a chance.”

“You don’t like librarians?”

“I used to be one. They’re the world’s worst enemies of good books. Other than that, they’re fine people.”

She fingered a book, opened it, and read something. But her eyes drifted, came up and met mine over the top edge. She had the deadliest eyes. I’d hate to have to lie to this lady with my life at stake, I thought.

“If you don’t know it yet, there’s an endless war going on between libraries and book dealers,” she said. “At best it’s an uneasy truce.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Oh yes; we really hate each other.”

“Why is that?”

“For obvious reasons. We’re all after the same thing: in some cases, things that are unique. They see us as mercenaries, motivated by greed and excessive profits.”

“That’s a laugh.”

“Sure it is. Try to convince them of that.”

“And how do we see them?”

“I know how I see them, having worked with them. I can show you libraries that would make you cry. Priceless, wonderful books given to the library, then put in some moldy basement to rot. Old-timers die and think they’re doing the world a favor when they leave their books to the library. They might as well take them out and burn them. Public libraries particularly. They just don’t have the staff or knowledge to handle it. And after all, the public’s got to have its Judith Krantz and its Janet Dailey. So the library buys fifty copies of that junk and then cries that it has no budget.”

“Where’d you work?”

“I started in a library back in Kansas, a good case in point. That library was given a gorgeous collection thirty years ago. It’s still right where they put it then, in a basement room. Part of the ceiling came down five years ago and the books are buried under two thousand pounds of plaster. I’d give a lot of money to get that stuff out of there.”

“Why don’t you try that? Most people respond favorably to money.”

“Forget it. There are all kinds of complications when you get into deals like this. Sometimes you win and save some fabulous things. More often you lose. But that’s another story. What did you want to ask me?”

“I think you better talk to the man who’s handling that case.” I wrote Hennessey’s name on the back of a bookmark and gave it to her.

“What’s it about?”

“I think I should let Hennessey tell you that.”

“You said something on the phone about a man named Westfall?”

I nodded. This was tricky water we were navigating. I knew I shouldn’t be discussing it with her, but I had been curious for a long time.

“Am I supposed to know him?” she asked.

“Are you telling me you don’t know him?”

“Never heard of him before this day.”

“What about Stanley Ballard?”

“Him I know. I did an appraisal for him. Nice old man.”

“You looked at all his books?”

“Every bloody one. A colossal waste of time.”

“You found nothing there?”

“He was in two book clubs, and that’s where ninety-nine percent of it came from. You know as well as I do what that stuffs worth.”

“The history can be okay.”

“But Mr. Ballard wasn’t a historian, was he? He was literati, and it was all book club fiction.”

Junk, I thought.

She said, “When he called for the appraisal, I told him it wouldn’t be a good use of his money unless the books were worthwhile. I don’t work cheap, Mr. Janeway. My expertise is every bit as specialized as a lawyer’s and just as hard to come by. When I get a call like that, cold, I tend to ask some questions before I jump in the car and go racing down the hill.”

“What questions?”

“The same ones you’d ask if you were me. Why they want the appraisal done, for starters. This eliminates most of them right out of the gate. Most of the time they say they just want to know what they’re worth. They’re just fooling around, wasting their time and mine. When I tell them that the fee for an appraisal starts at sixty dollars an hour, they back off fast. Once in a while you get a real one. He wants to get his books insured and he needs an appraisal before a policy can be written. Maybe he’s had a loss, a flood in a basement, and the insurance company doesn’t want to pay off. I do a lot of work like that. I don’t like insurance companies—they all try to lowball: some of them even claim that the books were never worth what they were insured for. That’s where I come in. I’m not shy about telling you, there’s nobody better at sticking it to a shyster insurance company. But I’m sure you know all this.”

“I don’t know any of it. I’m too new at it; I haven’t done any appraisals yet.”

“It’s like money from heaven. Take my advice and the next time you run a Yellow Pages ad, put ‘appraisals’ in big letters. You go out, look at the stuff, do a little research, write up a report, and collect more money than an auto mechanic makes in a week. These days, that’s substantial.”

“Do you do mostly insurance claims?”

“No, but I do get a lot of them. I had one just before I left town. It was typical. The guy had lost his whole library in a flood. The pipes broke, the guy was visiting a friend… you know the story. There were books in the basement that this man had collected for twenty years. The books had never been appraised, they were supposed to be covered by his homeowner’s policy… the replacement value, you know the clause. Well, the company wouldn’t pay. The guy submitted a bill for two lousy thousand dollars and they rejected it. That’s the biggest mistake they ever made. The guy called me and I went over and looked at the stuff. Christ, all he wanted was what he had in them, which was a fraction, believe me, of what it would cost to replace them today. There were some wonderful books; it broke my heart to see them all scummy and ruined. But I went through them and when I was done the guy had a retail valuation of thirty-five thousand dollars.”

“And on your say-so, the insurance company rolled over and coughed up.”

“They did what they always do, they sent some hot dog up the mountain to challenge my competence. You can imagine how I got along with him. So it looked like we were going to court. That’s okay with me if that’s how they want to play it. But all of a sudden somebody in that company got his head straightened out. All of a sudden they wanted to settle. They called and asked me to make up a book-by-book manifest, giving retail and wholesale values chapter and verse. I was delighted to do that. Suddenly I’m working on the company’s nickel. If I had a cup of coffee while I was putting that list together, it cost the company five dollars. I don’t mean to sound crass, but that company could’ve done what was right and got out of it cheap. When they decided to cheat, the bill went way up. So I gave them a list with references and footnotes and comparatives that they couldn’t possibly challenge. It ran sixty pages and took me three days to put together, at eighty-five an hour. They settled with my guy for a little more than a third of the appraised value, eleven-five. What really killed them was having to pay my bill on top of that.”

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.”