“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?”
