“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
“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
