Now's the time we smile. Well, not just smile. We have to nod too. Smile and nod. Wrinkle our brows and scribble down notes all sharp and hasty so he feels important; so he thinks we're hanging on his every word, gulping them all down like cheap cherry wine. No need to listen too hard for the first few minutes because these are his scripted plays. These are the ones Bill Valput tells to every sorry, little inquisitive soul that comes to Valput Properties looking to find answers to questions he won't even acknowledge exist. Questions about sewage-filled showers and saggy, yellow stained ceilings—holes in walls covered up with plywood and faucets that break off in your hand. Nope, to hear it from him, Bill Valput is Wheeling, West Virginia's misunderstood landlord with a heart of gold, beset on all sides by pernicious tenants who take a perverse glee in laying waste to his properties and leaving him with the bill. But there's not much use in bringing such things up with him. Better to just sit back and let the man talk himself out or, at the very least, let Cody, the pixie-haired renters advocate sitting next to me, do her best to talk her way around his walls of mendacity with a knowing wink and a bit of skin.
Might as well take a look around his office. You can tell a lot about a man by the things he keeps in his office. For instance, the engraved photo display to my right celebrating Payne Stewart's U.S. Open win at Pinehurst in 1999 let's me know that he's an avid golfer, while the replica of one of Stewart's WWJD bracelets sitting inside the display—along with his germanic surname and residence in a heavily Catholic enclave of an otherwise overwhelmingly Protestant state—indicates his faith. Over to my left, the diecast model Hummer and Ferrari, along with the Ferrari calendar that hangs beside them, give off the impression that Bill doesn't just like sports cars—he loves them. He loves them with the same sort of wide-eyed fetishistic glee that he did when he was 10 years old and carefully placing the decals on the 1:18 scale diecast Ferrari Spyder his parents got him for Christmas. Looking behind his desk, the requisite collection of family photographs tells me the he is married, with two grown daughters, and that one of those daughters is married and recently made Bill a grandfather. The photo of his daughters, which was taken in the massive entrance hall of his home, also lets me know that Valput lives in a McMansion somewhere out in the 'burbs that he most likely designed himself.
Of course, in the grand scheme of things, none of that really matters. Bill Valput could be a Baptist bass fishing enthusiast who lives by himself in an old Tudor cottage and it wouldn't change the simple fact that he is a very successful, very negligent landlord. On this count, Valput is no different than the thousands of other not quite above board landlords across this great nation of ours who don't maintain many of their properties and threaten their tenants with eviction at the drop of a hat. No, what makes Valput special—or at least special enough to get me to drive all the way from Cincinnati to speak with him—isn't what he does, but where he does it. With roughly 300 properties in Wheeling (WV), Martin's Ferry (OH), and Bellaire (OH), Valput just so happens to be situated atop the Utica Shale, a massive geologic formation that could contain up to 15.7 trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable natural gas.
