The Scarlet Ruse (15 page)

"Build the case and I'll try to tear it down."

"Okay. When she was alone here, she could bring these pages back to this little duplicating thing and run off copies. They give her exactly what had been bought for the Sprenger account and the exact order in the book."

"And then she-"

"Let me do it. If I'm going to. Hirsh let her run that little speculative account, bid things in at the auctions, buy things from other dealers. It was like some kind of a joke between them. So she could have bought junk and put it into a duplicate stock book in the same order. And she always got the names put on the books."

"At a luggage store?"

"Luggage and leather goods. Cerrito's. We walked past it going to the bank."

"So she could get a second stock book labeled Frank A. Sprenger without you or Hirsh knowing?" She nodded. I said, "I wonder if they keep any record."

"Could you go find out? Please? Now? I have to be sure. I just can't stand… thinking about it and not knowing."

I told her that they liked Jane Lawson at Cerrito's. Quite a few years ago, knowing that they were giving Hirsh a very special price on imprinting, she had asked if she could do it. The press was in the back room. She had become adept at locking the pieces of type into the press, aligning the album properly, and pulling the handle to give it the right pressure to impress the gold leaf letters into the leather. They were happy to have her do it. They enjoyed having her come in. They were shocked at her death and at the suddenness and the ugliness of it.

At M.A.'s suggestion, I took her into Hirsh's office and held her in my arms.

"Now I know the ugliest thing of all," she said. "The last and ugliest thing about it. She had to poison me."

"What!"

She pushed me away and stared at me. "You better believe it. We went to lunch together that day. That was because I was going to eat earlier so I could go to the bank at quarter to one. You know, I'd forgotten about it until today? That was back in May. I don't know the date. I could look it up. We had exactly the same thing. Exactly. That's what was so strange about it. I'm never sick. But coming back I told her I was feeling very very peculiar. By the time I got here, I was really sick. At the restaurant I went to the girls' room after our lunch came. That's when she must have put something in my coffee to make me toss up everything. You see, Trav, that's when she must have had the book full of junk all ready, in this box or one just like it, and she knew that Hirsh wouldn't go to the bank alone because he likes to make a little ceremony out of it. She had to know he'd take her. I didn't remember that one time because there are a lot of other times I went on the other accounts. And she went sometimes when I couldn't for one reason or another. You know what? I bet Mr. Sprenger would remember because that would have been the only time he saw her."

"But wasn't there another time you went to the bank to put things in Sprenger's book? July?"

"Right. But there was no reason to look at the old pages, like with the other investors. So nobody noticed. Trav, while you were gone, I've beat my brains out trying to remember if she had a box like this that day I was sick. I don't want to be unfair. I don't want to imagine anything that didn't really happen. But I keep thinking she had something she said she was going to mail. A package of some kind."

"How could she work the switch?"

"I'd guess maybe she'd go in there with the box empty and the duplicate stock book in her purse. She'd have a chance to slip the stock book full of junk from her purse to her lap, under the table. At the moment Hirsh would be showing Mr. Sprenger the first item, they would both be looking at it, and she could take the book out of her lap and open it on top of the good book and edge the book off into her lap. Probably with one hand she could shove it into the box, past the spring. I mean in that way, there would always be the book on top of the table. The table wouldn't ever be empty. Hirsh might remember if she mailed anything."

She sat on Hirsh's desk, and I stood frowning in front of her. "And I'm supposed to shoot it down?"

"I hope you can. I really hope you can. She… just wasn't that kind of a person."

"In May she scores. Big. In September she's still here?"

"I know. Mr. Balch's account must be worth at least two hundred thousand market value."

"Hirsh leafed through the book, and he guessed that the stuff that was substituted was worth about sixty-five thousand."

"What? Oh, no. You must have misunderstood. I think he included the good stuff we just added that day." She turned and indicated her notebook. "Jane was here a lot longer than me, but I bet I could take Sprenger's list and go up to New York with fifteen thousand dollars, and I could buy stuff that would look okay maybe to Mr. Sprenger or to you but not to a dealer. And… Hirsh sent Jane to New York in April to bid on some things when he couldn't make it."

"So where would she get fifteen thousand?"

"I don't know. I just don't know."

"Why do you say it that way?"

"Well… because we both do appraisals. You get so you know what to look for. It wouldn't be any big deal to see something really good and slip it out of the collection and put in something cheap that looks like it. They are estate things usually. The collector is dead. So it just looks like he made a mistake in identification. And it would be a hundred dollars here, fifty dollars there, two hundred in the next place."

"She'd have no trouble selling them?"

"Why should she? It's like they say, I guess. People start taking a little bit and then more and then a lot. Like a disease. If it was like that with her, Trav, then it wouldn't make any difference about her in-laws having money, would it?"

"Every big city has rich shoplifters. Kleptos. But the shrinks say they do it to get caught and punished."

"Don't you see? If something hadn't happened to her, she would have been caught. You would have found out."

"I would?"

"Hirsh said to me that Meyer told him that you have a kind of weird instinct for these things, that you have your own way of finding out who took what. I guess he's right. Look what's happened."

"Part of it has happened. Where did the Sprenger collection go? Who has it? Did somebody take it from her house or take the money she got for it? And are the other investment accounts okay?"

She stared and swallowed and put her hand to her throat. "Oh God, I hope so. I hope Mr. Benedict's collection is okay. If anything ever happened to those, it would kill both those old guys, I think." She hesitated, tilted her head. "No, maybe Jane was pretty shifty, but she wasn't stupid. You just couldn't sell those nineteen things anywhere. They're all famous. They've all been written up."

"If somebody wanted to get caught, though?"

"Maybe it wasn't like that with her."

"What do you mean?"

She got up from the edge of the desk and hung her arms around my neck. "I'm getting so I'm imagining things, maybe. I guess it could have been a year ago. Jane got real strange. Jumpy and nervous. She told me confidentially not to tell Hirsh, but she might quit and move away. She got some phone calls here she didn't want to talk about. They left her real quiet and shaky. And then after a couple of weeks she was herself again. But not really like before. She seemed… resigned and bitter. I was wondering…"

"Wondering what?"

"There are an awful lot of ways somebody could threaten a couple of young girls. She was always terribly concerned about them. If somebody wanted her to steal from the shop… I guess it's a dumb idea."

"We need all the ideas we can…"

Her fingers dug into my wrists. Her face changed. "Shh! Listen!" she whispered. She tiptoed to the doorway to Hirsh's cubicle office and looked stealthily around the door frame toward the front door.

"I thought I heard somebody," she said in a normal tone.

"Speak of being jumpy."

"Don't make fun, huh? I have this sixth sense pretty well developed after five years. I've had the idea the last few days that McDermit is having somebody make the usual check on me. It's about that time. Are you getting that boat ready like you promised?"

"Progress is being made."

"Like what?" she demanded, cool-eyed and skeptical.

"There are blocks that bolt to the deck just forward of the side deck, close to the pilot house. There are ring bolts outside, bolted through the pilot house bulkhead. Two fifty-five gallon-"

"I just wanted to make sure-"

"Two fifty-five gallon drums fit behind those blocks on the port and two on the starboard. A friend named Johnny Dow is bolting the blocks down where they belong. He'll put four clean empty drums in place-"

"Darling, please!"

"-clean empty drums in place and use braided steel cable with turnbuckles to make them secure, using the eye bolts. Meyer, who has the keys and knows the security systems aboard, will open up the Flush this afternoon, and Johnny will move it to the gas dock and get the drums filled with diesel fuel and get my tanks topped off and bring it back to the slip. Meyer has the list of provisions and maintenance supplies and will see that they are brought aboard and stowed today. I have a hand pump that starts a siphon action to transfer the fuel from the drums to the regular tanks."

"Please, dear."

"At the most economical speed, the additional two hundred and twenty gallons builds the maximum range, without safety factor, up to eleven hundred miles. I have not told Meyer why I wanted him to do me these favors, and I imagine he thinks it is busy work I have invented to keep him out of Miami."

"I'm sorry."

"I was damned reluctant to make that promise to you, M.A. But you wanted it made, and I have made it. Having made it, I would not dog it."

"If I ever say 'Like what?' to you again, the way I said it that time, wash out my big mouth with yellow soap."

"I promise you that too."

"Brutal male chauvinist pig?"

"Well, if you put up a fight, I'm not sure I can manage the soap part."

She grinned, assumed the stance, jabbed with a long left, and then hooked off the jab, a respectable whistler missing by a calculated inch.

"My very best punch," she said.

"You keep impressing me in new ways, Mary Alice."

"Darling, what are you going to do? Stay in the same place again tonight?"

"Join me?"

"Too many eyes are watching me. At least, I have the feeling they are. I think somebody saw me get home this morning. I tried to be sly, but it turned out stupid. I left my car home and took a cab. And so, of course, arriving home at eight something in a cab looks worse than if I'd had my car. No, honey, much as I need you, I'd be too jumpy. Where are you going to be the rest of today?"

"Here and there."

"But what is there you can possibly do?"

"Once in Vegas I saw an old lady in the Golden Nugget, absolutely totally broke. The slots had cleaned her. So she was sidling around pulling at the handles on the off chance some idiot left a coin in one of them. I saw her find a handle that she could pull, and she hit three somethings and got about twelve dimes down the chute. She got a half hour out of those dimes before she was broke again and started to pull at the handles on the idle machines. That's my mysterious system, M.A. I go around pulling handles in case some idiot forgot he left a dime in the machinery."

"What if I have to get word to you?"

"Leave a message at the Contessa for room 1802. This shop is letter A. Your place is B. If you are coming to the Contessa, it is C. If you are going to Lauderdale to wait for me, it's D. Use a last name that fits. Miss Adams, Miss Brown, Miss Carter, Miss Dean. So I'll check in for messages now and then. 'Miss Carter called and will call again' means I'll head for the hotel and see you there. Clear?"

"Sure. You do that pretty damned fast, you know. You must have had a hell of a lot of messages from girls in your day."

"In my day? Thanks. I had the feeling these were my days, somehow."

"If I let you live through them, maybe. I've got more work to do here. What'll I do with this funny box?"

"Put it in the safe for now."

"Should I tell Hirsh? I don't want to."

"Save it for now."

"Okay, dear. Please take care of yourself."

"I came here to take you to lunch."

"I don't want to be seen with you. And I'm not hungry. And you don't know how unusual that is. I'm always hungry."

Harmony Towers had all the exterior charm of a women's prison. But inside the colors were bright and cheerful, and the people at the main desk were helpful. Miss Moojah was expecting me, and I could find her in Community Room 7, down that corridor to the end, through the fire door, and up the stairs one flight, and I couldn't miss it.

Fifteen old people were sitting in a circle in Community Room 7 and a swarthy young lady was saying, "Weeth the irregular verps, Mr. Lewis, you muss memorize, eh? Traer. To breeng. Breeng me a drink. Imperative. Traigame una copita. Eh?"

They all stared at me, and a woman hopped up, excused herself, and walked briskly to the doorway, motioning me back out into the hall. She was medium tall, erect, stick thin, with penciled brows and hair dyed mahogany pink. She had a massive, jutting, macrocephalic jaw. Out in the hall she looked me over with great care, and then said in a deep, metallic contralto, "Around here one gets so accustomed to seeing withered little crickety old men or fat wheezing sloppy old men, one tends to forget how they must have once appeared, Mr. McGee."

"I could have come later, after your class."

"I would rather you took me away from it. It is a matter of duty and conscience to attend. There are seven dolts holding the rest of us back. I have petitioned to have the class split in twain. I am so far ahead of the lesson schedule right now, it is pitiful. Come along. We can talk in here. A waiting room. There are dozens in the building. Waiting for what? An absolute waste. Please sit down. Hirsh told me you are a friend of Meyer, and you are trying to help him. He was reluctant to tell me why he needs help. But with a bit of urging he gave me the whole story."