The Scarlet Ruse (6 page)

"And you certainly have one fantastic memory, Mary Alice."

She laughed. "I'm showing off. My memory isn't so great. I remember that one because I found one. Hirsh bought a collection of Colonials. It was so neat and orderly and well-labeled and mounted that we sort of took for granted the collector had really studied them. Well, it was just sort of luck. I took an ordinary one we had in stock and put it beside the one in the collection because I wanted to see which one was really best, for a customer. And the perforations didn't look right. I used the one stamp to measure the other. After the customer left, I used a gauge. Then, on my own, I sent it off to the Philatelic Foundation in New York, with a fee in advance, and in six weeks it came back with the certification it was S3b. So I put it on Hirsh's desk as a surprise. He put it in Sprenger's investment collection, and he gave me a hundred-dollar bonus. It's really fun to find something like that, you know? Like mining for gold, I guess."

Though I had no empathy for her excitement, I liked the expression on her face, the look of enthusiasm. To each his own. I wondered why some man hadn't made a lot of extra effort to keep hold of this girl. The special, bonus size. A lifelong supply of goodies. But she had warned me nicely about asking questions.

I decided abruptly that I was going to take the lady at her own valuation. It is a process of logic, I guess. If she had the art, the style, the exquisite ability to project a total plausibility regardless of what stress I'd put on her, then she would not have spent five years in a funny little stamp store in Miami. Pretense requires vast expenditures of energy. That much guile would have sought better stalking-places.

Besides, I liked the neat little creases at the corners of her mouth. I liked that tricky blue shade of her iris. I liked the genuine big-girl hunger with which she stashed away the medium-adequate meal. I liked the way the black hair had a coarse, healthy gloss and the way she tossed and swung it back out of her way.

"Okay," I said, "you are no longer on the suspect list."

"Are you sure you want to do me such a big favor?"

"I know how impressed you must be."

"Are you suspicious of practically everybody?"

"Practically."

"That must be a hell of a way to go through life, fellow."

"It's only when I'm working. The rest of the time I'm an amiable, trusting, innocent slob."

"Isn't it steady work?"

"It could be, but I don't let it. When I get a few bucks ahead, I retire. Retirement is more fun at my age than it would be later."

"You've got a point. Also, you don't look married. Which makes it easier, huh?"

"Just one thing about you raises a question."

"Such as?"

"You have a sedentary job, Mary Alice, and from what you said, I guess you work at home too. But I know good conditioning when I see it. You walk around on springs."

She grinned, clenched her fist, and made a muscle. At her invitation I reached over and prodded it with a thumb. "Very substantial," I said.

"I have to live with it, Trav, or give up. I’m big, and I've got good coordination. I ran with a pack of boys from the time I could run. I played all their games and all the girl-games too. I can win canes and boxes of taffy at those weight-guessing places. What would you guess me at? Don't try to flatter me."

"Hmmm. Between a hundred and thirty-five and a hundred and forty?"

"One fifty-six this morning, stripped, on my very good scales. I've got big heavy bones, and I grew a lot of muscle tissue at all the games. So I'm in training always, because if I let things go, they really go. The muscles turn to lard, and everything starts to sag and wobble around, very nasty. I do the Canadian thing. And I make all my points-men's points, by the way-every week of my life. I've done it so long, I love it."

"I dog it. I get soft enough so that it bothers me, and then I have to go to work on it."

"You look in real good shape, you know?"

"I've been working on it."

We looked at each other. The blue eyes seemed to get bigger, just big enough to let me in. I had the feeling I was reaching down into that blueness, to where something had gone click, startling both of us. I heard her breath catch, and then she took a deep deep breath, looking away as she did so, breaking the unexpected contact. I signaled the waiter, making a writing motion in the palm of my hand. He nodded and came toward the table, sorting through his checks.

We walked back side by side and about twenty inches apart.

"Thank you for a very nice lunch, Travis."

"You are most welcome, Mary Alice."

"Like Hirsh said, I want to help you any way I can."

"You've been a lot of help."

"Have I?"

"That estimate of the time it would take to change the items in the stock book was useful. It helps me see the whole picture."

"I'm glad."

"Perhaps when we get back to the store, you can let me inspect one of those books."

"Of course."

"My car is over there in that lot. Would you like to look at it?"

She stopped and frowned at me. "Why should I want to look at your car?"

"Maybe because it is older than you are."

"It is?"

"It's a pickup truck."

"Really?"

"Do you want to look at it?"

"Why not?"

As we neared it, I pointed it out. "Yecht," she said, "what a frightful shade of blue." And then she said, "But it's a home-made pickup truck!" And then she said, "My God, it's a Rolls-Royce." Then she braced herself against it and laughed. No silvery little tinkly giggle. Haw ho haw hah haw. Oh God. Oh ho haw! A bray. A contralto bugling.

"If you think this is funny, you should see my house boat, where I live."

"Whu-whu-whu-what's funny about that?"

"I can't explain it. I have to show you."

"Yuh-yuh-you do that. Oh dear." She found her kleenex and wiped her eyes and blew her nose. We headed for the office.

"Is it really that funny?"

"No. I hurt your feelings or something?"

"No."

"It… it was relief, kind of. When you said look at your car I thought, Oh God, another of those. You know. You'd have some kind of nasty little thing about two feet high and ten feet wide and twenty feet long, with fifty dials and a speedometer that goes up to two hundred. And I'd have to admire the ugly damn childish thing or even ride in it if you insisted. Then you'd show me your key that fits every Playboy Club in America and overseas, and then you'd try to do the old magic trick."

"What old magic trick."

"You know. All of a sudden you turn into a motel."

"And you laughed because none of that is going to happen?"

"And because that Miss Agnes is a very dear automobile," she said, pushing open the door to the shop.

Meyer was sitting on the dock, legs swinging, waiting for me. He came aboard. He stood behind me as I stowed the laundry.

"How did you make out?" he asked.

"Beautiful"

"What?"

"This is the best time of year. Right?"

"I stayed and talked to Hirsh for a while. By the time I got around to calling the shop, you were gone."

"We left early. Mary Alice and me."

Turn around, Travis."

"What?"

"Turn around a minute and look at me."

"Sure."

He stared and nodded. "I see."

"What do you see?"

"That you're going to try to help Hirsh Fedderman."

"What? Oh, sure. That's right. As right as…"

"Rain?"

"Whatever you say, old buddy."

When my chores were done, we had a talk. I pulled my wandering attention in from somewhere out beyond left field and tried to settle down to the task at hand. I remembered what Mary Alice had said about how long the switch would take and how incredible it seemed to her, how she wondered if any switch had really taken place at all. I tried her approach on Meyer.

"I have to believe Hirsh," Meyer said. "If he saw it, he saw it. His mind is very quick and keen."

"She really knows all that stuff."

"What?"

"All that stamp stuff."

"I would think it would be more remarkable if, after five years, she didn't know all about it."

"What?"

"Never mind. Good God!"

"I wanted to give her a ride in Miss Agnes. It was a slow afternoon. Jane told us to take off. I followed Mary Alice to her place, in her old yellow Toyota. We had a drink in Homestead and dinner in Naples."

"Naples?!"

"I know. We were just drifting along, talking about this and that, and Naples seemed like the closest place. So we came back across Alligator Alley and came here, and I showed her the Flush. It knocked her out, like Agnes did. I like the way she laughs."

"You like the way she laughs."

"That's what I said. So then I drove her home and by then it was too late to even stop in for a nightcap."

"How late is too late?"

"Quarter past five."

"No wonder your face looks blurred."

"Meyer, the whole twelve hours seemed like twenty or thirty minutes. We just hit the edges of all the things there are to talk about."

"Are you going to be able to think about Hirsh Fedderman's problem?"

"Whose what?"

He went away, shaking his head, making big arm gestures at the empty space ahead of him. If he had come back, I would have told him that I had almost decided that there was no problem at all, that Fedderman had been mistaken. If there is no way at all for something to have happened, the best initial assumption is that it didn't happen.

On that Friday I arrived at the store at closing time and drove Jane Lawson back to her place, a so-called garden apartment in a huge development of yesteryear, about a half-hour bus ride from Fedderman's store.

She sat erect on the edge of the seat and said, "Our gal was pretty punchy all day, Trav."

"I haven't been exactly alert."

"Now turn left again and here we are. I hate that miserable bus, but it would be a worse bus ride for Linda." She had already told me that Linda was the elder of her two, a scholarship freshman at the University of Miami in Coral Gables. Judy was a junior in high school. Sixteen and eighteen. I had noticed she talked about Linda quite a lot and had very little to say about Judy.

She tried the door and then got out her keys and said, "Excuse the way the place will probably look. Working mother and two teen gals. I've tried. But they have a tendency to hang their clothes up in mid-air."

The living room was small and oven-hot. She hurried over to a great big window unit and turned it on high-high, and then raised her voice to carry over the thunder of compressor and fan. "The house rule is the last one out turns the beast off. It eats electricity. But it will chill this place fast, and then I can turn it down to where we can hear ourselves think. Isn't it terrible? Fix you a drink?"

"If there's a beer?"

"There could be. Let me look."

She came smiling back with a cold bottle of beer and a tall glass and excused herself to change out of her working clothes. There was too much furniture in the room. The fireplace was fake. There was a double frame on the mantel, and in one side of it was an incongruously young man with a nice grin, Air Force uniform, lieutenant bars, pilot wings. In the other half was a picture of the same lieutenant in civilian clothes, sports jacket and slacks. He was holding a baby and looking down into its invisible face while a Jane Lawson, eighteen years younger, stood by him, no higher than his shoulder, smiling up at him.

There was an alcove off the living room with some high-fidelity equipment, with racks of tapes in bright dog-eared boxes, with tilted stacks of records. The room was getting cool very quickly. I went over and checked the controls on the beast and cut it from high cool to cool, from max fan to medium. It shuddered and smoothed to about the sound of a good chain saw on idle. I was back looking at the pictures when she came out in an overblouse and faded blue shorts and sandals. She was a slight and pretty woman, with the residual marks of old tensions in her face, with a firmness to her mouth and corners of her jaw.

"That's Jerry," she said. "It seems incredible. He was stopped right there in time, just thirteen months after this picture. In another year Linda will be as old as I was when I met Jerry."

"Combat?"

"No. He was trade school. He wore the ring. They used to have more flameouts in fighter jets back then. He was on a night exercise, just two of them. That particular model, the way it worked, there was an interlock so that if you didn't jettison the canopy first, you couldn't eject, you couldn't make the charge go off to blow the seat out. It was supposed to be a safety thing, so a green pilot couldn't get nervous and blow himself through the canopy. But his canopy release jammed and all the way down he told his wingman exactly what he was doing to try to free it. No messages for anybody. Just technical information. A real pro."

"They must have to take a special course in cool."

"If I sound bitter, it's because they were already turning out a better canopy release thing and making the change in the field as the kits came in."

So I told her about the radio tape years ago, made in Lauderdale, and broadcast only once before NASA came galloping in, all sweaty, and confiscated it. The interviewer had asked one of those good and tough-minded and free-thinking men of the early days of space orbiting how he felt as the rocket was taking off. Maybe it was because he had heard that question too many times. He answered it with a question. 'How would you feel, taking off, sitting up there on top of fifty thousand parts, knowing that every one had been let to the lowest bidder?'"

"Grissom?" she asked. I nodded. "I thought so. It sounds like Gus. I knew those guys. I came close to marrying one. The girls were little. They liked him. I was half in love and telling myself the girls needed a father. So maybe the new father was going to end up frozen hard as marble, circling us all forever, haunting us all forever. I dilly-dallied and I dithered and shilly-shallied and all those words. And the tram left the station before I could make up my mind whether to buy a ticket. Maybe it's best. Who knows? Well, my troubles aren't what you came to talk about."

"This problem could give you trouble you don't need. If the investment items are gone, Hirsh is going to have to make it good with Sprenger. With a man like Sprenger, I don't think there'd be a choice, even if Hirsh did want to look for an out. It might clean him out. It might take the store and the stock to do it."

She was sitting in the corner of the couch. She pulled her legs up under her and made a face. "That would really be rotten. For him, I mean. He's been so good to me. I can't believe I've been there fifteen years. I answered a blind ad, and when I found out what it was, I didn't want it at all. He liked my letter. He begged me to try it. He offered me too much money. I couldn't even type. I thought somebody was going to take advantage of this crazy little man, so it might as well be me. I didn't find out until later he'd interviewed at least thirty-five girls before me without finding anybody he wanted. He was looking for a nut who'd go to a business school nights and learn to type just because it would make things easier for him. Trav, don't talk about the troubles I could have. I'll manage. With the pay and the pension and being able to use the PX at Homestead, I've stuck rainy-day money away. Jerry's folks have helped some, and they'd help more if I had to let them. The thing is to help Hirsh so he doesn't have to sell everything."

"That's what Mary Alice says too, but she can't really believe the good stuff isn't still in that book in the safety deposit box."

"Hirsh doesn't imagine things like that. Know what I keep thinking?"

"What?"

"Don't tell Hirsh. If one investment account could be cleaned out like that, so could the others, couldn't they? He hasn't had a chance to look at any one of the other five during the past two weeks."

"You certainly know how to relax a person, Jane."

"You thought of that already, huh?"

"They're all handled alike, pretty much, aren't they?"

"Yes and no. The oldest account is Mr. Riker Benedict, and that was started about the same time I came to work. In fact, it was the first account Hirsh set up that way, mostly because Mr. Benedict couldn't really believe that the things Hirsh wanted to buy for him would keep going up in value year after year. He's bought nineteen classic pieces in fifteen years, famous items. And he's looking for another one now. The collection is worth so much more than Mr. Benedict put into it, there's really no point in keeping on with it in the same way. But it's a ceremony, adding a new piece. The two of them will spend half a morning in the bank going over the great rarities, one by one, whether they are adding a new one or not. With the other accounts I would say that sometimes they go over the things previously purchased and sometimes they don't. The Sprenger account is the one where he never looks at the old purchases or the new ones either. He just sits there like so much dead meat. He nods, shrugs, grunts, and that’s that."

"What would happen to those accounts if anything happened to Mr. Fedderman?"

"That's all worked out in the agreement. It's clear that he had no ownership interest in anything in the investment accounts, and his lawyer has a power of attorney in the event of Mr. Fedderman's death, and I think it's on file at the bank with a signature card. In the agreement the lawyer and the investor meet at the bank along with an appraiser certified by the APS, and the investment account is appraised, and if the current estimated resale value is higher than the breaking point in the agreement, the account is then accepted by the investor, and the agreement is surrendered. If the resale is less, the difference between it and the guaranteed price becomes a claim against the estate. But there would be no question of a claim of any kind on five of them. And on the stuff Hirsh has bought for Sprenger, I think Hirsh would come out a little bit ahead, actually, the way the market is going. You see, he hasn't really been taking any risk at all. This was just an easy way of easing the fears of people with risk capital. Sort of satisfaction-or-your-money-cheerfully-refunded. You can do that when the product is really tops."

"Unless the product mysteriously disappears."

"It's made him sick. It really has. Physically sick."

"I keep wondering how come Mary Alice keeps all the records and does all the work on the investment accounts?"

"Because I've been there longer? I used to do it, and then when Moosejaw retired and Mary Alice came on, I taught her the routines."

"Moosejaw?"

"Excuse me. Miss Moojah, a maiden lady with a very strong personality. A creature of legend. She didn't believe in the alarm system. There are eight buttons in handy, inconspicuous places. She kept a toy baseball bat under the cash register. Twice when she was alone, a would-be robber aimed a gun at her. Twice she picked up her bat and let him have it. One needed two lumps before he went down, and one collapsed on the first one. Then she'd push the button. It made Hirsh so mad he couldn't speak. He just made gobbling sounds. He was so afraid the next one would kill her. Anyway, I'm glad to have Mary Alice do the scut work. I'm sort of more into decision-making."

"Such as?"

"Well, the routine things, of course, that Hirsh hasn't time or patience for. When to reorder and how much. Albums and packets and mounts and so on. But the part I like best is watching the market and studying it and advising Hirsh. It's a lot of work, but he says I have a real talent for it. I study the changes in the catalog prices as they come out, Scott, Minkus, Stanley Gibbons, Sanabria. Also, I get the list of prices realized from all the leading auction houses and find out what the lots are bringing in New York and on the West Coast and in London. It isn't all up, you know. I saw some little early warnings three years ago on Italian issues. They'd moved up or been pushed up too fast. So we had some pretty good things in counter stock, and some real good things in the investment accounts, and Hirsh moved everything out quickly. He lets me run a little risk account, like speculation in inventory. I saw that early Canada was looking active, so I put the money in those issues, and they've really moved. They were always good, but sort of stodgy. Now they're glamour. I think that-Do you really care about all this?"