The Scarlet Ruse Read Online Free Page A

Fedderman said. "What is the matter with the world? Old friends don't see each other. What I wanted, Meyer, was to borrow your mind. Such a logical mind! I get excited, and I can't think two and two."
    "I listened to the story," Meyer said, "and it made me wonder if Frank Sprenger might be the kind of barracuda who'd steal his own property and make Hirsh pay him for the loss. The deposit box is in a busy bank. Hirsh here is not an unusual type. His signature isn't complex or ornate. Sprenger would know the way Hirsh usually greeted the different vault attendants. Sprenger had an inventory list of everything in the investment collection. I asked Hirsh if defective duplicates would be hard to find. He said some of them would take awhile, mostly no. So it began to seem plausible that Sprenger had somebody accumulate the same items, and then they went to the bank together and switched, took the good ones out of the stock book, and put the defective ones in. Somebody successfully passed as Hirsh Fedderman."
    "You like that assumption?" I asked Meyer.
    "I don't like it any better than you do. It is a very touchy thing. Hirsh goes there often. Somebody gets uneasy and steps on the silent alarm, and Frank Sprenger is in a special kind of trouble. Anyway, it didn't happen."
    "Vault records?" I asked.
    Fedderman beamed at me approvingly. "I keep a careful record of every time I go to the vault. I made a list. I went to see my friend Mr. Dobson and gave him the list and asked him to find out if I'd been there more times than on the list, because maybe I had forgotten to write down a visit, and that's why my inventory was sort of messed up. There was no extra visit at all."
    "And your next guess?" I asked Meyer.
    "Hirsh's practice is to turn the items over to Mary Alice McDermit. She keeps the records, puts the items in mounts. I suggested the switch took place in this shop, item by item, before they even got to the bank. Hirsh went up in blue smoke."
    "Not her. Believe me! Anyway, I always personally showed the new items to Sprenger. I couldn't help seeing if they had turned to some kind of junk. Could she make the switch right there in front of both of us? No! A stock book like this one has double-sided pages. It holds a lot. Here is the inventory list. To add up to that much without buying well-known pieces, there are almost seven hundred items. No. That's ridiculous. Even if she wanted to do it, there's no way."
    "Next guess?" I asked Meyer.
    "The next thing was try to talk you into taking a look. You said no. Today you said yes."
    I frowned at Fedderman. "What happens if Sprenger decides to ask you for cash money, according to your agreement?"
    "Don't even say it out loud! I have to find four hundred and fifty thousand. Where? I can sell out my investments. I can empty the bank account. I can borrow. I can liquidate inventory. Maybe I can make it. Then I can get some salvage from that junk, pay back the loan. Maybe I end up naked like the day I was born."
    "What if he wanted to cancel and the stamps hadn't been switched?"
    "No problem. You have no idea how hungry the auction houses are for prime merchandise. I could borrow, interest free, seventy-five percent of anticipated auction prices. That would be close to four hundred. I would come out ahead on the whole deal. The older an investment account is, the better off I am if the client wants out. If a client wanted out, I would have to advise him he'd be better off selling the items on the open market. I'd handle that for him without commission. It's part of the agreement. I'd get him the best price around."
    "When did you look through that stock book previously, Hirsh? Can you pinpoint a date when everything was in order?"
    "I tried. Four times this year I met Sprenger there. February, May, July, September. It was in February, or it was November last year, I looked through the book. Everything looked good. I think it was February, but I can't be sure."
    "So… it couldn't happen,