The Scarlet Ruse by John D. MacDonald

knees alternating. Any kind of a close look and that twelve-year-old impression was gone all of a sudden.
    She said, "It wasn't any of your really great stuff. You know. Like one-of-a-kind or tied to historical covers or anything. But it was all really first-class, high-catalog material, the kind you can depend on to hold value."
    "You like futzing around with postage stamps?"
    She gave me a blank, frowning look. "What do you futz around with, huh? Hitting an innocent little white ball with a long stick? Soldering wires together and playing four-track stereo? Slamming some dumb little car around corners, upshifting and downshifting? Are you a gun futz or a muscle futz?"
    "I think I know where you're going with that."
    "Where I'm going is that there's no list to tell you where you rate on some kind of scale of permanent values and find out how unimportant you are. But I can tell you what nobody ought to be doing."
    "What's that?"
    "Nobody ought to be sneering at anybody else's way of life."
    "Mrs. McDermit?"
    "Mmm?"
    "Could we set our personal clock back and start over again?"
    Her smile was bright, vivid, personal, merry. "Why, you dummy? We're getting along pretty remarkable."
    "We are? Good."
    "I like people. I really do. Here's the bank."
    The safety deposit vault was in the back left corner. There were three people on duty there. Hirsh Fedderman signed the slip and put down the number of his own personal box. They let us all in, and had the three of us wait in the corridor off to the side which led to the private booths and little rooms. Hirsh joined us, with his box under his arm. The attendant led us back to one of the little rooms. There was a table, three chairs. The attendant said he would bring another chair. I told him thanks, not to bother.
    The table was butted against the wall. It was narrower than a card table and about half again as long. They moved the chairs to where they had been in an identical little room on September seventh. As I stood with my back against the closed door, Hirsh and Mary Alice sat at the right, Mary Alice nearest me, facing Meyer across the table-Meyer, of course, representing Sprenger.
    I said, "Try to make as exact a reconstruction as you can. I'll stop you if I have any questions."
    Hirsh said, "I put the box right here, against the wall, nearest me, and I opened it like this and took the stock book out. Okay. Here is the stock book I brought, so…"
    "Put it in the box and close the box and then take it out as you did before and do with it exactly what you did the other time."
    Hirsh took it out and put it in front of Mary Alice and said, "Other clients, I hand them the book. They want to take a look at their money. Not Sprenger. I tried at first. He wouldn't take it. He'd just shrug."
    Mary Alice said, "That was when I was taking the new purchases out of my purse, like this. And the inventory sheet. I gave the inventory sheet to Mr. Sprenger, and I put the new stamps, in their mounts, right here, where they would be handy for Mr. Fedderman."
    "I took a copy of the list out of my pocket," Hirsh said. "I put it here in front of me, like this. Then I read off the items and found each one and showed it to Sprenger and then pushed it toward Mary Alice."
    "By then," she said, "I'd taken the book out of the slip case and opened it up, and as Hirsh pushed them toward me, I would pick them up and slip them into the book like this, into these transparent strips. I used these tongs because you have to have something to lift the edge of the strip. The stamps were in mounts like this, so it was just because it's easier for me, not to protect the stamps, I used stamp tongs."
    "Is that the same inventory list?" I asked.
    "Exactly," she said. "And I fixed up the right number of mounts and the right size. But these stamps I just put in are junk from the new issue service."
    "Go ahead just the way you did with him," I said.
    Hirsh tried to smile. "I'd try to give a little spiel. Clients like it. I