Read Prelude to Terror for Free Online

I’m still serious.”
    “Anyway, you’re recognisable now.” She really was a beauty, he thought, a self-assured, competent and cool-minded beauty with liquid gold hair and agate eyes. He had liked her better as she opened the door to him, when she had seemed flustered, cheeks pink, lips soft with uncertainty.
    “That’s just the point, Mr. Grant I had to make sure you wouldn’t be connected—through me—with Mr. Basset. Your Maurice Schofeld has visited the ranch. He has a good memory. Especially for women.”
    “Why didn’t you just call on me at my apartment? People do, you know.” This girl loves too much mystery, he was thinking: or is it to impress me? Then, as she only smiled and shook her head, he saw a possible explanation. “You had to make sure,” he quoted back, “that you wouldn’t be connected with me. Doormen talk. Right?”
    She rose and laid the folder down on the chair. “I haven’t much to offer in the way of supper. Just sandwiches. I didn’t want a waiter barging in.”
    “And connecting you with me, or me with you?”
    She had reached a service-cart, lifted the silver lid that covered a napkin-wrapped mound. He was the most annoying man, she thought: unsettling. Did he see everything as a joke?
    “No thank you,” he told her. “I’ve had supper. You go ahead.” He hoped that would stop her being the perfect hostess. In a way, it was touching: a woman putting a guest at ease with food and drink. The normal impulse, of course. Or did she want him to be so much at ease that he wouldn’t have one critical faculty left? “I think we’d better start talking, don’t you?”
    She replaced the lid on the salver of sandwiches, leaving them untouched. She was still thinking about his apartment, for she said, a touch defensively, “Your doorman might very well talk, if a certain reporter just stopped for a few moments to chat with him.”
    “What reporter?” Now that was carrying things too far.
    “A very investigative type. He’s writing a book on the way the ten richest men in America use—or misuse—their spending money. Victor Basset is one of the specimens under his microscope. Somehow he was tipped off that I was in town. That roused his natural curiosity, I suppose. Perhaps every lead must be followed.”
    “I sit corrected.” Grant smiled and took his first drink.
    She returned to her chair, lifting the folder with distaste. What was in it? he wondered for the third time. “It looks as if Basset’s present project is already blown,” he suggested.
    “I don’t think so. Or else there would have been some mention of it in the newspapers. No journalist can resist a scoop if he has the facts. At the moment, this one is merely wondering why I should be in New York as ‘Jane Smith.’ However, she’ll be leaving early tomorrow for Los Angeles. There she’ll disappear, thank heavens. I’ll return by stages to Arizona.”
    “Did Basset think all this up?” The trouble they’ve taken... Grant’s interest was really aroused now. He even forgot to ask himself if this was what she had been aiming for.
    “Mr. Basset wanted you for this assignment. That’s all. The arrangements were left to us.” Her mind flickered briefly to Gene Marck. “As usual,” she added with a smile.
    Us?... Grant let that drop meanwhile. “What is the assignment?”
    She studied him quietly. Gene had been wrong about this man: he wouldn’t take the job unless he heard the details—not even for a free trip to Vienna and five thousand dollars. She plunged in. “There is a picture up for auction in Vienna, early in August. Mr. Basset wants it. He has wanted it for forty years, but it wasn’t for sale. Now suddenly it’s available. It would add considerably to his collection of Dutch seventeenth-century paintings: the ‘Golden Age’ period.”
    “Who is the artist?”
    “Ruysdael. It’s one of his river scenes. Diagonal composition. Lots of green. Date—possibly 1642.”
    He looked