The title says it all ; can I use REPLACE (some systemname) to delete records.

Why ?

I have a candidate index on a table. Records are deleted and added to it (wow !). When a record is deleted and later I want to add a record with the same index, the insert is refused because of the uniqueness constraint (as far as the table hasn't been packed since). So to prevent this, before I delete the record, I change a value in the record (using the negative recno() which can never give duplicates) :

REPLACE whatever_part_of_the_index WITH -recno()
DELETE NEXT 1

So twice access to the table : can I reduce the access to only once ?