The Burglar on the Prowl - By Lawrence Block Page 0,2

he’d shown her a few refinements her younger lovers had never introduced, and he was pleased to report that the vigor and energy of youth was no match for the art and sophistication of experience.

It was a veritable Eden, that apartment he’d found for her, and all it lacked was a serpent, which soon appeared in the person of that acknowledged shitheel, Crandall Mapes. I’ll spare you the details, which is more than Marty did for me; suffice it to say that a sobbing Marisol had told a heartbroken Martin Gilmartin that she couldn’t see him anymore, that she would always be grateful to him for his generosity, and not least of all for the gift of himself, but that she had lost her heart to the man with whom she knew she was destined to spend the rest of her life, and possibly all eternity as well.

And that man, Marty was shattered to learn, was the shitheel himself. “She thinks he’s going to leave his wife for her,” he said. “He has a new girl every six months, Bernie. Once in a while one of them lasts a full year. They all think he’s going to leave his wife, and one of these days he will actually leave her, but not the way they think. He’ll leave her a rich widow, when a heart attack does what I’d like to do and takes him out of the game for good.”

If Marty was unusually bitter, it was explained in part by the fact that Mapes was not an entirely faceless rival. Marty knew the man, and had more than a nodding acquaintance with him. He’d run into him at shows and backers’ auditions, and he and Edna had actually been to the Mapes home, a fieldstone mansion in Riverdale. The occasion was a benefit for Everett Quinton’s Ridiculous Theater Company, which was looking for a new home after having lost its longtime house on Sheridan Square. “You paid a couple of hundred dollars for dinner and an intimate performance,” he recalled, “and then they did what they could to persuade you to write out a check for another thousand or two. Dinner was all right, though the wines were no more than passable, but Quinton’s a genius and I’d have made a contribution in any case. And Edna was glad for a look at their house. We all got the grand tour. They didn’t show us the basement or the attic, but they did drag us through all the bedrooms, and there was a painting in the master bedroom, a seascape.”

“I don’t suppose it was a Turner.”

He shook his head. “It was just passable,” he said, “like the wine. Your basic generic sailing ship. The only thing significant about the painting is that it was tilted.”

“That shitheel!”

He raised an eyebrow. “I’m not compulsive about it,” he said, “but it bothers me to see a picture hung at an angle. It goes against the order of things. Even so, I’m not ordinarily the type to go around straightening the paintings in other people’s houses.”

“But this time you did.”

“I was the last one to leave the room, Bernie, and something made me stop and return to the painting. You know that line of Coleridge? ‘As idle as a painted ship / Upon a painted ocean.’ ”

I recognized the line—two lines, actually—as from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” a poem which, unlike most of the other imperishable works we’d had to read in high school English, I’d actually liked. “ ‘Water, water, everywhere,’ ” I quoted back, “ ‘And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, everywhere, / Nor any drop to drink.’ ”

He nodded approvingly. “Most people think the last line is ‘And not a drop to drink.’ ”

“Most people are wrong,” I said, “most of the time, about most things. Was the painted ship silent, upon its painted ocean?”

“It was,” said Martin Gilmartin. “But what was behind it spoke volumes.”

Two

A wall safe,” Carolyn Kaiser said. “He was straightening the picture and he felt something behind it, and it was a wall safe.”

“Right.”

“And Marty’s idea,” she said, “and the whole point of inviting you to lunch, was that you could run up to Riverdale, let yourself into Mapes’s house, and open the safe.”

“I’d like to think it wasn’t the whole point of lunch. After all, we’re friends. Don’t you suppose he figured he’d enjoy my company?”

“Goes without saying, Bern. If I ever join a fancy club I’ll invite you for lunch