They left, darling in tow, and the genius closed up for the night. We walked over to the Bum Rap on Broadway, as we generally do, and Carolyn started to order Scotch, as she generally does, and then she paused. “If you want,” she said, “I’ll order something else.”

“Why?”

“Well, if you want to get good and drunk,” she said, “I could make a point of staying relatively sober.”

“We don’t have a car,” I said. “What do we need with a designated driver? Anyway, why would I want to get drunk?”

“You mean you don’t?”

“Not particularly.”

“Oh. Hey, this isn’t going to be a Perrier night for you, is it?”

Perrier is my drug of choice when my plans for an evening include illegal entry. “No,” I said. “It’s not.” And I proved it by asking Maxine to bring me a bottle of Tuborg.

“Well, thank God,” Carolyn said. “In that case I’ll have Scotch, Max, and you might as well make it a double. They said I’m a genius, Bernie. Isn’t that something?”

“It’s great.”

“If I had my choice,” she said, “I’d just as soon be a genius at something else. Nobody ever got a MacArthur Award for washing dogs. But it’s better than nothing, don’t you think?”

“Absolutely. You could be like me.”

“A genius at picking locks?”

“A genius at picking women.”

“I’m already a genius at picking women.”

“Can you believe it?” I demanded, and launched into my third recital of Lettice’s revelation. “What I want to know,” I said, “is when she would have gotten around to telling me if I hadn’t pressed her about the weekend. I mean, it’s not like she had a date to go to the movies with some other guy. She’s getting married.”

“Did you know she was seeing somebody else?”

“I more or less assumed it. We weren’t in a committed relationship. Actually we’d only recently started sleeping together.”