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."