"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."