I led him back into his room and closed the door. “Lie down and let me go for one.”

“No use,” he said, sinking dramatically onto the bed.

That was when I noticed an empty bottle of Jameson Irish Whiskey on his bedside table.

“Did you drink all this?”

“How else was I going to drown my sorrows?” he exclaimed.

“Then I suspect that all you’ve got is an almighty hangover,” I said. “Lie there, I’ll have them send up some black coffee.”

“Don’t bother. I just want to die anyway,” he said. “There is no point in continuing to live.”

I ignored him and phoned down to the front desk.

“What on earth is wrong?” I asked.

He turned his face away, staring bleakly out of his window, where a large sycamore tree shimmered in the breeze. “Everything,” he said. “Life has no meaning.”

I waited and at last he said, “You remember the divine young man with the yacht? We went on a cruise up the Hudson?”

“I do remember,” I said.

“He’s left me,” Ryan said bleakly. “His father told him to shape up and marry a suitable girl or he was going to cut him off without a penny, so money won out over my broken heart.”

“Ryan, why did you decide to be a playwright,” I said, chuckling, “when you could have been such a marvelous tragic actor?”

“How heartless you are, Molly Murphy. I bet if that great brute of a policeman abandoned you, you’d be a little down in the dumps yourself.”

“I’m sure I would,” I said, “but I don’t fall in and out of love with someone new every few weeks like you.”

“But this time was different,” he said. “I had such high hopes. We were going to sail his yacht to the Med for the summer. He was going to back my new play.”

“Ah, I see. So maybe money did play a small part for you as well.”

“A very small part,” he agreed. “One does like to dine well and a summer on the Med sounded so delightful. Better than being stuck in this sweltering cesspool for the summer. And now what will happen to my new play?”

“I didn’t know you’d written a new play,” I said.

“Only the most brilliant thing so far this century,” he said. “It will make that oaf George Bernard Shaw look like an illiterate schoolboy.”

“What’s it called?” I asked, since he was clearly perking up.

“I don’t have a title yet. And I have to confess that most of it is still in my head, but the smattering that is on paper—sheer, unadulterated brilliance.”

“Modesty, thy name is Ryan,” I said.

“One knows one’s worth,” he said.