“Nothing. I don’t know what you mean.” I didn’t recognize my voice.
“There must have been something. You’re an angry man, William. You’re angry at your father. Perhaps because he died and left you alone. But you didn’t say something very important that you needed to say; you still need to say it. What was it?”
I didn’t want to answer him. But he just waited. And finally I murmured, “He never said goodbye. He just died and never said goodbye to me.” Silence. Then I shook, helplessly, trembled, reduced after so many years to a child, tried to shake it off, tried to dismiss it, and very quietly said, “It wasn’t important.”
“It wasn’t important for him to hear it; but it was for you to say it.” I couldn’t look at him.
Then Marki said, “In the lens of time we are each seen as a diminishing mote. I’m sorry I upset you.”
“You didn’t upset me.”
“Yes. I did. Let me try and make amends. If you have the time, let me tell you about a few books I wrote. You may enjoy this.” So I sat back and he told me a dozen plots. He spoke without hesitations, fluidly, and they were awfully good. Excellent, in fact. Suspense stories, something in the vein of James M. Cain or Jim Thompson. Stories about average people, not private eyes or foreign agents; just people in stress situations where violence and intrigue proceeded logically from entrapping circumstances. I was fascinated. And what a talent he had for titles: DEAD BY MORNING, CANCEL BUNGALOW 16, AN EDGE IN MY VOICE, WHITEMAIL, THE MAN WHO SEARCHED FOR JOY, THE DIAGNOSIS OF DR. D’arqueANGEL, PRODIGAL FATHER and one that somehow struck me so forcibly I made a mental note to contact Andreas Brown at the Gotham Book Mart, to locate a used copy for me through his antiquarian book sources. I had to read it. It was titled LOVER, KILLER.
When he stopped talking he looked even more exhausted than when he’d asked me to sit down. His skin was almost gray, and the soft, blue eyes kept closing for moments at a time. “Would you like a glass of water or something to eat?”
He looked at me carefully, and said, “Yes. I’d very much like a glass of water, thank you.”
I got up, to force my way through to the kitchen.
He put his dry hand on mine. I looked down at him. “What do you want to be, eventually, William?”
I could have given a flip answer. I didn’t. “Remembered,” I said. Then he smiled, and removed his hand.
“I’ll get that water; be right back.”
I pushed through the crowd and got to the kitchen. Bob was still there, arguing with Hans Santesson about cracking the pro rata share of royalties problem for reprints of stories in college-level text-anthologies. Hans and I shook hands, and exchanged quick pleasantries while I drew a glass of water and put in a couple of ice cubes from the plastic sack half-filled with melted cubes in the sink. I didn’t want to leave Marki for very long.
“Where the hell have you been tonight?” Bob asked.
“I’m sitting way at the back, with an old man; fascinating old man. Used to be a writer, he says. I don’t doubt it. Jesus, he must have written some incredible books. Don’t know how I could have missed them. I thought I’d read practically everything in the genre.”
“What is his name?” Hans asked, with that soft lovely Scandinavian accent.
“Marki Strasser,” I said. “What a goddam sensational story-sense he’s got.”
They were staring at me.
“Marki Strasser?” Hans had frozen, his cup of tea halfway to his lips.
“Marki Strasser,” I said again. “What’s the matter?”
“The only Marki I know, who was a writer, was a man who used to come to these evenings thirty years ago. But he’s been dead for at least fifteen, sixteen years.”
I laughed. “Can’t be the same one, unless you’re wrong about his having died.”
“No, I am certain about his death. I attended his funeral.”
“Then it’s someone else.”
“Where’s he sitting?” Bob asked.
I stepped out into the passage and motioned them to join me. I waited for the crowd to sway out of the way for a moment, and pointed. “There, back in the corner, in the big easy chair.”
There was no one in the big easy chair. It was empty.
And as I stared, and they stood behind me, staring, a woman sat down in the chair and went to sleep, a cocktail glass in her hand. “He got up and moved somewhere else in the room,” I said.
No, he hadn’t. Of course.
We were the last to go. I wouldn’t leave. I watched each person pass out through the front door, standing right in front of the door so no one could get past me. Bob checked out the toilet. He wasn’t in there. There was only one exit from the apartment, and I was in front of it. “Listen, goddammit,” I said heatedly, to Hans and Bob and our host, who wanted desperately to vomit and go to bed, “I do not believe hi ghosts; he wasn’t a ghost, he wasn’t a figment of my imagination, he wasn’t a fraud; for God’s sake I’m not that guillible I can’t tell when I’m being put on; those stories he told me were too damned good; and if he was here, how the hell did he get out past me? I was right in front of the door even when I came to the kitchen to get the water. He was an old man, at least seventy-five, maybe older; he wasn’t a goddam sprinter! Nobody could have gotten through that crowd fast enough to slip out into the hall behind me without banging into everyone, and someone would have remembered being pushed like that…so…”
Hans tried to calm me. “Billy, we asked everyone who was here. No one else saw him. No one even saw you sitting on the sofa there, where you say you were sitting. No one else spoke to anyone like that, and many of the writers here tonight knew him. Why would a man tell you he was Marki Strasser if he was not Marki Strasser? He would have known that a room filled with writers who knew Marki Strasser would tell you if it was a joke.”
I wouldn’t let go of it. I was not hallucinating!
Our host went digging around in the back closet and came up with a bound file of old Mystery Writers of America programs from Edgar Award dinners; he flipped through them, back fifteen years, and found a photograph of Marki Strasser. I looked at it. The photo was clear and sharp. It wasn’t the same man. There was no way of confusing the two, even adding fifteen years to the face in the picture, even allowing for a severe debilitation from sickness. The Marki in the photograph was a round-faced man. almost totally bald, with thick eyebrows and dark eyes. The Marki I had talked to for almost an hour had had soft, blue eyes. Even if he had been wearing a hairpiece, those eyes couldn’t be mistaken.
“It’s not him. dammit!”
They asked me to describe him again. When that didn’t connect, Hans asked me to tell him the stories and the titles. The three of them listened and I could see from their faces that they were as impressed with the books Marki had written as 1 was. But when I ran down and sat there, breathing hard, Hans and my host shook their heads. “Billy,” Hans said, “I was the editor of the Unicorn Mystery Book Club for seven years; I edited The Saint Detective Magazine for more than ten. I have read as widely in the field of mystery fiction as anyone alive. No such books exist.”
Our host, an authority on the subject, agreed.
I looked at Bob Catlett. He devoured them a book a day. Slowly, reluctantly, he nodded his head in agreement.
I sat there and closed my eyes.
After a little while, Bob suggested we go. His wife had vanished an hour earlier with a group intent on getting cheesecake. He wanted to get to bed. I didn’t know what to do. So I went back to the Warwick.
That night I pulled an extra blanket onto the bed, but still it was cold, very cold, and I shivered. I left the television set on, nothing but snow and a steady humming. I couldn’t sleep.
Finally, I got up and got dressed and went out into the night Fifty-fourth Street was empty and silent at three in the morning. Not even delivery trucks and, though I looked and looked for him, I couldn’t find him.
I thought about it endlessly, walking, and for a whi
le I imagined he had been my father, come back from the grave to talk to me. But it wasn’t my father. I would have recognized him. I’m no fool, I would have recognized him. My father had been a much shorter man, with a mustache; and he h 1 never spoken like that, in that way, with those words and those cadences.
It wasn’t the almost-forgotten mystery novelist known as Mark! Strasser. Why he had used that name, I don’t know; perhaps to get my attention, to lead me down a black path of fear that would tell me without question that he was someone else, because it had not been Mark! Strasser. I didn’t know who he was.
I came back to the Warwick and rang for the elevator. I stood in front of the mirrored panel between the two elevator doors, and I stared through my own reflection, into the glass, looking for an answer.
Then I went up to my room and sat down at the writing desk and rolled a clean sandwich of white bond, carbon, and yellow second sheet into the portable.
I began writing LOVER, KILLER.
It came easily. No one else could write that book.
But, like my father, he hadn’t even said goodbye when I went to get him that glass of water. That tired old man.
* I’m not anti-women. This note expresses only my own opinion and not police officers in general. Further, I’m male.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © Introduction: “Blood/Thoughts,” copyright (in various forms) © 1968, 1969, 1973 and 1975 by Harlan Ellison. Copyright © 1983 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation. Renewed, 1996, 1997, 2001 and 2003 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
“The Whimper of Whipped Dogs,” copyright © 1973 by Harlan Ellison. Renewed, 2001 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
“Eddie, You’re My Friend,” copyright © 1975 by Harlan Ellison. Renewed, 2003 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
“Status Quo at Troyden’s,” copyright © 1958 by Harlan Ellison. Renewed, 1986 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
“Nedra at f.5.6” (under the title “The Hungry One”), copyright © 1956 by Harlan Ellison. Renewed, 1988 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation. Revised version, copyright © 1975 by Harlan Ellison. Renewed, 2003 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
“Opposites Attract” (under the title “Mad Bomber”), copyright © 1957 by Harlan Ellison. Renewed, 1985 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
“Toe the Line,” copyright © 1957 by Harlan Ellison. Renewed, 1985 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
“Down in the Dark” (as by “Ellis Hart”), copyright © 1967 by Harlan Ellison. Renewed, 1995 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
“Pride in the Profession,” copyright © 1966 by Harlan Ellison. Renewed, 1994 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
“The Children’s Hour” (as by “Wallace Edmondson”), copyright © 1958 by Harlan Ellison. Renewed, 1986 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
“White Trash Don’t Exist” (under the title “Murder Bait”), copyright © 1956 by Harlan Ellison. Renewed, 1984 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
“Thicker Than Blood,” copyright © 1957 by Harlan Ellison. Renewed, 1985 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
“Two Inches in Tomorrow’s Column” (as by “Ellis Hart”), copyright © 1965 by Harlan Ellison. Renewed, 1993 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
“Promises of Laughter,” copyright © 1969 by Harlan Ellison. Renewed, 1997 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
“Ormond Always Pays His Bills,” copyright © 1957 by Harlan Ellison. Renewed, 1985 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
“The Man on the Juice Wagon” (as by “Cordwainer Bird”), copyright © 1963 by Harlan Ellison. Renewed 1991 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
“Tired Old Man,” copyright © 1975 by Harlan Ellison. Renewed, 2003 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.”
Copyright © 1975 by Harlan Ellison
Copyright © 1983 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation, Renewed 2003
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ISBN 978-1-4976-0454-4
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Harlan Ellison, No Doors No Windows
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