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 while 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 had never spoken like that, in that way, with those words and those cadences.
It wasn’t the almost-forgotten mystery novelist known as Marki 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 Marki 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.