“Just before Emily got the call from Nina, the actress phoned to invite me to dinner the next evening at her home in Bel Air, to discuss the motivation of her character, maybe to slightly massage some dialogue. I told Emily the call was from the director, I needed to go to LA for a couple days, it was important to the picture, I couldn’t drive with her up to San Luis Obispo. Emily understood. She always understood. She was always supportive.”

Turning a third photo toward David, Jessup said, “She didn’t really understand, Dave. She didn’t understand how you was lying your ass off to her.”

David looked over Ronny Jessup’s head at a high window screened and barred even though it was out of reach. A white bird perched on the outer sill, peering in and down at them as though it must be an augury of some portentous event impending.

He said, “She went to Nina by herself, stayed four days, started home in the afternoon, and ran into worse weather than she was expecting. And then her car broke down. I never . . . I never saw her again.”

Jessup shook his head. “That don’t do it, Dave. You skipped the best part. You skipped the actress part. It weren’t just dinner. You stayed the night, I bet.”

“Two nights. All these years later, I still don’t understand myself, why I did it, what I was thinking. The fact that she was famous, that every man I knew would have envied me if they’d known? The glamour?” A short, bitter laugh escaped him. “It was about as glamorous as mud wrestling. She drank too much. So did I, though I never had before. She did cocaine, and I didn’t. She was beautiful, but not as beautiful as Emily. She was uninhibited, yeah, but to an extent that scared me, that sickened me, the things she wanted, and in spite of all that, she was boring, self-absorbed. No real wit, no great intelligence, no genuine warmth but plenty of the method-acting kind.”

“Tell me what you done with her and all, what sickened you,” Jessup said. “Tell me, Dave. You got to look me in the eyes, look me straight in the eyes, Dave, don’t shy away, and tell old Ronny . . . if then you want me to tell you.”

When you made a deal with the devil, you had to expect there was fine print that, in your eagerness to descend, you failed to read but by which you were obligated to abide.

They sat eye to eye through David’s disclosures. The longer he met Jessup’s cobra stare, the more he was spell-caught by it, unable to look away. An ineffable connection arose between them, a seeming psychic wire. Word by word, David sensed not that something vital might be draining from him, which the term psychic vampire could have predisposed him to feel, but instead that Ronny Jessup strove to transmit some essential part of himself into his visitor, as though, at the end of this, David would find himself shackled and trapped in Jessup’s body, while Jessup walked free as David Thorne.