“I guess I do,” I said. “Don’t ask me why. I remember titles and authors a lot, that’s natural in this business, and I guess I remember character names, too.”

“In a Lonely Place. He’s a screenwriter, Dixon Steele, do you remember? He has to adapt a novel but he can’t bear to read it, and he gets a hat-check girl to come tell him the story. Then she’s murdered, and he is a suspect.”

“But there’s another girl,” I said.

“Gloria Grahame. She’s a neighbor and gives him an alibi, and then she falls in love with him and types his manuscript and prepares his meals. But she sees the violence in him when his car is in an accident and he beats up the other driver, and again when he beats his agent for taking his script before it was finished. She thinks he must have killed the hat-check girl after all, and she is going to leave him, and he finds out and starts choking her. Do you remember?”

Vaguely, I thought. “Vividly,” I said.

“And there is a phone call. The hat-check girl’s boyfriend has confessed to the murder. But it’s too late for them, and Gloria Grahame can only stand there and watch him walk out of her life forever.”

“You don’t need the book,” I said. “Not in hardcover or in paperback. You’ve got the whole thing memorized.”

“He is very important to me.”

“I can see that.”

“I learned English from his films. Four of them, I played them over and over on the VCR. I would say the lines along with him and the other actors, trying to pronounce them correctly. But I still have an accent, don’t I?”

“It’s charming.”

“You think so? I think you are charming.”

“You’re beautiful.”

She lowered her eyes, drew a wallet from her purse. “I want to pay for the book,” she announced. “It is twenty-two dollars, yes? And then there is the sales tax.”

“Forget the tax.”

“Oh?”

“And forget the twenty-two dollars. Please, I insist. The book is my gift to you.”