The Cavanaugh Quest by Thomas Gifford

shaking the antenna, making the screen flicker, but I could hear Tony Martin singing “I Hear a Rhapsody” while the lower classes danced in the beachfront bar and Robert Ryan was being nasty to Paul Douglas. Barbara Stanwyck was married to big, bluff, kindly Paul but she had the hots for lean, hungry psycho Robert, who ran the projector at the little movie house. It was Clash by Night from a lot of years ago but I’d enjoyed it when it was new and I was enjoying it now that it was old. I was drinking a cold Grain Belt and Barbara Stanwyck was looking sexy and cynical, saying tough things to Robert to show him she cared: “If I ever loved a man again … he could have my teeth for watch fobs!”
    Watch fobs, indeed.
    “You impress me as a man who needs a new suit of clothes or a new love affair,” she said, giving Robert the old one-two. “But he doesn’t know which.” That really made him mad and I sat there enjoying his seething. Then I put down the beer and picked up the stack of snapshots, which indicated quite clearly why Sam Proctor had bought the Leica. There were twelve pictures, two of Anne by herself, six of the two women together from different angles, and four of Kim, two standing by the net and two in action, stroking the ball.
    I peered at her, trying to see into the third dimension.
    Hitting a forehand: arm straight, eyes watching the blur of white coming off the racket, a tip of tongue clenched between her teeth, pigtails flying. Backhand: almost on tiptoes, slicing a shot coming too close to her body, face a mask of concentration, her one-piece two-tone tennis dress molded back against her strong thighs and slender torso. By the net, in close-up as Sam found out what his camera could do, she gave him a faint smile in one shot, sweat running down her face, eyes boring into the camera. Again, off guard, she looked away, long fingers brushing perspiration from an eyebrow, a pigtail tied with a ribbon hanging forward over a shoulder. Her dark hair was pulled tight, her skin dark and smooth and youthful; I’d have called her twenty-five at the most, yet I knew I was a decade off. For some reason my stomach clenched up as I stared at the pictures. She frightened me and I had no idea why; she was just a woman, of course, but she’d been a different woman for everyone I’d questioned.
    Her dark eyes returned my stare.
    Hubbard Anthony had called her the sort of person who made a strong impression on you, always busy, always working, being helpful, always bettering her self.
    Harriet Dierker had said she was as good as a murderer, a hellion, a witch, lovely to look at, the sort of woman the word “bitch” was invented for, a temptress, always bending over and stretching and showing her legs …
    But Tim Dierker had refused to say anything at all.
    Bill Oliver had noticed a good deal more than he thought he had: businesslike, never a hair out of place, clothes just perfect, the way a certain kind of woman always was.
    For my father she was the sort of female who gets talked about, with a trim figure, a solemn face, dark eyebrows, shining hair. She had seemed a sexual creature to him: He’d said it made you wonder if she had a line of that dark hair going up her belly; that was the way she made him think …
    For Darwin McGill she was a cockteaser. “I pulled her brassiere off,” he’d said, “and there were these tiny round tits … with big stiff nipples … She told me that I was just one step from losing my job and facing a criminal action. She was so composed, Paulie, I just felt like I wanted to hide …”
    But Anne had had another view altogether, finding her terrified of sex, frigid, so competent and organized and neat and determined. She thought I’d have liked Kim, and what the hell was that supposed to mean?
    It didn’t hang together; it was a patchwork of contradictions and I couldn’t piece it together. I couldn’t help but wonder if what I was really getting was a series of