The Cavanaugh Quest by Thomas Gifford

I went inside. Julia was drinking iced tea in the long living room, curled at one end of a pale-gray modern sofa. The only light came from the see-through glass ginger jar beside her. Dusk had settled across the room and crickets made the only sound. She looked up and smiled faintly.
    “Feel better?” she asked. She put her book down; it dealt with the peculiarly successful marriage between Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West.
    “Just a little worse, actually.”
    “Iced tea in the pitcher on the cart.”
    I poured a tall glass and added lemon and sugar, slid into a chrome-and-leather director’s chair. My mouth tasted like an army had used it for a latrine all evening.
    “Archie’s gone. His Sherlock Holmes meeting.”
    “Right.” I drank some iced tea. “What about Kim? What do you think? Was she a monster?” I was too tired to chat.
    “Well, yes and no, Paul.”
    “Come on, Julia, what the hell does that mean?”
    “Everybody’s a monster to someone. Don’t you think? And everybody has his own monster. So, yes and no.”
    “Why did he kill himself, then?”
    “Love or money, those are the usual reasons, aren’t they?”
    “But which?”
    Julia shrugged. “Why not ask Kim?”
    After I popped three Excedrin I kissed her forehead and flung myself recklessly into the hot night.

4
    D ARWIN MCGILL WAS A HANDSOME man but something had gone wrong in the vastness behind his large brown eyes. His skin looked like a very expensive piece of luggage, dark brown from the sun and unnaturally smooth, but puffed out from too much time spent in the bar at Norway Creek, which was where I found him. The room was dim and almost empty with the big Casablanca ceiling fans slowly rotating above us and the doors thrown open to the patio, pool, and putting green beyond. A few members sipped at tall ones in frosted glasses outside and a couple of teenagers splashed in the pool, the underwater lights casting ominous shadows across their faces and flinging rippling shadows against the thick oaks bordering the golf course. McGill looked up as I sat down on the stool beside him, nodded, crooked a finger at the bartender.
    “Jack,” he said, “another gimlet for me and …” He glanced at me.
    “Gin and tonic,” I said, and Jack went away. It was cool in the bar and the sweat on my neck was drying. “How’s it going, Darwin?”
    “The way it always goes,” he said grimly, a slight slur in his speech. “Spend all day in the sun chasing whitey, get too damn tired and dehydrated for a man my age, and take all night replacing the sweat with gin.”
    “You’re just down,” I said. “You’re in fantastic shape.”
    “Bullshit.” He frowned, rattled the remains of ice cubes in his glass while waiting for the fresh one. “Bad news today, I’ve got good reason to be down … Liver’s gone bad, Paulie, and you know what that means. Doctor tried to break it gently. Botched it, of course.” He sighed and waited while Jack put our drinks down on club coasters. “I cried for thirty-five minutes and then gave a lesson at eleven o’clock. He said I didn’t have to cut out the booze—it wouldn’t make much difference one way or the other—but a bit of moderation might be in order.” He gave me a sour little grin. “How can men be doctors, having to give people the bad news?”
    “Well, they get to give them the good news, too,” I said.
    But he was in a mood and not to be cheered; was it as bad as he seemed to think? I’d always found him a jock, utterly outside of my sphere of caring, but it was disheartening to hear the dribs and drabs of his story while my mind was full of Blankenship and Kim. My mind wandered, with my eyes, across the room with its glossy tables and padded, leather-backed chairs, the potted palms, the dusty Moroccan architecture, all arches and whatnot. Anne and I had finished more evenings in the room than was good for us, a fact which put us well into the company of so many of our friends