The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove Read online

Chapter 2~3

   

  Two

  The Sea Beast

  The cooling pipes at the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant were all fashioned from the finest stainless steel. Before they were installed, they were x-rayed, ultrasounded, and pressure-tested to be sure that they could never break, and after being welded into place, the welds were also x-rayed and tested. The radioactive steam from the core left its heat in the pipes, which leached it off into a seawater cooling pond, where it was safely vented to the Pacific. But Diablo had been built on a breakneck schedule during the energy scare of the seventies. The welders worked double and triple shifts, driven by greed and cocaine, and the inspectors who ran the X-ray machines were on the same schedule. And they missed one. Not a major mistake. Just a tiny leak. Barely noticeable. A minuscule stream of harmless, low-level radiation wafted out with the tide and drifted over the continental shelf, dissipating as it went, until even the most sensitive instruments would have missed it. Yet the leak didn't go totally undetected.

  In the deep trench off California, near a submerged volcano where the waters ran to seven hundred degrees Fahrenheit and black smokers spewed clouds of mineral soup, a creature was roused from a long slumber. Eyes the size of dinner platters winked out the sediment and sleep of years. It was instinct, sense, and memory: the Sea Beast's brain. It remembered eating the remains of a sunken Russian nuclear submarine: beefy little sailors tenderized by the pressure of the depths and spiced with piquant radioactive marinade. Memory woke the beast, and like a child lured from under the covers on a snowy morning by the smell of bacon frying, it flicked its great tail, broke free from the ocean floor, and began a slow ascent into the current of tasty treats. A current that ran along the shore of Pine Cove.

  Mavis

  Mavis tossed back a shot of Bushmills to take the edge off her frustration at not being able to whack anyone with her baseball bat. She wasn't really angry that Molly had bitten a customer. After all, he was a tourist and rated above the mice in the walls only because he carried cash. Maybe the fact that something had actually happened in the Slug would bring in a little business. People would come in to hear the story, and Mavis could stretch, speculate, and dramatize most stories into at least three drinks a tell.

  Business had been slowing over the last couple of years. People didn't seem to want to bring their problems into a bar. Time was, on any given afternoon, you'd have three or four guys at the bar, pouring down beers as they poured out their hearts, so filled with self-loathing that they'd snap a vertebra to avoid catching their own reflection in the big mirror behind the bar. On a given evening, the stools would be full of people who whined and growled and bitched all night long, pausing only long enough to stagger to the bathroom or to sacrifice a quarter to the jukebox's extensive self-pity selection. Sadness sold a lot of alcohol, and it had been in short supply these last few years. Mavis blamed the booming economy, Val Riordan, and vegetables in the diet for the sadness shortage, and she fought the insidious invaders by running two-for-one happy hours with fatty meat snacks (The whole point of happy hour was to purge happiness, wasn't it?), but all her efforts only served to cut her profits in half. If Pine Cove could no longer produce sadness, she would import some, so she advertised for a Blues singer.

  The old Black man wore sunglasses, a leather fedora, a tattered black wool suit that was too heavy for the weather, red suspenders over a Hawaiian shirt that sported topless hula girls, and creaky black-on-white wing tips. He set his guitar case on the bar and climbed onto a stool.

  Mavis eyed him suspiciously and lit a Tarryton 100. She'd been taught as a girl not to trust Black people.

  "Name your poison," she said.

  He took off his fedora, revealing a gleaming brown baldness that shone like polished walnut. "You gots some wine?"

  "Cheap-shit red or cheap-shit white?" Mavis cocked a hip, gears and machinery clicked.

  "Them cheap-shit boys done expanded. Used to be jus' one flavor. "

  "Red or white?"

  "Whatever sweetest, sweetness. "

  Mavis slammed a tumbler onto the bar and filled it with yellow liquid from an icy jug in the well. "That'll be three bucks. "

  The Black man reached out - thick sharp nails skating the bar surface, long fingers waving like tentacles, searching, the hand like a sea creature caught in a tidal wash - and missed the glass by four inches.

  Mavis pushed the glass into his hand. "You blind?"

  "No, it be dark in here. "

  "Take off your sunglasses, idjit. "

  "I can't do that, ma'am. Shades go with the trade. "

  "What trade? Don't you try to sell pencils in here. I don't tolerate beggars. "

  "I'm a Bluesman, ma'am. I hear ya'll lookin for one. "

  Mavis looked at the guitar case on the bar, at the Black man in shades, at the long fingernails of his right hand, the short nails and knobby gray calluses on the fingertips of his left, and she said, "I should have guessed. Do you have any experience?"

  He laughed, a laugh that started deep down and shook his shoulders on the way up and chugged out of his throat like a steam engine leaving a tunnel. "Sweetness, I got me more experience than a busload o' hos. Ain't no dust settled a day on Catfish Jefferson since God done first dropped him on this big ol' ball o' dust. That's me, call me Catfish. "

  He shook hands like a sissy, Mavis thought, just let her have the tips of his fingers. She used to do that before she had her arthritic finger joints replaced. She didn't want any arthritic old Blues singer. "I'm going to need someone through Christmas. Can you stay that long or would your dust settle?"

  "I 'spose I could slow down a bit. Too cold to go back East. " He looked around the bar, trying to take in the dinge and smoke through his dark glasses, then turned back to her. "Yeah, I might be able to clear my schedule if" - and here he grinned and Mavis could see a gold tooth there with a musical note cut in it - "if the money is right," he said.

  "You'll get room and board and a percentage of the bar. You bring 'em in, you'll make money. "

  He considered, scratched his cheek where white stubble sounded like a toothbrush against sandpaper, and said, "No, sweetness, you bring 'em in. Once they hear

  Catfish play, they come back. Now what percentage did you have in mind?"

  Mavis stroked her chin hair, pulled it straight to its full three inches. "I'll need to hear you play. "

  Catfish nodded. "I can play. " He flipped the latches on his guitar case and pulled out a gleaming National steel body guitar. From his pocket he pulled a cutoff bottleneck and with a twist it fell onto the little finger of his left hand. He played a chord to test tune, pulled the bottleneck from the fifth to the ninth and danced it there, high and wailing.

  Mavis could smell something like mildew, moss maybe, a change in humidity. She sniffed and looked around. She hadn't been able to smell anything for fifteen years.

  Catfish grinned. "The Delta," he said.

  He launched into a twelve-bar Blues, playing the bass line with his thumb, squealing the high notes with the slide, rocking back and forth on the bar stool, the light of the neon Coors sign behind the bar playing colors in the reflection of sunglasses and his bald head.

  The daytime regulars looked up from their drinks, stopped lying for a second, and Slick McCall missed a straight-in eight-ball shot on the quarter table, which he almost never did.

  And Catfish sang, starting high and haunting, going low and gritty.

  "They's a mean ol' woman run a bar out on the Coast.

  I'm telling you, they's a mean ol' woman run a bar out on the

  Coast. But when she gets you under the covers, That ol' woman turn your buttered bread to toast. "

  And then he stopped.

  "You're hired," Mavis said. She pulled the jug of white cheap-shit out of the well and sloshed some into Catfish's
glass. "On the house. "

  Just then the door opened and a blast of sunlight cut through the dinge and smoke and residual Blues and Vance McNally, the EMT, walked in and set his radio on the bar.

  "Guess what?" he said to everyone and no one in particular. "That pilgrim woman hung herself. "

  A low mumble passed through the regulars. Catfish put his guitar in its case and picked up his wine. "Sho' 'nuff a sad day startin early in this little town. Sho' 'nuff. "

  "Sho' 'nuff," said Mavis with a cackle like a stainless-steel hyena.

  Valerie Riordan

  Depression has a mortality rate of fifteen percent. Fifteen percent of all patients with major depression will take their own lives. Statistics. Hard numbers in a very squishy science. Fifteen percent. Dead.

  Val Riordan had been repeating the figures to herself since Theophilus Crowe had called, but it wasn't helping her feel any better about what Bess Leander had done. Val had never lost a patient before. And Bess Leander hadn't really been depressed, had she? Bess didn't fit into the fifteen percent.

  Val went to the office in the back of her house and pulled Bess Leander's file, then went back to the living room to wait for Constable Crowe. At least it was the local guy, not the county sheriffs. And she could always fall back on patient confidentiality. Truth was, she had no idea why Bess Leander might have hung herself. She had only seen Bess once, and then for only half an hour. Val had made the diagnosis, written the scrip, and collected a check for the full hour session. Bess had called in twice, talked for a few minutes, and Val had sent her a bill for the time rounded to the next quarter hour.

  Time was money. Val Riordan liked nice things.

  The doorbell rang, Westminster chimes. Val crossed the living room to the marble foyer. A thin tall figure was refracted through the door's beveled glass panels: Theophilus Crowe. Val had never met him, but she knew of him. Three of his ex-girlfriends were her patients. She opened the door.

  He was dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a gray shirt with black epaulets that might have been part of a uniform at one time. He was clean-shaven, with long sandy hair tied neatly into a ponytail. A good-looking guy in an Ichabod Crane sort of way. Val guessed he was stoned. His girlfriends had talked about his habits.

  "Dr. Riordan," he said. "Theo Crowe. " He offered his hand.

  She shook hands. "Everyone calls me Val," she said. "Nice to meet you. Come in. " She pointed to the living room.

  "Nice to meet you too," Theo said, almost as an afterthought. "Sorry about the circumstances. " He stood at the edge of the marble foyer, as if afraid to step on the white carpet.

  She walked past him and sat down on the couch. "Please," she said, pointing to one of a set of Hepplewhite chairs. "Sit. "

  He sat. "I'm not exactly sure why I'm here, except that Joseph Leander doesn't seem to know why Bess did it. "

  "No note?" Val asked.

  "No. Nothing. Joseph went downstairs for breakfast this morning and found her hanging in the dining room. "

  Val felt her stomach lurch. She had never really formed a mental picture of Bess Leander's death. It had been words on the phone until now. She looked away from Theo, looked around the room for something that would erase the picture.

  "I'm sorry," Theo said. "This must be hard for you. I'm just wondering if there was anything that Bess might have said in therapy that would give a clue. "

  Fifteen percent, Val thought. She said, "Most suicides don't leave a note. By the time they have gone that far into depression, they aren't interested in what happens after their death. They just want the pain to end. "

  Theo nodded. "Then Bess was depressed? Joseph said that she appeared to be getting better. "

  Val cast around her training for an answer. She hadn't really diagnosed Bess Leander, she had just prescribed what she thought would make Bess feel better. She said, "Diagnosis in psychiatry isn't always that exact, Theo. Bess Leander was a complex case. Without compromising doctor-patient confidentiality, I can tell you that Bess suffered from a borderline case of OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder. I was treating her for that. "

  Theo pulled a prescription bottle out of his shirt pocket and looked at the label. "Zoloft. Isn't that an anti-depressant? I only know because I used to date a woman who was on it. "

  Right, Val thought. Actually, you used to date at least three women who were on it. She said, "Zoloft is an SSRI like Prozac. It's prescribed for a number of conditions. With OCD the dosage is higher. " That's it, get clinical. Baffle him with clinical bullshit.

  Theo shook the bottle. "Could someone O. D. on it or something? I heard somewhere that people do crazy things sometimes on these drugs. "

  "That's not necessarily true. SSRIs like Zoloft are often prescribed to people with major depression. Fifteen percent of all depressed patients commit suicide. " There, she said it. "Antidepressants are a tool, along with talk therapy, that psychiatrists use to help patients. Sometimes the tools don't work. As with any therapy, a third get better, a third get worse, and a third stay the same. Antidepressants aren't a panacea. " But you treat them like they are, don't you, Val?

  "But you said that Bess Leander had OCD, not depression. "

  "Constable, have you ever had a stomachache and a runny nose at the same time?"

  "So you're saying she was depressed?"

  "Yes, she was depressed, as well as having OCD. "

  "And it couldn't have been the drugs?"

  "To be honest with you, I don't even know if she was taking the drug. Have you counted them?"

  "Uh, no. "

  "Patients don't always take their medicine. We don't order blood level tests for SSRIs. "

  "Right," Theo said. "I guess we'll know when they do the autopsy. "

  Another horrendous picture flashed in Val's mind: Bess Leander on an autopsy table. The viscera of medicine had always been too much for her. She stood.

  "I wish I could help you more, but to be honest, Bess Leander never gave me any indication that she was suicidal. " At least that was true.

  Theo took her cue and stood. "Well, thank you. I'm sorry to have bothered you. If you think of anything, you know, anything that I can tell Joseph that might make it easier on him. . . "

  "I'm sorry. That's all I know. " Fifteen percent. Fifteen percent. Fifteen percent.

  She led him to the door.

  He turned before leaving. "One more thing. Molly Michon is one of your patients, isn't she?"

  "Yes. Actually, she's a county patient, but I agreed to treat her at a reduced rate because all the county facilities are so far away. "

  "You might want to check on her. She attacked a guy at the Head of the Slug this morning. "

  "Is she in County?"

  "No, I took her home. She calmed down. "

  "Thank you, Constable. I'll call her. "

  "Well, then. I'll be going. "

  "Constable," she called after him. "Those pills you have - Zoloft isn't a recreational drug. "

  Theo stumbled on the steps, then composed himself. "Right, Doctor, I figured that out when I saw the body hanging in the dining room. I'll try not to eat the evidence. "

  "Good-bye," Val said. She closed the door behind him and burst into tears. Fifteen percent. She had fifteen hundred patients in Pine Cove on some form of antidepressant or another. Fifteen percent would be more than two hundred people dead. She couldn't do that. She wouldn't let an-other of her patients die because of her noninvolvement. If antidepressants wouldn't save them, then maybe she could.

  Three

  Theo

  Theophilus Crowe wrote bad free-verse poetry and played a jimbai drum while sitting on a rock by the ocean. He could play sixteen chords on the guitar and knew five Bob Dylan songs all the way through, allowing for a dampening buzz any time he had to play a ba
r chord. He had tried his hand at painting, sculpture, and pottery and had even played a minor part in the Pine Cove Little Theater's revival of Arsenic and Old Lace. In all these endeavors, he had experienced a meteoric rise to mediocrity and quit before total embarrassment and self-loathing set in. Theo was cursed with an artist's soul but no talent. He possessed the angst and the inspiration, but not the means to create.

  If there was any single thing at which Theo excelled, it was empathy. He always seemed to be able to understand someone's point of view, no matter how singular or farfetched, and in turn could convey it to others with a succinctness and clarity that he seldom found in expressing his own thoughts. He was a born mediator, a peacemaker, and it was this talent, after breaking up numerous fights at the Head of the Slug Saloon, that got Theo elected constable. That and heavy-handed endorsement of Sheriff John Burton.

  Burton was a hard-line right-wing politico who could spout law and order (accent on order) over brunch with the Rotarians, lunch with the NRA, and dinner with Mothers Against Drunk Drivers and wolf down dry banquet chicken like it was manna from the gods every time. He wore expensive suits, a gold Rolex, and drove a pearl-black Eldor-ado that shone like a starry night on wheels (rapt attention and copious coats of carnuba from the grunts in the county motor pool). He had been sheriff of San Junipero County for sixteen years, and in that time the crime rate had dropped steadily until it was the lowest, per capita, of any county in California. His endorsement of Theophilus Crowe, someone with no law enforcement experience, had come as more than somewhat of a surprise to the people of Pine Cove, especially since Theo's opponent was a retired Los Angeles policeman who'd put in a highly decorated five and twenty. What the people of Pine Cove did not know was that Sheriff Burton not only endorsed Theo, he had forced him to run in the first place.

  Theophilus Crowe was a quiet man, and Sheriff John Burton had his reasons for not wanting to hear a peep out of the little North County burg of Pine Cove, so when Theo walked into his little two-room cabin, he wasn't surprised to see a red seven blinking on his answering machine. He punched the button and listened to Burton's assistant insisting that he call right away - seven times. Burton never called the cell phone.

  Theo had come home to shower and ponder his meeting with Val Riordan. The fact that she had treated at least three of his ex-girlfriends bothered him. He wanted to try and figure out what the women had told her. Obviously, they'd mention that he got high occasionally. Well, more than occasionally. But like any man, it worried him that they might have said something about his sexual performance. For some reason, it didn't bother him nearly as much that Val Riordan think him a loser and a drug fiend as it did that she might think he was bad in the rack. He wanted to ponder the possibilities, think away the paranoia, but instead he dialed the sheriff's private number and was put right through.

  "What in the hell is the matter with you, Crowe? You stoned?"

  "No more than usual," Theo said. "What's the problem?"

  "The problem is you removed evidence from a crime scene. "

  "I did?" Talking to the sheriff could drain all of Theo's energy instantly. He fell into a beanbag chair that expectorated Styrofoam beads from a failing seam with a sigh. "What evidence? What scene?"

  "The pills, Crowe. The suicide's husband said you took the pills with you. I want them back at the scene in ten minutes. I want my men out of there in half an hour. The M. E. will do the autopsy this afternoon and this case will close by dinnertime, got it? Run-of-the-mill suicide. Obit page only. No news. You understand?"

  "I was just checking on her condition with her psychiatrist. See if there were any indications she might be suicidal. "

  "Crowe, you must resist the urge to play investigator or pretend that you are a law enforcement officer. The woman hung herself. She was de-pressed and she ended it all. The husband wasn't cheating, there was no money motive, and Mommy and Daddy weren't fighting. "

  "They talked to the kids?"

  "Of course they talked to the kids. They're detectives. They investigate things. Now get over there and get them out of North County. I'd send them over to get the pills from you, but I wouldn't want them to find your little victory garden, would you?"

  "I'm leaving now," Theo said.

  "This is the last I will hear of this," Burton said. He hung up.

  Theo hung up the phone, closed his eyes, and turned into a human puddle in the beanbag chair.

  Forty-one years old and he still lived like a college student. His books were stacked between bricks and boards, his bed pulled out of a sofa, his refrigerator was empty but for a slice of pizza going green, and the grounds around his cabin were overgrown with weeds and brambles. Behind the cabin, in the middle of a nest of blackberry vines, stood his victory garden: ten bushy marijuana plants, sticky with buds that smelled of skunk and spice. Not a day passed that he didn't want to plow them under and sterilize the ground they grew in. And not a day passed that he didn't work his way through the brambles and lovingly harvest the sticky green that would sustain his habit through the day.

  The researchers said that marijuana was only psychologically addictive. Theo had read all the papers. They only mentioned the night sweats and mental spiders of withdrawal in passing, as if they were no more unpleasant than a tetanus shot. But Theo had tried to quit. He'd wrung out three sets of sheets in one night and paced the cabin looking for distraction until he thought his head might explode, only to give up and suck the piquant smoke from his Sneaky Pete so he could find sleep. The researchers obvi-ously didn't get it, but Sheriff John Burton did. He understood Theo's weakness and held it over him like the proverbial sword. That Burton had his own Achilles' heel and more to lose from its discovery didn't seem to matter. Logically, Theo had him in a standoff. But emotionally, Burton had the upper hand. Theo was always the one to blink.

  He snatched Sneaky Pete off his orange crate coffee table and headed out the door to return Bess Leander's pills to the scene of the crime.

  Valerie

  Dr. Valerie Riordan sat at her desk, looking at the icons of her life: a tiny digital stock ticker that she would surreptitiously glance down at during appointments; a gold Mont Blanc desk set, the pens jutting from the jade base like the antennae of a goldbug; a set of bookends fashioned in the likenesses of Freud and Jung, bracing leather-bound copies of The Psychology of the Unconscious, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), The Interpretation of Dreams, and The Physician's Desk Reference; and a plaster-cast bust of Hippocrates that dispensed Post-it notes from the base. Hippocrates, that wily Greek who turned medicine from magic to science. The author of the famous oath that Val had uttered twenty years ago on that sunny summer day in Ann Arbor when she graduated from med school: "I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment, but I will never use it to injure or wrong them. I will not give poison to anyone though asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a plan. "

  The oath had seemed so silly, so antiquated then. What doctor, in their right mind, would give poison to a patient?

  "But in purity and in holiness I will guard my life and my art. "

  It had seemed so obvious and easy then. Now she guarded her life and her art with a custom security system and a Glock 9 mm. stashed in the nightstand.

  "I will not use the knife on sufferers from stone, but I will give place to such as are craftsmen therein. "

  She'd never had a problem with that part of the oath. She was loathe to use the knife. She'd gone into psychiatry because she couldn't handle the messy parts of medicine. Her father, a surgeon himself, had been only mildly disappointed. At least she was a doctor, of sorts. She'd done her internship and residency in a rehab center where movie stars and rock idols learned to be responsible by making their own beds, while Val distributed Valium like a flight attendant passing out peanuts. One wing of the Sunrise Center was druggies, the
other eating disorders. She preferred the eating disorders. "You haven't lived until you've force-fed minestrone to a supermodel through a tube," she told her father.

  "Into whatsoever houses I enter, I will do so to help the sick, keeping myself free from all intentional wrongdoing and harm, especially from fornication with woman or man, bond or free. "

  Well, abstinence from fornication hadn't been a problem, had it? She hadn't had sex since Richard left five years ago. Richard had given her the bust of Hippocrates as a joke, he said, but she'd put it on her desk just the same. She'd given him a statue of Blind Justice wearing a garter belt and fishnets the year before to display at his law office. He'd brought her here to this little village, passing up offers from corporate law firms to follow his dream of being a country lawyer whose daily docket would include disagreements over pig paternity or the odd pension dispute. He wanted to be Atticus Finch, Pudd'nhead Wilson, a Jimmy Stewart or Henry Fonda character who was paid in fresh-baked bread and baskets of avocados. Well, he'd gotten that part; Val's practice had supported them for most of their marriage. She'd be paying him alimony now if they'd actually divorced.

  Country lawyer indeed. He left her to go to Sacramento to lobby the California Coastal Commission for a consortium of golf course developers. His job was to convince the commission that sea otters and elephant seals would enjoy nothing better than to watch Japanese businessmen slice Titleists into the Pacific and that what nature needed was one long fairway from Santa Barbara to San Francisco (maybe sand traps at the Pismo and Carmel dunes). He carried a pocket watch, for Christ's sake, a gold chain with a jade fob carved into the shape of an endangered brown pelican. He played his front-porch, rocking-chair-wise, country lawyer against their Botany 500 sophistication and pulled down over two hundred grand a year in the bargain. He lived with one of his clerks, an earnest doe-eyed Stanfordite with surfer girl hair and a figure that mocked gravity. Richard had introduced Val to the girl (Ashley, or Brie, or Jordan) and it had been oh-so-adult and oh-so-gracious and later, when Val called Richard to clear up a tax matter, she asked, "So how'd you screen the candidates, Richard? First one to suck-start your Lexus?"

  "Maybe we should start thinking about making our separation official," Richard had said.

  Val had hung up on him. If she couldn't have a happy marriage, she'd have everything else. Everything. And so had begun her revolving door policy of hustling appointments, prescribing the appropriate meds, and shopping for clothes and antiques.

  Hippocrates glowered at her from the desk.

  "I didn't intentionally do harm," Val said. "Not intentionally, you old buggerer. Fifteen percent of all depressives commit suicide, treated or not. "

  "Whatsoever in the course of practice I see or hear (or even outside my practice in social intercourse) that ought never to be published abroad, I will not divulge, but consider such things to be holy secrets. "

  "Holy secrets or do no harm?" Val asked, envisioning the hanging body of Bess Leander with a shudder. "Which is it?" Hippocrates sat on his Post-its, saying nothing. Was Bess Leander's death her fault? If she had talked to Bess instead of put her on antidepressants, would that have saved her? It was possible, and it was also possible that if she kept to her policy of a "pill for every problem," someone else was going to die. She couldn't risk it. If using talk therapy instead of drugs could save one life, it was worth a try.

  Val grabbed the phone and hit the speed dial button that connected her to the town's only pharmacy, Pine Cove Drug and Gift.

  One of the clerks answered. Val asked to speak to Winston Krauss, the pharmacist. Winston was one of her patients. He was fifty-three, unmarried, and eighty pounds overweight. His holy secret, which he shared with Val during a session, was that he had an unnatural sexual fascination with marine mammals, dolphins in particular. He'd confessed that he'd never been able to watch "Flipper" without getting an erection and that he'd watched so many Jacques Cousteau specials that a French accent made him break into a sweat. He kept an anatomically correct inflatable porpoise, which he violated nightly in his bathtub. Val had cured him of wearing a scuba mask and snorkel around the house, so gradually the red gasket ring around his face had cleared up, but he still did the dolphin nightly and confessed it to her once a month.

  "Winston, Val Riordan here. I need a favor. "

  "Sure, Dr. Val, you need me to deliver something to Molly? I heard she went off in the Slug this morning. " Gossip surpassed the speed of light in Pine Cove.

  "No, Winston, you know that company that carries all the look-alike placebos? We used them in college. I need you to order look-alikes for all the antidepressants I prescribe: Prozac, Zoloft, Serzone, Effexor, the whole bunch, all the dosages. Order in quantity. "

  "I don't get it, Val, what for?"

  Val cleared her throat. "I want you to fill all of my prescriptions with the placebos. "

  "You're kidding. "

  "I'm not kidding, Winston. As of today, I don't want a single one of my patients getting the real thing. Not one. "

  "Are you doing some sort of experiment? Control group or something?"

  "Something like that. "

  "And you want me to charge them the normal price?"

  "Of course. Our usual arrangement. " Val got a twenty percent kickback from the pharmacy. She was going to be working a lot harder, she deserved to get paid.

  Winston paused. She could hear him going through the glass door into the back of the pharmacy. Finally he said, "I can't do that, Val. That's unethical. I could lose my license, go to jail. "

  Val had really hoped it wouldn't come to this. "Winston, you'll do it. You'll do it or the Pine Cove Gazette will run a front-page story about you being a fish-fucker. "

  "That's illegal. You can't divulge something I told you in therapy. "

  "Quit telling me what's illegal, Winston. I'm married to a lawyer. "

  "I'd really rather not do this, Val. Can't you send them down to the Thrifty Mart in San Junipero? I could say that I can't get the pills anymore. "

  "That wouldn't work, would it, Winston? The people at the Thrifty Mart don't have your little problem. "

  "You're going to have some withdrawal reactions. How are you going to explain that?"

  "Let me worry about that. I'm quadrupling my sessions. I want to see these people get better, not mask their problems. "

  "This is about Bess Leander's suicide, isn't it?"

  "I'm not going to lose another one, Winston. "

  "Antidepressants don't increase the incidence of suicide or violence. Eli Lilly proved that in court. "

  "Yes and O. J. walked. Court is one thing, Winston, the reality of losing a patient is another. I'm taking charge of my practice. Now order the pills. I'm sure the profit margin is going to be quite a bit higher on sugar pills than it is on Prozac. "

  "I could go to the Florida Keys. There's a place down there where they let you swim with bottlenose dolphins. "

  "You can't go, Winston. You can't miss your therapy sessions. I want to see you at least once a week. "

  "You bitch. "

  "I'm trying to do the right thing. What day is good for you?"

  "I'll call you back. "

  "Don't push me, Winston. "

  "I have to make this order," he said. Then, after a second, he said, "Dr. Val?"

  "What?"

  "Do I have to go off the Serzone?"

  "We'll talk about it in therapy. " She hung up and pulled a Post-it out of Hippocrates' chest.

  "Now if I keep this oath, and break it not, may I enjoy honor, in my life and art, among all men for all time; but if I transgress and forswear myself, may the opposite befall me. "

  Does that mean dishonor for all time? she wondered. I'm just trying to do the right thing here. Finally.

  She made a not
e to call Winston back and schedule his appointments.