The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove - By Christopher Moore Page 0,42

Fights? Joseph coming home late? Anything?"

"I told you before. I can't talk about it."

Theo took a dollar out of his pocket and slid it across the table. "Take this."

"Why?"

"I want you to be my therapist. I want the same patient confidentiality that you're giving Bess Leander. Even though that privilege isn't supposed to extend beyond the grave. I'm hiring you as my therapist."

"For a dollar? I'm not a lawyer, Constable Crowe. I don't have to accept you as a patient. And payment has nothing to do with it." Val was willing him to go away. She had tried to bend people to her will since she was a child. She'd spoken to her therapist about it during her residency. Go away.

"Fine, take me as a patient. Please."

"I'm not taking any new patients."

"One session, thirty seconds long. I'm your patient. I promise you'll want to hear what I have to say in session."

"Theo, have you ever addressed, well, your substance abuse problem?" It was a snotty and unprofessional thing to say, but Crowe wasn't exactly being professional either.

"Does that mean I'm your patient?"

"Sure, okay, thirty seconds."

"Last night I saw Joseph Leander engaging in sexual relations with a young woman in the park." Theo folded his hands and sat back. "Your thoughts?"

Jenny couldn't believe she'd heard it right. She hadn't meant to, she was just delivering an English muffin when the gossip bomb hit her unprepared. Bess Leander, not even cold in the grave, and her straitlaced Presbyterian husband was doing it with some bimbo in the park? She paused as if checking her tables, waited for a second, then slid the muffin in front of Theo.

"Can I bring you anything else?"

"Not right now," Theo said.

Jenny looked at Val Riordan and decided that whatever she needed right now was not on the menu. Val was sitting there wide-eyed, as if someone had slapped her with a dead mackerel. Jenny backed away from the table. She couldn't wait for Betsy to come in to relieve her for the lunch shift. Betsy always waited on Joseph Leander when he came in the cafe and made comments about him being the only guy with two children who had never been laid. She'd be blown away.

Betsy, of course, already knew.

Gabe

Gabe tied Skinner up outside and entered the cafe to find all the tables oc-cupied. He spotted Theophilus Crowe sitting at a four-top with a woman that he didn't know. Gabe debated inviting himself to their table, then de-cided it would be better to approach Theo under the pretense of a rat news update and hope for an invitation.

Gabe pulled his laptop out of his shoulder bag as he approached the table.

"Theo, you won't believe what I found out last night."

Theo looked up. "Hi, Gabe. Do you know Val Riordan? She's our local psychiatrist."

Gabe offered his hand to the woman and she took it without looking away from his muddy boots. "Sorry," Gabe said. "I've been in the field all day. Nice to meet you."

"Gabe's a biologist. He has a lab up at the weather station."

Gabe was feeling uncomfortable now. The woman hadn't said a word. She was attractive in a made-up sort of way, but she seemed a little out of things, stunned perhaps. "I'm sorry to interrupt. We can talk later, Theo."

"No, sit down. You don't mind, do you, Val? We can finish our session later. I think I still have twenty seconds on the books."

"That's fine," Val said, seeming to come out of her haze.

"Maybe you'll be interested in this," Gabe said. He slipped into an empty chair and pushed his laptop in front of Val. "Look at this." Like many sci-entists, Gabe was oblivious to the fact that no one gave a rat's ass about research unless it could be expressed in terms of dollars.

"Green dots?" Val said.

"No, those are rats."

"Funny, they look like green dots."

"This is a topographical map of Pine Cove. These are my tagged rats. See the divergence? These ten that didn't move the other night when the others did?"

Val looked to Theo for an explanation.

"Gabe tracks rats with microchips in them," Theo said.

"It's only one of the things I do. Mostly, I count dead things on the beach."

"Fascinating work," Val said with no attempt to hide her contempt.

"Yeah, it's great," Gabe said. Then to Theo, "Anyway, these ten rats didn't move with the others."

"Right, you told me this. You thought they might be dead."

"They weren't, at least the six of them that I found weren't. It wasn't death that