"Christopher Moore - The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moore Christopher)

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