The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove

ya'lllookin 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, Mavisthought, 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 likemildew, 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 turnyour 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 toherself 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