Cahill looked like a man who could bench-press my car. His muscles rippled under his tailored business shirt like the surface of the ocean. I don’t know whether they were moving or I was just swooning from my trek.
His office was furnished identically to Lorber’s, right down to pictures on the wall of himself standing outside of various Burgerville restaurants across the country. The only difference was a Lucite paperweight on his desk with a butterfly in it.
“It’s good to meet you, Mr. Monk,” Cahill said, offering Monk his hand. “I want to help you any way I can in your investigation.”
I gave Monk a disinfectant wipe before he had a chance to ask for it. I was eager to please after our little tiff.
“I can assure you my hands are clean,” Cahill said with a smile. “In every respect.”
“It sounds like you’re honing your denial skills for the trial,” I said. “The smile might just work on the jury.”
“I didn’t murder Brandon Lorber,” Cahill said. “I was at a Burgerville opening in Chula Vista.”
“Lorber was killed by a professional hit man,” Monk said. “An alibi doesn’t clear you as the one who hired him. But I believe my assistant was referring to the criminal trial for all the fiscal shenanigans here.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Cahill said.
People said that a lot around Monk.
In the context of a murder investigation, it was usually a lie.
In the context of observing one of Monk’s rules about things, like the proper way to rake leaves, it was the truth.
But we weren’t talking about raking leaves. We were talking about raking in cash and committing a murder to hide it.
“Then you are one terrible CFO,” I said. “The police forensic accountants have put you under an electron microscope. We know all about the overpriced buy-out of franchises that were secretly owned by Lorber’s brother-in-law and the pillaging of the marketing fund, among other things. It’s your job to know where the money is going around here, isn’t it?”
“What I meant to say was that I wasn’t involved in any financial irregularities,” Cahill said. “It was all Brandon’s doing. He manipulated the figures I was given, he lied to me, and he paid off my subordinates to feed me inaccurate information. I was shocked by the extent of his criminal activities, which is why I’ve been cooperating fully with the Justice Department for the last few months.”
Monk walked over to Cahill’s desk and examined the shredder.
“So you’re going to blame all the shenanigans on Lorber when the crimes here become public,” Monk said. “I can understand why you would. Lorber won’t be here to defend himself or to point the finger at you instead.”
“Lorber takes the fall, you take the company,” I said. “His murder has worked out well for you.”
Cahill started to speak, but Monk interrupted him.
“Nice shredder,” Monk said. “May I try it?”
“Go ahead,” Cahill said and pointed his finger at me. There appeared to be more muscles in his finger than in my leg. “You think I’m coming out of this unscathed? I’m going to be pilloried in the press. I’m going to lose millions of dollars in stocks and everything I had in the employee pension plan.”
Monk took a piece of blank notepaper off of Cahill’s desk and fed it into the shredder, which spit it out in tiny strips. Cahill pointed to the shreds with his big finger.
“That might as well be my future as a CFO,” Cahill said, “unless I can somehow save this company. But the odds aren’t in my favor.”
Monk took two of the shreds, held them up to the light, then dropped the strips back in the trash.
“It could be worse,” Monk said. “You could be going to jail.”
“Not likely,” Cahill replied. “I have immunity from prosecution in return for my testimony.”
“I’m sure that immunity doesn’t extend to murder,” Monk said.
“If you’re looking for someone with a motive to kill Brandon, you don’t have to look any further than his own house,” Cahill said. “His wife gets everything, and now that Brandon is dead, nobody can take it from her. If he was alive, he would have been prosecuted and his assets would have been seized. She’d have lost the Pacific Heights mansion, the yacht, the Gulfstream, the house in Hawaii, the house in Vail, and the his-and-hers matching silver Bentleys. She would have had to go back to strutting her surgically sculpted ass on the catwalk.”
“She was a model?” I asked.
“She was a stripper,” Cahill said. “Brandon met her in a Dallas strip club fifteen years ago and left his wife for her. She was a gold digger. She has very expensive tastes, which I doubt Brandon would have been able to afford once the government got through with him.”
“Do you think she’d kill to keep it?” I asked.
“She loves her Bentley a hell of a lot more than she loved him,” Cahill said. “Gold diggers don’t stick around once the gold is gone. They go looking for a new place to dig.”
“I don’t know why people would pay to see someone take off their clothes,” Monk said as we went back down the stairs. I could have told him, but he didn’t give me the chance. “I would pay a naked person to put their clothes on.”
Now that was interesting. “Would you watch them do it?”
“I wouldn’t even be in the same zip code,” Monk said. “And I would still cover my eyes.”
“Then what is it you’d be paying for?”
“Peace of mind,” Monk said. “I would know that there’s one less naked person in the world.”
“I didn’t know nudity was a big problem,” I said.
“Huge,” Monk said. “Bigger than global warming.”
“Maybe they’re taking off their clothes because it’s getting so warm.”
But I could tell from the contemplative look on his face that my flip remark wasn’t going to put an end to his musing on this issue.
“Why would someone marry a naked person?” he asked.
This was like having a conversation with my daughter. She was always asking me weird questions that weren’t so easy to answer. Not too long ago, she asked why we couldn’t put sick people to sleep like dogs. My daughter is very pragmatic when it comes to death, which scares me a bit, since she’s likely to be the one taking care of me in my old age.
I answered Monk the way I would have answered Julie if she’d asked me the same question.
“Everybody is a naked person,” I said.
“I’m not naked,” Monk said.
“Not now,” I said. “But you can’t be dressed at every moment.”
“Of course you can,” Monk said.
“At some point during the day even you have to take your clothes off, Mr. Monk.”
“No, I don’t.”
“How’s that possible?”
“It’s required in a civilized society. You’re supposed to dress and undress in stages,” Monk said. “You always leave one piece of clothing on at all times throughout the process. Didn’t you read the manual?”
“What manual?”
“The one my mother gave me and that your mother gave to you, of course,” Monk said. “You might want to brush up on your skills by reading the revised edition that you gave Julie. A lot of things have changed since you and I were kids.”
“I didn’t give Julie a manual.”
Monk looked at me in horror. “What kind of mother are you? You’d better get one before child protective services finds out.”
His mother gave him a manual for dressing? She must have written it herself. I thought it would be fascinating and more than a little horrifying to read.
“Maybe I could borrow your family’s copy,” I said.
“I wish you could,” Monk said, “but it’s long gone.”
“What happened to it?”
“Trudy asked to read it once,” Monk said. “I haven’t seen it since. It’s a mystery.”
It wasn’t to me.
If I’d been Monk’s wife, and loved him as much as she did, I know what I’d have done with that manual. I’d have burned it. I wondered if it was really such a mystery to Monk, who had solved much more complicated riddles than that.
“So if you don’t ever completely undress,” I said, “how do you shower?”
Monk blushed. “Don’t you think you’re getting a little personal? I’m your boss, after all. You shouldn’t be thinking about me in the shower.”
“I’m not,” I said.
“I don’t even want to think about me in the shower,” he said.
Monk stopped at the fifth floor, took a deep breath for courage, and dashed out. For him, being on an odd-numbered floor was like walking on a rope bridge over a deep gorge, so he must have had a good reason for doing it.
I followed after him to Lorber’s office.
“What are we doing here?” I asked.
“Conducting an important test,” Monk said.
He took a piece of blank paper from Lorber’s desk and fed it into the shredder.
“If you’re trying to figure out which machine the shredded document came from, you can forget it,” I said. “The shredder in here is identical to the one in Cahill’s office.”
“No two shredders are identical,” he said.
“It’s the same brand, the same model, and the same blades.”
“That’s where you’re wrong.” Monk picked up two shreds and held them up to the light. “They get dull and chipped in different places. All it takes is one document with a staple in it to put an almost imperceptible groove in the edge of a blade.”
“Almost imperceptible?” I said. “You’d need a microscope to see it.”
“I can see it,” Monk said.
“You can?”
Monk dropped the shreds back in the trash. “The shredded document came from Cahill’s office. I just wanted to double-check.”
“So he knew exactly what was going on and instead of going straight to the authorities, he shredded the evidence,” I said. “He’s a liar.”
“Most murderers usually are,” Monk said.
“Is he one?”
“I don’t know,” Monk said. “Yet.”
I admired the unshakable confidence behind the way Monk said “yet.” In every case he investigated, there was never any doubt in his mind that he would find the killer.
There was just one exception, and it was the case that mattered the most to him.
Trudy’s murder.
I looked forward to the day that changed.
22
Mr. Monk and the House of Horrors
I’m not sure why people draw a distinction between so-called old money and new money. Money is money. Either you have it or you don’t. It’s how you spend it that counts.
I know from personal experience what it’s like to be rich and poor. I came from a very wealthy family that made their fortune in the toothpaste business.
“Everybody has teeth and they don’t want to lose them,” my grandfather used to say. “It’s the most secure business on earth.”
It was a business my grandfather almost lost after it was revealed that he’d laced the original formula for his toothpaste with sugar to appeal to his customers’ “sweet tooth,” thus hastening their dental decay. The business miraculously recovered from the scandal, diversified, and thrived, becoming the global conglomerate that it is today.
I had whatever I wanted when I was growing up exceptmaybe a little insecurity. My life was too safe, too pampered, too restricted.
I know what you’re thinking: oh, boo-hoo for the rich girl. Believe it or not, money isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. Not only does money not buy you happiness, but it doesn’t necessarily give you freedom either. Sure, you have freedom from the fear of starvation or homelessness. But when everything comes easy, and you live in a rarefied world, it doesn’t really feel like you’re living.
So I rebelled. I disavowed my family’s money and I eloped with a man who was rich in character but cash poor. It was the happiest time of my life, and I have Julie to always remind me of it.
I’ve been struggling financially ever since. It’s no treat being a single mother. It would be easier to just give in and take my father’s money, but then I wouldn’t be surviving on my own, and what lesson would my daughter take from that? And I wouldn’t have met Monk, and my life would be considerably less unpredictable and exciting.
Knowing what it is to be rich and poor means that I’m not impressed by wealth or the people who have it. Monk isn’t either, but for entirely different reasons. He’s socially illiterate. He’s unaware of the deference, envy, and feelings of inferiority that are expected of you by those who have more money than you do.
In fact, Monk didn’t know the appropriate behavior in any situation. He made his own rules and was surprised when nature and humankind didn’t follow them.
So neither Monk nor I was intimidated by Brandon Lorber’s Victorian mansion in Pacific Heights and its commanding, IMAX view of the Golden Gate, Marin County, and Alcatraz Island.
Pacific Heights has been the Mount Olympus of San Francisco’s elite since the 1800s. Merchants and robber barons flush with their gold, sugar, and railroad riches needed a high place where they could live above the riffraff they exploited and be certain that everyone could see the monuments to their success.
That’s still true today, whether your money is old or new or just on paper.
Stottlemeyer and Disher, being poorly paid civil servants, would have been uneasy around so much money and power, which is probably why they opted to let us see Veronica Lorber on our own. I think the captain believed that a black-sheep rich girl and a socially clueless detective would be more effective with the widow Lorber than they would be. Money and influence are kryptonite for people whose livelihoods depend on the whims of politicians.
So I parked at the cul-de-sac at the end of Broadway, where the street met the lush forest of the Presidio and the top of the Baker steps that led down to the Marina District.
I saw two painters with their easels standing at the top of the Baker Street steps facing the spectacular view. One artist was painting a picture of the bay, the other was painting the painter who painted the bay.
I looked over my shoulder as we walked to the Lorber mansion to see if maybe there was someone else above us perhaps painting a picture of a painter painting a picture of a painter painting the bay. I bet you can’t say that four times fast.
There were two stone lions, each with one paw on a stone ball, on either side of the Lorbers’ front gate. Monk was troubled by this; he liked the symmetry of the matching lions but felt they should have a ball under each paw.
He didn’t say that, but I could tell. I’d been with Monk a long time. And like I said before, he’s not real good about hiding his feelings.
I wasn’t wild about the lions either. Lots of rich people had them and I had no idea what they were supposed to symbolize. Why lions? And why did they have their paws on stone balls?
Mr. Monk in Outer Space Page 20
