by Lee Goldberg
“That could take weeks,” I said. “And that’s assuming we could even get access to those files.”
“Nick can. He’s got all kind of sources in the department who talk to him when they shouldn’t,” Stottlemeyer said. “He’s also in a perfect position to scrutinize the background of every member of the Dorchester staff, if he’s willing to do it.”
“He will,” I said.
“But what can I do?” Monk asked.
“What you do best,” Stottlemeyer said.
“Which is what?”
“Be yourself,” Stottlemeyer said. “If the clues are out there, you’ll see them, if you haven’t already.”
“If I’ve seen the clues,” Monk said, “why don’t I have the solution?”
“I don’t understand the way you think, Monk. It gives me a headache to even try. But I know you see and hear more than you think you do,” Stottlemeyer said. “My guess is that all those details are swirling around in your head like a million pixels waiting to combine into a picture.”
Maybe a few of them were in my head, too, which was why I got that ticklish feeling about the ten years between Steve Wurzel’s disappearance and Peschel’s death.
“I hope you’re right,” Monk said.
“I’m not hoping,” Stottlemeyer said. “I’m counting on it.”
“I wish you wouldn’t,” Monk said. “I don’t work well under pressure.”
“Think of the pressure I’m under,” Stottlemeyer said. “I’m wearing a jumpsuit with three Velcro strips.”
Monk rose from his chair. “You’re right. What was I thinking? No suffering of mine can compare to the living hell that you are enduring. Your misery is my misery until this ordeal is over.”
“That’s the spirit,” Stottlemeyer said.
I called Danielle on our way out of the jail and asked her to get some operatives to take a look at any old cases that might have involved Peschel.
She had some information to give us on the Wurzels but I told her to give us the briefing at Monk’s apartment. I wanted to give her hell but not over the phone and definitely not at Intertect.
As soon as we got back, Monk hurried to the bathroom to give his hands a quick rinse. Danielle showed up about twenty-five minutes later, so I figured we had at least five more minutes to ourselves before he was finished washing his hands.
That was more than enough time for me to cut off her head and hand it to her, figuratively speaking, of course.
“We need to talk,” I said, echoing both Slade and my father. I thought about adding “young lady,” but it would have made me feel even older in comparison to her. “I thought we had an understanding.”
“I haven’t sent any more files over,” she said, stiffening up defensively. She was bracing for an attack and she was going to get one.
“I’m talking about trust,” I said. “When we first met, you told me that you worked for Mr. Monk first, Nick second, and that we never had to worry about your loyalty.”
“That’s right,” she said. “I meant it, too.”
“It’s not enough to say it, Danielle. You have to actually follow through.”
“I have,” she said.
“We ran into Nick at the Dorchester Hotel. He knew that Mr. Monk and I met with Phil Atwater in Mill Valley,” I said. “I can think of only one way he could have known about that.”
She loosened up, seemingly relieved, which was not the reaction I was expecting. “That’s because you don’t know about the tracker.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Each car in the Intertect fleet is equipped with a GPS locator unit,” she said. “It’s just like the ones that trucking companies install on their big rigs so they can keep track of their freight at all times.”
It gave me the creeps. “Intertect keeps its operatives under surveillance?”
She shook her head. “Every operative knows that there is a locator on their cars. Nick says it’s for our own safety and security. We’re in a dangerous line of work. If we get into trouble, Intertect can always send backup to our last-known location or, if we disappear from the grid, they can even backtrack where we’ve been for the last few weeks and retrace our steps.”
“Are our phones tapped, too?”
“Of course not,” she said. “Watching you isn’t the point. It’s about keeping our people safe.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Does Intertect log your keystrokes on your computer?”
“Yes,” she said. “But it’s not what you think.”
“What I think is that I am never using a computer or a phone at Intertect.”
“The company takes these measures for your protection and to guarantee that if you are killed in the course of your work, your investigation doesn’t die with you.”
“That’s cold,” I said.
“That’s pragmatic,” she said.
“So Nick knows where we’ve been and any research work that you’ve done for us.”
“I don’t know if he does or not, but if he wanted to, the information is readily available to him from his computer. Is there any reason you wouldn’t want him to know what we’ve been doing?”
“I cherish my privacy and Mr. Monk’s.”
“Welcome to corporate America in the digital age,” she said. “Intertect isn’t any different from any other big company as far as keeping tabs on the activity of its employees.”
“Do you have a personal computer that wasn’t supplied by Intertect?”
“Yes,” she replied. “My laptop.”
“From now on, I want you to use only that for any work you do for Mr. Monk,” I said. “If we want Nick to know what we are doing, we’ll tell him.”
I wasn’t willing to give up my nice Lexus just because it spied on me. But now I knew how all those female Russian spies and SPECTRE agents felt when they slept with James Bond.
“Trust works both ways,” Danielle said. “I need to know you’re going to give me the benefit of the doubt instead of immediately assuming that I’ve betrayed you in some way.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I’m sorry. You’ve done great work. Mr. Monk is very impressed with you.”
“What about you?”
“You make me feel old and inadequate.” I said it without even thinking and shocked myself with the truth of it.
“You’re joking,” she said.
“I wish I were,” I said.
“I meant what I told you at Intertect,” Danielle said. “You and Mr. Monk are a team. You don’t realize just how experienced an investigator you really are. You could hold your own with any of our operatives.”
That was when Monk walked into the room. “There’s nothing quite as refreshing as washing your hands, brushing your teeth, irrigating your nasal passages, cleaning inside your ears, and flushing your eyes. I’m ready to take on the world.”
It seemed to me that Monk took on the world every time he walked out his front door. The world usually won.
“I have the information that you asked for on Linda Wurzel,” Danielle said, handing me a photograph.
“What about Dalberg Enterprises?” I asked, glancing at the picture.
Wurzel was tall and thin and wearing a blue pantsuit Hil lary Clinton would have loved and a necklace of big pearls that reminded me of Wilma Flintstone’s bling. Her unnaturally alert eyes, sharp jawline, sculpted nose, fish lips, bronze tan, and drum-tight brow suggested to me she’d had more than a few intimate encounters in a tanning bed with Mr. Botox, Mr. Collagen, and Mr. Scalpel.
“Linda Wurzel is Dalberg Enterprises,” Danielle said. “Dalberg is her maiden name. She was in real estate before she met her husband and his wealth allowed her to considerably enlarge her property portfolio.”
“So she’s the one who bought Peschel’s building,” I said. “Not her husband.”
“Yes,” Danielle said. “Though I don’t know how involved her husband was after their marriage in her real estate speculation. He might have provide
d more than just money. Since her husband’s death, she sits on the board of InTouchSpace and devotes the rest of her attention, and a considerable chunk of her wealth, to various philanthropic and arts organizations.”
“Where can we find her?” I asked.
“Mr. Slade made us promise to stay out of the Peschel investigation,” Monk said.
“He asked us to,” I said. “We didn’t promise. And this isn’t about the Peschel case, this is about Braddock’s murder.”
“I don’t see the connection,” Monk said.
“They are both dead, Captain Stottlemeyer is in jail, and I had a tickle.” I turned to Danielle. “So, where is Linda Wurzel?”
“She has an office downtown and an estate in Sea Cliff,” Danielle said. “And three days a week she has a standing appointment at JoAnne’s. She has one today.”
“Is that her psychiatrist?” Monk asked.
“Her beautician,” Danielle said. “JoAnne has a very exclusive salon in Chinatown.”
“That’s the last neighborhood I’d expect someone in her social class to go for manicure and a facial.” Chinatown was a historic neighborhood and popular tourist attraction, filled with tacky gift shops and great restaurants, but it wasn’t exactly known for trend-setting style. At least I thought it wasn’t.
“JoAnne’s is the place to go for the latest beauty treatments,” Danielle said. “All the socialites, heiresses, and debu tantes go there, as well as every actress and model north of LA, south of Seattle, and west of Santa Fe.”
“It’s that good?” I asked.
“That’s what all the magazines say,” Danielle replied. “I wish I could afford it. Geisha facials start at two hundred and fifty dollars and garra rufa pedicures can cost as much as two hundred.”
Thank God for Slade’s credit card.
“I suddenly feel the need to beautify myself,” I said. “How about you, Mr. Monk?”
“I just washed my hands, brushed my teeth, irrigated my nasal passages, cleaned my ears, and flushed my eyes,” Monk said. “I don’t see how you could improve on that without being hosed down and decontaminated by a certified hazardous materials team.”
“You’re about to find out,” I said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Mr. Monk and the Geisha Facial
Whenever friends of mine from out of town come to visit, they always want me to take them to Fisherman’s Wharf and Chinatown.
Fisherman’s Wharf has lost all of its authentic charm and become a low-end shopping center with a Fisherman’s Wharf theme. But I take my friends there anyway and reward myself for my sacrifice with a loaf of fresh, hot sourdough bread at Boudin, which is no longer the simple bakery that it once was, either. Taking its cue from the rest of the neighborhood, Boudin has become a massive attraction, complete with tour, two restaurants, and a gift shop.
It’s depressing.
But Chinatown is still pretty much the real thing, a distinct city within a city. I don’t wait until out-of-town friends show up to go there. It’s one of my favorite places.
There are lots of ways into Chinatown, but tourists always want to go through the pagoda-style, three-arched gate on Grant Avenue and Bush Street that’s adorned with ornamental dragons, carps, and lions. It’s a manufactured photo op built in 1970 and draws a clear line between the Union Square shopping district and the main street of Chinatown.
I avoid the gate for exactly that reason and I usually wander in from the opposite end of Grant Street.
Visually, Chinatown is nothing like China. It’s an American backdrop dressed up with Chinese stuff, sort of the urban equivalent of decorating a Ramada Inn banquet room with surfboards, piles of sand, suntan lotion, and seashells for a party with a beach theme. Red lanterns are strewn across streets with names like Stockton and Sacramento. Pagoda cornices, green tiles, and colorful Chinese signage are affixed to the kind of standard Edwardian stone and concrete buildings found on any Main Street in America.
But even so, it’s the real deal. There are twenty thousand Chinese people living in the neighborhood, so you’ll find some uniquely Chinese touches that will transport you, if not to China, at least to somewhere away from the familiar.
There are pagoda-styled streetlights supported by twin golden dragons whose tails twine around the poles. You won’t find that in your housing tract. In the windows of meat markets and grocery stories, you’ll see turtles, ducks, squid, pigs, and eels ready for the dinner table. You won’t find that at your neighborhood Safeway.
When you walk the streets you’ll hear a cacophony of Chinese, from people talking and yelling, movie clips playing loudly in DVD shops, and music blaring from the stores, apartments, and car radios.
And you’ll smell incense mingling with the luscious aroma of Chinese food being fried, grilled, boiled, and steamed in the countless bakeries, restaurants, and tearooms.
Chinatown is a complete sensory experience.
I like letting myself be pushed by the flow of tourists down Grant Street because it takes me past the scores of gift shops that are spilling out onto the sidewalks with things like silk ties, back scratchers, prayer wheels, Buddha statues, chop-sticks, porcelain figurines, teapots, T-shirts, pottery, sandals, wind chimes, pot holders, mah-jongg sets, bells, Hello Kitty pillows and bootleg Versace bags.
Monk hates Chinatown, of course, for all the reasons I love it. He becomes overwhelmed by the disorganization, the disarray, and the lack of symmetry. For him, it’s anarchy.
So rather than inflict Grant Street on him, I parked on the western periphery of Chinatown and we walked down one of the less busy and ornamented streets to JoAnne’s, an unassuming storefront tucked between a dim sum restaurant and a laundry.
The simple sign on the salon read, JOANNE’S, beneath what I assumed was the same thing written in much larger Chinese script. Elaborate drapes, decorated with pagodas, wa terfalls, dragons, and carp, were closed over the windows, so it wasn’t possible to peek inside. But from the outside, the salon didn’t look to me like the epicenter of chic for skin and nail treatments.
I opened the door and we stepped inside.
Based on the facade, inside I expected to see a drab neighborhood nail salon full of wizened old Chinese women sitting in torn vinyl chairs.
I was half-right.
The old Chinese women were there, but so were women of all ages, sizes, races, and ethnicities. They all wore white terry-cloth robes and sat in retro-futuristic chairs made of black leather and chrome. Their faces were being slathered with white cream and their fingernails were being buffed like sports cars by beautiful, slender young Chinese stylists with incredibly smooth skin, identical short haircuts, and one-piece white uniforms that resembled a lab coat on top and a miniskirt on the bottom.
The stylists looked so much alike that they might have been androids manufactured from a single mold.
The place resembled a nightclub more than a salon. The floors were black marble, the walls were gleaming white, and the curved-edge counters were stainless steel and it was all bathed in an otherworldly blue glow from ambient LED lighting.
“I like it here,” Monk said.
I wasn’t surprised. The stylists all looked alike and the customers, with the white face cream and matching robes, did, too. The interior was shiny and clean and the ambient light was the same blue as toilet bowl cleaner.
I spotted Linda Wurzel in the back of the salon. She didn’t have cream on her face or I might not have recognized her from a distance. She was wearing a robe and sitting in a chair in front of an ankle-high aquarium on the floor. It wasn’t until we got closer that I realized that her feet were actually in the aquarium and that there were several other women nearby sitting with their feet in individual fish tanks, too.
Dozens of tiny brown fish swarmed around her feet as if they were devouring them.
“Excuse me, Mrs. Wurzel?”
She looked up at me with those unnaturally alert eyes. “Yes?”
“I’m sor
ry to disturb you. I’m Natalie Teeger and this is Adrian Monk.”
She glanced at Monk, whose gaze was fixed on her feet.
“The famous detective? The one who solved the murder of those two judges?”
“That’s him,” I said.
“You work with Nick Slade,” she said.
“You know him?”
“I’ve bumped into him at the InTouchSpace Invitational Golf Tournament,” she said. “He was one of our many early investors. What can I do for you?”
“You could take your feet out of that aquarium,” Monk said.
“It’s not an aquarium,” she said. “I’m getting a pedicure. The fish are eating the dead skin on my feet.”
“Piranha!” Monk yelled.
He grabbed her legs under the knees and yanked her feet out of the water.
Her chair tipped over backwards but I caught it before she fell.
Linda Wurzel yelped in surprise and slapped his hands, drawing stares from everyone in the room.
“Let go of me,” she said.
Monk did. “Are you insane? You’re lucky you still have feet.”
“I appreciate your concern for me, Mr. Monk, but they aren’t piranha; they are garra rufa, which means ‘doctor fish,’” she said. “They’re harmless carp.”
“They aren’t harmless if they are gnawing on your flesh,” Monk said. I have to admit I was with Monk on this one.
“They’re only eating the dead skin,” she said, and dipped her feet back in, causing Monk to gasp. I wasn’t too comfortable with it, either. “It’s a painless and totally natural pedicure that has been around for centuries.”
“So has the bubonic plague but we don’t use it as a weight-loss treatment,” Monk said.
Wurzel laughed. “This is a far more hygienic pedicure than anything traditional salons do. But I’m sure you didn’t come here to save me from some hungry carp.”
Monk eyed the fish warily, as if waiting for them to show their true, vicious nature. I had a hard time tearing my eyes away from them myself.
“We’re investigating the murder of a police officer named Paul Braddock,” I said.
