Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse

by Lee Goldberg

  Gentrification, beautification, and renovation are everywhere, my friends. It’s not just happening with buildings and neighborhoods. Go down to L.A. and you can see they’re gentrifying, beautifying, and renovating people there now, too.

  The streets were still damp from Friday’s intermittent rains, but the skies were clear and bright, with a crisp, cold wind blowing off the white-capped bay. I could smell the sea, mingled with a hint of fried food wafting up from Chinatown.

  The firehouse was on top of a hill with dramatic views of the Transamerica Pyramid and Coit Tower. It was a redbrick building from the mid-1900s with a stone carving of the SFFD emblem, an eagle with its talons gripping crisscrossed axes over licking flames, mounted above the arched garage doors.

  “When I was a kid,” Monk said, “I wanted to be a firefighter.”

  “You did?” I said.

  “I loved everything about it,” he said. “Except the firefighting part.”

  “Then what was it about being a firefighter that you loved?”

  “This.”

  Monk turned to the firehouse and opened his arms as if to embrace the sight in front of him. Both of the garage doors were open, letting the breeze stream into the station, where half a dozen firemen scrubbed and shined the two gleaming fire trucks, the sunshine glinting off the sparkling chrome and polished red metal.

  “Isn’t it great?” He sighed.

  I followed his gaze as he took in the fire hoses, neatly folded atop one another on the fire trucks; the spotless cement floors of the garage scrubbed and mopped to a marblelike sheen; the neat rows of fire hats, coats, and helmets aligned in open racks of dazzling steel; the pickaxes, shovels, and other tools mounted on the wall in order of size, shape, and function. The beauty of cleanliness, efficiency, and order.

  His eyes were wide in childlike awe and appreciation. He was ten years old again, though I must confess that in a lot of ways I’m not convinced he’s ever really grown up.

  Monk approached the captain, who stood beside a rolling cart of neatly folded white towels and a laundry basket, watching his men at work. His short-sleeved blue uniform was perfectly pressed and starched, his badge gleaming so bright that it was nearly pure light. He was in his fifties, with the kind of hard, chiseled features that only soldiers, comic-book characters, and statues usually possess.

  “May I help you?” the captain asked.

  “Actually, we’d like to help you,” Monk said. “I’m Adrian Monk and this is my assistant, Natalie Teeger.”

  “I’m Captain Mantooth.” He offered his hand to Monk. “You’re the detective, right?”

  Monk shook his hand, then held his open palm out to me for a disinfectant wipe. I gave him one. If Mantooth was offended, he didn’t show it.

  “I’ve been hired to investigate Sparky’s murder,” Monk said as he wiped his hands.

  “Are you working for Joe?” Mantooth asked.

  “Who is Joe?” Monk replied, and handed the wipe back to me.

  “Firefighter Joe,” I supplied, stuffing the wipe into a Baggie in my purse. By the end of a day my purse was usually overflowing with little Baggies of wipes. “He and Sparky were a team.”

  “They were much more than that, Miss Teeger,” Mantooth said. “Joe Cochran rescued that dog from the pound ten years ago, and they have been inseparable ever since. Sparky wasn’t my dog, but I still feel like we lost one of our men last night. We all do.”

  Monk picked up one of the folded towels from the cart and gestured to the fire truck. “May I?”

  Mantooth shrugged. “Sure.”

  Monk went over to the truck and buffed one of the sparkling chrome headlights. When he turned back to us he had a big, boyish grin on his face.

  “Wow,” he said.

  The captain and I watched Monk polish a valve. The other firemen on the truck watched him, too. I could see we might be there for a while, so I decided to press on.

  “Can you tell us what happened last night?”

  “We responded to a residential fire four blocks from here. Must have been around ten o’clock, but I can check the logs for the exact time. A woman fell asleep on her sofa while she was smoking a cigarette. It’s the most common cause of fire death worldwide and easily the most preventable,” Mantooth said. “We knocked the fire down and got back here about two A.M. We knew something was wrong the minute we pulled into the garage. Usually Sparky runs out to greet us, tail wagging. But he didn’t this time. . . .”

  Monk approached us, but it wasn’t to ask a question or actually participate in some meaningful way in his own investigation. It was to drop his used towel into a basket and get a fresh one.

  “This is so cool,” he said, then grinned giddily at us both and got to work scrubbing a spotless door handle. Mantooth couldn’t stop staring at him.

  “Were there any signs of a break-in?” I asked.

  “No,” he replied, tearing his gaze away from Monk and back to me. “The firehouse wasn’t locked.”

  “Was it unusual to leave the firehouse open and the dog by himself?”

  “Not at all,” Mantooth said. “That’s one of the reasons, historically, that we have dalmatians. They guard the firehouse. Joe is full of facts like that. He can tell you all about dalmatians.”

  “Has anyone ever tried to steal anything from the firehouse before?”

  “Not before and not last night,” Mantooth said. “As far as I can tell, nothing is missing. It’s a safe neighborhood, or at least it used to be.”

  I didn’t know what to ask next, so I turned to Monk, who was, after all, the legendary detective around here.

  “Mr. Monk?” I said.

  He kept polishing.

  “Mr. Monk,” I repeated, more firmly this time. He turned around. “Isn’t there something you’d like to ask Captain Mantooth?”

  Monk snapped his fingers. “Of course. Thank you for reminding me.”

  He tossed the dirty towel in the basket and looked at the captain. “Do you have any of those honorary-fireman badges?”

  “You mean the ones we give the kids?”

  “No, the ones you give the honorary firemen,” Monk said.

  “I think so,” Mantooth said. “Would you like one?” Monk nodded. Mantooth went back to the office. Monk looked at me.

  “Wow.”

  “Is that all you’re going to say?”

  “Yippee.”

  “Don’t you have any questions you’d like to ask about the murder? Like what happened here that night?”

  “I already know.”

  “You do?”

  “I’ve known since we walked in,” he said.

  “How?”

  He drew a triangle in the air with his hands. “Simple geometry.”

  There’s nothing simple about geometry. I flunked it in high school, and I’m occasionally awakened by this nightmare that Mr. Ross, my tenth-grade math teacher, hunts me down and makes me take the final exam again.

  “Is there a way we could keep geometry out of this?” I said.

  “The dog was over there.” Monk pointed to the far right-hand side of the station house. “Point one of the triangle. That was his favorite spot to lie down when the trucks were away.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You can see where he’s scratched the wall with his paws,” Monk said.

  I followed his gaze and squinted. Sure enough, there were some light scratches the dog must have made when he was stretching or rolling over or lying against the wall.

  “When the fire trucks are gone, that spot gave Sparky a clear view of the garage doors,” Monk said. “When the fire trucks were here, they blocked the view from there, so he slept in his basket in the kitchen, where he could get table scraps and also enjoy more foot traffic.”

  He tipped his head toward the kitchen, and I saw the edge of the dog’s basket inside the open doorway. I could see a rubber hot-dog chew toy in the basket.

  I couldn’t figure out how, or when, Monk noticed th
e scratches and the dog bed. It seemed to me that from the moment we got there all his attention had been on the fire trucks. But I was wrong.

  Monk cocked his head, looked around the station, then took a few steps forward, as if he were placing his feet in a set of footprints in the sand.

  “The murderer crept in through the open garage and reached this point, the second point in our triangle, when the dog saw him and charged,” Monk said. “He looked around for something to defend himself with and spotted those.”

  Monk whirled around to face the axes, shovels, and rakes neatly arranged along the wall to the left of us, every tool in its proper place. At least I knew why that had attracted Monk’s attention.

  “He ran over there, the dog closing in on him. He grabbed the pickax off the wall and swung it at the dog at the last possible second.” Monk took a few steps forward and stopped near the open racks of coats, helmets, and boots. He tapped the floor with his foot. “Sparky died right here. The third point in our triangle.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Simple geometry,” Monk said again.

  “He’s right, Miss Teeger,” the captain said, coming up behind me. “That’s exactly where we found the poor dog when we got back, right here in front of the turnouts.”

  “The what?” I said.

  “It’s what we call our firefighting gear,” he said. “All the stuff we wear into a fire.”

  Monk looked past me. “Uh-oh.”

  “Uh-oh, what?” I asked.

  He went over to the rack of heavy fire coats, which were all aligned front-to-back in a neat row. One of the coats was hanging from a hanger that was facing a different direction from the others.

  Naturally, Monk took the coat off the hanger, turned the hanger around, and hung the coat up again, careful to make sure the shoulders lined up with the ones behind and the ones in front.

  Mantooth shook his head in amazement. “He’s more of a stickler for order than I am.”

  “Than anybody,” I said.

  “I wish all my guys were like him.”

  “Be careful what you wish for,” I said.

  Monk came back and wagged his hands in front of me for some wipes. I reached into my purse and gave him two.

  “Are you absolutely sure nothing has been stolen from the firehouse?” Monk said while cleaning his hands.

  “All of the equipment is accounted for, and none of the guys have reported anything missing from their lockers,” Mantooth said.

  “How about something that you wouldn’t think of as important?” Monk said. “Something so insignificant, obscure, and unremarkable that nobody would necessarily miss it?”

  “Then how would we know if it was gone?”

  “I once solved a murder where it turned out all the killer was after was a piece of paper jammed in a copying machine.”

  “We don’t have a copying machine.”

  “I once solved a murder where it turned out all the killer was after was a rock in a goldfish aquarium.”

  “We don’t have any goldfish.”

  Monk glanced at me. “This is going to be a tough one.”

  “Come to think of it,” Mantooth said, “we’re missing two towels.”

  “What kind of towels?” Monk asked.

  “The ones we use to clean and polish the fire truck,” Mantooth replied. “We had thirty-four the day before the fire and thirty-two afterward. I know this sounds silly, but I’m kind of compulsive about keeping track of the towels.”

  “It sounds perfectly natural to me,” Monk said. He’d found a kindred spirit.

  “Do you really think someone would come in here to steal two towels?” the captain said.

  Monk shrugged. “Where do you keep them?”

  “In the basement, by the washer and dryer.”

  This was getting ridiculous. There was no way someone killed a dog over a couple of towels. So to stop the insanity, I piped up with a question of my own.

  “Captain Mantooth,” I said, “can you think of any reason someone would want to harm Sparky?”

  “You’d have to ask Joe,” Mantooth said. “He was closer to that dog than he was to any of us. When he went off duty, he’d take Sparky home with him.”

  “Where can we find Joe now?”

  “He’s still on duty, but he didn’t want to be here, not today, not without Sparky,” Mantooth said. “So I sent him back to the scene of the house fire to oversee the cleanup and assist the arson investigators. He should still be there.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” Monk said. “This has been wonderful.”

  “You’re welcome back anytime, Mr. Monk.”

  Monk started to go when Mantooth called out to him: “Wait, you don’t want to leave without this.”

  The captain pinned a badge on Monk’s lapel. The badge was a red helmet atop an emblem of a fire truck encircled by a golden fire hose and the words JUNIOR FIREFIGHTER in block letters. Across the bottom it read: SAN FRANCISCO FIRE DEPARTMENT.

  Monk looked down at it and smiled. “Wow.”

  4

  Mr. Monk and the Ruined Weekend

  Since the scene of the previous night’s fire was only four blocks away, and it was such a beautiful day, I thought it would be nice if we walked, even though it meant a steep climb uphill back to the car. I didn’t even mind that Monk counted and tapped each parking meter we passed along the way. I was too preoccupied trying to make sense of what we’d just learned at the firehouse.

  If the guy’s plan was to kill Sparky, why didn’t he bring a weapon with him? If he came to steal something, and killed Sparky in self-defense, how come nothing was missing?

  I asked Monk the same questions. Between his parking meter count, which I will spare you, he answered them. Sort of.

  “He could have been staking out the station house for days, waiting for them to leave to fight a fire so he could murder the dog,” Monk said.

  “Why would he want to do that?”

  “Maybe the dog urinated on his roses.”

  I could see how that could strike Monk as a compelling motive for murder.

  “So assuming this insane gardener was that intent on killing Sparky,” I said, “why did he wait for the dog to go after him? Why didn’t he just walk up to the dog and clobber him with a baseball bat or something?”

  “He would have had to bring the baseball bat with him,” Monk said. “And then he’d have to dispose of it later. Then there’s the risk that it might be found and could somehow be traced back to him.”

  “And if he keeps it, it might link him to the crime later,” I said.

  Monk nodded.

  It made sense. The case wasn’t so confusing after all.

  “On the other hand,” Monk said, “maybe he didn’t expect Sparky to be there.”

  “But Sparky was always there,” I said.

  “Only when Joe was on duty,” Monk said. “Otherwise Joe took the dog home with him.”

  It had been only a few minutes since Captain Mantooth had told us that, and already I’d forgotten it. I obviously wasn’t cut out for detective work.

  “So you think Sparky’s murder was an accident,” I said. “You think the killer was after something else and got caught by the dog.”

  “Not necessarily,” Monk said. “He could still have been going there to murder Sparky.”

  I was getting confused all over again.

  “How can you kill a dog that isn’t there?”

  “You could poison his food.”

  I thought about it. The killer staked out the station on a day he knew that Joe wouldn’t be working, waited for everyone to leave to fight a fire, then sneaked inside to poison the food. But instead the killer was attacked by the dog he’d come to kill, a dog that wasn’t supposed to be there, and had to protect himself with the pickax.

  It could have happened that way.

  Or the other way.

  Either way, it wasn’t too complicated. I could deal with it.

  “Or
the dog was killed by accident,” Monk said, confusing things for me all over again. “And the guy was in the firehouse for an entirely different reason.”

  “Like what?” I said. With that question, I gave up trying to make sense of the case. That was Monk’s job, not mine.

  “I don’t know,” Monk said. “But I once solved a murder that was all about a penny. . . .”

  The house that had caught fire was still standing, but the first floor was charred and gutted, the windows broken and rimmed by black where flames had licked out. The property was cordoned off with yellow caution tape, and several firefighters picked through the rubble while others hosed things down.

  The smell of smoke was heavy in the air, the streets and gutters inundated with soot-blackened water, the storm drains clogged with burned debris. There was a fire truck, a black-and-white, an SFFD sedan, and an unmarked police car parked in front of the house.

  The people in the neighborhood were out on their porches and milling on the sidewalks, looking at the house and talking animatedly among themselves. There’s nothing like a fire to bring a community together.

  The burned house was one of a half dozen identically bland, blockish town houses built side by side in the 1950s. They must have been designed by somebody who was really into the “international modern style” popularized by Le Corbusier, Richard Neutra, and Mies Van Der Rohe, only done artlessly and on the cheap (as you can probably tell, I took a few architecture courses and have been waiting for an opportunity to show off what little I remember). The town houses were unadorned by moldings, eschewing style for function, and the doors and windows were flush with the flat walls around them, making the places stand out in sharp (and, if you ask me, offensive) contrast to the gables, cornices, and bay windows of the utterly charming Victorian homes across the street.