Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse

by Lee Goldberg

  As much as Stottlemeyer may have resented Monk’s astonishing observational and deductive abilities, he’d nonetheless come to depend on them, unfairly, if you ask me. So had the department as a whole. It was the reason they tolerated all of Monk’s considerable eccentricities. I think Monk, on some level, knew this.

  Whenever a homicide was too tough to crack, they could always call in Monk. With the exception of one case, the murder of his own wife, he always got his man.

  Until now.

  What had to make losing to Breen even worse for Monk was that this wasn’t even a case where Stottlemeyer had asked for his help. This was a case that he’d dragged Stottlemeyer into. And now Stottlemeyer’s badge was on the line because of it.

  But more than that, Monk’s future as a police consultant was also on the line. If Monk could no longer be counted on to solve every crime, what reason did the police, or Stottlemeyer, have to call on him anymore? What motivation would they have to tolerate his irritating quirks?

  It was wrong for Stottlemeyer to expect Monk never to fail, to always make some miraculous deduction at the right moment. But because Monk had done it so many times before, what would have been an unrealistic expectation of anyone else had become the basis of their professional relationship.

  That night, Stottlemeyer had gambled on it and lost. And if Stottlemeyer was demoted or booted because of Monk’s failure, Monk’s career as a consultant to the SFPD was effectively over as well.

  And, perhaps, so was their friendship. Because if they didn’t have mysteries to solve, what did they have to draw them together? What would they share in common?

  Maybe I was overanalyzing it, but as we drove through the darkness and the fog, that’s what I heard in the awkward, heavy silence, and that’s what I saw in their long faces.

  When Monk and I got back to my house, we found Mrs. Throphamner asleep on the couch, snoring loudly, her dentures in a glass of water on the coffee table. Hawaii Five-O was on the TV, Jack Lord in his crisp, blue suit staring down Ross Martin, who looked ridiculous in face paint playing a native Hawaiian crime lord.

  Monk squatted beside the glass of water and stared at Mrs. Throphamner’s dentures as if they were a specimen in formaldehyde.

  I turned off the TV, and Mrs. Throphamner woke up with a snort, startling Monk, who lost his balance and fell into a sitting position on the floor.

  Mrs. Throphamner, flustered and disoriented, immediately reached for her dentures and knocked over the glass, spilling everything right in Monk’s lap.

  Monk squealed and scampered backward, the dentures resting on his soaked crotch.

  Mrs. Throphamner reached down for her dentures and inadvertently toppled onto Monk, who squirmed and called for help underneath her, unwilling to touch her himself.

  Julie charged, sleepy-eyed, out of her room in her pajamas. “What’s going on?”

  “Mrs. Throphamner spilled her teeth in Mr. Monk’s lap,” I said. “Give me a hand.”

  Julie and I lifted Mrs. Throphamner up. She angrily snatched her teeth from Monk’s lap, plopped them into her mouth, and marched out of the house in a huff without so much as a “good night.” I didn’t even get a chance to pay her.

  Monk remained on his back on the floor, staring up at the ceiling. He didn’t move. He didn’t blink. I was afraid he was catatonic. I leaned down beside him.

  “Mr. Monk? Are you okay?”

  He didn’t say anything. I looked over my shoulder at Julie.

  “Get me a bottle of Sierra Springs from the fridge.”

  She nodded and ran off to get it.

  “Please, Mr. Monk. Answer me.”

  He blinked and whispered hoarsely, “This day has been a nightmare.”

  “Yes, it has.”

  “No, I mean really,” Monk said. “The city dump. The homeless encampment. The dentures in my lap. All of that didn’t really happen, did it?”

  Julie returned with the bottle. I opened it and offered it to Monk.

  “I’m afraid so, Mr. Monk.”

  He sat up, took the bottle from me, and guzzled it as if it were whiskey.

  Monk tossed the empty bottle over his shoulder. “Keep ’em coming.” He looked at Julie. “You’d better go to bed, honey. This is going to get ugly.”

  21

  Mr. Monk and Marmaduke

  Monk drank two more bottles of Sierra Springs and carried another four off with him to bed, slamming the door behind him.

  In the morning I found him sleeping facedown and fully dressed on top of his bed, the floor littered with empty water bottles. I quietly gathered up the plastic empties and left the room without waking him.

  It was my morning to carpool Julie and her friends to school, and I have to admit, I was worried about leaving Monk alone. I wasn’t concerned that he was suicidal or anything dire like that—however I was afraid of what he might do in my house if left unsupervised. Would I return to find my closets reorganized? My clothes rearranged by size, shape, and color?

  I toyed with waking him up and dragging him along on the carpool, but the thought of him stuck in an SUV filled with rowdy adolescent girls made me reconsider. Yesterday was nightmarish enough for him and, frankly, for me, too.

  I decided to take my chances and left him alone. I rushed Julie through breakfast, wrote a note to Monk telling him where I was, and hurried off to pick up the other kids and ferry them to school.

  Monk was still asleep when I got back forty-five minutes later. I was relieved and worried at the same time. It wasn’t like him to sleep in, at least not during the time he’d been staying with us. I was debating whether to call Dr. Kroger when Monk finally got up around nine, looking as if he’d spent the night barhopping. His clothes were wrinkled, his hair was askew, and his face was unshaven.

  I’d never seen him looking so rumpled, so human. It was kind of endearing.

  “Good morning, Mr. Monk,” I said as cheerfully as I could.

  Monk acknowledged my greeting with a nod and trudged barefoot into the bathroom. He didn’t emerge from his room again until noon, dressed in fresh clothes and looking his tidy best. But instead of coming to the kitchen for breakfast, he simply returned to his room and closed the door to suffer his purified-water hangover in peace.

  I wasn’t sure what to do, so I busied myself with household chores like paying bills and taking care of the laundry. While I worked, I tried not to think about Lucas Breen and the murders he committed. I also tried not to think about Firefighter Joe and my lingering anxieties about our nascent relationship. So, of course, Lucas Breen and Firefighter Joe were all I could think about.

  I couldn’t prove that Breen was guilty of murder, but I figured out what was bothering me about Joe. Yeah, I know, it’s obvious what it was, and I can see it clearly now, but I couldn’t then. That’s how it is when you’re in the middle of a relationship, even if it’s only been two dates. You’re too wrapped up in your own insecurities, desires, and expectations to see what’s right in front of you.

  Maybe it’s the same way when you’re a detective in the middle of an investigation. You’re under so much pressure to solve the case, and you’re bombarded with so many facts, that it’s almost impossible to see everything clearly. You see static instead of a picture.

  I imagine that it was often like that for Stottlemeyer or Disher. I saw how much they invested themselves in their investigations, how hard they had to work at it.

  For Monk, it’s all inside out. The investigation looks easy and everything else is hard.

  We’re so distracted by how difficult it is for him to accomplish even the simplest things in life that we don’t notice the effort that he puts into solving crimes and how much of himself he puts on the line.

  Figuring out the solutions to puzzling mysteries seems to come so fast and so naturally for him, we just shake our heads in wonder and chalk it up as miraculous. We don’t stop to consider the mental and emotional resources he has to marshal to pull that “miracle” off.
r />   After all, we’re talking about a man who finds it virtually impossible to choose a seat in a movie theater and yet somehow manages to sort through thousands of possible clues in a case to arrive at a solution. That can’t be as easy as it looks. There’s got to be some heavy lifting involved. And I’m sure even he has times when he can’t see what’s obvious to everybody else or, in his case, what would ordinarily be obvious to him.

  Who can he possibly turn to who can understand his anguish at times like that? Nobody. Because there’s no one else like Adrian Monk, at least not that I know of.

  Even so, I resolved to give it my best shot. I went to his room and knocked on the door.

  “Come in,” he said.

  I opened the door and found him sitting on the edge of his bed, a book open on his lap. He grinned and tapped a finger on the page.

  “This is priceless,” he said.

  I sat down beside him and looked at what he was reading. It was a collection of single-panel comic strips about Marmaduke, a Great Dane the size of a horse.

  In the comic Monk was looking at, Marmaduke was returning to his doghouse with a car tire in his mouth. The caption read: Marmaduke loves chasing cars.

  “That Marmaduke,” Monk said. “He’s so big.”

  “It’s a joke that never gets tired,” I said.

  It was a lie, of course. I couldn’t imagine what Monk, or anybody else, found amusing about that comic strip. But at least now I knew the secret to recovering from a night spent binge-drinking purified water.

  “He is so mischievous.” Monk turned the page and pointed to a comic where Marmaduke takes his owner for a brisk walk, lifting the poor man right off his feet. The caption read: There’s always a windchill factor when I walk Marmaduke!

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Dandy,” Monk said without conviction. He turned another page.

  “You’ll get Lucas Breen, Mr. Monk. I know you will.”

  “What if I don’t?” Monk said. “Captain Stottlemeyer could be demoted and Julie’s heart will be broken.”

  “They’ll survive,” I said.

  “I won’t,” Monk said, and turned another page in the book. Marmaduke jumps into a swimming pool, creating a splash that empties out all the water. Who invited Marmaduke to our pool party?

  Monk shook his head and smiled. “He’s enormous.”

  “You can’t solve every case, Mr. Monk. You’re asking too much of yourself.”

  “If I can find the person who killed my wife, I won’t need to solve another murder ever again,” Monk said. “So until that day comes, I have to solve them all.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “There’s an order to everything, Natalie. If I can’t get justice for Esther Stoval, Sparky the fire dog, and that homeless man, how can I ever hope to get it for Trudy?”

  That didn’t make a damn bit of sense to me. It was also one of the saddest things I’d ever heard.

  “How can you put that burden on yourself, Mr. Monk? Those killings have nothing to do with what happened to Trudy.”

  “Everything in life is linked. That’s how you can spot the things that don’t fit.”

  I shook my head. “No, I don’t believe that. You really think that if you solve some magic number of cases, you will have done your penance and God will tell you who killed your wife?”

  Monk shook his head. “There’s nothing magic or spiritual about it. I’m not skilled enough yet to figure out who murdered my wife. If I solve enough cases, maybe someday I will be.”

  “Mr. Monk,” I said softly, “you’re the best detective there is.”

  “That’s not good enough,” Monk said. “Because whoever killed Trudy is still free, and so is Lucas Breen.”

  Monk turned another page in the book.

  “You can’t do this to yourself, Mr. Monk. You’re holding yourself to a standard of perfection no person could ever meet.”

  “That wacky dog gets into one mishap after another.” Monk smiled and pointed at the page.

  Marmaduke chases a cat up a tree and manages to uproot the tall pine, much to the dismay of several children who are lugging planks of wood, hammers, and nails. I guess we won’t be building our treehouse today.

  “He sure does.” I patted Monk on the back and left the room.

  Adrian Monk was, without a doubt, the most complex man I’d ever met, and perhaps the most tragic. I wished he could let go of some of that guilt he carried around.

  Of course, I was a fine one to talk. How many nights did I stare at the ceiling and wonder if Mitch died because of me? If I had loved him more, he wouldn’t have been able to leave us. He wouldn’t have been half a world away. He wouldn’t have been shot out of the sky. If I loved him more, Mitch wouldn’t have needed to fly; he wouldn’t have needed anything but me. But I obviously didn’t love him enough, because he had to go. And now he was dead.

  I knew it was foolish and irrational to blame myself for his death, but even so, I can’t deny that the guilt was there and still is.

  Were Monk and I really so different?

  But he was luckier than I. He knew what he had to do to set his world right again. I didn’t have a clue. What penance could I pay to restore order in my world?

  I went into the kitchen, looked out the window, and saw Mrs. Throphamner in her backyard, tending her roses, the strong scent of those flowers filling my house. I hoped what happened last night wouldn’t scare her away from watching Julie for me. I’d come to depend on Mrs. Throphamner. The first step toward keeping her happy was probably paying her what I owed her.

  I was heading back into the living room in search of my purse, and the cash to pay Mrs. Throphamner, when Monk came charging out of his room, holding open his book, a big smile on his face.

  “He’s done it,” Monk said jubilantly.

  “Who’s done what?”

  “Marmaduke,” Monk said, tapping the open page and the strip about the uprooted tree. “He’s figured out how to get Lucas Breen!”

  Stottlemeyer was in his office looking glum. Monk’s Marmaduke book was open on the desk in front of him. Disher stood behind the captain and looked over his shoulder.

  “This is the solution to the case,” Monk said.

  We sat in chairs facing Stottlemeyer’s desk and waited for his reaction. Stottlemeyer glanced at the comic, then back at Monk.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Stottlemeyer said.

  That probably wasn’t the reaction Monk was expecting. But he shouldn’t have been surprised. It was the same reaction I had.

  “I agree with the captain on this. I don’t think a dog could really uproot a tree like that,” Disher said. “Even one Marmaduke’s size.”

  “Sure he could,” Monk said.

  “That’s not my problem with it,” Stottlemeyer said.

  “But trees that size have very deep roots,” Disher said. “A car could crash into a tree like that one and it wouldn’t move.”

  “Marmaduke is full of rambunctious energy,” Monk said. “Cars aren’t.”

  “Would you both stop it?” Stottlemeyer snapped. “I’m not sure you grasp the gravity of this situation, Monk. This morning I was officially reprimanded by the chief over what happened last night. I have to go in front of an administrative review board next week and explain my actions. They could demote me.”

  “They won’t once you arrest Lucas Breen,” Monk said.

  “You mean after I confront him with this Marmaduke comic and he confesses?”

  “Basically, yes,” Monk said, tapping the book. “This ties Breen irrefutably to all three murders.”

  “Frankly, Monk, I don’t see how,” Stottlemeyer said.

  So Monk explained it, sharing with us the realization he had had while reading the comic and his simple plan for acting on it. I could only smile to myself and marvel, once again, at the mysterious way Monk’s mind worked. But I knew he was right. It was our only hope of bringing down Lucas Breen.

  Stottlem
eyer was quiet for a moment, mulling over what Monk had told him.

  “If I go up against Breen again and I lose, they will take my badge,” Stottlemeyer said. “I need to know you’re right about this.”

  “I am,” Monk said.

  Stottlemeyer pursed his lips and nodded. “Okay, then, let’s do it.”

  He rose from his seat and put on his coat.

  “What about me?” Disher asked. “What would you like me to do?”

  “Stay right here, Randy, and see that those tests that Monk suggested are run on the homeless man and his possessions,” Stottlemeyer said.

  “I could do that with a phone call,” Disher said. “I want to back you up on this, Captain.”

  “I know you do,” Stottlemeyer said. “But if this goes wrong and my career blows up, I don’t want you to get hit with the shrapnel. I’m only willing to gamble one badge on Monk and Marmaduke, and it’s mine.”

  Disher nodded. Stottlemeyer squeezed his shoulder and we walked out.

  “Marmaduke,” Stottlemeyer muttered. “He’s one big dog.”

  “The biggest,” Monk said.

  22

  Mr. Monk and the Clam Chowder

  The ride in the elevator up to Lucas Breen’s thirtieth-floor office went a lot faster without Monk. Stottlemeyer had his arms folded across his chest and tapped his foot nervously. I carried Lucas Breen’s surprise in my half-open bag and listened to a horrendous instrumental version of Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” which, of course, lived up to its name. The bad elevator music was still stuck in my head when we stepped out into the waiting area.

  The beautiful Asian receptionist greeted us with her best approximation of a smile. She wore a thin headset that connected her to the phone system. Several flat-screen monitors built into the desk showed security-camera views of the lobby, the garage, and other areas of the building. On one of the screens I spotted Monk sitting at a table outside of the Boudin Bakery in the lobby. He’d covered the seat bottom with napkins before sitting down.