by Hy Conrad
Jasper and his wife, Celia, had lived in Bernal Heights, in a ramshackle cottage lodged between two vacant lots. According to Jasper’s statement, they had been in bed that night and were awakened by noises somewhere in the house. Jasper got up and told Celia to stay in the bedroom and lock the door. When he walked into the living room, he found a tall black man wearing gloves trying to pry their flat-screen TV off the wall mounts with a crowbar. According to Jasper, he and the intruder struggled until Jasper slipped and fell and was knocked unconscious with the aforementioned crowbar. A nasty bruise on the side of his head was the only physical evidence of the struggle.
When he came to, Jasper claimed that he found the door to the bedroom broken down and his wife dead on the floor, also bludgeoned with what was probably the same crowbar. Metallic traces were found in one of Celia’s gaping wounds. But the weapon was never found, a fact that was the basis of much of Jasper’s defense.
“Well, well, what a surprise,” said the large, fleshy man as an armed guard led him into one of the prison’s interview rooms. “Captain Stottlemeyer.” I’m not sure how many convicted felons could instantly remember the officer in charge of putting them away. Jasper Coleman could and did.
“I’m here, too,” said Randy. “Lieutenant Disher. Remember?”
“Yeah,” said the inmate, looking unimpressed. “Dumb and dumber. When are you two going to find Celia’s real killer?”
“We found him seven years ago,” said Stottlemeyer.
The four of us were lined up in chairs on the opposite side of the bolted-down steel table, like a small jury facing the accused—in this case, the convicted. Monk was on the far right, dividing his attention between Coleman and the pages of Randy’s journal from 2008. He seemed mesmerized by the combination of hard facts and random observations, not to mention the sketches and doodles in the margins of almost every page. Monk and I introduced ourselves, but Coleman couldn’t have cared less.
“What do you know about Judge Nathaniel Oberlin?” asked the captain.
“I know that the two of you were in cahoots, that you scumbags railroaded me. I know that I’ve been wasting away for seven years due to you.” Coleman allowed himself a thin grin. “I also know Oberlin got poisoned and you yahoos thought it was a tropical disease.”
“We know better now,” said Monk. “It was someone with a grudge against the judge and the captain.”
“Really? I guess I’m not the only innocent guy you screwed over. Does that mean you’re next, Captain? Are you coming down with a tropical disease?”
“Not yet,” said Stottlemeyer. “That’s why we’re here.”
The convict’s laugh was low and mean. “You trying to pin this on me, too? A guy in prison?” He leaned forward. “Just between us, I hope he gets you. I’m rooting for him.”
“What friends do you have on the outside, Coleman? Anyone who might help you get revenge?”
“I’m not a killer. My wife’s killer is still out there, thanks to you.”
“No, he’s in here,” replied the captain. “There was no evidence of an intruder. No neighbors reported seeing anything. There was no DNA except yours and Celia’s, no fingerprints.”
“It was freaking three a.m. and the guy wore gloves.”
“Wearing gloves to jack a TV off your wall? And this thing about three a.m. when the two of you were fast asleep?” The captain had the SFPD report file in front of him, which might have been slightly more reliable than Randy’s journal entry. “There was food in Celia’s stomach. According to the ME, she had eaten a good-sized snack somewhere after two a.m., when, according to your statement, you were both sound asleep.”
“Maybe she got up without me hearing,” said Jasper Coleman. “Or the medical examiner made a mistake.”
“Or maybe, after years of late-night fights and Celia’s calls to the police about spousal abuse, you finally killed her. That’s the conclusion a jury of your peers came to.”
“That was your doing.” Jasper’s wrists were shackled to the steel table, but he still managed to point both index fingers at the captain. “You and the judge and Bloomquist, the assistant DA. The three of you cherry-picked the evidence. You glossed over the lack of a murder weapon, which made the jury gloss over it. From the second you showed up, you had it in for me.”
“I suppose you know,” I said. “Edgar Bloomquist died in a skiing accident five years ago.”
“In Switzerland. I celebrated with a piece of cake. I had another piece of cake when Oberlin died.”
“Leaving just me,” said the captain. “Don’t start baking that cake.”
“Hey, what about me?” said Randy. “I had it in for you, too.”
Stottlemeyer scowled. “Randy, no one had it in for Jasper Coleman. We checked all avenues of the investigation. Impartially. As for the crowbar, Jasper had plenty of opportunities to dispose of it before the first responders arrived. According to them, he was in the bathroom washing his hands.”
“I’d been attacked. I was putting a cold, wet towel on my head.”
“Randy, what is this?” Monk asked. He was pointing to something in the ex-lieutenant’s journal.
“What’s what?” Randy went to look over Monk’s shoulder at the page in question. So did the rest of us.
“It’s a doodle,” said Stottlemeyer. The little sketch was squeezed in just below Randy’s journal entry for that day: all about the weather, what he had for lunch, his interview with the dead woman’s husband.
“It’s a doodle,” Randy repeated. “You know doodles. They come to you out of the blue, no thinking necessary.”
I refrained from any wisecracking about Randy and his nonthinking process. It wasn’t the time or place.
The doodle in question was in the lower right corner, a thin dirty hand, wearing a wedding ring, picking up nails, carpenter nails, off the floor. Randy was a decent artist. In high school, I believe his ambition had been to draw comic book heroes.
“Why did you draw that?” asked the captain curiously.
“I don’t know,” said Randy. “It was seven years ago and … I don’t know.”
Monk raised a finger and thought out loud. “The other two doodles on the page have something to do with Mr. Coleman—his face, him sitting in a chair. But this one’s different. A man’s hand picking up …” My partner scrunched his brow and turned to Jasper Coleman. “Were you picking your fingernails during your interview with Randy?”
“Doing what?” said Jasper. There was an instantly defensive tone in his voice. “I wasn’t picking my nails.”
“Interesting,” said the captain. He began leafing through several pages in the SFPD file. “Randy didn’t mention anything about nails in his interview report.”
“Maybe not,” said Monk. “But my bet is that he noticed it, at least subconsciously. Later that day, when he was writing in his journal …”
The captain wasn’t convinced. “Randy draws dragons. That doesn’t mean he’s arrested a dragon.”
“Hold on, Leland. Wow.” Randy threw his elbows onto the table and pressed his head between his fists. “Monk’s right. Jasper was picking his fingernails. Somehow it must have registered, but I didn’t write it down.”
“I was not picking my nails,” growled Coleman, leaving even less doubt than before.
“Let me check on that.” The captain cleared his throat and flipped another page in the official report. “By the time Mr. Coleman was taken into custody and was swabbed, there was nothing under his nails. Of course that was hours later.”
“What does that mean?” asked Randy, turning to Monk. “You think it was blood or skin tissue? I can’t believe I let a suspect pick his nails during an interview.”
“He wasn’t a suspect at the time,” I pointed out. “He was a victim and a witness.”
“Still, I should have had a swab done right then. What was I thinking?”
“Don’t beat yourself up,” said Randy’s old partner. “We put the guy away without the
swab, that’s what counts.”
Monk looked up again from Randy’s old journal. “By the way, Mr. Coleman, when did you get married?”
We all followed Monk’s gaze to the gold band on the convict’s left ring finger. “Celia and I got married in two thousand and four,” said Jasper. “Why?”
Stottlemeyer made a face. “He wore that ring all through the trial, trying to get jury sympathy. I’m surprised he’s still wearing it.”
“He’s not,” said Monk. “Mr. Coleman has put on a fair amount of weight since his conviction. I’d say sixty pounds, no offense. Prison food can do that. Randy’s doodle shows a skinny man with a bruise on his head. Yet the ring he’s wearing now fits perfectly. Hence, it’s a new ring.”
Stottlemeyer looked up to the guard standing by the door. “Is this true?”
The guard was smiling. “It’s true, sir. Jasper got himself a fan. They were married in the prison chapel about a month ago.”
We were all taken aback by the news, except Monk, of course. I mean, you hear stories about gullible women becoming romantically obsessed with famous killers. But I’d always thought of it as a kind of urban myth.
“She came here interested in getting justice for me. We wound up falling in love. What’s wrong with that?”
“Seems like a very sweet girl,” volunteered the guard.
“Mrs. Kristen Jones-Coleman,” said Jasper with some pride. “The name was a compromise. We had a long discussion about keeping her maiden name.”
Stottlemeyer brushed his mustache. “You mean she had reservations about taking the name of a wife killer?”
“Just the opposite,” said Jasper. “She wanted my name. I had to talk her into using both, at least until you guys wise up and catch the real guy.”
“Yeah,” said the captain. “We’ll get right on that.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Mr. Monk and the Planted Evidence
Despite the remnants of rush-hour traffic, we got the captain home in time for dinner. On the curb in front of the bungalow in Dogpatch sat an SFPD cruiser with a familiar face behind the wheel. Officer Joe Nazio often pulled this kind of duty. I parked the Subaru right behind him and we all got out to say hello.
Like almost everyone, Joe was glad to see our friend from New Jersey. He teased Randy about being a big-deal police chief. And Randy teased him about getting stuck as a glorified babysitter. “Actually, every officer in the precinct wanted this job,” said Joe. “Protecting Captain Stottlemeyer? That’s an honor.”
The captain is pretty old-school and doesn’t take praise very well. “For the sake of your career, I’ll try my best not to get murdered.”
“Please do that, sir.”
A second later, the door to the bungalow flew open and the real bodyguard emerged, all smiles and wearing an apron. If an assassin ever did manage to get past Joe Nazio, he would have to contend with Trudy Stottlemeyer. And with Teddy. From somewhere in the house, we could hear him howling with anticipation.
The next morning Trudy called, bright and early. “Leland isn’t going into work, doctor’s orders. I know how excited he was to see Randy. But the excitement has worn off and he needs his rest. I hope you can get along without him.”
Trudy had always tried to ignore the danger of Leland’s job. But this time he had been doing the most domestic of chores, taking the dog out for a walk. They’d both come back with a near deadly dose of thallium coursing through their systems. That was hard to ignore.
“No problem,” I said. “Tell the captain we’re off to meet the wife. We’ll drop by later to report in—unless you think he really needs total rest.”
“No, Leland wants to be kept in the loop. Just call before you show up.”
Before leaving San Quentin, we had stopped by to see the warden. He informed us that, except for his ongoing anger issues about his conviction, Jasper Coleman had been a model prisoner. There had been no reason for the state to deny visiting rights to Kristen Jones, a twenty-something paralegal who had read an article and become fascinated with his case. And there had been no reason, a year or so later, to deny the couple the right to get married.
“It’s the law,” said the warden. “Even if it seems like an unworkable marriage, some people make it work.”
I telephoned Jasper’s bride from the prison’s razor-wired parking lot and said we were private investigators looking into her husband’s case. She seemed eager to set up an appointment for the following day and gave me the address.
I was surprised to see that Mrs. Kristen Jones-Coleman had taken up residence in the old Coleman house. Was she actually sleeping in that bedroom, where Jasper had bludgeoned Celia to death? Were there still stains on the floor? Even if Kristen totally believed in his innocence, what kind of woman would do this?
In stark contrast to the rest of the block, the Coleman house was awash in flowering plants: morning glory vines on the fence; beds of roses and lilies; a row of hydrangea bushes nearly blocking the curb in front; pots of violets on either side of the front door. The lush setting might have felt cheerier if it didn’t remind me so much of the flowers at a funeral.
“Every house has seen its share of tragedy,” said Kristen shortly after we walked in. No one had asked the question, but she knew we were thinking it.
Kristen had just made a fresh pot of coffee. I took a bottle of Fiji Water out of my tote for Monk and the four of us settled around the coffee table by the front window—three coffees and water in a glass that Monk had personally washed out, no ice—not far from the spot where her husband had hit himself with a crowbar before getting rid of it somehow and calling 911.
“Sometimes I do think about that horrible night,” she went on. “But Jasper won’t sell. And I want it to be here for him when he’s released.”
“Your husband still has a lot of anger with the police,” said Randy, getting right to the point. “There was a captain and a lieutenant on his case.”
“I don’t know about a lieutenant,” said Kristen. Randy’s face fell. “But Jasper told me all about a Captain Stottlemeyer and a Judge Oberlin. They were the ones responsible for this travesty. The judge died, that’s what Jasper said. We celebrated with a cake I brought in on visitors’ day.”
“You celebrate people’s deaths?” I had to ask.
Kristen shrugged. She didn’t care. “You mentioned on the phone that you were private detectives.”
“Yes,” I confirmed, speaking for the majority. “We’re looking into the death of Judge Oberlin. There is a possibility that he was murdered in connection with an old case.”
“Oh.” She looked disappointed. “I thought you might have some evidence to help Jasper.”
“Not per se, no.” Not anywhere near per se.
“Then why are you here? You don’t think …” She opened her mouth and drew in a little gasp. “You think Jasper might be behind the judge’s death? That’s ridiculous.”
“We have to check all possibilities,” I said. “Does your husband ever talk about getting even with the system?”
“Jasper’s in prison. How could he kill a judge?”
“Someone on the outside could be helping him,” Randy pointed out.
“Who on the outside? Jasper doesn’t have any friends… . You mean me?”
“We sort of do,” said Randy. “I mean, that’s why we’re here. We’re checking out the possibility.”
“That I would kill someone? How would that help? Neither one of us is a murderer.”
Kristen struck me as a sweet-natured girl, petite but not particularly pretty. Smart, but perhaps naive and easily manipulated. She wanted to believe she was part of a bigger cause, working to right a wrong and free the man she’d fallen in love with. “Jasper wants to clear his name. That’s all.”
“And you really believe he’s innocent?” asked Monk.
“I do. The police combed the house looking for the weapon. They took a metal detector to the backyard and the front. Also the lots next door.
It would have been impossible for my Jasper to do anything like that, given the injury he sustained.”
I don’t know when Monk started focusing out the front window, but I noticed it now. He was sitting straight in his chair, maybe even rising slightly to get a better view. “Are you a gardener, Mrs. Coleman?”
“Yes,” she said, looking a bit confused by the change of subject. “I never got to grow things in my little apartment, except a few geraniums on my balcony.”
“And you’ve been living here for a while, since before you got married.”
“Yes,” she said, more guardedly now. “How did you know?”
“I’d say at least six months,” Monk observed, “from the way the plants have taken root and spread out. Jasper Coleman’s been in prison, so I assumed it was you.”
Kristen nodded. “He asked me to move in. The house was empty and it’s still his property. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“Nothing wrong at all,” said Monk. “A house needs someone to look after it.”
“Monk, what’s up?” Randy stretched his tall frame to look out the window. “Does this have something to do with the fingernails? Dirt under his fingernails?”
I’d had the same thought. “Did Coleman bury the weapon? How? Where? The police ran a metal detector over everything.”
Monk ignored us. “Those hydrangeas out by the streetlamp. Did you put those in?”
“I did,” admitted Kristen. “It’s public property, I know, but other people do it. I think it adds a nice touch.”
“Very nice,” said Monk. We were all standing now, turning from the coffee table to get a better look out the window. “Randy, are crowbars ever made of aluminum? It doesn’t have to be a crowbar, but something similar. A tire iron?”
“Sure,” said Randy, happy to know something Monk didn’t. “Cast aluminum is used for crowbars and tire irons. What does that have to do with gardening?”
“A lot. Mrs. Coleman, you seem like a healthy, symmetrical person, everything in its place. I assume you planted all pink hydrangeas. No sane person would mix blue and pink.”
