by Hy Conrad
“I think they were all pink, yes.”
“And yet the flowers on one of the bushes are starting to come in blue. Curious.”
Without another word of explanation, Monk led the way out the front, followed by a curious parade of three. The houses in this neighborhood were fairly close to the street. In fewer than five strides we reached the strip of garden by the curb, perhaps three feet wide and thirty feet long, with the lamppost in the middle.
The hydrangea bushes were small but well manicured, spread out enough to give them room. In a year or two they would probably outgrow the space and need to be replanted.
“If you sweep a metal detector around the base of this streetlamp, it’s going to go off,” said Monk.
“Sure,” said Randy. “It’s galvanized steel.”
“So a clever killer could step out the door at three a.m., stuff an aluminum crowbar tip-first into the ground, and go back inside. The police would get pings but they probably wouldn’t dig. What would be the point?”
“Are you saying it’s buried here?” asked Randy, pointing to a bush just to the right of the post.
“No.” Monk pointed to the bush on the left. “It’s here, under the bush with the blue flowers.”
From the second we pulled up, my partner had been distracted by the asymmetry of the puffy balls of color. I, too, had noticed the difference but didn’t think twice about it. As is often the case with Monk, the annoying little detail had turned out to be important.
“Hydrangeas are sensitive to acidity in the soil, like aluminum. It can change their color. You see? This whole row, pink except here, on this one side of the lamppost. So …” Monk paused for effect. “Why is this one small patch of dirt more acidic? It’s not rust from the lamppost.”
“Not if the lamppost is galvanized steel,” said Randy. “It wouldn’t rust.”
“There’s only one way to find out. Mrs. Coleman?” I asked, pointing to the blue bush.
“No,” she spat out instantly. “You do not have my permission to dig. You’re just trying to get more evidence against my Jasper. Planted evidence,” she added, seemingly unaware of the pun.
There were so many things wrong with her logic. I gently attacked her points one by one. “First, we don’t need your permission to dig since, as you pointed out, this is public land. Second, we don’t need more evidence against your husband. He’s been convicted. Third, you planted these bushes yourself. They look pretty undisturbed, so I don’t know how we could have planted evidence. Mrs. Coleman, what we need from you is a shovel. May we please borrow a shovel? It will save us some time.”
The poor woman finally gave in. I think she was holding out hope that Monk might be wrong. But she didn’t seem surprised—after Randy dug around the root ball and pried out the hydrangea and set it to one side and started digging a little deeper—to hear the clink of metal on metal.
It was an aluminum crowbar that Randy pulled out of the hole and showed off. He was wearing plastic gloves, courtesy of Monk, and dropped the crowbar into a large plastic baggie, courtesy of my PBS tote. It wasn’t evidence in an ongoing case, but we would turn it over to the DA’s office just to be safe. It always pays to be safe.
“That proves nothing,” said Kristen, her voice cracking just a little. “The real killer could have put it there.”
“Why?” asked Monk.
“Why?” she repeated. “To get rid of it.”
“Why?” Monk asked again. “Why would a killer remove a murder weapon from the scene, then stop outside and take the time—and the risk—to push it into the ground by a streetlamp?”
Mrs. Kristen Jones-Coleman desperately wanted to have an answer for this. But she didn’t. “Jasper’s a good man,” she protested. “He didn’t kill anyone. That crowbar doesn’t prove a thing. Get off my property now. How dare you …”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
When we pulled away from the curb a minute or so later, I stopped at the corner to check my rearview mirror. Kristen was still there, standing perfectly still at the curb with the shovel in her hand and the uprooted hydrangea bush by her side. “Why did you have to do that?” I asked softly.
“Do what?” asked Monk.
“You know what. Her husband’s in prison for life. His appeal isn’t going anywhere. But she had a purpose. Why did you have to smash the one illusion that was keeping her going?”
“And let her stay happily married to a killer? Natalie, you don’t mean that.”
“I don’t know what I mean,” I said. And I slowly turned the corner.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Mr. Monk Makes a House Call
“I couldn’t keep him home,” said Trudy. She made it sound like an accusation.
Randy had put her on speaker. He leaned forward from the backseat as her voice filled the old Subaru. “Lieutenant Thurman came by and they went off to see his father. Arnold Senior is very sick, and Leland … Well, you know Leland.”
“Captain Arny is sick?” asked Randy.
“Heart disease,” Monk and I and the iPhone speaker said almost in unison. “It looks pretty bad,” I added.
“I had no idea,” said Randy. “We should go see him.”
“We want to bring the captain up-to-date on the case,” I said over my shoulder as I made an uphill light at Potrero Avenue.
“Well, he’s at Captain Thurman’s,” said Trudy. “Do you want the address?”
“Sure,” said Randy. “We can kill two birds with one stone. Oh …” He winced. “I didn’t mean that. No one’s dying, at least not Captain Stottlemeyer. I meant …”
“You don’t have to explain, Randy. I know the expression.” Trudy gave us the Thurman address and made us promise to get Leland home.
It was one of those old San Francisco houses, rambling, dark, and in disrepair from a hundred years of weather and fifty years of poor maintenance. You could just tell it had been in the same family for generations; no yuppie remodeling here. Rebecca, Arnold Thurman’s daughter, met us at the door.
“He’ll be so glad to see you,” she said. “A.J.’s in his room, I think. But the captain’s in the bedroom with Dad. It’s in the back.” And she led the three of us down a shadowy hallway. “You’ll have to forgive the old place. It’s falling apart.”
“It’s charming,” I said.
“We had to take out a second and a third mortgage,” Rebecca said, “for the medical payments. But we’ll be okay. Something will turn up.”
Until that moment, I’d never given a thought to A.J.’s living arrangements. Apparently, neither Arny Junior nor Rebecca had managed to fly out of the old wooden nest, which was probably for the best, given the current situation.
The room was set up like a hospital, with a regulation, adjustable bed, a heart monitor, a sideboard covered in medication, and an empty IV-drip stand over by the shaded window. The blips from the monitor grew slightly faster as soon as we walked in. “Monk and Natalie. And Randy Disher. My God, boy, I never thought I’d see you again.”
I was shocked by Captain Thurman’s appearance. He’d always been a hulking man, a larger, more substantial version of A.J. Now he seemed shrunken to half that size. “Clear off some chairs. It’s like a damn visiting hour in here.”
I did as I was told, taking a few glossy catalogs from a chair and setting them on the windowsill. “Sotheby’s?” I said, looking at the covers. “Christie’s. Pretty fancy.”
“Yeah, my kids like to dream big. Don’t know where they got that, not from my side. Becky, how’s that herbal tea coming? Can you believe it? They won’t let me have regular tea. And coffee’s just a memory.”
“Coming, Dad,” said Rebecca in a tone of infinite patience, and exited the room.
“I guess this means you won’t have any use for that whisky,” joked Captain Stottlemeyer. “I should drink it now, right in front of you.” He was sitting at Captain Thurman’s bedside, in pretty much the same position as Trudy had been at his bedside.
�
�Gallows humor,” growled the other captain. “I hope you choke on it.”
“What’s the joke?” I asked.
Captain Thurman smiled. “You may not know this, young lady, but Leland’s pop was a renowned bartender.”
“I do know that,” I said. “I used to be a bartender myself.”
“I doubt you were in Hamish’s league.”
“Well, I was pretty good… . Wait! Hamish Stottlemeyer? You’re kidding.”
Leland grinned. “A good old Scottish name, at least the front half.”
“His pop had a gallows sense of humor, too,” said Arnold. “There were six of us best buds in the old days. Fraternity brothers. I think we’d just turned twenty-one. Getting old and dying were the furthest things from our minds.”
“As they should be,” I agreed.
“Well, that’s when his pop takes down from his top shelf an old bottle of whisky. He plops it smack down on the bar. That was the night he’d gotten us all skunked. I’m surprised we remember anything.”
Captain Stottlemeyer took over. “So us boys are already plastered and he plops down this bottle and he says, ‘Boys, this is for the last survivor. Because all of you are going to get old and gray, God willing. And then you’re going to die off one by one. In no time, there’s only going to be one of you fine fellows left.’” The captain was imitating a decent Scottish brogue. “‘So, boyos, I want you to promise me you’ll leave this fine bottle untouched until only one of you is left. Then you’ll go into a bar somewhere in the world, all by yourself. The last man. And you’ll have the barkeep uncork it, and you’ll drink a dram for every one of your fallen comrades, naming each by name as you slug it back and turn it upside down on the bar.’”
“Wow,” said Randy. “Cool.”
“The amazing thing is that we all loved the idea,” said Arnold.
“It’s a romantic notion,” I said. “Kind of an old Scottish tradition.”
“Ghoulish,” Monk corrected me.
“We all solemnly raised our drunken hands and swore.” Arnold sighed. “That’s the kind of brotherhood you can’t break up. Just the idea of it made us all stay in touch. Thirty-six years.”
There was a respectful pause in the room. “Wow,” said Randy again. “That’s quite a story.”
The captain nodded. “And the strangest part was my pop didn’t have a Scottish accent.”
“He didn’t,” Arnold confirmed. “Somehow over the years of telling, you gave him this mysterious brogue. But the rest is true, hand to God. The bottle’s in some safety-deposit box.”
“Five swigs of whisky will probably kill off the sixth then and there,” said Stottlemeyer. Then his face turned serious. “You’re going to outlive us all, Arny. You know that.”
“Yeah.” Arnold appreciated the sentiment. “Not if they make me drink herbal tea.”
“Things will turn out. You’ll get well enough for a transplant and we’ll get you to the top of that wait list.”
The two men clasped hands and locked eyes with real affection. When the moment ended, it was as if nothing had happened. “Well,” said Stottlemeyer, turning to Randy, “tell me. What’s happening with the wife killer’s wife?”
Randy took the lead, filling in both captains. I didn’t have the heart to talk about it. When it came time for the crowbar part, Monk jumped in with the color commentary—pink versus blue.
“Who knew you were such a gardener?” marveled Stottlemeyer.
“Only hydroponic, where there’s no soil or insects. As for hydrangeas, they’re unpredictable and disorderly. That’s how they got on my watch list in the first place.”
Through it all, I’m not sure how much Captain Thurman was listening. He’d been involved in enough murder cases of his own. Somewhere along the way, Rebecca arrived with her father’s tea and left again, disappearing into the house. “Becky’s an emergency room nurse. They gave her some sort of paid leave to deal with me.”
“A nurse,” I said. “It’s nice to have a nurse in the family.”
“Damn kids want me to live forever,” he mumbled under his breath.
Stottlemeyer seemed pleased by our work that morning. “Well, it looks like we got one right, eh, Randy, even when Monk was off in Germany.”
“Don’t let my son hear you say that,” said Captain T. “He thinks you can do every case without the magic of Monk.”
“I think you know better than that,” said Captain S.
“Hey, my son’s a jackass, you don’t have to tell me.”
Adrian Monk smiled. But I felt mixed emotions. You never want a father saying something like that about his only son. On the other hand, it was true.
“So, where to now?” asked Captain S. “Mrs. Coleman doesn’t look like a viable suspect.”
“We’re checking with the prison to see if Jasper has any other contacts on the outside,” I said. “But it doesn’t look promising.”
“So who else wants to kill me?”
“There’s still the robbery case,” said Randy, holding up his dinosaur-covered journal. “A couple of rich college kids broke into their uncle’s Nob Hill penthouse and stole a boatload of antique silver. Tens of thousands of dollars’ worth. The responding officer’s report said it was probably random. There had been several breakins in the building. But the captain and I didn’t think so. Well, the captain didn’t think so.”
“I remember those kids,” said Leland. “Mean and entitled.”
“Sounds like low-level stuff,” said Captain T.
Randy shook his head. “Not if you’re kids with your whole life in front of you and you get sent away for seven years.”
Monk whistled. I didn’t even know he could; maybe it was an accident. “Seven years. That’s pretty harsh for a first offense.”
Leland shook his head. “When we came to question them, they both pulled weapons, unregistered semiautomatics. That was worse than the burglaries, legal-wise.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“I sweet-talked them out of shooting me,” said the captain. But I’m sure there was more to it than that.
“They served their time at Pleasant Valley,” noted Randy. Pleasant Valley was a state prison in Fresno and even though it was minimum security, I’m sure it wasn’t all that pleasant. “Both boys—men now, I guess—were released two months ago.”
“It did seem harsh,” Captain S. admitted. “The uncle, the one they robbed, he tried to get the charges dropped. By then it was out of his hands.”
“I’d be mad, too,” said Captain T. “At the judge who sentenced me and the cop who didn’t fall for the random burglar theory.”
“Two cops,” Randy reminded everyone.
“Don’t worry, Randy,” said Captain S. “I’m sure they want you dead, too.”
It wasn’t more than a second later when Randy’s iPhone pinged with a text. He jumped, as if expecting a death threat typed out on the display. “It’s Trudy,” he reported. My phone pinged and so did the captain’s. Randy read the joint message aloud. “‘Enough fun, guys. Time for Leland’s nap.’”
“The old ball and chain,” chuckled Captain T.
“It’s actually a pretty good ball and chain,” said Leland. “And she’s right.”
We did our best to fade into the background as the two captains said their good-byes, perhaps their final good-byes, although neither one brought up the subject. “You take care of yourself,” said Captain Thurman, and waved us out of his room.
Lieutenant A.J. Thurman stood waiting in the front hall. “Thanks for coming,” he said to Captain S. “Seeing you really perked him up.”
As we put on our jackets from the coatrack, I happened to glance out the window. “Where’s Officer Nazio?” I asked. Now that I thought of it, I hadn’t seen a patrol car when we’d pulled up.
“Gave him a few hours off,” said Stottlemeyer. “I already had a police escort, right?”
“That’s right,” said A.J. “I’ll call Nazio and tell him you�
�re on your way. Meanwhile, if you guys don’t mind escorting the captain home …”
“Hey, I’m not a five-year-old on a playdate.”
“You’re right. If this was a playdate, they wouldn’t need sidearms.” A.J. raised an eyebrow. Randy responded by patting the bulge under his jacket, while I patted the top of my PBS tote. I found myself carrying my Glock more and more these days.
A.J. was first out the door and onto the sidewalk. “Let me check,” he said, motioning for us to stay back. He made a big show of looking up and down the street while the rest of us did a four-way eye roll, including Monk. Technically, of course, A.J. was right to check the perimeter.
“Suspicious vehicle at nine o’clock,” he said, coming back to the doorway. Looking left past the stop sign on the next block, I could see it. I could also hear it, an oversized, dark SUV, idling loudly by the curb. The afternoon sun glared off its windshield. “It’s not a neighbor,” A.J. whispered. Why was he whispering? “The people in those houses are at work.”
It seemed overly cautious to me. An SUV idling on the next block on a residential street is hardly a red flag. We couldn’t even determine if anyone was inside. But this was A.J.’s territory. If anyone knew what would be out of place, it was him.
“What do you want to do?” asked Randy.
“I say we go out the back way,” said A.J. “It’s more controlled. You can pull the car around through the alley.”
“I can’t disagree with the lieutenant,” said Monk, “although I really want to. A smaller, more controlled environment is safer.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake.” That was the extent of Stottlemeyer’s protest. Police etiquette dictates you don’t make a fuss when your safety is in someone else’s hands. It’s their business to keep you alive.
I crossed the street to my Subaru while the others retraced their steps back through the house. Before pulling out, I checked my mirrors. The SUV was still there.
After a few one-way streets, I found the narrow alley. It was also one-way, out of necessity, just wide enough for the household garbage cans and their weekly pickup. Halfway down the block I could see the captain, his lieutenant, and the Summit police chief stepping sheepishly out of the back gate. They began to walk my way as I drove slowly theirs. With any luck, they could get in without dinging my doors against a gate or a wall or a can. At some point I was going to have to bite the bullet and get all my current dings buffed out, just out of pride. Or I was going to have to sell the car, which might be easier and cheaper. These were the thoughts going through my head when I saw the stocky figure walk out into the lane behind them, in a black ski mask.
