by Hy Conrad
“I don’t know. The sense of normal? No offense, Monk.”
“I can barely hear you over the din,” shouted Monk, more for effect than anything. He took my pack of earplugs, broke the plastic wrap, and stuffed the buds firmly in his ears. “That’s better. What were you saying?”
“I can hear it now,” said Randy as we got closer. There was indeed a thumping bass beat coming through the basement door. “It’s Nirvana.”
“No, it’s like the opposite of Nirvana.”
“Adrian.” I had a question. “If the earplugs block the music, don’t they also block Randy’s voice?”
“I’m sorry, Natalie, I can’t hear you.” And he began pounding his fist on the door.
All three of us tried pounding on the thick wooden door, one after the other.
The music was indeed Nirvana, “Heart-Shaped Box” to be specific. Not my favorite. The denizens of the basement apartment did their best to ignore us, but at some point they realized we were interfering with their music and we weren’t going away. They cranked it down to half volume, probably just in time to hear Randy shouting, “Police—open up” in his deepest voice. He continued to shout “police” but added “Summit, New Jersey” under his breath each time, just to keep it legal.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Mr. Monk and the Basement Nazis
“And I swear that I don’t have a gun. No, I don’t have a gun. No, I don’t have a gun.”
Monk tried not to listen, but the words came through. Even with the distraction of earplugs and the pounding guitars, it was the lyrics he found most disturbing. “Did you write this song for me?” he asked, staring at the tall stereo speakers. “Just now? How did you do that?” His voice held a note of paranoia.
“I wish.” Marshal Willmott smirked. “It’s, like, Nirvana, dude.”
“Why does everyone compare bad music to Nirvana? Are we in opposite world?”
I tried to explain, almost shouting. “This is a famous song. ‘Come as You Are’ by a group called Nirvana.”
“Okay …” He thought about it. “And the words just happen to answer my question?”
“That’s right,” said Colin. “We don’t have a gun. And you don’t have a search warrant.”
“Are those some more of the lyrics? Because that would really freak me out.”
We were in the main room of a wood-paneled basement. High in a side wall, just under the ceiling, was a cemented-over door, barring what had been an entrance up to the rest of the family’s world. The cement door simply hung there without a staircase.
The center of the space was defined by a moth-eaten Oriental rug and two reclining easy chairs facing a TV against the wall, a real, old-fashioned TV, as deep was it was wide. The remainder of the four walls were decorated with Nazi flags and Nazi eagles and framed, smiling photos of the original Nazis. You could squint and imagine yourself in the Hitler bunker during the final days of the war.
On either side of the “living room” were the sleeping areas, each with a garment rack for hanging clothes and cinder-block shelves crowded with personal items. The beds were army-style cots, each perfectly made, with tight hospital corners. This was actually Monk’s doing, the first thing he took care of after we came down the steps from the garden. Monk didn’t explain and the Willmott boys didn’t ask, as though grown-ups were always coming down to make their beds.
Being the only real officer, Randy took control, telling them that we would like to ask a few questions. Colin and Marshal were cocky enough to agree. They pointed to a stack of folding chairs, probably stored for family events, back when the Willmotts held family events. They were now stored under a portrait of Eva Braun. We unfolded them in a semicircle in front of the leather recliners and Randy started in with his first question about the gun, a moment that happened to coincide with the current song on the playlist.
Monk was still fidgeting when Randy crossed the concrete floor to the stereo receiver. A second later the room fell into a merciful silence. Colin and Marshal looked like they were about to object but didn’t. “So,” said the ex-lieutenant, coming back to the semicircle. “We’ve established your claim not to be in possession of a gun.”
“What?” said Monk, then remembered he was wearing earplugs. He removed them with a disposable wipe and handed the whole mess to me.
Colin looked quite different from his Eiffel Tower photo, even taking into account the fifteen years. His head was shaved, although his thin eyebrows proved he was still blond. He was prison thin and prison pale, with just the first signs of age starting to crease around his hard blue eyes. His outfit, identical to his cousin’s, was black jeans and an orange T-shirt. A lot of ex-cons I’ve met refuse to wear orange. Too many memories. But the Willmotts seemed to embrace it.
I would describe Marshal next, but his look was almost identical. They could have been mistaken for twins, which might have been part of their affinity in the first place, two handsome, golden-haired sons of privilege growing up a mile or so from each other. I might have had trouble telling them apart if it weren’t for the tattoos. Colin’s crawled up the left side of his neck and incorporated a swastika in a red circle. Marshal’s was on the right and featured the jagged lightning bolts of the Nazi storm troopers edging up toward his ear.
Monk seemed mesmerized, his gaze jumping from one pulsing swatch of neck skin to the other. I was just thankful that there was no ink on their prominent, bobbing Adam’s apples. That might have sent him over the edge.
“Now tell us what you know about rat poison,” said Randy, making the most of his tough-cop persona.
“Rat poison?” The light was beginning to dawn in Colin’s eyes. “You mean like the stuff that killed Judge Oberlin? That kind of poison for rats?”
“I’m telling you, that was a good day,” said Marshal. “Talk about karma.”
“How did you know that?” asked Randy. “The type of poison.”
“It was on the news,” said Marshal. “Channel Four. Oberlin was the prick who gave us seven years. I Googled this thallium junk. We had some of it here in the basement, but Col and me threw it out after seeing the news. Seemed too dangerous to keep around, you know?”
I couldn’t believe my ears. “You threw it out?”
“Yeah,” said Colin. “We put the containers into some old Tupperware, sealed it up tight, and tossed it. Couple days ago. So, you know, if anyone was to get a search warrant and happen to go through our quarters and find some microscopic trace of it, that’s why. Easily explained.” He didn’t seem to care if we believed him or not.
“We’re good citizens,” added Marshal. “Some people I know wouldn’t have used Tupperware.”
“Is that what they teach you in prison?” asked Monk. “How to get rid of toxic evidence?”
“Yeah.” Colin grinned and for the first time I saw the perfectly orthodontured teeth his family must have spent a small fortune on. “We learned a lot in prison.”
Monk nodded. “Did you learn it from your white-collar, minimum-security prison mates? Or from TV?”
“You shut up.” Colin’s grin faded. “What kind of name is that? Adrian Monk.”
“It’s my name.” Monk couldn’t stop looking at their necks.
“Is that Jewish?” asked Colin.
“Monk is English,” I interjected. I’d actually looked it up some time ago. “It was the name given to someone working for a monk or a monastery.”
“So I guess not Jewish,” said Colin, although he didn’t seem convinced. His hand went up to scratch his tattoo. When Monk winced, he saw it.
“You say it was a good day when you heard about Judge Oberlin,” said Randy. “How about Captain Leland Stottlemeyer?”
“Stottlemeyer?” said Marshal. The cousins exchanged glances. “The captain who arrested us. What about that scumbag? Is he dead?”
“Yeah, is he dead?” echoed Colin. “Serves the bastard right.”
“Sorry, he’s not.” The Summit police chief leaned forward
in his folding chair. “And neither is Randall Disher, the lieutenant who put the cuffs on you. Remember me?”
“Who?”
Randy looked deflated. “Guys, come on. Me. You don’t remember?”
The shaved-headed Nazis leaned forward in their recliners for a better look. “Sorry, dude,” said Colin. “That was you?”
“Did you put on some weight?” asked Marshal.
“No, I didn’t put on weight. Maybe five pounds. But that was me with the cuffs. Don’t say you wouldn’t like a little revenge.”
“You were just doing your job,” said Marshal. “No hard feelings.”
“No hard feelings?”
“It’s not like the captain,” said Marshal, his eyes narrowing with the memory. “The rest of you were happy with ‘person or persons unknown.’ But he kept at it. Like he didn’t have any bigger crimes in town.”
Marshal had also raised a hand to scratch his tattoo. This time both cousins noted Monk’s wince of distress. Their eyes met and their crooked, smug grins returned. What happened next was fascinating, like some nature film showing predators in the wild, communicating without sound, silently stalking their prey.
Colin went first, making sure Adrian was watching. He began to scratch at his tattoo. For the first time, I saw that the nail on his pinkie was longer than the others, and was sharpened to a point. He pulled the nail slowly down his neck, through the red circle and the black swastika, leaving a mark all the way. Monk winced again, this time with sound, an audible shudder. “Augh, what are you doing?”
Marshal’s turn was next. His nail looked identically sharp. It came down through the lightning bolts to his collarbone, then across the pale skin of his throat, straight across the Adam’s apple to his other collarbone.
“What are you … That can get infected,” groaned Monk. “Stop that.”
Adrian Monk is perfectly fine with blood and guts and dismemberment, as long as the subject has stopped breathing. Then the person becomes a thing, a part of a puzzle. His mind divorces itself from its need for order and perfection. But if the subject is still breathing … If the damage is self-inflicted with a fingernail, done perhaps with four manic eyes and a pair of menacing grins … Even for me, the sight was unsettling.
Colin was next. He mimicked his cousin’s movement across his throat. Then he went to work on his left arm, drawing upward along the skin from his wrist to his elbow. Marshal giggled like a kid of five and did the same.
“Stop that,” Monk shouted. But he couldn’t tear his eyes away.
Both of them were giggling, goading each other on as they’d done for most of their lives. Keeping Monk in their gaze, the Willmotts went simultaneously for the other arm, starting from the wrist, this time digging deeper. I couldn’t believe they were hurting themselves like this, just to momentarily torture a man they didn’t even know. Their giggles had grown into full-blown, Charles Manson–type laughs.
Monk threw a hand across his eyes and stumbled to his feet, skidding his folding chair back across the concrete floor and heading blindly for the basement stairs.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Mr. Monk Takes a Nap
We all have our ways of coping with traumatic events. And in our business, there are a lot of them. Adrian likes to stay cloistered in his apartment; Randy likes to hang out with his cop buddies; and me, I like to switch gears—to keep busy, but on something else, something to distract me, in this case, from the image of our primary suspects grinning like skinhead banshees as they drew bloody designs on their necks and arms.
That night, all three of us coped according to expectations. Monk was at home, his phone unplugged; Randy was exchanging macho tales at the cop bar over on Turk Street where they have the best hot wings in town; and I spent a lovely evening with Al from 24-Hour Holiday Pawn, fending off his friendly advances and trying to isolate a few frames from his security camera footage.
Not so bright and not so early the next morning, I filled my travel mug with Peet’s House Blend, grabbed my keys and tote, and tiptoed by the guest room door. I could tell Randy was up by the sound of sneezing and sniffling. I knocked. “Morning, sunshine. Everything all right?”
“Morning,” he moaned back. “I think I caught a cold last night. Or some allergy or something.”
“It’s more like Sharona’s revenge for deserting her.”
“You think I caught her cold?”
“Probably.”
“Wouldn’t it be funny if I went back and gave it to her all over again? Okay, maybe not funny.” He took several inhalations and exploded in one big sneeze. “Can you do without me today?”
“Absolutely. I’m just meeting with a computer geek.” I didn’t say who the geek was because then he might come along and the last thing I needed was him giving me his cold. “Take care of yourself.”
My daughter isn’t really a geek. But she is a college-educated twenty-one-year-old living in the Bay Area, which makes her pretty much a geek in my world.
Julie had taken the BART over from Berkeley and was waiting for me at the strip mall. Al and I had managed to isolate a few blurry images of Sue Not-O’Brien pacing out in front. I remembered the moment well, her thoughtful, confused expression. And the relief she’d shown when I’d walked up and offered my services.
The five best images were clumped together in my Photoshop file. Julie was in my chair and I was behind her in Monk’s—although if you tell him I was using his chair, I will deny it, and he’ll probably believe me rather than some stranger like you.
“It’s just like some old-time movie,” said Julie. I’d finally broken down and told her about Sue. “Some mysterious woman comes to a private eye begging for help and then she disappears and it’s all mysterious. Like Chinatown.”
“Chinatown is an old-time movie?”
“You gotta admit, it’s pretty cool. I texted my friends and they have a lot of theories.”
“Julie, this isn’t a game or a brainteaser. I may have gotten myself into some weird situation I don’t even know about.”
“That’s why I’m here to help.” She enlarged the image one more time.
“Why is it still so blurry?”
“Mom, this isn’t Mission Impossible.”
“I know. But I was hoping for maybe Law & Order: SVU. Some picture I can show around, maybe put up on a billboard. ‘Do You Know This Woman?’”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Right. Look, is there any way you can combine some of the images—a clear nose from this one, un-fuzzy hair from that one?”
“You’re still kidding, right?”
“Right.”
“Stop staring over my shoulder and talking like a Tom Cruise character. I’ll do what I can.”
I arranged Monk’s chair back under his desk in exactly the same position and same height, making sure there were no skid marks. It was the best I could do.
I stepped outside and away from the windows, so as not to be accused of hovering, and used this break to check in with Monk. He had replugged his phone. “Those guys are crazy. I can’t get them out of my mind.” It was his way of saying hello.
“Good morning, Adrian,” I replied. “Did you get any sleep?”
“Forty-eight minutes. But if I don’t get in my solid two hours, I’m a mess. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw their dirty fingernails scraping across their skin.”
“Try thinking of them as corpses.”
“I wish.”
“Do you think they killed the judge?”
There was a pause. “They’re up to something, and it’s not over. That performance was meant to scare me. Colin-the-swastika knew my name was Adrian, even though Randy introduced me as Mr. Monk. We’ve put away more than one resident of Pleasant Valley, so someone must have mentioned my name and my OCD.”
“Any other leads—besides they wanted to scare you?”
“The two of them share a kind of unspoken communication. Very dangerous. I didn’t get much else. I was
distracted.”
“Anything at all?”
“Well, they’re fixated on revenge. That’s clear. They still talk to Colin’s mother, not his father or to Marshal’s family, whom they hate even more than Colin’s. The boys applied for passports, expedited ones, so the documents may have already arrived. They’re planning something secret for Saturday, after which they’re fleeing the country.” He paused for effect. “Other than that, I know nothing.”
I both love it and hate it when he does that. “Adrian, don’t make me beg. The passports?”
He sighed dramatically, but moments like that are what he lives for. “There was a white sheet taped up against the wall in a corner. That and the glossy paper in their computer printer scream, ‘homemade passport photos.’ In their wastebasket near the bottom were two FedEx strips for sealing overnight envelopes, so they were in a hurry to go somewhere.”
“You’re right. I should have seen that.”
“You’re forgiven. Do you want to take a crack at the Saturday thing? It’s not that hard.”
“It’ll be faster if you do it.”
“Agreed. There was a calendar on the wall above Marshal’s cot.”
“I saw it,” I said, a little proud of myself. “You think it’s odd that ex-cons without a job or a lot of appointments would have a calendar on the wall?”
“No. I think it’s odd that the calendar page was for August, next month. The July page was torn off.”
“Huh.” Okay, this was puzzling, at least to me. “It’s still early. Why would they tear off July?”
“Because they didn’t want a cop and two private detectives to walk in and see it. While I was making up Marshal’s cot, I caught a glimpse of the torn-off page. It was on the floor.”
“And … ?”
“I couldn’t see much, not without them noticing. But this coming Saturday was circled in red with a little skull and crossbones drawing.”
“A skull and crossbones? In red?”
“Something bad is happening Saturday.”
“You think?”
“Yes, I do.” Monk was getting better at detecting sarcasm, but there were occasional lapses.
