by Lee Goldberg
“He’s not going to be satisfied with just a session,” he said. “Adrian will want to cling to me every second that I’m here.”
“He’ll leave,” I said.
“In my professional opinion, you’re wrong,” Dr. Kroger said. “I know Adrian a lot better than you do.”
“Then you should have expected this, shouldn’t you?” I said as cuttingly as I could. “You just have your session with him and let me handle the rest.”
“What he’s done today is very wrong,” he said. “I don’t know if I can continue seeing him as a patient after this.”
“We’ll worry about that when we get back to San Francisco, ” I said. “Right now, you have an appointment and Mr. Monk is waiting. I’ll see you in an hour.”
And with that, I turned my back on Dr. Kroger and walked away.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Mr. Monk Returns
I picked one of the hiking trails at random and just started walking uphill. I wandered past the covered patio and into the woods.
Once I was enveloped by the forest, I might as well have been in my hometown of Monterey, California. The only difference was the sunlight. It was as if there was a filter over the sun. It wasn’t as bright or as harsh as I was used to. If I lived in Lohr, I’d save money on sunglasses.
It was also surprisingly quiet. I couldn’t hear any cars and it was easy to forget I was only thirty or forty yards from a hotel full of people.
The quiet was really nice. You don’t realize just how loud your world is until the volume is suddenly turned down. I became aware of sounds I don’t usually hear in my hectic urban life. The breeze rustling through the leaves. Birds chirping. The buzz of insects. The trickle of water washing over rocks in a creek. The crackle of dry brush under my feet. The gentle background noise was like soft music.
I wandered a bit farther and came upon what first appeared to be a tree house. But as I got closer, I could see that it was actually a hunter’s blind made of branches and wood and enshrouded with vines. If not for the corrugated metal roof, it would have melded perfectly with the trees.
I climbed up the ladder into the blind and sat on the bench inside for a few minutes. I tried to imagine what it would be like sitting there for hours with my rifle, waiting for a defenseless animal to wander by for me to shoot.
I didn’t see the pleasure or the sport in that. But sitting in that blind, I was overwhelmed with childhood memories of playing in the tree house that I’d built with my friends from scrap wood we’d scavenged from a construction site.
They were memories I hadn’t tapped in years. It was like channel surfing and stumbling unexpectedly onto a favorite movie that you’d forgotten.
I got so lost in my reverie that forty minutes seemed to pass in a matter of seconds. When I realized the time, I climbed out of the blind and walked back down to the Franziskushohe.
I came into the lobby just as Dr. Kroger and Monk were finishing up their session outside. Dr. Kroger escorted Monk into the lobby as if it was his waiting room in San Francisco. If I’d been sitting on the couch reading Cosmopolitan or Highlights for Children, the re-creation would have been complete.
Monk was transformed. He appeared settled, almost serene. He was back to his old self again. Except for the lederhosen, that is.
“I think we made some real progress today, Adrian,” Dr. Kroger said. His words sounded forced to me.
“The excitement doesn’t have to stop now,” Monk said. “We can keep right on going.”
“Your session is over for today.”
“But you don’t have any other patients to see. We can spend all of our time together,” Monk said. “You’re here, Natalie is here. This can be a dream vacation.”
His dream, our nightmare.
Dr. Kroger gave me an “I told you so” look. But I was prepared for this. I’d worked out my strategy during the walk back to the hotel.
“We can’t stay here, Mr. Monk.”
“Of course we can. This is a hotel,” Monk said. “The three of us could get adjoining rooms. Wouldn’t that be grand?”
“I don’t think so, Adrian,” Dr. Kroger said.
“Why not?” Monk said.
“Because for seventy years this building was a sanitarium for people with tuberculosis,” I said. “And bronchitis, asthma, emphysema, and pneumonia.”
“To name a few,” Dr. Kroger said, meeting my eye and giving me a slight, appreciative nod.
“A few?” Monk said.
“Think of all the thousands of sick people who’ve been here,” Dr. Kroger said, “and all the coughing and sneezing and wheezing that has occurred within these walls.”
“The whole place is probably caked with layers of dried phlegm,” I said.
Monk shuddered. “That’s not possible.”
“See for yourself,” I said.
I led them outside and across the parking lot to one of the trailhead signs, which had a reproduction of a vintage photograph showing patients strolling with their nurses outside the hotel.
Monk stared at the picture in disbelief. “And they made this into a hotel? Were they insane?”
“After the sanitarium closed it became a convent,” I said. “Maybe they thought it was cleansed by prayer.”
“Prayer isn’t an antibiotic,” he said and held his hand out to me. “Wipe.”
I gave him one. He looked at Dr. Kroger as he scrubbed his hands and arms with the moist disinfectant towelette.
“You should leave with us,” Monk said. “While you can still breathe.”
“I’m staying,” Dr. Kroger said. “The conference is here and I have a strong immune system.”
“God help you,” Monk said, handing me the used wipe and motioning urgently to me for a new one. He started cleaning his legs with the towelette as Dr. Kroger began to walk back to the hotel.
“Good-bye, Adrian,” Dr. Kroger said.
“See you the day after tomorrow,” Monk said.
Dr. Kroger froze in his tracks and turned slowly to look at us. “You’re coming back?”
“For my next appointment.” Monk snapped his fingers at me for another wipe. I gave it to him.
“Do you think that’s wise with all the disease and nature around here?” I asked.
“I would walk across hot coals to see Dr. Kroger,” Monk said. “That’s how much he means to me.”
“You can’t imagine how that makes me feel,” Dr. Kroger said and trudged back to the hotel, his shoulders slumped with misery. He was a beaten man. I knew how he felt.
Monk started wiping his face and neck. “There goes a great man, facing certain death so that he can enhance his knowledge of psychiatry for his patients.”
“Do you feel better now?”
“Wonderful.” Monk held the wipe over his nose and mouth. “Completely relaxed.”
“I can see that,” I said.
We went back to the car. He didn’t stop breathing through the wipe until we drove back over the little bridge at the bottom of the hill and were heading into town.
“We need to call Captain Stottlemeyer right away,” he said.
“What for?”
“I’ve solved a murder,” he said.
“You have?” I said. “Whose?”
“Clarke Trotter’s,” Monk said.
I’d forgotten all about the cheating husband who was clobbered with a frying pan and I thought that Monk had, too. Monk hadn’t seemed to be paying attention to anything at the crime scene except his own misery.
But apparently I was wrong. On some level, he was unconsciously picking up details the whole time, despite his emotional and psychological meltdown. It was like he had a split personality, one that was freakishly unstable and another that concentrated unwaveringly on details and was impervious to distraction.
“What makes you think that Captain Stottlemeyer hasn’t already closed the case?” I asked.
“He would have called.”
“Why would he do that?”
<
br /> “Professional courtesy,” Monk said. “He wouldn’t want me concentrating on the mystery for nothing.”
“He didn’t think that you were concentrating on it at all,” I said.
“Of course he did,” Monk said. “He was relying on me.”
“He couldn’t rely on you,” I said. “That’s why you were fired from the case.”
“I don’t recall things that way,” he said.
“That’s because you have a selective memory,” I said. “You remember every single detail except the ones that don’t fit your worldview.”
“Everything fits in my worldview,” Monk said.
We parked in the town square again. I scrounged around in my purse for my cell phone and called the captain.
“What’s the emergency?” he asked groggily. I’d obviously awakened him.
“Shouldn’t you be at work?”
“It’s my day off,” he said.
Oops. I checked my watch. It was about seven a.m. in San Francisco.
“Sorry,” I said. “We’re nine hours ahead.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We’re in Germany,” I said.
“Who is?”
“I am,” I said. “With Mr. Monk.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” he said. “Monk has to be sedated just to cross the bay into Oakland.”
“I’d tell you all about it but this call has probably cost me more than my mortgage payment already. Mr. Monk has solved a murder.”
“In Germany?”
“In San Francisco.” I put the phone on the speaker setting and held it up between Monk and me. “He knows who killed Clarke Trotter.”
“It pains me to say this,” Monk said. “The murderer is Betty, his mother-in-law.”
“How do you know that?”
“She confessed,” Monk said.
“I was in her house with you and I didn’t hear any confession, ” Stottlemeyer said.
“She didn’t confess there,” Monk said. “She confessed to us at Trotter’s apartment.”
“She wasn’t with us in Trotter’s apartment,” Stottlemeyer said, his voice strained with irritation.
“But she left her confession behind,” Monk said. “It was the kitchen.”
“The kitchen was her confession?” Stottlemeyer said.
“You’ve got it,” Monk said.
“I don’t have anything,” Stottlemeyer said. “Except an early-morning headache.”
“Here’s what happened,” Monk said. “Betty went over to Clarke’s apartment to talk with him. We’ll never know why he let her in, but he did. It was a fatal mistake. Something he said or did pushed her over the edge. She grabbed the frying pan from the stove and hit him with it. Then she went back to the kitchen, intending to clean the pan and cover up her crime. But when she saw all the filthy dishes, the dirty counters, and the complete disorganization, she couldn’t stop there. She had to wash all the dishes and clean the entire kitchen. The mess was too much for her to ignore.”
“It’s hard to imagine anyone being that compulsive,” I said. “Isn’t it?”
“She was only human, Natalie,” Monk said. “No decent, civilized human being could walk away from a mess like that.”
“No decent, civilized human being could commit a murder, ” I said.
“I sympathize with her,” Monk said. “She’s a good woman who was provoked into a violent act by a repugnant human being. She was acting out of love for her daughter and her grandchildren. And I admire her.”
“What for?” I said.
“Even after committing a murder, she did the right thing and cleaned up the mess in Trotter’s kitchen,” Monk said. “That selfless act of decency should go a long way towards convincing the judge to grant her some leniency at sentencing.”
“Before this case can ever get to a courtroom, we’re going to need proof to back up your theory,” Stottlemeyer said. “Where is it?”
“The kitchen is the proof,” Monk said.
“Anybody could have cleaned it,” Stottlemeyer said.
“It wasn’t anybody,” Monk said. “It was her. The items on the counters and the dishes in the cupboards are arranged just like the dishes in her kitchen.”
“You didn’t see inside the cabinets,” Stottlemeyer said.
“I didn’t have to,” Monk said. “I saw how she arranged the items on her counters and how things were organized on Trotter’s. And I saw Trotter’s dish towels. They were folded and ironed, just like the towels and cloth napkins in her home.”
“They were?” I said.
“You could see that?” Stottlemeyer said.
“She probably wore dish gloves while she cleaned the kitchen,” Monk said, “but I wouldn’t be surprised if she took them off to iron the towels. You’ll find her fingerprints on the iron.”
“So his tidy kitchen was as good as a signed confession,” I said.
“It’s better than one,” Monk said.
“I’ll look into it,” Stottlemeyer said. “It’s good to have you back, Monk.”
“I’m in Germany,” Monk said.
“And still solving more murders in San Francisco than I am,” Stottlemeyer said. “It’s rough for my ego but I’ll live with it. Catch you later. Try not to get into too much trouble over there.”
We said our good-byes and I put the phone back in my purse.
Monk looked at me. “Promise me you’ll never tell the captain about this.”
“About what?”
Monk gestured to his lederhosen. “If word got out that I was running naked through the streets of Germany, it could ruin my career. Dr. Kroger is bound to secrecy by doctor-patient privilege, but you aren’t.”
“It’s springtime, Mr. Monk. You’re on vacation in a foreign country. It’s okay to wear shorts. All the tourists are doing it,” I said. “Besides, you have nice legs.”
“What are you doing looking at my legs?” he said. “Look away.”
I did, stifling a smile.
“This can only lead to trouble,” he said.
“What kind of trouble could it lead to?”
“Promise me you’ll never say a word about this,” he said. “Not even to me.”
“Your secret is safe,” I said. “At least until I write my memoirs.”
“You’re writing a book?” he asked, a touch of panic in his voice.
“Not yet,” I said. “But someday I might.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
