by Lee Goldberg
“I am,” Monk said.
“They neglected to mention your modesty,” Stoffmacher said.
“I am also very tidy,” Monk said, trying to shake a bit of white fluff off his shoe.
“Good to know,” Stoffmacher said, narrowing his eyes at him. He clearly wasn’t sure what to make of Monk. Most people aren’t.
The man next to Stoffmacher cleared his throat. Stoffmacher took the hint.
“This is Kommissar Geshir,” Stoffmacher said, almost reluctantly.
“I’m always glad to meet another colleague in law enforcement. It so happens that I’m the top detective in this department,” Geshir said to Monk as he offered him his hand. Monk shook it.
“Congratulations,” Monk said, still wiggling his foot to rid himself of the evil fluff. Finally it flew off.
“You are also the only detective in the department,” Stoffmacher said.
“Which puts me at the top,” Geshir said.
“Or the bottom,” Stoffmacher said. “If you count me.”
“You’re the boss,” Geshir said, “so you don’t count.”
They were so busy arguing that neither one of them appeared to notice Monk disinfecting his hand with a towelette.
Watching the two detectives, I was overwhelmed by a strange sense of déjà vu.
“You’re telling me I don’t count?” Stoffmacher said. “You might want to consider the implications of that remark.”
Geshir shifted his weight nervously. “My English isn’t very good. I probably chose the wrong words.”
“I’m sure you did,” Stoffmacher said.
He turned to Monk, who at this point was already beginning to roam around the room, tipping his head from side to side, doing his Zen-detecting thing.
I found it reassuring to see him at work. It meant that he hadn’t totally lost his grip. Maybe now that he had something to occupy his mind and his time, he might be less overwrought about the six-fingered guy he thought he’d seen at the market.
Stoffmacher looked at me. “What is he doing?”
“Solving your homicide,” I said, my eyes drawn to Stoffmacher’s mustache. I’d never seen anything quite like it. I wondered how many hours he spent waxing it, oiling it, or soaking it in tar.
“That’s a nice gesture, but this isn’t a murder,” Stoffmacher said. “It’s suicide. Axel Vigg was despondent. His girlfriend ended their relationship, he was fired from his job at the glass factory, and he was about to be evicted. So he shot himself in the head. Sadly, these things happen.”
Monk straightened a painting on the common wall with the duplex next door. It was a still life of a fruit bowl. I’d be tempted to shoot myself, too, if I had to look at a bowl of fruit every day.
“He’s been dead at least twelve hours,” Monk said. “How was the body discovered?”
Geshir referred to his notes.
“Vigg was supposed to meet some friends last night and didn’t show. This morning he didn’t answer his phone or his door, so his friends got worried and called his landlord,” Geshir said. “The landlord unlocked the door and found the body.”
Monkwalked over to the front door and examined the knob and the dead bolt. “Did the landlord unlock both locks?”
“I don’t know,” Geshir said.
“I’d like to find out,” Monk said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Geshir said. Stoffmacher nudged him. “But I will go outside and ask him.”
Geshir stepped past us and went outside. Monk’s attention was drawn to something else. He walked over to the bright orange couch, which would have been gaudy even in the seventies, and examined what looked to me like a bullet hole in the thin cushion of the backrest. He scrutinized the rest of the couch, too, as if he’d never seen one before.
“Why did he shoot his couch?” Monk asked.
“Maybe because it’s ugly,” I said. “Personally, I would have set fire to it instead.”
“It was a test shot,” Stoffmacher explained, “to make sure the gun was operating properly and wouldn’t jam when he did the deed.”
Monk pointed through the air, following what I assumed was an imaginary line from the couch to the gun on the floor. He crouched beside the gun and peered at it.
“Did anyone hear the gunshots?” he asked.
“Not that we know of,” Stoffmacher said. “If he shot himself during the day, the neighbors were most likely at work. Even if they were home, they probably wouldn’t remember hearing a gunshot. It’s not unusual to hear gunfire in this neighborhood.”
“Really?” I said. “It seems so safe and peaceful here.”
“It is,” Stoffmacher said. “People don’t even lock their doors at night.”
“So why would they be accustomed to hearing gunshots?” I asked.
Monk stood in front of the couch and stared at the wall and the sun-bleached outline on the wallpaper of a painting that once had hung there. I know he detested wallpaper. The seams rarely matched up, so the patterns were never properly aligned.
“We are on the edge of the forest and hunting is a popular sport,” Stoffmacher said and I remembered the hunting blind I’d sat in yesterday. “I’m not surprised that no one heard this poor man shoot himself.”
Monk rolled his shoulders. “This wasn’t a suicide.”
“You’re saying it was murder?” Stoffmacher said.
“It wasn’t murder either,” Monk said.
“Then what was it?”
“An accident,” Monk said.
Stoffmacher stroked the curled end of his mustache. “You think the victim accidentally shot himself in the head?”
“He didn’t shoot himself,” Monk said. “Someone else shot him.”
“So you’re saying someone else was holding the gun,” Stoffmacher said, “and accidentally pulled the trigger.”
“That’s not what I am saying at all.” Monk turned to the brick fireplace and began counting the bricks on either side to make sure they were even and symmetrical.
“Forgive me. I think we’re having a little language problem,” Stoffmacher said. “That must be why I am misunderstanding you.”
“You’re not,” I said.
“Then what is he talking about?” Stoffmacher asked me.
That’s when Geshir bounded in like a golden retriever coming back with the tennis ball he’d been told to fetch.
“The landlord says he only unlocked the doorknob,” Geshir said. “The dead bolt wasn’t locked.”
“Now it all makes sense,” Monk said.
“It doesn’t make any sense at all,” Stoffmacher said, exasperated.
I had to smile.
They were experiencing pure, unadulterated Monk for the first time. They had no idea how his mind worked. I’m not saying that I did either, but at least I was used to the backwards, sideways, and often inexplicable way he put things together. I had the benefit of knowing it would fit in the end and that it was best just to go with the flow rather than question it.
“It’s obvious what happened here,” Monk said. “It’s right up there on the wall.”
Monk pointed to the bleached patch of wallpaper above the couch. Stoffmacher, Geshir, and I looked at the wall.
“There’s nothing there,” Geshir said.
“There was, but now it’s over there.” Monk gestured to the painting of the fruit on the opposite wall. “That painting used to be on this wall. It matches the bleached outline on the wallpaper.”
“So?” Geshir asked.
“Someone moved it.” Monk went over and lifted the painting off the other wall, revealing a hole. “To hide this.”
Geshir walked up to the hole and peered through it.
“You can see right into the living room of the other apartment, ” Geshir said. “I wonder if a really hot woman lives there and if she likes to walk around naked.”
Stoffmacher grimaced with pain, but it wasn’t physical. “That’s a bullet hole, Kommissar. Is there anybody home next door?”
/> “I don’t see anyone,” Geshir said.
Stoffmacher grabbed him by the collar and yanked him away from the wall. “I mean, did you knock on the door when we arrived and did anyone answer?”
“No,” Geshir said, sounding a bit flustered. “I mean, yes, I knocked, but no, no one answered.”
“Get the landlord to open it up,” Stoffmacher said.
“Why?”
“Because whoever fired the shot did it from the other apartment,” Stoffmacher said. “It’s an exit hole.”
Geshir went outside to find the landlord.
I decided that Friderike was right. Homes today aren’t nearly as well made as homes that were built centuries ago. A bullet certainly wouldn’t go through a wall at her house. It wouldn’t even scratch it.
I wondered whether it would make more sense to pack some mud and rocks around my windows rather than replace the weather-beaten wooden frames every few years.
Stoffmacher turned to Monk. “How did you know that bullet hole was going to be there?”
“All the clues pointed to it,” Monk said.
“What clues?” he asked.
“The bullet hole in the couch, the bleached wallpaper where the painting was, and the little nicks on the handle of the gun.”
“There are nicks on the gun handle?” Stoffmacher crouched beside the gun and squinted at it. So did I. We both saw the tiny nicks on the bottom and edge of the handle.
“The shooter used his gun to hammer the nail into the wall,” Monk said. “So he could hang the picture over the bullet hole that came from the other apartment.”
“How did you see those marks on the handle?” Stoffmacher asked.
“I always see the little things. It’s a gift,” Monk said. “And a curse.”
“I don’t get the curse part,” Stoffmacher said.
“You will,” I said.
“There’s also dried dirt on the couch cushions where the shooter had to stand to remove the painting,” Monk said.
Stoffmacher and I looked at the couch. Sure enough, there were bits of dirt as well as some fluff from the stuffing of the back cushion and a pillow feather. He mulled over this latest discovery.
“So the neighbor fired a bullet into his wall and accidentally killed this man,” Stoffmacher said, motioning to the corpse on the floor. “The neighbor came in, put a gun in Vigg’s hand to make it look like suicide, shot the couch, moved the painting to cover the bullet hole, and then locked the doorknob on his way out to delay the discovery of the body.”
He could lock the doorknob without the key, but not the dead bolt, which explained why the question of whether the dead bolt was locked or not was so significant to Monk. Everything seemed to fit, but there was one piece I didn’t get.
“Why did he shoot the couch?” I asked.
“To make sure the crime lab would find gunshot residue on Vigg’s hand so we would believe he shot himself,” Stoffmacher said. “Then the neighbor moved the painting to cover the bullet hole.”
“That’s one explanation of how things happened,” Monk said.
“There’s another?” Stoffmacher said.
“It’s possible that the man next door isn’t the one who fired the bullet that went through the wall and accidentally killed Axel Vigg.”
“Then who did it?” I asked.
“Whoever shot and killed the man next door,” Monk said.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Mr. Monk and the Deal
We went outside and found Geshir talking to the land-lord, a flustered little man with a mustache that looked like a bow tie. Monk examined a feather on the door-step and then looked up at a group of ducks and their ducklings crossing the roadway towards the creek on the other side. I wondered if he was going ask the police to cite them for littering.
Geshir took a set of keys from the landlord and met us in front of the neighbor’s door.
“The apartment is rented, furnished, on a month-to-month basis by a man named Bruno Leupolz,” Geshir said. “He’s only lived here a couple of weeks.”
“Where does he work?” Stoffmacher took some rubber gloves from his pocket, slipped a pair on, and handed us each a pair, but Monk didn’t put them on.
“The landlord doesn’t know much about him,” Geshir said, “except that he came from Berlin and pays in cash.”
Stoffmacher motioned to the door. Geshir put on a pair of rubber gloves, unlocked the door, and slowly pushed it open.
The first thing I noticed as we stepped inside was the smell. Or rather the lack of one. It meant that we weren’t going to find a decomposing corpse, which was a big relief for me. One was enough for one day.
The layout was like the other one, only in reverse. The place was clean and sparsely furnished and the walls were bare. There was a writing table pressed up against the wall, right below the bullet hole. There was no blood on the walls, the carpet, or the linoleum floor of the kitchenette.
We fanned out into the living room in silence, looking around for signs of I don’t know what.
Monk examined the ashes in the fireplace, the pencils and blank paper on the writing table, and the ink-jet printer on one of the chairs.
Nothing seemed unusual or out of place to me, but I don’t have Monk’s eye for detail.
We followed the two cops upstairs, Monk nearly stumbling to avoid a tiny feather on one of the steps. The bedroom was small and had a view of the hotel up on the hill. There was a pair of men’s casual shoes, the laces still tied, in front of the half-open closet, the doors scuffed where other shoes the tenant had kicked off his feet had hit them.
I was pleased with myself for noticing that. The only reason I did was because my late husband, Mitch, used to kick off his shoes without untying them all the time. Not only did he scuff up the doors and walls, but he left the shoes all over the floor for me to trip over when I woke up at night to go to the bathroom.
There was a pair of pants and a shirt flung on top of the unmade double bed. Monk rolled his shoulders. I knew how much he hated anything that was unmade. He was probably fighting the urge to tuck in the sheets and fluff the pillow.
Geshir opened the bathroom door and we looked inside. There was nothing unusual in there either. Like a corpse, for instance. It appeared that Monk was wrong about a murder having occurred here.
Stoffmacher stroked his mustache. “It looks like Herr Leupolz accidentally shot his neighbor, tried to make it look like a suicide, and then fled.”
“But he didn’t take any of his clothes,” Monk said. “They are still hanging in his closet. His suitcase is still there, too.”
“He didn’t have time to pack,” Stoffmacher said.
Monk tipped his head from side to side, shifted his weight from foot to foot, and rolled his shoulders. Stoffmacher and Geshir stared at him.
