Mr. Monk Goes to Germany

by Lee Goldberg

  “Bruno’s girlfriend was one of Dr. Rahner’s patients,” Ernestine said. “She dumped Bruno and invested every penny she had in the doctor’s resort, and then moved in there.”

  I knew of only two people who lived at the resort full-time, and only one of them was a woman. Well, mostly a woman. I cringed at the thought at the same moment that Monk did, too.

  Ernestine eyed us both. “So you heard about Katie’s problem.”

  “You knew?” Monk said.

  “I’m a reporter and I wanted to know why Bruno was so obsessed with this psychiatrist to the point that he would turn down paying assignments to pursue the man,” she said. “There was no story. It was entirely personal. He desperately wanted Dr. Rahner to be guilty of something so he could get Katie back, which was why I was so skeptical about Bruno’s latest angle.”

  “Leupolz discovered something else about Dr. Rahner?” Monk asked.

  “Bruno claimed that the doctor’s time-share resort was actually a huge financial scam, that the money Dr. Rahner convinced his patients and their families to invest in his real estate development business, presumably to build similar resorts elsewhere, was actually going into his own pocket. Bruno said that he’d discovered the doctor had gambled that money on higher-risk investments and lost, so he was now using the cash he’d connived from new investors to pay back the old ones.”

  “A classic Ponzi scheme, using the money from the new suckers to mollify the old ones,” I said. “Would a shrink abusing the trust of his patients to get them to invest in a real estate scam be a story for you?”

  “Only if there was a huge amount of money involved, so Bruno naturally said that there was, tens of millions of euros, including his ex-girlfriend’s meager life savings. But he’d say anything to get me to run a story on the psychiatrist. That’s why I insisted that Bruno show me lots of hard evidence to support his charges. He said he would.”

  “But you didn’t see it,” Monk said.

  “That’s because it probably didn’t exist,” she said.

  “It doesn’t now,” Monk said. “His notes were burned and his laptop is missing.”

  She shrugged. “I was pretty hard on him when we spoke. I told him that he was losing what little journalistic credibility he still had left, and that if he didn’t wise up soon, nobody would ever hire him as a reporter again. Maybe burning the notes and tossing the laptop was his way of finally coming to his senses and giving up on a lost cause.”

  “Or maybe Dr. Rahner murdered him,” Monk suggested.

  “That would be a story,” she said. “What evidence do you have to back it up?”

  I was afraid she’d ask that. I was even more afraid that Monk would answer it.

  “I’ve seen the way Dr. Rahner ties his shoes,” Monk said.

  She raised an eyebrow. “That’s your evidence?”

  “There’s more, much more. There’s the suicide of Axel Vigg, which wasn’t a suicide at all. The hole in his wall wasn’t for looking at stewardesses and he didn’t shoot his couch. Who would do that? There’s also the pillow feathers on the carpet and the clean shoes that should have been dirty but weren’t.”

  It sounded like the rambling of a lunatic to me and I actually knew what he was talking about. I could only imagine what it sounded like to her.

  “I don’t understand any of that,” Ernestine said, “or how it proves that Bruno’s heart attack was a murder, or that Dr. Rahner was responsible.”

  “Oh, he was,” Monk said. “I’ve seen lots of murderers and he’s definitely one. I knew it the instant I saw those six fingers.”

  “You’re going after him because of his extra finger?”

  “I know he killed Bruno Leupolz and he could also be the man who hired a bomber to blow up my wife’s car. She was a reporter, too.”

  “I see.” She escorted us to her door and held it open. “I thought Bruno was blinded by obsession, Mr. Monk, but you’re much worse.”

  “It’s not going to get any better,” he said and we left the office.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Mr. Monk Hits a Wall

  Iled us towards Checkpoint Charlie. I figured I could find a souvenir there for Julie and a taxi to take us back to the airport.

  Monk frowned with frustration, his hands balled into fists, like a petulant child.

  “I know how Dr. Rahner killed Bruno Leupolz and Axel Vigg, I know how he covered up his crimes, and I even know what his motives were,” Monk said. “The only thing I don’t know is how to prove any of it.”

  “Do you really think Dr. Rahner is the man who arranged Trudy’s murder?”

  “I’d like him to be,” Monk said.

  “But do you believe that he is?”

  “He’s got six fingers on his right hand, he was in San Francisco around the time she was killed, and he’s a murderer,” Monk said. “It’s more likely than not that he is.”

  “But he might not be,” I said.

  He looked at me. “You don’t think it’s him.”

  “It’s possible that Dale the Whale could have found out that Dr. Rahner fudged his credentials long before Bruno did and blackmailed him into arranging Trudy’s murder,” I said. “But I don’t think Dr. Kroger was involved.”

  “You think it’s just a coincidence that Dr. Kroger and Dr. Rahner know each other.”

  “Yes, I do,” I said. Up until that moment, I hadn’t realized that I felt that way. “And if that part is a coincidence, then I have to wonder if maybe the rest of it is, too.”

  “The killing Trudy part,” Monk said.

  I nodded. “So what do we do now?”

  “We go back to Lohr and see this through to the bitter end,” Monk said. “But this time I’m taking one of my pills.”

  “For a one-hour flight?”

  It seemed like overkill. The effects of the medication lasted about twelve hours.

  “I also need it for what we’re doing when we get back to Lohr,” Monk said. “I want to go back into the woods and see if we can find where Dr. Rahner hid Leupolz’s body.”

  Monk would definitely have an easier time dealing with all that nature if he was drugged up.

  I wasn’t sure that I would, though.

  At the corner, the turbulent and violent history of the Berlin Wall was displayed in photographs on a wooden wall that had been erected around a vacant lot where a portion of the GDR’s border-crossing complex had once stood.

  I paused to look at the pictures and read some of the captions. They didn’t tell me much that I hadn’t learned in high school, but standing in that spot, I could feel the history. It was still recent enough that people like Ernestine, who didn’t seem any older than I was, had been witnesses to it.

  The pictorial felt cheap and perfunctory. I thought it would have been much better to have a few Berlin residents who’d lived with the wall in their lives standing around on the corner. They could have talked to us informally about how the wall had affected their lives and shaped who they were today.

  That’s not to say there weren’t some people there for the tourists. There were a couple of guys wearing old U.S. and Russian military uniforms and posing with tourists in front of the guard shack in return for some spare change. It was the Berlin version of having your picture taken with Mickey Mouse and Dopey and just as meaningful.

  There was a souvenir shop a few doors down from the guard shack. I went inside, hoping to find something more authentic and interesting than a T-shirt, key chain, refrigerator magnet, or mug with a picture of the Brandenburg Gate on it.

  On the back wall of the store, the shelves were covered with chunks of painted concrete glued to plastic stands. As I got closer, I realized they were pieces of the Berlin Wall, sold by size, from a pebble to a huge slab with rebar poking out of it.

  Monk examined a chunk and then started rearranging the pieces that were on the shelf in front of him.

  I picked up a blue-green painted bit of rubble about the size of a Ping Pong ball. It cos
t nine euros, which was cheaper than a mug and something I couldn’t buy anywhere else but Berlin—assuming it was genuine, of course. Even if it wasn’t, it was still the perfect souvenir.

  “Put that back,” Monk said, still moving the pieces around.

  “It’s okay. They’re for sale,” I said.

  “They shouldn’t be,” Monk said. “What if someone wants to put it back together?”

  “They won’t,” I said.

  “But what if they change their minds? They’ll never be able to do it if the pieces are scattered all over the globe.”

  “Good,” I said.

  Monk sorted the pieces by size and tried to match them up. It was futile.

  “None of these pieces fit,” he said with irritation.

  “The wall was broken into millions of little pieces, Mr. Monk. You can’t honestly expect the bits of rubble on these shelves to snap together like puzzle pieces.”

  “They could,” Monk said. “All we have to do is find all the pieces that are missing.”

  “You want us to reassemble the Berlin Wall,” I said.

  “They’ll thank us later,” Monk said.

  “No, they won’t,” I said. “Besides, it would take us years.”

  “You should have thought of that before you brought us in here,” Monk said miserably. “We’re committed now.”

  I left Monk at the shelves, went up to the counter, and whispered a question to the female cashier. “Do they sell pieces of the Berlin Wall at the airport?”

  “Yes,” the cashier said, “but they are much more expensive there and they don’t have nearly as wide a selection of colors and sizes as we do.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  It might be pricier buying the piece at the airport, but it was the only way I was leaving Berlin with the souvenir. By then, Monk would be under the influence of his wonder drug and wouldn’t care about devoting his life and mine to recovering every piece of the Berlin Wall.

  I went back to Monk, who was becoming increasingly frustrated at his inability to fit any of the pieces of the wall together.

  “This is a living hell,” Monk said.

  “You’d better take your pill now if we’re going to make our flight.”

  “But what about this?” Monk said. “We can’t just walk away and leave chaos behind.”

  “We’ll come back later,” I said.

  “When?”

  “When we have more pieces,” I said.

  “Good idea,” he said and I gave him his pill.

  Thirty minutes later, we were at Berlin-Tegel and all was forgotten.

  I bought my piece of the wall at the airport gift shop and stowed it deep inside my purse where I hoped Monk would never see it.

  Monk, meanwhile, settled in at an airport café, where he was sampling as many different German pastries as he possibly could, including at least four different kinds of streusel.

  He wore many of those pastries on his shirt by the time we got on the plane, where he helped himself to a copy of each of the free magazines.

  “You can’t read German,” I said.

  “They’re free,” Monk said. Even on drugs, he was a cheapskate.

  The plane wasn’t as crowded as our earlier flight. I took a window seat and Monk took the aisle, leaving the seat between us empty.

  Before we took off, a stewardess came down the aisle, checking to see if our seat belts were fastened. It was the same stewardess who’d been on our last flight. She seemed shocked by the change in Monk, who was studying the Playboy centerfold.

  “What do you think?” Monk tipped his head to the naked woman in the magazine. “Real or fake?”

  “I’m not an expert,” she said.

  “If you’re not,” Monk said, “who is?”

  She ignored him and moved on. Monk showed the centerfold to me.

  “You’re familiar with these,” he said. “What do you think?”

  I yanked the magazine from his hands and shoved it into the seat pocket in front of me.

  “Behave yourself,” I said.

  The man sitting across the aisle from Monk leaned towards him.

  “They’re real,” he said, nodding to underscore his certainty.

  “If those are real,” the woman next to him said, “then I’m a man.”

  “Are you?” Monk asked.

  “That’s my wife you’re talking to!” the man said, his face reddening fast.

  Monk shrugged. “This is Germany.”

  The passenger in front of Monk peered over the top of his seat at him. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  Before Monk could reply and things could escalate into a fistfight, the woman in the seat behind Monk tapped his arm.

  “They’re fake,” she said.

  “Real,” said someone else.

  “Fake,” said someone else.

  “One is real,” someone else said. “The other is fake.”

  And so it went, up and down the plane. By the time we landed in Frankfurt, Monk had managed to poll all the passengers and the crew on this vital question, but they were evenly split on the issue. Most of the men, though, believed the centerfold’s breasts were real. Or wanted to.

  What a shock.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Mr. Monk Takes a Walk in the Woods

  It was dark when we got out of our car in the Franziskus-hohe parking lot. Monk turned on one of the two flashlights that we’d bought on our way back to Lohr and aimed it into the woods, letting the beam play on the trees.

  “Ready to go?” he asked me.

  “It’s dark,” I said.

  “That’s why we’ve got flashlights,” he said. “But the moon is so bright we hardly need them.”

  “Maybe we should do this in the morning,” I said.

  “This is the perfect time to do it.”

  “You’re not going to be able to see anything.”

  “But this is probably what it was like when Dr. Rahner was out there, looking for a place to hide the body until morning. We’ll see things the way he did.”

  “You’re on drugs,” I said.

  “You’re scared,” Monk said, grinning.

  “I am not,” I lied.

  Monk shined the light under his chin, giving him a ghostly look. “You think the boogeyman is going to get you?”

  “I’m being cautious. What if you trip over something?”

  “Uh-huh.” Monk reached into his pocket and came out with his prescription bottle. “Maybe you’d like one of my pills.”