by Lee Goldberg
I smiled and squeezed Ambrose’s hand. “I am so happy for you, Ambrose.”
“Oh for God’s sake, wake up. What do we know about this woman?” Monk asked. “She could be an ex-con.”
“She is,” Ambrose said.
“She could have killed someone,” Monk said.
“She has,” Ambrose said.
Monk slapped his hands on the table in frustration. “And you let her into your home? You’re insane. You’ve become a danger to yourself.”
“Then so are you, Mr. Monk,” I said.
“How can you say that? You know me. I would never act as impulsively, as irresponsibly, and as self-destructively as he has.”
“Yes, you would,” I said. “You already have.”
“What are you talking about?” Monk asked.
“I’m an ex-con,” I said.
“You were arrested for a minor offense in college,” Monk said. “It’s not the same.”
“I’ve killed someone,” I said.
“That was in self-defense,” Monk said.
“Even so, all those things didn’t stop you from letting me into your home.”
“But not in my shower,” Monk said.
“Is that what’s bothering you, Adrian?” Ambrose asked. “That Yuki and I are together?”
Monk stared at him. “You’re together together?”
“How could you not know that? How could you not see the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me?” Ambrose said. “Why does everyone think you’re this astoundingly observant detective when you are totally blind?”
“Oh my God,” Monk said, lowering his head and covering his face with his hands. “This just keeps getting worse.”
He was right. I had to save Monk from himself. I got up from my seat. “I think it’s time for Mr. Monk and me to go.”
“I’ll call you when we have some information for you,” Ambrose said.
Monk got up and pointed a finger at Ambrose. “Don’t come crying to me when Yuki strips this house of valuables and runs off with her Hells Angels friends to get tattooed.”
“She’s already tattooed,” Ambrose said. “She has a snake on her back. I think it’s beautiful.”
“The apocalypse is nigh,” Monk said. “And the first horseman just rode in on a Harley.”
And with that, Monk marched out of the house, slamming the door behind him. I was about to say something when Monk came back in, went straight over to one of the stacks of newspapers in the living room, straightened the issue on top, then stormed out again.
“Please forgive him, Ambrose,” I said. “He doesn’t handle change well.”
“I didn’t like change, either, until the change was Yuki. Does that make sense?”
I gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Perfect sense.”
CHAPTER NINE
Mr. Monk Hits the Bottle
The drive back into San Francisco across the Golden Gate Bridge was an ordeal, as I knew it would be.
“Can you believe what Ambrose has done?” Monk lamented.
“I’m very happy for him.”
“Then you care nothing for his well-being.”
I’d had it with him by that point and couldn’t hold back any longer.
“As I recall, Mr. Monk, the whole point of taking your brother out on that road trip was because you’d achieved a balance in your life that you felt he’d been denied. One of the things that saddened you was that he hadn’t found someone to love. Well, now he has. So what are you complaining about? Isn’t this what you wanted?”
“Not with some biker chick that he picked up on the side of the road.”
“Who cares where you find love as long as you find it?” I said. “Or it finds you?”
Monk looked at me gravely. “I think they’re fornicating.”
I wanted to slam my head against the steering wheel. “You’re missing the whole point.”
“Take me to Dr. Bell’s office right away.”
“You were just there this morning,” I said.
“This is a crisis,” he said. “A psychiatric emergency.”
“Are you having a mental breakdown?”
“No, I’m fine,” Monk said. “I’m the epitome of clear thinking and rationality.”
“So what’s the emergency?”
“Do you have amnesia? My brother is fornicating with a homicidal tattooed motorcycle mama! Dr. Bell might be the only one who can save him.”
“How do you expect Dr. Bell to do that?”
“By committing Ambrose to a mental institution.”
“On what grounds?”
“Insanity, of course. If what Ambrose is doing isn’t insanity, nothing is.”
“By that, you mean having sex.”
Monk gave me a stern look. “Do you realize what that actually involves?”
“I have a distant memory,” I said.
“At least he had the good sense to do it in a shower,” Monk said, “where there’s plenty of soap, cleanser, disinfectant, rubber gloves, and scrubbing brushes.”
I didn’t bother arguing any more with Monk. It was pointless when he was that distraught. Instead, I did as he asked and took him to Dr. Bell’s office. I didn’t think Dr. Bell would do anything about Ambrose, but I hoped that he could do something for Monk.
I dropped him off in front of Dr. Bell’s office and sped away. I didn’t want to be around when the disinfectant wipes hit the fan.
I found a parking spot a few blocks away off Columbus Avenue and walked down to Washington Square. It was a nice day, and I was happy to just sit there and watch the children play, and the couples make out, and the dogs chase balls, as if all of them were actors on a stage, performing for an audience of one.
But after about an hour, my cell phone rang and a very irritated Dr. Bell insisted that I come get Monk immediately. I didn’t ask Dr. Bell how the session went and he wouldn’t have told me if I had.
When I drove up to Dr. Bell’s office, Monk was already waiting for me, pacing on the sidewalk out front. He got in the car and slammed the door.
“The planet has slipped off its axis and is rolling into the abyss,” he said.
The fact that Monk was using a belabored metaphor like that could only mean that things didn’t go well.
“I take it Dr. Bell declined to institutionalize your brother for falling in love.”
Monk shook his head. “He wasn’t paying attention to what I was saying. He was too busy listening to the fatties in his compulsive overeaters group.”
“You crashed their session, Mr. Monk.”
“Oh come on. What do they have to talk about? So I told them: ‘Stop eating so much, you’re all fat enough as it is. If you can’t do that, simply wire your jaws shut until the tonnage is gone.’ There. Done. Problem solved. I assumed we were ready to move on to a real psychiatric emergency, like my crazy brother taking showers with a sociopath. But things inexplicably got ugly.”
“I can imagine,” I said.
“No, you can’t. They became an angry mob. They charged me like rampaging elephants. I wasn’t sure whether they were going to crush me, or eat me, or both. Those people desperately need help.”
“Which is what they were trying to get from Dr. Bell when you intruded on their therapy session and ridiculed their problems.”
“Ambrose is on his own,” Monk said. “There’s nothing I can do for him.”
“He’ll appreciate that,” I said.
“You say that now,” Monk said. “But wait until his heart is broken.”
“It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
“This isn’t love. It’s lunacy.”
“Love is a kind of lunacy.”
“I’m glad you’re finally seeing reason,” Monk said.
We went back to Monk’s place, where he went straight to the refrigerator, took a drink of Fiji water right out of the bottle, and then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He looked me in the eye defiantly, as if
I represented the conventions he was breaking. Maybe that’s because I was the only one around. It actually would have made much more sense for him to look defiantly into a mirror. I had no problem drinking out of the bottle or using the back of my hand as a napkin.
“Am I shocking you?” he asked, then took another sip from the bottle.
“Not really,” I said.
“I guess there are no boundaries of human behavior left to cross after what we’ve seen today.”
“You’re probably right,” I said. “I think I’ll go home and try to cope.”
He opened the refrigerator again and tossed me a bottle of Fiji water.
“Drink responsibly,” Monk said. “Don’t open that until you get home.”
“Will do,” I said. “Are you going to be okay?”
“Nope,” he said, took another swig, and wiped his mouth again with the back of his hand.
It was shortly after eight the next morning when my phone rang. As soon as I heard it, I knew for certain that it was Captain Stottlemeyer and that someone was dead. I was right. Sunrise in San Francisco almost always casts light on a corpse.
I called Monk with the news and it immediately put him in a good mood. There was nothing like the violent, tragic end of another human being’s life to brighten his day.
I really shouldn’t say that. It’s not fair to Monk.
The truth is, it wasn’t the murder itself that made Monk happy—it was the challenge of solving a puzzle, the opportunity to set things right, and the chance to feel needed. It was just a shame that someone had to die for him to feel those things.
And I knew that this time it wasn’t the mystery he was looking forward to as much as the opportunity to clean it up, literally instead of just figuratively.
Although it didn’t lift my spirits that someone had been murdered, I did feel that shot of adrenaline, and that flutter of excitement in my chest, that came with the knowledge that I’d soon be caught up in another investigation. I discovered that the death of the Invisible Man wasn’t enough to sate my eagerness to prove myself.
Monk was waiting for me on the street outside of his apartment building when I drove up. He was holding the box that contained a set of disposable full-body coveralls, rubber gloves, filtered respirator mask, goggles, and rubber boots. He put the box in the backseat and then got into the car beside me.
I glanced at him. He had dark circles under his eyes, his hair was slightly askew, and I saw a wrinkle on his sleeve.
“Rough night?” I asked.
He nodded. “I hit the bottle pretty hard and then I went to bed without bathing or brushing my teeth.”
“You’re lucky to be alive,” I said as I steered the car away from the curb and headed for the crime scene, which was down in the Mission District.
“This situation with Ambrose has me reeling.”
“He’s happy, Mr. Monk. There’s no reason to reel.”
“Happiness is an illusion, Natalie. It doesn’t actually exist.”
“Of course it does,” I said. “It’s what you feel when you’re not sad.”
“That’s unconsciousness. And I’m pretty sure that I’m miserable when I am unconscious, too.”
I gave up, as I usually do, in any discussion where I try to change Monk’s mind about something. He’d have to make his own peace with Ambrose’s relationship.
The crime scene was the Bargain Thrift Store on Mission between Seventeenth and Eighteenth streets. It was a largely Latino neighborhood, and on that block alone there were two taquerias, three nail salons, a check-cashing center, a used-book store, two pawnshops, a beauty salon, a bakery, two corner produce markets, one fortune-teller, and three storefront iglesias pentecostales.
The street in front of the Bargain Thrift Store was clogged with official police vehicles, so we had to park a few doors down in front of the Adult Supercenter, a banner above the blacked-out windows reading “Hundreds of New Toys Just In.”
“That’s disgusting,” Monk said as we got out of the car. “They’re trying to lure in children.”
“No one under the age of twenty-one is allowed inside. The advertising is aimed at adults.”
“Adults don’t play with toys, kids do. And no parent in their right mind would buy toys for their kids in there.”
“I don’t think those are the kind of toys that they are selling.”
“What other kind of toys are there?” Monk looked back at the store. “Look at the sign on their window: ‘We have lifelike dolls of all shapes, sizes, and colors. Come in and play.’ ”
I thought about what would be involved in explaining why he was wrong, and the examples that I would have to give, and I made a decision.
“You’re right, Mr. Monk. My mistake. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
As we crossed the street, Monk stopped a uniformed officer and pointed to the adult store. “You need to go into that store and tell them that they shouldn’t be selling toys in there. What if children wander in, looking for Hot Wheels or Barbies to play with?”
I stood behind Monk and nodded vigorously at the cop, hoping he’d get the message.
“I’ll get right on it, Mr. Monk,” the cop said and headed for the store.
Monk smiled and we continued on toward the crime scene. “There’s an officer who is going to rise quickly through the ranks.”
I looked over my shoulder in time to see the officer double back and shoot me a thumbs-up. Monk was right—he would go far.
CHAPTER TEN
Mr. Monk and the Thrift Shop
Stottlemeyer and Devlin met us outside the door of the thrift store. Monk peered past them through the open doorway at the sales floor, which was scattered with secondhand furniture, racks of old clothes, and shelves overflowing with dishware, linens, hats, lamps, countertop appliances, outdated electronics, and a thousand other discarded items.
“What is this awful place?” Monk asked.
“The thrift shop for the Bay Cities food bank,” Devlin said. Monk stared back at her with a blank look on his face. “People donate their used clothing, appliances, dishes, and furniture, which the shop then sells to benefit the charity.”
“The charitable thing to do would be to burn it all,” Monk said. “What kind of person would eat off dishes and stick silverware in their mouths that other people have used?”
“Oh, just about anyone who has ever been in a restaurant or had a meal in someone’s home,” Stottlemeyer said. “In other words, everyone on earth but you.”
“In those cases, you know where the dishes have been and that they’ve likely been thoroughly cleaned a thousand times,” Monk said. “Who knows where these have been or what has been served on them? Maybe they were used to serve slop to pets or barnyard animals.”
“Have you seen a lot of farms here in San Francisco?” Devlin asked.
Monk ignored her question. “What about all this furniture? Who would sit or sleep on furniture other people have been using for God knows what kind of activities?”
“Anyone who has ever been in a restaurant, hotel, or in someone’s home,” Devlin said.
“Hotels and restaurants have maid services and are regularly visited by health inspectors. The same can’t be said for private homes, where most of this has come from,” Monk said. “But what I really can’t imagine is what sort of a person would wear clothes other people have worn.”
“A person who can’t afford new clothes,” I said. “Or who finds vintage clothing stylish.”
“It’s disgusting,” Monk said. “Shopping here is no different than rooting around in a trash Dumpster.”
Devlin tugged on her leather jacket. “I got this at a thrift store.”
“That’s different,” Monk said. “You were in vice working undercover as a crack whore.”
“I never went undercover as a crack whore,” Devlin said. “And I am not undercover now.”
Monk cleared his throat and shifted his weight. “Oh.”
“If you
’re done buttering up the lieutenant, I’d really like to go inside and investigate this murder,” Stottlemeyer said. “What do you say, Monk?”
“I’ll need another minute or two,” Monk said. “I have to go back to the car and put on my biohazard suit.”
“It’s a thrift store,” Devlin said. “Not a toxic waste spill.”
“I don’t see the distinction,” he said.
Monk and I went back to my car, where I helped him suit up, using duct tape to tightly seal his coverall sleeves and pant legs to his gloves and boots. He put on his goggles and secured his respirator mask over his nose and mouth, and then we returned to the thrift store.
Devlin shook her head. “Don’t you think that’s overkill?”
“That place is a pit of pathogens,” Monk said, the mask giving his voice a Darth Vader–esque quality. “HIV, hepatitis, herpes, E. coli, and hantavirus—it could all be in there.”
He turned to look into the store, so he didn’t hear Devlin when she said, “It could all be out here, too. The streets aren’t any cleaner.”
Stottlemeyer nudged her hard with his elbow and whispered, “Shut up before you set us back years with him.”
“What did she say?” Monk asked, turning around again.
“That she’ll be very cautious inside the thrift shop and that she greatly appreciates your concern for our health,” Stottlemeyer said.
“And what did you say?”
“I thanked her for advising us to exercise extreme caution.”
“So why did you whisper?”
“Because I was ashamed to admit that you were right,” Stottlemeyer said.
Monk nodded, barely hiding his satisfaction with the answer. “Let’s get to it.”
The four of us went inside the store, which had the musty, dusty smell of someone’s attic, tinged with the coppery scent of spilled blood.
Devlin led the way, weaving through the cluttered aisles toward the windowed office in the back, which looked out on the sales floor. The window was spattered on the inside with blood, which explained why the smell was in the air.
