by Lee Goldberg
I had no way of knowing if I was right about the guy, short of asking him, but it was a game I played with myself all the time. It was a way to keep myself sharp to assist Monk in his investigations.
Lately, I’d become more involved in his cases, not only to keep myself interested but also because I enjoyed it, which is why I was so flattered to hear that Stottlemeyer had praised my skills to Disher.
The captain was probably just buttering me up so I’d go with Monk to New Jersey without putting up a fight. And if he was, well, kudos to him for manipulating me so well.
We reached the conveyor that led into the X-ray machine. Sharona dropped her purse in one of the plastic baskets and began shedding her jewelry, her jacket, her belt, and her shoes.
“That’s enough,” Monk said, grabbing her by the arm. “This isn’t a strip club.”
“You’re required to remove this stuff, Adrian.”
“You expect me to believe they’re going to let you run naked through the airport?”
“Relax, I’m done. This is all I’m taking off.”
“Thank God, because otherwise you’d need a pole and some music.”
“Now it’s your turn, Adrian,” she said. “Take it off.”
“Are you insane?” Monk looked around. “You expect me to disrobe in front of everyone?”
“It’s the law,” she said. “You, of all people, should respect that.”
It was so nice having her around to handle him for a change. It was an enormous relief to need to carry only half the load of managing Monk. It dawned on me that this trip to New Jersey could turn out to be a relaxing little vacation for me.
“It’s only your jacket, your belt, and your shoes,” she said. “You don’t even have to unbutton your collar.”
“Okay.” He rolled his shoulders. “I’ll do it. Where’s my privacy curtain?”
“They don’t have curtains,” I said.
“That’s indecent,” he said.
Sharona noticed the TSA guards were beginning to eye Monk suspiciously and she whispered to him, “Adrian, if you don’t stop making a scene and move along, the guards are going to give you a full-body and cavity search. Is that really what you want?”
That was all the incentive to comply that he needed. He motioned urgently to me for a disinfectant wipe, which I carry by the ton in my huge purse. I gave him one.
Monk thoroughly wiped the plastic basket before he took off his coat, carefully folded it, and laid it down inside. The whole process must have taken five minutes.
The people around us in line began to fidget with frustration, especially the housepainter in the next line. I smiled at him to show that I sympathized.
“Hurry up, Adrian,” Sharona said. “We have a plane to catch and so do all the people behind us.”
“Forgive me, Sharona. Unlike you, I’m not used to stripping in public.” Monk handed me the used wipe, which I placed in a Ziploc bag while he removed his belt, rolled it up carefully, and laid it on his jacket.
“You have to take off your shoes, too,” I said.
“How am I supposed to walk without my shoes? The floor is filthy.”
I’d come prepared for this. I reached into my purse, took out two shower caps, and held them out to him. “You can put these on your feet like booties.”
“Wipe,” he said.
I gave him one. He slowly and thoroughly wiped down another basket, then set his shoes inside it after putting the shower caps over his socks.
By this time, all of the security personnel and everyone in line were watching him, the guards with wariness and the travelers with impatience. I began to fear that a cavity search was in store, not just for him but for me and Sharona as well. That was assuming the crowd didn’t beat us up first.
The other line was moving twice as fast as ours. The turpentine guy was nearly at the metal detector himself. I smiled at him again.
“How’s the house painting business?” I asked him.
He gave me a look. “Excuse me?”
“The sunburn, the flecks of paint in your hair, the smell of turpentine—it’s a dead giveaway that you’re a painter who works outdoors.”
He seemed suddenly very self-conscious and ran his hands through his hair, checking for flecks of paint.
“Really, you can see all of that?”
“It’s a gift,” I said. “And a curse.”
“That’s amazing,” he said
I nodded, pleased with myself. “So I’ve been told.”
Actually, that was the very first time, and I turned to Monk, hoping he’d overheard, but he was staring at the metal detector as if it were a vicious dog as Sharona walked through. I was disappointed, but at least I had my deductive skills confirmed.
Sharona didn’t set off any alarms and moved on to the other end of the X-ray machine to retrieve her stuff from the baskets.
Now it was Monk’s turn to go through.
He took a deep breath, let it out slowly, then leaped through the detector and almost right into the arms of the TSA guard on the other side, a heavyset African-American woman.
“You can’t be jumping through the scanner like that,” the guard said. “You have to go back and walk through slowly.”
“But that will expose me to more radiation,” he said.
“You have to do it, Adrian,” Sharona said as she hurriedly put on her jewelry. “It won’t hurt.”
“Not now,” Monk said. “But it will in ten years when my skin is falling off, I glow in the dark, and you’re tormented by the unrelenting guilt.”
Monk took a deep breath, leaped through the scanner to the other side, then turned to face the guard again.
“Come along now, sir,” the guard said, beckoning him forward with a wave of her hand. “Slowly this time.”
He took another deep breath, closed his eyes, and stepped through the scanner, wincing as if he were being stuck with needles, then came through to the other side. He opened his eyes and exhaled as he stood in front of her.
“Whew, thank God that’s over,” he said and started toward Sharona, but the guard blocked his path.
“Step over here, please,” the guard said, motioning him to a glass-walled cubicle.
“What for?”
“I need to pat you down,” she said.
“No, you don’t,” he said.
“Yes, I do,” she said.
“But no bells went off,” he said. “I’m clean. Very, very clean.”
“We select people at random for patdowns,” she said. “I am selecting you.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re behaving strangely,” she said.
“There’s nothing strange about not wanting to be irradiated.”
“I can pat you down or you can step into the full-body scanner.” She gestured to a large machine that looked like a bigger, meaner version of the metal detector. “Your choice.”
“What does that machine do?”
“It shows me what’s underneath your clothes.”
“I am underneath my clothes,” he said.
“I want to be sure that’s all you’ve got under there,” she said.
“Just do it, Mr. Monk, and stop arguing,” I said, aware that all the guards were tensing up now, and it was making everyone else tense, too, including my new admirer the housepainter, who’d just come through the other metal detector.
“I don’t understand why you are doing this to me, a clean and upstanding citizen,” Monk said, “while you let bank robbers sail through security unmolested.”
“I don’t see any bank robbers,” the guard said.
Monk pointed at the housepainter. “You don’t see him?”
The man jerked as if poked with a cattle prod and bolted back through the metal detector again, plowing through the crowd of waiting travelers like a linebacker, hell-bent on reaching the escalator that led down to the terminal exit.
An alarm bell went off somewhere and a bunch of TSA agents scrambled after the
guy, tackling him and taking the rope line down with them. The taut rope ensnared a line of travelers as it was pulled down and swept them off their feet, too, creating pandemonium.
The guard looked at Monk and waved him through. “Have a nice trip.”
5
Mr. Monk in the Air
“How did you know he was a bank robber?”
I finally asked Monk the question after we’d gone to the gift shop and purchased some Fiji water and Wheat Thins for him and some candy for Sharona and me. We were sitting at the gate, waiting to board our flight.
“You would have known he was, too, if you’d seen him,” Monk said. “And smelled him.”
“Actually, I did both,” I said. “But I deduced from the scent of turpentine, his sunburned face and neck, and the flecks of paint on his skin that he was a housepainter who worked outdoors. I asked him and he confirmed it.”
“And you believed him?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because he’s a bank robber,” Monk said, cleaning the rim of his water bottle with a disinfectant wipe before opening it and taking a sip. “You saw all the signs.”
“I did?”
“He robbed a bank but the money was booby-trapped with a red dye pack that exploded in his face. He was wearing a Halloween mask, but the dye still got in his hair, on his ears, and on his neck. His skin wasn’t red from sunburn, but from the irritation caused by the turpentine and abrasive rubbing he did to get the dye off.”
Sharona shook her head. “This is exactly why Randy needs you, Adrian. You’re a one-man police force. You don’t even have to be investigating something to solve a crime.”
I wasn’t finished with this yet. I didn’t see where I’d gone wrong.
“It was a lucky guess,” I said. “You made one set of assumptions based on the evidence and I made another. Mine were just as valid. I could have been right.”
“No, you couldn’t. You didn’t look closely enough at him,” Monk said and set his water bottle down. Sharona picked it up.
“Fiji water?” she said. “This isn’t your usual brand.”
“They went out of business,” Monk said. “This is nearly as good and as uncontaminated. That’s rainwater that fell on mountains of Viti Levu island in 1515 and percolated through layers of silica, basalt, and sandstone, where it remained sealed and pure until it was drawn out in the bottle you now hold in your hands.”
“Wow,” she said. “So it’s like you’re drinking really old wine, only without the kick.”
“Oh, there’s a kick,” Monk said. “I could tell you stories.”
“Okay, tell me.”
But I wasn’t finished with Monk yet. “Wait a minute, he’s got some explaining to do. What didn’t I see that you saw?”
He turned to me. “His face and arms weren’t red, just his neck and ears. That suggested he was wearing a mask and long sleeves.”
“Still consistent with painting,” I said.
“His eyes were bloodshot, too, from the tear gas that’s also released with the dye pack.”
“Still consistent with my theory. They could have been bloodshot from not wearing sunglasses or from allergies or from getting paint in them. Tear gas from an exploding dye pack is not the only explanation.”
“You’re forgetting that red dye has a substantially different composition than latex paint.”
“And you could see that chemical difference just by glancing at the flecks?”
“I’m not blind,” he said as he grabbed the water bottle back from Sharona and took another sip. “Paint flecks and dye flecks also have markedly different textures.”
“Markedly,” Sharona said, nodding with agreement. “You didn’t know that, Natalie?”
She was just teasing me but I was in no mood for it. I didn’t like being reminded that my deductive skills were still lacking.
Then again, Monk might know the chemical and textural differences between dye and paint, but he didn’t know Facebook from the phone book, couldn’t win a taste test between Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi, and wouldn’t recognize Lady Gaga if she showed up at his front door and belted out a song.
So what if I didn’t know all the arcane stuff that he did. That didn’t make me inept. It just meant I would miss some things that he wouldn’t.
And vice versa. Let’s see how he’d do on a murder case where the solution depended on knowing what Diet Pepsi tastes like, knowing the entire Lady Gaga songbook by heart, and being able to navigate Facebook.
I couldn’t wait for that case to come along.
I glanced at the flat-screen monitor behind the counter at the gate. We had only a few minutes before boarding. It was time to raise the issue that I’d been avoiding.
“We’ll be boarding soon, Mr. Monk. Have you thought about how you want to deal with the flight?”
“I’ve already prepared my last will and testament,” Monk said. “If that’s what you’re concerned about.”
“What I meant was, do you want Dioxynl? Or maybe a tranquilizer?”
“I am not taking any drugs,” he said.
“It will make the flight less stressful for you,” I said, “and everybody else on the plane.”
“I don’t want to die a junkie,” he said.
“One pill won’t make you a junkie, Adrian,” Sharona said.
“It’s how it starts,” Monk said. “Today you have an aspirin, tomorrow you’re a crack whore.”
“But if you’re going to die today, it won’t come to that,” she said, “so what’s the difference?”
“I don’t want my senses to be impaired. I may need them.”
“For what?” she asked.
“Using the parachute,” he said.
“Passengers aren’t given parachutes,” I said.
“Still?” he said, exasperated. “It’s been years since I notified the FAA about that issue.”
“You really expect airlines to give each passenger a parachute?” Sharona said.
“It makes more sense than equipping every seat with a life vest for flotation,” he said. “That’s like giving people parachutes on boats.”
I had to admit that his argument made a certain amount of sense to me, which was frightening. I’d clearly been working for him too long.
They started boarding our flight a few minutes later and Monk seemed a bit weak-kneed as he got to his feet and surprisingly subdued as we walked down the Jetway to the plane.
I’d prepared myself for the arguments to come. For instance, I was ready to tell him that he shouldn’t think of the three-seat rows in the plane as odd-numbered, but rather as six-seat rows cut in half, and since six is an even number, it all balanced out in the end. Besides, at least the plane was divided symmetrically.
But I didn’t have to make that argument or any others, because by the time we got to our seats, Monk could barely stand, and he was out cold after we got him buckled into his window seat.
I took the seat beside him and Sharona took the aisle. She was smiling with smug satisfaction.
“While I was talking to Mr. Monk, you put something in his bottle of water, didn’t you?”
She nodded. “Adrian will sleep all the way to Newark.”
“He’ll be angry,” I said.
She waved off my concern. “He’ll thank me later.”
While Monk slept, Sharona told me about life in Summit, which was only a thirty-minute train ride from midtown Manhattan, so while it felt like a small town, it was essentially an upscale bedroom community for people who worked in New York City.
It was a great place to live.
The main drag was Springfield Avenue and appeared much the same today as it had for decades, a picture-perfect example of small-town USA. But if you looked a bit closer, you’d see that the coffee shops and mom-and-pop stores were being squeezed out by fancy cafés, art galleries, and boutiques selling designer clothing and home décor.
The town’s roots as a pastoral farming community were still evident i
n the rolling hills, tree-lined streets, and lush landscaping around the homes, many of which dated back to the early 1900s and had been impeccably restored and maintained.
That takes big bucks and there was plenty of that in Summit. The residents tended to be highly educated, well paid, and totally self-absorbed professionals with busy lives.
So as long as the schools were good, the streets were clean, the crime rate was low, and no demands were made on their time or money, the citizens didn’t pay any attention to what was happening in local government.
And why should they? Everything was orderly, smooth, and peaceful, requiring nothing from them except prompt payment of their property taxes.
So thanks to the apathetic citizenry, the politicians were able to pillage the treasury without anyone noticing or caring until a clerical error and an overzealous new police chief stripped away the facade to reveal the corruption under the surface.
“But enough about the town,” Sharona said. “Let me tell you about Randy Disher.”
“You’re forgetting that I know him,” I said. “We worked together for years.”
She shook her head. “I thought I knew him, too, when I was working for Adrian. But I really didn’t. What you saw was this eager-to-please, goofy guy totally wrapped up in being a cop and proud of it.”
“And he isn’t that guy?”
“Oh, he was. But I didn’t know then where it was all coming from. He’s this incredibly sincere, warm, passionately loyal man who had nothing else to focus those qualities on except the job and his boss, so they became a substitute for what was missing in his life.”
“The love of a good woman,” I said.
“It seems so clear now, but it took me ten years, and remarrying a guy I divorced, moving away, and divorcing him a second time, to discover that my Prince Charming was right in front of me all the time. I can’t believe I blew him off for so long.”
“Why did you?”
“Mainly because he was a cop. Until I started working with Adrian, they were people I was brought up to avoid. It was a hard habit to break. Besides, he had that ridiculous cop swagger, which was laughable because he was so sweet. I couldn’t take him seriously.”
