Mr. Monk Helps Himself

by Hy Conrad

  “Your husband hired Mr. Monk to entertain at a party at this address,” the captain continued. “Would you mind telling us what happened?”

  Yes, he was lying. She knew he was lying. But it was still a question that needed an answer.

  “He just walked out,” Alicia said, raising her hands helplessly. “When I got home, he was in the garage, changing into his costume. He seemed distracted. I think the poor man has emotional problems. Does he have emotional problems?”

  Suddenly the captain was on the defensive. “That’s not the question, Mrs. Harriman. What happened?”

  “I think he has emotional problems. He was babbling something about clowns and murder. Then he just walked out.”

  “That wasn’t him,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” Alicia asked, her brow attempting to furrow. This woman was smooth. “Of course it was him.”

  “Where is your husband?” Devlin asked.

  “I told him what happened with the clown and he went out looking for him. We were very concerned.”

  “And where did you go?” asked Stottlemeyer.

  “I did the same. I took my car and started scouring the neighborhood. We were being Good Samaritans, Captain, trying to help a man who is obviously disturbed. You would think the police would thank us for this. Instead, I come back and find you in my house and everyone else gone… . Where are my children? You haven’t answered me.”

  The captain stuck to the truth on this one. The guests had been sent home. The kids were at an ice-cream parlor, on his nickel, and the housekeeper was ready to run back to Bulgaria.

  “Where is he?” I demanded. “Where’s Adrian Monk?”

  “I don’t know,” said Alicia, her face hardening. “He came here pretending to be J. P. Tatters, a clown who seems to be deceased. Then he changed into his costume and walked out of the garage. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have my children to take care of and a dozen parents to apologize to.”

  “That wasn’t him,” I said. “He would never dress as a clown.”

  “And yet this was his part-time job.”

  There really was no response to that, so I didn’t try.

  Alicia escorted us to the door. “If you have any more questions, I’d advise you to contact our lawyer. I know we’ll be contacting him.”

  The captain and I took a cab to the station, leaving Lieutenant Devlin with my Subaru parked conspicuously across the street. It wasn’t bad to have a visible presence, not in a case like this.

  “They’re obviously in it together,” I said, pacing back and forth in the captain’s office with the door closed. “And she’s the brains. You can tell.” I stopped and took a breath. “Are they going to kill him?”

  It was something neither one of us wanted to consider. “They’re not real killers,” said Stottlemeyer, “even though they’ve killed four times. They’re poisoners. There’s a difference between that and someone who has to face his victim and get his hands bloody. I think it buys us some time.”

  “Do they own a gun?”

  He had already checked. “No gun permits in their record. But obviously, they can’t let him go.”

  “The question is, where did they take him?”

  Stottlemeyer was at his desk, already thumbing through the Harriman file. “It’s a weekday, so their office is out of the question. They don’t own or rent any other properties in the city, not in their names or their company’s name.”

  “It has to be somewhere fairly close.”

  “There is one other possibility,” he said reluctantly.

  I knew where he was going to go. I could tell from his tone and from the way he’d reacted when Alicia Harriman told her story. “It wasn’t Monk. I could tell.”

  “But it’s not unreasonable,” he argued. “If Monk sucked it up enough to change into a clown, then maybe it got to be too much and he had one of those breaks Dr. Bell talks about.”

  “A dissociative break,” I said.

  This was certainly possible. Monk has done strange things when pushed too far, like one time having a gold grill put in his teeth when he was working for a gangsta rap artist. Who knows what he would do if forced into clown attire and makeup? But I knew what I’d seen. “It wasn’t him.”

  “Look, I’m not saying the Harrimans are innocent. But maybe Monk is out there somewhere, catatonic and hunkered down. We have to consider that.”

  I wasn’t about to. And I was angry with him for doubting me. I was just about to say as much when the phone rang. Stottlemeyer instantly picked it up and put it on speaker. “Devlin?”

  “John came home.” She was calling from the driver’s seat of my Subaru. “He was on foot.”

  “How was he dressed?” asked the captain.

  “Same as before. Jeans, sneakers, Forty-niners sweatshirt. Nothing clown-related that I could see.”

  “Okay. Keep us posted.” And he hung up.

  “That doesn’t prove a thing,” I said. “Alicia drove off to meet him. He changed in her car, then walked home. They know we’re watching.”

  “You’re positive it wasn’t Monk?”

  “Captain.” I tried to control my temper. “If things were reversed, if that was me in the garage and Monk in the car, would you believe him? Don’t answer. You wouldn’t even think twice. You would trust Monk.”

  “You’re not Monk.”

  “You’re right. I’m not. I’m Natalie Teeger, the ex-cop who happened to be right about Miranda Bigley’s murder when everyone else, including Monk, was dead wrong.”

  “I get that, but—”

  “No buts.” I was seething, as angry as I’d ever been. “You trust me or you don’t. But every second you waste not looking for wherever they’re keeping him is a second off his life. Do you honestly think they’re going to let him go?”

  Stottlemeyer thought it over. I could tell I’d gotten to him. And then Devlin called. Again, he put her on speaker.

  “You’re not going to like this,” Devlin started.

  “Just say it!” That was actually me.

  “Natalie?” Devlin was shocked, too. “Okay. John and Alicia just came out and did a little gardening.”

  “Gardening?”

  “Yeah. They’re tearing out the rest of the foxgloves. John just took them into the garage.”

  “Thanks.” The captain hung up and stared into my eyes.

  “Do you believe me now?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Mr. Monk Is Nowhere

  “Natalie, I owe you an apology,” said the captain. I didn’t say a word, just waited. “And I apologize,” he added.

  “Accepted.”

  “I guess I got to looking at you a certain way and I didn’t really notice the change.”

  I understood. If you put any detective next to Monk for all those years, they would have faded into the background.

  “Like the Bigley case,” he went on. “Prime example. If you hadn’t stirred things up, it never would have been solved.”

  It’s funny. You can wait forever to hear the right words, imagining how special the moment will be when people finally acknowledge your contribution. And then when it comes, there’s always something marring the moment. In this case it was my kidnapped friend. “Do you think he’s locked in a car trunk?”

  “Their car? That would mean he’s back in their garage, which seems too risky for these guys.”

  “What about a stolen car or a car rented under a fake name?”

  “You would need some preparation for that. And they didn’t have any prep time. The good news is we have a tail. At some point, they’ll need to go back and deal with Monk, and Devlin will be there.”

  “I can relieve her,” I volunteered.

  “Thanks. But that’s our strong suit. Devlin and I will be splitting that in twelve-hour shifts, if it goes that far.”

  “What do I do?”

  “Find where they’re hiding Monk?”

  “Me?”

  “You’re a detective
. Start living up to your hype.”

  The captain hadn’t said it in a mean way. And he didn’t mean that he wouldn’t do his part. But if anyone knew how Monk thought, it was me. If anyone knew how he might try to escape or signal his whereabouts, it was me. If there ever was a time when I had to step up and prove myself, it was now.

  I drove Devlin’s car to the Sacramento Street stakeout and switched it out for the Subaru. Then I drove it back to my Noe Valley cocoon, fortified myself with a half glass of wine, and made a very difficult call.

  “Hey, Ellen.” I knew she’d been waiting to hear from me. “I’m afraid everything didn’t go as planned.”

  Ellen was as understanding as could be. It didn’t hurt that she had just been on the other end of just such an undercover operation—one where everything had turned out all right, except for one badly sprained ankle. It gave her an unwarranted sense of optimism. “You guys have been in tighter spots, right?”

  “Of course.” Only this time Monk was in the spot alone with a pair of serial killers.

  “I suppose the police just can’t go in and arrest them and demand answers,” she half suggested.

  “Not since that pesky Fourth Amendment.”

  We talked for twenty more minutes, both of us spouting words of reassurance. But my mind was elsewhere.

  If Monk was alive and conscious, he would be trying to contact us. I couldn’t count on him using the red cell phone. I was sure they’d already found it.

  I flashed back to my own experiences with him in similar situations: like the time we were chained to a bathtub and drew attention by sending smoke signals up through the chimney; or the time we were locked in a vault, running out of air, and called for help by hacking into the wiring for the electronic display outside the bank.

  “Think like the person you want to be,” Ellen said, bringing me back into the conversation. “Remember? That’s what Miranda said. You can do this. Just try to think like Adrian.”

  I spoke to Stottlemeyer twice more that evening, asking for little pieces of information, sharing a stupid theory or two, and checking to see if John and Alicia had made a move. They hadn’t. Both were still at the Sacramento Street house.

  That night I barely dozed off. I was relieved that the Harrimans hadn’t even tried to leave, but worried for Monk. Had he been without food and water? Were they planning to starve him? No, they weren’t. They were in their garage, making poison. Somehow that didn’t make me feel better.

  The next morning, around sunrise, I made a pot of strong coffee, which only succeeded in making me more jittery. Then I took my phone from the recharger, got in my car, and began to aimlessly cruise the streets of the city. For a Thursday morning, the traffic was pretty light.

  I stuck to the central part of town, the three or four miles surrounding the Pacific Heights home. Somewhere in this sea of a few thousand buildings, Adrian Monk was waiting for me to find him. I don’t know what kind of inspiration I was expecting, but it wasn’t hitting me. Once, while crossing Ellis Street, I saw a red balloon floating away on the light morning breeze, a fugitive perhaps from a birthday party, one that I hoped was going a little better than Celine Harriman’s.

  I don’t know how long I did this. Less than an hour. Then I stopped for gas, just to stop and have something to do. Stepping away from the pump, I called Stottlemeyer again. He was still on duty, expecting Devlin to relieve him at any moment.

  “Any ideas?” he asked, yawning into his end of the line.

  “Is there a shed behind the Harrimans’ house?” I asked.

  “No shed,” he said. “Just a tiny yard, typical for that neighborhood.”

  The pump had just clicked, but I didn’t want to go back, not with my cell phone open. Call it an urban legend if you want, but a gas-pump explosion was the last thing I needed that morning.

  “How about any relatives in the city, someone away on vacation?”

  “No relatives,” said Stottlemeyer. “And we checked out the Bulgarian housekeeper. She lives in a two-bedroom apartment with her family of six.”

  I was leaning against the Pump ’n’ Go trash bin, with a clear view down Van Ness Avenue, the sun just rising above the buildings. Another red balloon floated gently by. Or could it have been the same red balloon? No, that didn’t make sense.

  “Hold on,” Stottlemeyer said. The line went silent. “Garage door’s opening up. The green SUV. They’re on the move, both of them.”

  “Follow them,” I shouted.

  “Thank you, Natalie. I’ll do that.” And the captain hung up.

  I didn’t know what to do now, except worry and stare at my phone. I moved my car away from the pumps, just to be polite, and left it idling by the front of the Pump ’n’ Go convenience store.

  It must have been a full fifteen minutes before Stottlemeyer called back. “We lost them.”

  My heart sank. “What do you mean, you lost them?”

  “They parked at their office building, in the garage. I parked a level up. Devlin got there just in time and she followed them into the lobby, just ahead of me. By the time we showed our badges and got past security, they were gone.”

  “Did they go up to their office?”

  Stottlemeyer sighed. “We called their office. His assistant said they weren’t in. The building apparently has two entrances. Devlin’s on the street now, trying to track them down but it doesn’t look good.” He paused and sighed again. “Natalie, I’m sorry.”

  “That’s okay,” I said, not meaning it.

  “John was carrying a backpack,” he added.

  “A backpack?” My mind raced to the obvious, and I wasn’t happy. After half a day and a night alone, wherever he was, Monk would be desperate for food and water. Showing up and poisoning him would not be impossible. “They’re going to kill him now,” I shouted into the phone.

  “Not if we can help it. Call if you have any breakthroughs.”

  I let the captain get back to his problem and I got back to mine.

  I don’t know how long I was standing there, my back against the trash bin, when I caught sight of yet another red balloon floating down Van Ness. This was a different one. For one thing, it wasn’t flying off. It was floating lower than the others, bumping its way amid the power lines and streetlamps. Another fugitive from the same party? And then it struck me. I had seen the first red balloon less than an hour after sunrise. Who would be having a party at that hour?

  There was also something odd about the string on the balloon, more like a kite’s tail than a string and probably what was weighing it down. I grabbed my binoculars from the backseat and focused as best I could.

  It wasn’t a string or a tail, not in the normal sense. It was either gray or brown, maybe two inches wide and less than two feet long. It wasn’t made of Mylar or anything else festive. It was basically just a strip of cloth—a long, tattered piece of cloth. And then it hit me.

  I knew where Monk was.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Mr. Monk and the Balloons

  The realization came suddenly and completely.

  There might have been other explanations for the appearance of balloons with tattered tails—three balloons that I was aware of in the space of an hour and a half. But as a cop, you’re taught not to trust coincidences, especially on the morning when I was scouring this forty-block area for some communication from Monk

  It made sense. A place with access to red balloons, a helium tank, tattered strips of cloth, a window or vent, all at some location the Harrimans knew would be empty and safe. Monk might have even written a message on the cloth, using the AG-7 astronaut pen he always carried in his jacket. But I didn’t need a message. I knew.

  Stottlemeyer wasn’t answering his cell. So I left a quick message, then drove, trying to remember which one-way streets would take me the four or five blocks I needed to go. I had never been there before, but I had learned the address and a lot of other details from Lieutenant Devlin.

  I parked in fr
ont of a hydrant on Willow Street, between the Vietnamese restaurant and the fitness center and grabbed my bag from the passenger seat. Like Devlin said, it was a narrow one-story building that had once been an alley. Right away I could see that the wooden door had been jimmied, the old wooden doorjamb pried back enough to disengage the flimsy lock.

  Poor Monk, I thought. Did the Harrimans appreciate their cruelty, not only subjecting him to a kidnapping and the threat of an agonizing death, but to do it in the abandoned clown lair of J. P. Tatters, the one place he dreaded above all others?

  Okay, there were several places Monk dreaded above all others. But you get the idea.

  For a few seconds, I thought about waiting. Stottlemeyer would be getting my message any minute now and be racing on over. But then again, so would the Harrimans with their backpack, if they weren’t here already.

  Gently, I forced the lock, eased open the door, then eased it shut behind me. The useless lock clicked into place.

  The interior was black and silent. Good news. No, not quite black or silent, I gauged as my eyes started to adjust. There were soft, scraping, hissing sounds coming from the back left corner. And a small horizontal window at eye level, also in the back left corner.

  I switched on a ceiling light by the door, a bare bulb that threw its glare only halfway through the space. “Adrian?” Making my way back through the shadows, I could see on both sides the collections of noses and wigs, seltzer bottles and bright oversized shoes. It gave me the creeps, and I actually like clowns. “Adrian?”

  Between the lightbulb and the window, there was enough light for me to see the whole ridiculous, fascinating picture.

  A duct-tape gag hung loosely from his shirt and handcuffs connected his wrists around a vertical pipe. Throughout his eighteen hours of captivity, he had managed to reach out and drag in his supplies. I know eighteen hours sounds like a long time, but I was still impressed by what he’d been able to do, especially given the dirt and the handcuffs and the imminent threat of clowns.

  As I had guessed, there was the helium tank with its hose. Also a box of red balloons from a nearby shelf and pair of J. P. Tatters’ tattered slacks from a hanging rack.