Mr. Monk Is a Mess

by Lee Goldberg

  “What can you tell us, Doc?” Stottlemeyer asked.

  “It appears she bled out from the wounds to her neck and wrist, but I can’t be sure there aren’t other injuries until I’ve drained the water,” he said. “I won’t be able to determine the exact cause of death, or other contributory factors, until I get her on a table and open her up.”

  “She looks pretty opened up to me already,” Stottlemeyer said.

  “A straight razor will do that,” Hetzer said.

  His comment made me take a second look at the razor, which was in a baggie in the CSI’s hand. I spoke to her.

  “Could you please open the bottom drawer of the vanity?”

  She looked at Captain Stottlemeyer for approval and he nodded. She opened the drawer, which was where I kept Mitch’s old shaving stuff. A key item was missing.

  “That was my husband’s straight razor,” I said. “He liked to shave the old-fashioned way. I kept his shaving kit after he died.”

  That wasn’t entirely the truth. I’d had them since he was deployed to Kosovo. It was what I did every time he was on a mission. It was my way of keeping his presence in the house. The shaving tools and the smell of the cream that still lingered on them reminded me of him.

  But in those first agonizing months after he was shot down, leaving me a widowed mother with a small child, they took on added poignancy. I’d take out his shaving brush and run it along my tear-streaked cheeks. It was almost as if he were there, tenderly stroking my face, comforting me and assuring me that we’d get through his loss.

  It was bad enough that someone had broken into my home, but for her to have been killed with Mitch’s razor felt like sacrilege.

  “We’ll have to hold on to the razor for a while,” Stottlemeyer said.

  “I know,” I replied.

  Monk squeezed between us, leaned into the bathroom, and cocked his head so he could look at the dead woman.

  “This wasn’t a murder,” Monk said. “It was a suicide.”

  “Or a murder made to look like a suicide,” Stottlemeyer said.

  Monk shook his head. “The razor is in her right hand. The depth and arc of the wound on her throat are consistent with a self-inflicted lesion.”

  Dr. Hetzer squinted at the wound. “I’ve got to agree with Monk on that.”

  “There also isn’t the blood splatter on the wall or splashed water on the floor that would indicate that a struggle took place,” Monk said.

  “The killer could have cleaned it up,” Stottlemeyer said.

  “And taken the blood- and water-soaked rags with him?” Monk said, turning to me. “Do you appear to be missing any towels?”

  “Not in here,” I said. “But I’d have to take a look in my linen closet to be sure. I don’t own many towels, so it’ll only take me a minute to do an inventory.”

  I went to the hall closet and checked the towels. They were all accounted for.

  “This could all be staged,” Stottlemeyer said. “Maybe he killed her somewhere else and put her in the tub afterward.”

  “But if he killed her elsewhere in the house, where’s the blood?” I said. “My carpets are clean.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” Monk said. “Looking at them is probably what pushed her over the edge.”

  “Let me get this straight,” I said. “You’re saying that seeing my dirty carpets drove her to suicide?”

  “It’s certainly occurred to me more than once,” Monk said. “Seeing those permanent stains can’t help but drive you to despair and force you to confront the futility of your own existence.”

  “Slashing your throat is an awfully brutal way to kill yourself,” I said. “Why not take pills? Or slit both of your wrists?”

  “Maybe she wanted to be absolutely sure she got the job done,” Stottlemeyer said. “Or maybe she wasn’t just depressed with her life, she actually hated herself, and those other ways were too gentle a way to go.”

  “If that’s true,” I said, “what could she have done that made her feel so angry about who she was?”

  “I know what you mean,” Monk said. “It’s not like she’s the one who stained the carpets.”

  “That wasn’t what I was getting at,” I said.

  Devlin stepped out of the bedroom, holding a wallet. “The victim is Michelle Keeling, age twenty-six, from Las Vegas, Nevada. Does that ring any bells?”

  “Never heard of her,” I said. “And I certainly didn’t invite her to house-sit and kill herself in my bathroom.”

  Stottlemeyer gestured to the purse. “Find anything else in her purse?”

  “Come see for yourself,” Devlin said and led us back into my bedroom. She had the contents of the purse spread out on the bed, already placed in transparent evidence bags.

  The first thing I noticed was that my spare house keys weren’t among the stuff in her purse. The second thing I noticed was a baggie full of jewelry.

  “That’s my wedding ring,” I said, picking up the bag. “And the rest of my jewelry. She even took Mitch’s old watch and cuff links.”

  “So she was a squatter and a thief,” Monk said.

  “But not a very picky one,” I said. “This stuff is hardly worth stealing. Even if you melted my wedding ring down, it wouldn’t be worth more than a few hundred dollars. The only real value any of this has is sentimental.”

  “How sentimental are you about this?” Devlin picked up a baggie containing a stack of crisp hundred-dollar bills that had to add up to a few thousand dollars.

  “I work for Adrian Monk,” I said. “I don’t have that kind of money around the house. Or anywhere else.”

  Monk gestured to the pillows. “Two people slept in this bed. You can see that from the pillows and the way the bottom sheet is wrinkled. Whoever the other person was suffers from acid reflux disease.”

  “How can you tell?” Devlin asked.

  “The pillows are stacked so that he could sleep with his upper body raised,” Monk said. “And there’s a Pepcid tablet on the floor between the bed and the nightstand. Natalie doesn’t take Pepcids.”

  “This is true,” I said.

  Devlin took a baggie and picked up the pill with it. “So we’re looking for a killer with heartburn.”

  Stottlemeyer examined an evidence bag containing a few matchbooks from Keeling’s purse. “It appears that Michelle liked to visit the Belmont Hotel bar. She’d need all that cash just to buy a Diet Coke there.”

  I knew the Belmont. Everyone did. It was built after the great San Francisco earthquake in the heart of Union Square and had become a local landmark. I glanced down at her clothes and, based on what they cost, and the money in her purse, she’d fit right in there.

  “If she could afford these fancy clothes and had all that cash, why didn’t she just get a hotel room?” I asked. “What was she doing in my house?”

  It was a rhetorical question. I wasn’t really expecting an answer and I didn’t get one.

  Devlin held up a baggie that contained an unmarked bottle of little red pills. “I wonder what these are for.”

  “The lab will figure it out,” Stottlemeyer said and glanced over at Monk, who was also examining some pills in a baggie, but those were sealed in a foil card with a calendar printed on it. “But I know what those pills are.”

  “So do I,” Monk said, setting the birth control pills down and looking at me. “I was having a moment of déjà vu.”

  Monk and I shared a look. We’d come full circle. I glanced at Stottlemeyer and he knew it, too.

  Devlin shifted her gaze between the three of us.

  “What am I missing?” she asked.

  “Natalie killed an intruder in this house a few years back,” Stottlemeyer said. “It’s how we met her.”

  The intruder attacked me, we struggled, and I killed him on the living room couch with a pair of scissors. The captain brought Monk in to help investigate why the guy broke into my house.

  The next day Monk came back to the house, went through my
stuff, stumbled upon my birth control pills, and managed to embarrass me in front of my daughter.

  Monk eventually figured out what the intruder was after and solved a thorny mystery, too. When it was all over, he hired me as his assistant.

  And now my house had been broken into again, there was another dead body and another package of birth control pills.

  Only this time I wasn’t the killer, the birth control pills weren’t mine, and I wasn’t a frightened single mother working as a bartender.

  Now I was one of the jaded cops, a woman who’d lost track of all the corpses that she’d seen and all the murderers that she’d looked in the eye.

  I was an entirely different person.

  I’d known that for a little while now, but I think it wasn’t until that precise moment that Monk and Stottlemeyer realized it, too.

  It was a significant moment, one we absorbed in silence.

  Devlin was left out of it and, judging by the look on her face, she didn’t like it much. To be fair, she ended up in that position a lot when the four of us got together. I could sympathize. I’d felt that way with Monk, Stottlemeyer, and Disher for months at first.

  “You’ve both had a long day,” Stottlemeyer said. “You ought to go and let us handle this. I’ll give you a call in the morning and let you know what we’ve turned up.”

  Now that he’d mentioned it, I was tired. The idea of going to sleep sounded good to me, but it wasn’t going to be in my own bed as I’d hoped, at least not tonight.

  “Let me grab a change of clothes and we’ll be on our way.”

  I made a move toward my closet but Devlin stepped in front of me.

  “Sorry, I can’t let you do that,” Devlin said. “The whole house is a crime scene.”

  “It’s a suicide,” I said.

  “We don’t know what it is, or why Michelle Keeling was here, or what other evidence might be in the house,” Devlin said. “Until then, you can’t take anything out of here.”

  I looked to Stottlemeyer for support, but he sighed and shrugged his shoulders. “I’m afraid she’s right, Natalie. You must have some clean clothes in your luggage you can use for a day or two.”

  “I didn’t bring any suitcases back with me.”

  It took Stottlemeyer a moment, but then he got the implications and nodded to himself. “Because you weren’t coming back to San Francisco to stay. You came here to pack. You’ve decided to keep working as cops in Summit.”

  Monk lowered his head with guilt. “I’m sorry, Leland.”

  “What are you apologizing for, Monk? I’m happy for you,” Stottlemeyer said, forcing a smile. “Three of my favorite people are going to be working together doing jobs that they love. I think that’s a great thing.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” I said. “I wish it hadn’t come out this way. This wasn’t how we planned to tell you.”

  The truth was, we didn’t have any plan at all.

  The captain waved off my concern. “We’ve been friends too long to worry about that. Good news is good news.”

  Maybe so. But if that was true, why did Monk and I feel so lousy about it?

  CHAPTER NINE

  Mr. Monk Cleans Up

  I stepped outside and called a crime scene cleaning company I knew and asked them to deal with my bathroom as soon as the police released the scene.

  Monk waved his hands in front of me, interrupting my call. “Wait, wait. You should tell them to do your whole house.”

  “But there’s only blood in the bathroom,” I said. “The rest of the house is uncontaminated.”

  “You’re living in denial. Did you see those carpets?” Monk said. “How many more people have to die before you do something about it?”

  I ignored Monk and finished my call with the crime scene cleaners. Thankfully, it was too dark for him to notice how dirty the exterior of my car was, or he might have suggested that I hire the crime scene cleaners to go over it, too.

  When I got off the phone, he invited me to stay the night at his apartment.

  I’d been sleeping on a couch for the last few weeks so I figured one more night on one wouldn’t kill me. Besides, it wasn’t like I had a lot of other options. He sweetened the deal by offering me whatever I needed from his vast supply of unopened toothbrushes, toothpaste, bars of soap, and shampoos to get myself cleaned up.

  So I accepted his invitation but made a slight detour on the way to his place. There was a Marshalls at the corner of Fifth and Market and I knew I could pick up a cheap change of clothes there.

  I parked in the red zone, stuck my SFPD crime scene permit on the dash, and ran inside before Monk could start lecturing me about breaking the law.

  I’m not a picky shopper and I’m an easy size to fit. I went straight to the clearance racks and selected a pair of jeans, some T-shirts and a blouse, underwear, and socks. In less than ten minutes, I was out the door again with my purchases and I’d made only a small dent on my credit card. I got back in the car quite pleased with myself for being so swift and thrifty.

  “You forgot to buy pajamas,” Monk said.

  “I can sleep in my underwear,” I said.

  “Not on my couch you can’t,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I might want to sit on it again someday.”

  “You think I’m that horribly filthy and disgusting?”

  “No, of course not,” he said.

  “I’m relieved to hear that.”

  “I think everybody is,” he said.

  “Fine. I’ll sleep in my clothes.”

  “The clothes you wore on the plane, where you sat on a seat that thousands of other people have sat upon, sweated upon, and been airsick upon, and that you wore into your home, a palace of stained carpets and decomposing corpses?” Monk said. “Are we talking about those clothes?”

  I sighed. Turned off the ignition and ran back into the store, found a tank top and a pair of sweats that could double as pajamas, and went back to the car.

  “Satisfied?” I asked as I tossed the bag into the backseat.

  He looked over his shoulder at the bag, then back at me. “Were they out of bathrobes?”

  “And nun’s habits, too,” I said and drove off.

  The closer we got to Monk’s apartment, the more tired I became and the more alert he got, which made sense. His tranquilizers had worn off entirely and he’d gotten plenty of sleep, while I’d been wide-awake for a long and stressful day of cross-country travel, confrontations, and corpses.

  I was ready for bed. But as soon as Monk opened his front door and turned on the light he gasped in horror.

  “Oh my God,” he said. “It’s a hellhole.”

  I’d predicted his reaction but I hadn’t planned on being around to witness it. I’d forgotten that he hadn’t seen his apartment yet while he was wide-awake.

  “I think you’re overreacting, Mr. Monk. Your apartment is perfectly, antiseptically, freakishly clean.”

  “Compared to your house, of course it is. Then again, so is a public urinal,” he said, taking off his jacket and hanging it up in the closet. “It’s going to take us all night to clean this place, perhaps longer.”

  “I’m too tired to clean.”

  “You can’t sleep in this kind of filth.”

  “I think I could,” I said.

  “This is actually a blessing. Cleaning is exactly the therapy you need right now,” he said, carefully rolling up his sleeves. “You’ll thank me later.”

  “No, I’ll see you later,” I said and turned back to the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know, but I’ll figure out something,” I said and walked out.

  I just didn’t have the energy or patience to get into a fight with him that I was sure to lose. Even if I avoided the argument and simply refused to help him scrub, vacuum, polish, dust, and disinfect an already perfectly clean apartment, which would be rude considering I was his houseguest, he’d make so much noise doing his
work that it would be impossible for me to get any rest.

  So I surrendered and fled.

  I got in the car and started driving toward the Bay Bridge. My initial intention was to go to Berkeley and crash with my daughter and her roommates in their apartment.

  But then I decided I didn’t really want to burden her with my problems, which might cause some awkwardness with her roommates. They probably wouldn’t understand how a dead woman could end up in my bathtub or why I was so blasé about it.

  When you work with Adrian Monk, you get used to dead bodies turning up in places you’d never expect.

  I also didn’t want to tell her about my new job, or that I was moving, under these circumstances.

  So that left me wondering where to go next. I was considering that question when I reached the red light at the intersection of Pine and Van Ness and the new tower of the Belmont Hotel came into view. New was a relative term—the original hotel was built in the early 1900s and the tower was built in the 1970s.

  But seeing the hotel aroused my inner Nancy Drew. As soon as the light turned green, I pulled into the red zone across the street and took out my iPhone to surf the Web for deals at the Belmont.

  I found a special weekday rate for locals that was $199 a night, but that was still pricey for me. So I called the front desk and asked them what the local rate would be for their worst room with the worst view on the worst floor, figuring it would still be better than the best room at a mediocre hotel. They offered me a room on the fourth floor located by the elevator and the ice machine and overlooking an alley for $150 a night.

  That was still steep for me, but it was a terrific rate for a legendary five-star hotel in the heart of San Francisco.

  So I booked the room and drove right over to the Belmont, which was on Powell Street, directly across from the cable car stop at Union Square and next door to a bakery that had been making sourdough bread since the gold rush. You couldn’t get more San Francisco than that.

  I dropped off my car with the valet, who distastefully regarded my Buick as if it were one of Ellen Morse’s poop products. I grabbed my bags from Marshalls, probably not a store logo they were used to seeing at the Belmont, and went inside the hotel.