Mr. Monk Is a Mess

by Lee Goldberg

  Monk, meanwhile, leaned to his right to compensate for the pen in his left pocket as he approached the podium. He looked like a man with hemorrhoids walking on a tightrope.

  “Did you pinch a nerve or something?” the agent asked.

  Monk handed over his clip-on ID. “No. What makes you say that?”

  “You’re walking funny,” he said.

  “You must be mistaken,” Monk said, and tried to straighten up, but overcompensated and nearly fell over. He quickly righted himself, leaning once again to the right. Everyone was staring at him—agents, visitors, and security guards.

  My bag came through the X-ray. I was about to snatch it up when the security guard reached for it first.

  “I’d like to search your bag,” she said.

  “Of course,” I said. “Be my guest.”

  Monk reached the conveyor belt for the X-ray machine and faced a quandary. If he emptied his pockets and handed over the pen, he would be revealed as a thief. If he left it in his pocket and walked through the scanner, he risked having it go off and being revealed as a thief.

  And Monk wasn’t a risk taker.

  “I confess,” Monk yelled, took the pen out of his pocket, and raised his hands above his head. “Don’t shoot.”

  The agent behind the podium took the pen from Monk’s raised hand, examined it, then gave it back to him.

  “It’s no problem, sir. We give these away. Think of it as a souvenir.”

  Monk sighed with relief and lowered his hands.

  That’s when the security guard who was searching my bag pulled out Nesbo’s nameplate and the photo of the dog.

  “But these are not,” she said.

  The agent at the podium picked up a phone and was instantly connected to someone. “You better get down here. We have a situation in the lobby.”

  Monk glowered at me from the other side of the scanner. “Happy now?”

  “Ecstatic,” I said.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Mr. Monk and the Bad Neighborhood

  Special Agents Thorpe and Cardea were called down to deal with us and when they saw the stuff that I’d taken from Nesbo’s desk in the evidence room, they were not amused.

  “What the hell were you trying to prove with this lame stunt?” Thorpe asked, his arms folded across his chest.

  Monk folded his arms across his chest and faced me. “I’d like to know the answer to that myself.”

  “I’ve shown that your security down here is tight,” I said. “We couldn’t even get through with a ballpoint pen.”

  “We already knew that,” Cardea said, folding his arms just so he wasn’t left out. “We’re the FBI.”

  “But the security in your evidence room sucks,” I said. “You can walk out with anything. For all you know, whoever the thief was went in and out of there on legitimate business for weeks, taking away a stack of cash every time. It could even have been more than one person. And they could have walked it out of here without much trouble. Cash in someone’s pockets isn’t going to show up when someone walks through the scanner.”

  Thorpe looked at Monk. “Was that your plan for getting the money out?”

  “I had nothing to do with the theft of the money or Agent Nesbo’s personal belongings,” Monk said.

  “If I were you, Thorpe, I’d stop wasting your time on us and start investigating the people inside this building,” I said. “You might actually accomplish something.”

  “We found the marked money in your home,” Thorpe said. “With a corpse.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that maybe the money was planted in my house as a distraction?”

  “No, it didn’t,” Thorpe said, “and this stunt doesn’t change anything.”

  “Yes, it does,” I said and waved at the cameras positioned in various corners of the ceiling in the lobby. “If you’re ever dumb enough to drag us into court, it gives us some wonderful footage to show the jury to prove just how pathetic security is in the evidence room. You’ve given us our reasonable doubt.”

  I grabbed my bag and walked out.

  Monk followed and joined me on the sidewalk.

  “That was great,” Monk said, falling into step beside me as we walked to my car.

  “Really?”

  “We punk’d them right back.”

  “We did?”

  “And I get to keep this pen,” he said and showed it to me. “It has the FBI insignia on it. How cool is that?”

  “Our troubles aren’t over. We still need to figure out who actually stole the money from the FBI and why Michelle Keeling had ten thousand dollars of it and why she killed herself in my house and what happened to Yuki Nakamura and do it all while we’re packing up and preparing for our new lives in Summit.”

  “Or not,” Monk said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “We could do nothing.”

  “You mean forget about the money, Michelle Keeling, Yuki, and the move to Summit?”

  “Fantastic idea,” he said. “I feel better already.”

  “You can’t just ignore your problems and hope that they’ll go away.”

  “They aren’t my problems.”

  “They are problems for me and Ambrose.”

  “But, strictly speaking, not mine.”

  “You can’t live in a sterile little bubble, unaffected by the troubles of the people you supposedly care about or the events in the world around you.”

  “That’s my dream.”

  “What about the job in Summit?”

  “My life would be a lot easier if I don’t take it.”

  We reached my car. I walked around to the driver’s side. “How easy is your life going to be when I’m gone, Ambrose hates you, and you’re all alone?”

  “We could try it and see,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said and opened my door. “You can start by finding your own way home.”

  I got in the car and started the engine. Monk tried to open the passenger door, but it was locked. He pounded on the window.

  “Natalie, you can’t abandon me here,” he said. “There are people everywhere. What if I bump into somebody? Do you really want that on your conscience?”

  I waved at him. “Have a nice day.”

  “You’re punking me, aren’t you?”

  I smiled at him and drove off.

  * * *

  My first stop was the post office, where I picked up all of my mail that had been on vacation hold. I was astonished when they handed me a large overflowing plastic box filled with magazines, bills, and promotional flyers.

  I’d had no idea that I got so much stuff every month. There was probably an entire forest somewhere that was now dry, barren earth thanks to me.

  I made a quick stop at my local grocery store, bought some necessities like frozen pizzas, Diet Coke, and Oreo cookies, and headed home.

  I felt a sharp pang of anxiety when I saw two police cars parked at the corner, but relaxed when I realized that it wasn’t my house they were at this time. The cops were at the Gossett place, a Victorian that had been under constant renovation for twenty years by its owner, a struggling singer-songwriter who played on a lot of cruise ships and was often at sea.

  My house was half a block down. I pulled into my driveway and saw one of my neighbors, Mary-Ruth Denny, standing on her porch, smoking a cigarette. She was in her twenties, favored sleeveless shirts and tank tops, and always seemed to have a bra strap showing on her shoulders.

  I got out of my car, opened the back door, and pulled out my big box of mail and the bag of groceries. My hands were full, so I kicked the car door closed, the loud noise catching Mary-Ruth’s attention.

  “Sorry about all the commotion here yesterday,” I said, standing there, holding my stuff.

  She nodded. “It’s scary knowing that there was a murderer killing someone right next door while we were asleep in our beds.”

  “If it’s any consolation to you, it wasn’t a murder,” I said. “It was a suic
ide.”

  “Was it someone you knew?”

  “Nope. A complete stranger. It’s pretty bizarre.”

  She shook her head with disgust. “This whole neighborhood is really going to hell. Yesterday someone kills herself in your house, today someone breaks into the Gossett place and trashes it. What’s the world coming to?”

  “There’s crime everywhere, Mary-Ruth. It’s just been a bad week on our block, that’s all.”

  “No, you’re wrong. This was a quiet, peaceful street when we bought this place. I don’t know what happened, but now it’s turning into a slum.”

  Obviously, her Realtor never disclosed that before Mary-Ruth and her husband moved in, I’d killed an intruder in my living room. Or that my house had been fire-bombed. Or that the previous owner of her place murdered her husband and buried him in the backyard. Compared to all that, things had been pretty quiet lately.

  “I suppose you’re right,” I said.

  “I told Frank we’re moving the first chance we get,” Mary-Ruth said.

  “Maybe I will, too.”

  “Good luck with that,” she said and flicked her cigarette stub onto her dry lawn. I half expected the grass to burst into flames.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “The housing market is in the toilet as it is. But the value of our house has just plummeted even more because we’re unfortunate enough to be your neighbor. Who wants to live next door to a death house? But at least we still have some value left in our home. You’ll be lucky if you can give yours away.”

  Mary-Ruth turned to go back into her house, quite pleased with herself.

  “Do you ever wonder why your rose garden is so colorful, Mary-Ruth?”

  She stopped and looked back at me. “Because I use Miracle-Gro.”

  “No, it’s because the lady who owned your house before fertilized it with her husband’s putrid, decomposing corpse.” The color drained from her face. “Be sure to mention the Red Roses of Death in your real estate listing.”

  So much for my restraint. I smiled and went to my front door. I could forget about ever borrowing a cup of sugar from Mary-Ruth.

  The first thing that struck me once I got inside was how fresh it smelled and how orderly everything was. The carpets had been shampooed, the kitchen floors mopped, and everything was dusted and straightened. Even the dishes had been washed and put away.

  I kicked the front door closed, dropped my box from the post office on the couch, and took my grocery bag to the kitchen, where I unloaded my stuff.

  Then I took a deep breath and hesitantly walked down the hall to the bathroom. I felt an irrational sense of doom. I certainly didn’t expect to see a body still in there, but even so, I couldn’t shake the memory of Michelle Keeling in a tub of bloody water.

  Or that she was holding my husband’s razor.

  But my bathroom was pristine, something it had never been before. Every surface gleamed. The glass sparkled. It was so clean, I hardly recognized it as my own. There was no sign of the bloody death that had occurred there. In fact, there was no sign that the bathroom had ever been used at all.

  Where was the stained grout? The permanent water spots? The scuffed floor? Even Mitch’s razor was gone, stuck in an evidence bag somewhere at police headquarters.

  I stared at the shiny bathtub, wondering if I could ever use it again after what had happened in it.

  Of course I could.

  Why couldn’t I?

  How many hotel rooms had I stayed in without knowing what had happened before in the bed or the bath?

  Like Mary-Ruth, who’d had no idea of her home’s dark past, maybe there were things about this house I didn’t know. After all, the house was at least a hundred years old. How many owners had there been? How many people had died under this roof, naturally or unnaturally?

  I knew of at least one other.

  I’d killed an intruder on my couch and that hadn’t stopped me from sitting there to read the Sunday paper or watch TV.

  Did that make me cold and heartless?

  No, it didn’t.

  It made me a survivor.

  And at that moment I knew something else. I wanted my husband’s razor back, even if a woman had slit her own throat with it.

  It was mine. It meant something to me. And I wasn’t going to let her take that away.

  I stuck a frozen pizza in the oven, and while I waited for it to cook, I started sorting through my mail, dividing it into piles on the kitchen table. Once the pizza was ready, I brought it to the table, opened my laptop, and logged on to the Web site that the Beach’s grocery store manager had given me.

  I selected the security camera footage for four p.m. two days earlier and started watching.

  I had a clear view of the section of parking lot directly in front of the store, the street, and the U-Store-It facility on the other side. I could even make out Ambrose’s motor home.

  The only activity I saw was grocery store customers coming and going.

  At about 4:05, Yuki rode into the lot on her motorcycle, pulled into a space, and took off her helmet, which she set on the seat, apparently unconcerned that it might get stolen.

  She wore a leather jacket over a T-shirt, jeans, and black boots. She was in her twenties, with long black hair that fell midway down her back, where I knew she had a tattoo of a snake coiled around her spine.

  Yuki strode toward the store and out of the bottom of the video frame. A moment later, a black panel van with tinted windows drove into the picture from the left and parked beside the motorcycle, completely blocking it from the view of the camera.

  Nobody got out of the van. I couldn’t see anyone through the tinted passenger window.

  Five minutes later, Yuki walked back into the frame carrying a bag of groceries, and headed to her motorcycle, disappearing behind the van.

  At first nothing happened. It might have been a still picture if not for the traffic going by on the street.

  But then the van shook, and a couple of apples toppled out into the lane, followed by a splatter of milk. Then a man fell down, or at least I thought so, judging by the arm I saw flop to the ground at the rear of the van.

  Yuki ran out into view, holding her helmet in one hand, and fled across the parking lot to the street, disappearing around the corner.

  What struck me wasn’t the urgency of her flight, or the blood trickling from her lip, or the flash of anger—or was it fear?—that I saw in her eyes in the instant before she turned her back to the camera.

  It was the blood on the helmet.

  She’d hit someone with it.

  Good for you, Yuki.

  Another long moment passed. The van started up and the man on the ground stood. I didn’t see him, I just saw his hand push against the asphalt and then his arm withdrawing from view.

  But since the guy on the ground couldn’t have started the van, that meant there was at least one other person involved in the fight.

  The van peeled out of the parking spot and sped off after Yuki, going so fast that it fishtailed as it made the turn onto the street and around the corner.

  I sat back and looked at the screen.

  At the motorcycle and its slashed tires.

  At the apples and the spilled milk.

  And one question, out of the many swirling in my head, rose to the forefront of my mind.

  Where were the rest of the groceries?

  Yuki certainly didn’t take them.

  That meant that the men had actually picked up the bag and taken it with them.

  They’d cleaned up the scene.

  But why? Who were they? What did they want?

  And where was Yuki now?

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Mr. Monk Is Left Behind

  I finished off the entire pizza and watched the video a dozen more times. On each viewing, I tried to focus on a different aspect of what I was seeing, hoping to notice a telling detail that I might otherwise have missed if I kept looking only at the
big picture.

  The van came into the picture from the left, which meant they’d either driven in from the side entrance or they were already in the parking lot, out of camera view, when Yuki arrived.

  So I backed the video up to see if I could spot when the van got there.

  I could.

  I saw the van pass by on the street about five minutes before Yuki showed up, but I didn’t see the vehicle enter the parking lot.

  That meant that they must have gone around the block and then entered the lot from the side entrance.

  And then they waited.

  That raised a lot of questions.

  Were they waiting specifically for her?

  Or was she chosen at random?

  And for what?

  If they were after her in particular, how did they know that she was coming?

  Once she arrived, they waited for her to go inside the grocery store and then drove into the one parking space that completely blocked her motorcycle from being seen by the camera or any of the shoppers.

  They also parked at an angle that prevented the camera from getting a clear shot of the van’s rear license plate or the front windshield.

  I didn’t think that was a lucky accident. They’d planned it that way.

  So they must have scouted the location in advance and knew exactly where the camera was and what it could see.

  And they picked up her spilled groceries, so nothing but her motorcycle was left behind and there was no sign of a struggle.

  These guys knew what they were doing.

  They were professionals.

  And somehow that made what I’d seen even more frightening.

  I couldn’t see what happened, but my assumption was that they’d slashed the tires on Yuki’s motorcycle while she was shopping and when she returned, they attacked. She fought to save herself from being—what?

  Robbed?

  Kidnapped?

  Killed?

  But then things took another strange turn.

  Once she was free, she didn’t run into the grocery store, where she could get help and call the police.

  Instead, she chose to run across the open parking lot to the street.

  It made no sense.

  When the van drove off after her, I froze the video and managed to get a glimpse of the license plate, but it was splattered with mud.