by Hy Conrad
I had just joined the line at the makeshift bar when Mariah fell in behind me. “I see you’ve met Sylvia Sheffield,” she said in an even voice.
“Yes,” I said. I never know how to respond to lines like that, so I make a habit of remaining neutral.
“Is that why you need another glass of wine?”
I chuckled. “Probably. Does she always travel with the captain?”
“This is the first time I’ve met her, so I guess the answer is no.”
“Well, I can see why she decided to come. The captain has a very friendly handshake.”
“Only with pretty, single women,” said Mariah. I was flattered that she seemed to include me in that group.
The white wine was nearing the end of its run. We had our glasses refilled and crossed away in the direction of the casino. Through the closed glass doors, we could see the twinkly lights and the dealers getting ready for our arrival into international waters.
“I was thinking about your friend,” said Mariah. “Tomorrow we’re docking in Catalina, you know.”
Of course I’d known. It was on the schedule. But until this moment it had never dawned on me as an escape route. We’d been so focused on getting him into a new room, we hadn’t thought of this. Monk could get off in Catalina and fly home.
“That’s a great idea,” I said. “I’ll mention it to him.” I didn’t explain that this would entail forcing Monk onto an airplane. One crisis at a time. Besides, he’d been on planes before.
As the lobby started emptying out, I thanked Mariah again for her suggestion and headed out to the lingering dusk and the open air. Dropping Monk off in Catalina? Hmm. How would that work exactly?
The evil part of me wanted to see him gone. I’d have a much better time and probably make a better impression on potential clients. But Monk deserved to be here. He was the essence of Monk and Teeger. And it wasn’t totally his fault that he hadn’t understood the concept of single supplement.
On the other hand, if Monk got off in Catalina, how would he get back to San Francisco? Would I be forced to get off with him? No, that would be unacceptable. It would mean a huge waste of money and a lost opportunity.
On the third hand, what about Ellen?
Ellen Morse was Monk’s part-time girlfriend. I don’t quite know how to define their relationship. They had met in Summit, New Jersey, back when Monk and I were doing some work for the Summit police chief, our old friend Randy Disher. Ellen owned a boutique in Summit called Poop, which sold a seemingly endless variety of items made from animal dung—everything you could imagine and some things you were better off not imagining.
For some reason, Ellen and Monk had hit it off, so well, in fact, that Ellen opened a second Poop store, this one on Union Street in the heart of San Francisco’s trendy shopping district. She had done it to be close to him, although he didn’t always return the love. In fact, he had never stepped foot inside either of her stores. He just couldn’t. And he continued to ridicule them every chance he got.
I’m making him sound like a horrible boyfriend. I’m sure he wasn’t. But I did wonder if, after the death of his beloved Trudy, there would ever be another real relationship in his life.
So, back to my third hand. What about Ellen?
I knew Ellen was in San Francisco this month. And she was sympathetic to Monk’s OCD, having long suffered from symptoms of her own, on a smaller scale. Perhaps she would be willing to fly down to Catalina tomorrow, take Monk off my hands, and let me continue on my cruise. They might even want to spend a night on the romantic little island before flying back, if they could find a hotel clean enough.
I was ambling along the Granada deck on level three, enjoying the ocean’s gentle sway. I could only imagine how Monk must be reacting to the sway, wherever he might be. I could almost hear him moaning softly with each little roll of the ship’s deck. Wait a minute! I could hear him moaning softly. For real.
I stopped in my tracks and spun around. There was nothing—just me and the deck and the hull of the ship. Plus the railing and the Pacific Ocean. And the lifeboats. A line of orange lifeboats lay evenly spaced on the deck, each attached to a pair of davits that could pick up each rubberized craft and swing it out over the water.
It wasn’t hard to isolate the right lifeboat. It was the one with the cover unfastened from its grommets but laid perfectly back in place. It was also the one that was moaning, emitting a steady low hum of anxiety, almost like a sound machine.
“Adrian?” I pulled back the cover and there he was, lying faceup and frozen like a corpse in a coffin, perfectly centered on one of his favorite blankets from home. He was still dressed in his orange life vest. “Are you okay, Adrian? Are you seasick?”
“Seasick?” He thought about it. “No, I don’t get seasick. Do you think I should?”
“No. Don’t even think about it.” Why did I bring that up? “I just wondered what you were doing here.”
“Trying to survive,” he said, still not moving. “Natalie, I thought I could do this. But the ship and the ocean and all the people. People are everywhere. It’s like China.”
“Adrian, you can’t hide out in a lifeboat. You can’t.”
“Why not? It’s safe. It’s clean. And when the ship does decide to sink, I’ll be the first one in.”
“I’m going to get you off the ship tomorrow,” I said. “Promise.”
That’s all it took for him to sit up and smile. Then he frowned. “Okay, what’s the catch?”
“There’s no catch.”
I sat down on the edge of his lifeboat and explained the plan, about Catalina and Ellen and a quick plane ride back to the safety of his protective Pine Street apartment. He wasn’t too wild about the plane ride, but the rest of it must have sounded pretty good.
“You’re going to talk to Ellen and have her come for me? Great.” His expression turned embarrassed. “Ellen might be surprised to hear I’m gone.”
“Wait,” I said. “You didn’t tell your girlfriend you were leaving town?”
“I thought she might slip up and tell you. It was a very hush-hush operation.”
“Fine,” I sighed. “I’ll straighten it out with Ellen. But you have to promise to go back to your cabin. Darby’s not so bad. All you have to do is make it through the night.”
Monk agreed to take care of himself, to try to put up with Darby, and, most important in my mind, not to sleep in the lifeboat. Just to make sure, I helped get him and his blanket safely out, then spat in the bottom of the rubberized boat. Not a big spit. Not a loogie. But any spit was enough.
“Ugh,” Monk said, and threw his hands over his eyes. “What did you do that for?”
“To make sure you keep your word. And I’m going to spit in at least two more lifeboats. At random. Just to make sure.”
“You would never do something so disgusting.”
“You want to bet your hygiene on that, buddy?”
“Natalie, you don’t know what you’re doing. Now I’ll never be able to abandon ship.”
“Good,” I said. “Meanwhile, I have dinner to eat and some schmoozing to do. See you in the morning.”
This was my version of tough love, although in any other world, it wouldn’t seem so tough. My partner was on a cruise ship with a full, friendly staff to take care of him. He could survive.
Back in my cabin, I brushed my teeth and hair and changed for my evening of dining and forced smiles. Then I put in a ship-to-shore call to Ellen Morse. It would be expensive but worth every cent.
“He’s where?” Ellen said, sounding more upset than surprised.
“On a cruise ship with me,” I said. “I’d love to explain every charming detail, but I’m being charged by the second, and I’ve had only two small glasses of wine.”
“I was just about to go over to his place and cook him dinner,” she said. “Meat loaf and peas and pound cake. He knew I was coming. He insisted on the menu.”
“Sorry. That was all part of his hush-hush ope
ration.”
“Unbelievable.”
By the end of the one-minute-fifty-two-second call, Ellen had agreed to grab the first flight down to Catalina Island tomorrow and take full custody. The woman was a saint.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Mr. Monk’s Cure for Snoring
My first evening aboard the Golden Sun could not have gone better. Three criminal defense attorneys from three of the biggest firms in San Francisco had taken my card and expressed a real interest in using us on their most difficult cases, even after I’d explained that Monk wouldn’t work for a client who was guilty and that he almost always knew when a client was guilty.
“Glad to hear it,” said Gregor Melzer in an accent that was certainly Slavic and probably Russian. He had been the man across the lounge in the gray, expensive haircut and the Tommy Bahama shirt. He had changed into a gray suit that almost matched his hair. “We can use him as a Geiger counter,” he joked. “Not that we won’t wind up representing them. But it’s always nice to know.” On second thought, it probably wasn’t a joke—or a bad idea.
“As long as you pay us,” I said. I handed Gregor a business card and watched as he slid it into his wallet.
After our very successful dinner, Malcolm and I took a leisurely stroll around the Valencia deck, then up one flight and around the Granada deck. I don’t know what it is, but there are some people with whom you have to struggle to make any kind of conversation, and others who just make it so easy. Malcolm was one of the easy ones. And his Louisiana lilt didn’t hurt. Every time we spoke, about anything, the words just flowed, as if we’d been talking like this for years.
I do have to admit to a little distraction that evening. As we passed by the rows of lifeboats on each deck, I couldn’t help checking them for any signs of entry. Nothing. Good. I had not seen Monk at dinner, but to my knowledge he was no longer hiding in lifeboats.
The next morning, I woke up in a good mood. In a few hours, the ship would be docking in Catalina. Monk would be stepping onto dry land and into the arms of his girlfriend—although, now that I think of it, I’ve never actually seen them in each other’s arms.
My mood lasted until after I finished my morning routine, got myself dressed and brushed, and started fantasizing about sizzling bacon and fresh-brewed coffee. That’s when I swung open my door and found Monk asleep, nestled in a fetal position right in my doorway like a homeless man on a frigid night. He literally fell into the room just as a family of four scuttled by in the hallway, trying not to look.
“What the hell?” I screamed.
Monk was jolted awake. “Natalie, Natalie, Natalie.”
I scrambled to get him off the floor and onto my bed. He was in no shape to stand. “Adrian. How long have you been here?”
“Most of the night. Did you know your room number is 555? Not as symmetrical as room 000, but still a very nice room number.”
“You are not getting my room,” I said. Then I asked the obvious, although I really didn’t want to. “How did last night go with Darby?”
“Darby kind of fell out of sight,” Monk said. Turns out he meant that literally.
As Monk had promised, after the lifeboat incident, he’d gone back to cabin 457 to try to make peace with his alcohol-loving roommate. While Monk had been away, Darby had sobered up and ceased to be his easygoing self. He had managed to reclaim his half of the space and made the measurements exact by drawing a line down the middle of the room with a black Sharpie.
Monk’s impulse, of course, was to erase the offending line and vacuum the rug. But Darby stopped him. “Keep all your crap on your side,” he warned. “And your creepy little noises.”
The sink, Darby explained, would be on his side and the bathroom on Monk’s, although each would have visitation rights. According to Monk, Darby’s side was admirably roomy, except for the scattered clothes and littered beer cans. Monk’s side now resembled a child’s bedroom fort, with walls and passageways made of neatly stacked accessories, hanging clothes, and dozens of bottles of Fiji Water.
“Where are the backup batteries to my backup alarm clock?” Monk asked as he frantically searched and restacked his fortress.
“You, my friend, are a lunatic,” Darby explained. “But you are not going to ruin this week for me. Understand?”
In just a few more minutes, they succeeded in annoying each other enough that they both stalked out of cabin 457. I’m not sure what Monk wound up doing for food that night. As I said, I hadn’t seen him in the dining room.
At some point—he didn’t recall when—Monk came back and found the cabin empty. He borrowed the bathroom for two hours, then squeezed into bed, pinning himself under the covers, blankets pulled up to his chin. He didn’t say so, but I imagine there was some whimpering involved.
Later that night, Darby stumbled his way into his side of the cabin, coming home from one of the many shipboard bars, no doubt. The man collapsed into his own bed and promptly began snoring.
Now Monk doesn’t appreciate snoring. Even his own snoring sometimes keeps him awake. Maybe if his roommate’s had been soft and perfectly timed like a metronome, Monk could have made an effort to endure it. But Darby’s snores were erratic and explosive, and Monk dealt with them as long as was humanly possible—approximately eleven seconds, according to his backup clock.
His first try at a solution was to cross the black Sharpie line and gently shake Darby’s shoulder. This did nothing. The man barely moved, and his snorts were uninterrupted. Monk tried a harder shake. Then a harder one and another, until he felt like he was going to dislocate the fellow’s shoulder. His final push was enough to send Darby tumbling to the floor.
Monk scuttled into the safety of the bathroom and slammed the door. But he could still hear. Darby’s tumble had had no effect on the sounds escaping his lips. Monk emerged in a quandary. Here was a man seemingly impossible to revive. And yet Monk had to wake him. Maybe a good slap to the head. But if the slap woke him up, wouldn’t he attack Monk? Most men would.
Darby McGinnis lay faceup on the carpet. The vibration from the snores alone would have kept Monk agitated, so he couldn’t let this go on. No way. And then the idea of breath came to him. If this man couldn’t breathe, Monk reasoned, he couldn’t snore. He would have to wake up.
It took Monk several excruciating minutes to wad up the tissues in just the right shape and size, and long enough so he would never have to touch Darby’s face. The first tissue slid effortlessly into the snoring man’s left nostril. This had no effect except to redirect the airflow. So it was time for the second tissue into the second nostril.
The result of tissue number two was that Darby’s open mouth fell even further open and his volume intensified.
Monk was left with no choice, at least in his mind. He found a washcloth in the bathroom, wadded it into a ball, slipped it into Darby’s mouth, then hurried back into his bathroom fortress. Just in case.
It turns out that completely cutting off someone’s air supply can have quite an immediate effect. Monk was barely out of the way when Darby, the balding, aging frat boy, began jerking his head and sputtering for breath. He groggily gasped into his washcloth and, when that didn’t work, pawed at his nose, and when that didn’t work, became fully, desperately awake. But still drunk.
In a matter of seconds Darby was on his feet, his mind not quite aware of his predicament. He grasped at the washcloth and pulled it out. But he was still oxygen deprived and still in a panic and suddenly aware of these foreign objects in his nostrils.
All he seemed to know at that moment was that he needed air. And that led him to stumble toward the balcony and push open the glass slider.
“He just banged up against the railing,” Monk confessed to me, his hands flailing. “It wasn’t my fault. Those railings are meant to handle a lot more weight than that.”
“What? You’re saying the balcony railing broke?” I slapped him on the arm. “Adrian.”
“Ow.” He massaged the arm. “Now you h
ave to hit me on the other one.”
“Gladly.” And I did. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“Ow. It wasn’t my fault. The man was snoring.”
“Did he fall?” My mind was reeling. “Did he fall into the ocean?”
“He fell onto the balcony below. Eight and a half feet, by my calculations.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. The third-level balconies, as I knew from the ship’s map, jut out farther than the ones above them, almost like terraces. “Was he hurt? Did he break anything?”
“I don’t know,” Monk said. “I ran before I could find out. I’ve been here in your doorway for hours and hours. Honestly, I expected you to be up before now. You’re being a bit of a slugabed.”
“Slugabed?” I let that one go, having more important things to worry about. “Okay. Did Darby see you last night when he came in? Did you speak to each other?”
Monk thought for a second. “No. He was skunk drunk, and I was behind a wall of Fiji Water, pretending to be asleep.”
“Good,” I said. “Adrian, you stay here. If anyone comes and asks, tell them you were here in my room all night.”
“You mean I can stay here? Where are you going to stay?”
“No, you cannot stay here. Just say you did.”
“Can I rearrange your room? It really needs it. You’ll thank me later.”
“No.” I said it firmly, then grabbed my little ship’s map from the end table before scooting out the door. Infirmary, infirmary … Ah, there it was.
The Golden Sun’s infirmary was on level two, a small windowless room outfitted with an examining table, a few locked cabinets for supplies and drugs, and an alcove with a cot-like bed. The door was open when I got there. I didn’t know quite what I was going to say, so I went with the first thing that came to mind.
“Excuse me,” I said, knocking on the edge of the open door. “I was wondering if you had anything for sea sickness … Oh, Mariah. Good morning.”
