by Hy Conrad
“Give us a moment,” I told them.
Monk and I looked at each other, thinking out our options. Then I covered up the lens and whispered. “We can’t leave the ship now. What about Mariah? And the captain? And the vandalism?”
“You know we can still hear you,” came Devlin’s voice from the other side.
“Sorry,” I said, and removed my hand.
“What do you say, Monk?” said the captain with a big Skype grin. “You hate boats. And we really need you. The mayor’s office is pissed that we let our only suspect go.”
“My boss informs me that we have prior obligations,” Monk said.
“Prior obligations?” Devlin said. “What obligations? Something more important than murder? Natalie?”
“No,” I had to admit. “Something exactly like murder.”
Devlin threw her hands up out of the frame. “Augh, I should have known. It’s always a new murder with you two.”
“What?” I said. “It’s not like we caused it. We just happened to be there. The same way you’re always at a murder.”
“We’re homicide detectives.”
“Children,” growled the captain, like a father turning around in the driver’s seat. “I’m sorry to hear about your murder, Monk. Anything we can do?”
“It’s being called an accident,” I informed them. “The ship comes back on Saturday, but they’re going to need a sign-off from the SFPD before they can sail again. We’re hoping you can make them stay.”
“Do you have any evidence?” asked Devlin.
“I have it half figured out,” said Monk. “The easy half.”
Stottlemeyer nodded. “We’ll keep the morning open. Meanwhile, we need to establish a better channel for communication on the Melrose case.”
I agreed to keep my cell phone on as much as possible—a billable expense—and to check the business center several times a day for updates—also billable.
“Did you at least put a tail on Portia Braun?” Monk asked.
A few reddish pixels hinted at a blush on the captain’s face. “By the time I found out, her lawyer had already arranged her release. We lost her.”
“Did you check the airports?” I asked. “How about trains or buses?”
They had checked, of course. But no trace.
“Well, keep trying,” said Monk. “Meanwhile, arrange a police presence at the Melrose mansion, with emphasis on the library. Keep a guard there until I get back or drown at sea, whichever comes first.”
“Guard the Melrose mansion? Why?” asked Stottlemeyer.
“No reason,” said Monk. “Oh, and the Melrose son. Don’t let him do anything about probating the will. Put everything on hold.”
“Why?” asked Stottlemeyer again.
“No reason,” said Monk.
Before hanging up, Devlin made a final, impassioned effort to get him to divulge his theory about London and the two forgeries. She was wasting her breath.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Mr. Monk Goes Shopping
“What does Sumesa mean?”
“It means clean,” I said. “Antiseptically clean. Super clean.”
Monk and I were standing outside a Mexican supermarket looking up at the neon sign—SUMESA—which perhaps could be translated as “su mesa,” your table, but which, for the sake of my sanity, I had translated differently.
“It looks fairly clean,” he admitted grudgingly. This was the fourth grocery store we’d been to in San Marcos, and the first one I could convince him to walk inside.
This was how I was spending my day in an exotic tropical resort, Skyping with the police, then casing grocery stores to find American-made products wrapped in protective plastic. The next challenge would be smuggling the food back on board the Golden Sun. After that, I would have the task of finding somewhere to sleep, after having been kicked out by the Bulgarian party girls.
Monk took a wipe in each hand as he began pushing his cart. I followed at a distance as he made his selections from the shelves of Del Monte canned vegetables and, in the next aisle, Spam. “You’re going to eat Spam?” I asked in shock and awe. “You turn up your nose at my organic salads, and you’re going to eat Spam.”
“Nothing better,” he said, and took an extra can just for good measure. “My mother served Ambrose and me Spam all the time. It’s made in a U.S. factory, far away from all the dirt of nature, precooked to perfect edibility, sealed in a solid metal can—again avoiding nature—and comes out in a lovely symmetrical shape and exactly seven ounces every time. It’s almost the perfect food.”
“If it came in ten ounces, it would be perfect,” I said. I haven’t been at the man’s side for a decade without knowing how he thinks.
“You don’t know how many letters I’ve written to Hormel.”
“I can guess,” I said. And then something in the next aisle caught my own eye. “Ooh. I’ll meet you at checkout.”
When I joined him a few minutes later, he looked at my selections and frowned. “Natalie, I’m worried about you.”
“Don’t you start.” I had picked out a corkscrew and the store’s only bottle of California merlot. “Thanks to you, I can’t have a drink anywhere on that ship.”
“What are you talking about? Look at my old roommate, Darby. The ship gladly serves alcoholics.”
“I’m not an …” Oh, what was the use! I shut my mouth and bought my wine. When it came time for him to pay, I didn’t point out that he’d neglected to purchase a can opener.
We’d walked only half a block from the Sumesa, heading back to the Golden Sun, when I spotted four women from the ship, blocking the cobblestone street in front of a souvenir vendor and his pushcart. Two of the women I recognized.
“Better hide your hooch,” Monk whispered. I checked to make sure the bottle was fully inside the paper bag.
“Natalie, dear, how are you?” It was Daniela Grace, trying on a colorful scarf from the pushcart. Her eyes examined my face, like sympathetic X-rays, forcing me to clutch the bag even tighter. “You remember Ruth Weingart from the other night.”
How could I forget! “Ruth. I’m so sorry for that scene. I’m not usually like that.”
“We all have our moments,” said Daniela. “The important thing is how you’re doing today. Are you all right?”
I smiled and reassured them and filled up the awkwardness by making sure everyone was introduced. There was the thin, pulled-together Daniela and the taller, more matronly Ruth. The third friend was Sondra Winters, a gorgeous African-American, probably in her thirties. Rounding out their foursome was Lynn Sung. She was Asian with a Midwestern accent, probably the oldest of the bunch.
They were all friends from the Bay Area, and all four had persuaded their reluctant husbands to join them on this weeklong outing. “That’s the great thing about a cruise,” said Sondra. “You can ignore the hubbies and know they won’t get into trouble. Like kids.” Everyone laughed.
We spent the next few minutes immersed in small talk, all except Monk, of course. What lovely scarves! Isn’t the food on the ship delicious! Isn’t the weather perfect! We could have kept on going but were interrupted by a human bulldozer headed directly for us, weaving dangerously over the cobblestones.
It was Darby McGinnis. The potbellied man had just stepped out of a storefront bar, a Corona Light in each hand. He was mumbling angrily under his breath. “How can they not have whiskey? It’s a bar, for God’s sake.” The six of us instinctively flattened ourselves against a stone wall, leaving the poor street vendor to fend for himself.
As the drunken man stumbled down the street, the women scowled.
“I’m not like that at all,” I felt obligated to blurt out, still clutching my paper bag. No one replied.
“Excuse us,” said Daniela, replacing the scarf on the vendor’s cart. Her friends did the same. It had taken them long minutes to choose their favorites. Now they were rejecting them, throwing them back on the cart. “We’ll see you later. Natalie. Mr. Monk.”
“Half price. Two for one,” the vendor suddenly offered. But the women’s buying mood had been broken, and the four friends began moving like a pack down the winding street in the same direction as Darby. “Best bargain in San Marcos,” the vendor shouted after them. His energy was wasted, and they all disappeared, Darby and the women, around a corner.
Monk had remained mercifully quiet throughout the encounter. Not even a peep about the wine bottle in the paper bag in my hand. “Thanks for not being yourself,” I said. “I appreciate it.”
“Hmm,” he replied, not really hearing me.
“What’s wrong?” I checked Monk’s face. Something was bothering him.
“Are those ladies related to one another?” he asked.
“Related?” What an odd question.
“Are they sisters or something? I think they’re sisters.”
“Sisters? Adrian, one is African-American. One is Asian. And I think one is Jewish. So no, they’re not sisters.”
“Well, they look alike,” he insisted.
“They do not,” I said. “They’re friends.” Do friends start looking like one another after a while, I wondered, like husbands and wives or people and their dogs? “Maybe it’s because they dress similarly,” I suggested. “Or have the same hair stylist.”
“Maybe,” he said. But he didn’t sound convinced.
Two hours earlier, when we’d first stepped onto the streets of San Marcos, Monk had been freaked out by the cobblestones. They were uneven and asymmetrical and made it hard to walk without stepping on a crack. But he’d gotten used to them fairly quickly, mainly because there was so much other disorder to distract him.
One of the main distractions here was traffic. An almost-constant honking of car horns ricocheted up the alleyways. Scooters and motorcycles buzzed by everywhere, even on the sidewalks. We had already witnessed two little fender benders.
“They drive worse than you.” As usual, Monk had meant it as a compliment.
A few seconds later, when we heard an accident, the sound was different. The revs of the engine, the shouts of pedestrians, the crash of metal into something solid. More engine and tires. Finally, the screams for help.
It had come from nearby, maybe two blocks away, right by the San Marcos bus terminal. Monk and I both switched into cop mode and ran—he still grasping his bags of Spam, I clutching my wine. When we got there, the first thing I saw was Malcolm’s messenger bag in the middle of the street. Directly ahead, a crowd was already gathering around the body.
“Nine-one-one is oh-six-six,” Monk shouted.
“What?” I shouted back.
“For an ambulance. Dial oh-six-six.” It was just like Monk to have the emergency numbers memorized. He probably knew hundreds of them all over the world. Just in case.
• • •
We hadn’t expected to see Captain Alameda again. He and Monk had said their good-byes at the police comisaria, joking that they would meet in another ten years, the next time with even lovelier assistants. But next time turned out to be less than two hours later.
The San Marcos Civil Hospital was a frightening place, chaotic and broken and full of pain, not a place that I would trust to give me the best care. In Malcolm Leeds’ case, it didn’t matter. The man was already dead.
Monk couldn’t stay in the emergency room. He was okay with death and injury and the sight of blood. It was the proximity to germs that made him queasy. As for me, I was just stunned. First Mariah, now Malcolm. For the first little while, I tried to cope by treating it as just your average, run-of-the-mill death. Nothing personal.
Alameda met us outside with the news. “Your friend stepped off a curb,” he reported. “The car came straight down the hill and didn’t stop. A direct hit. He died instantly. The car kept going. The doctors always say ‘died instantly’ to make you feel better. This time it might be true.”
“Any witnesses?” That was Monk. I was still too shocked to speak.
“Too many,” Alameda said. “It was by the bus terminal. There was much coming and going and traffic everywhere. The witnesses agree on few things. It was a car, not a truck. A dark color—brown or black or green. And it was a tourist driving.”
“How do they know it was a tourist?”
“The license plate for a rental car has orange stripes across the top and bottom. No one saw the number, but witnesses agree it had orange stripes.”
“Good to know,” Monk said. I could almost see him storing that factoid in his memory banks. “Is anyone checking the rental car companies?”
“Rodriguez is doing that. We may get lucky. Maybe not, if the car is undamaged. This is still your Easter period and there are many visitors.”
“Spring break,” I said, correcting him—the one thing I said the whole time.
“Spring break, yes. San Marcos is most popular with your San Francisco schools. Four or five nonstops a day in this season. Takes less than two hours.”
“Can I examine the body?” Monk asked.
Alameda smiled. “I thought you didn’t like our hospital.”
“I don’t like any hospital,” Monk said, sounding more diplomatic than usual. For a split second. “But yours is especially bad. It’s terrible. It’s filthy. I’d rather die.”
“Thank you,” said Alameda. “So maybe you should wait until it is back on your clean American ship. I’ll start the paperwork now.”
It turns out when an American dies naturally or accidentally—and there was no evidence here to the contrary—the body is returned to the States. My first thought was about the ship’s morgue. Would there be enough room? And would Malcolm be the last person to need it this week?
They were still talking about the body when a taxi pulled up to the emergency room curb. Captain and Mrs. Sheffield stepped out. “We came as soon as we heard,” said Sylvia Sheffield. “This is so tragic.”
I had called the ship right away, using the emergency number on the reboarding pass they hand out whenever you disembark. I had expected the Sheffields to arrive a little sooner than they did.
The Mexican captain explained the situation to the ship’s captain and to its owner. In turn, they asked a few questions about the body’s transfer. Had Alameda done this kind of thing before? Yes, more than you’d think. Could the transfer be done subtly and without fuss? Yes, of course. No gurney or body bag on the gangway? No, just a wooden box, like a supply delivery. Then Alameda said good-bye to us once again and left.
“Does Mr. Leeds have any relatives who need to be informed?” asked Sylvia.
“We knew each other slightly,” I said, finding my voice again. “Malcolm’s parents are dead, and there’s no wife or girlfriend I know of. He has a sister in San Francisco. She’s probably listed on the contact form.” Before sailing, we’d all been required to list an emergency contact back in the States. I had listed my daughter Julie. Monk had listed me.
“I’ll take care of calling her,” said the captain.
“Thanks, dear,” Sylvia said. “Now, how do we break the news? Two deaths in one week? The last thing this ship needed.”
“We don’t say a thing,” Sheffield decided for everyone. “Mr. Leeds was traveling alone. As far as the passengers know, Mr. Leeds disembarked in San Marcos and didn’t reboard. It might be an illness. Or trouble back home. Things happen.” He regarded us sternly. “Are we all on the same page?”
I had thought about this option, as I’m sure Monk had. He thinks about everything. On the one hand, it seemed disrespectful to let someone so warm and vibrant vanish from the face of the earth without being properly mourned. On the other hand, he would be mourned by his sister and friends back in the city, and no one had really known him on the Golden Sun, except for me. And it would allow the cruise to continue as normally as possible.
“Same page,” said Monk. I nodded. This was the moment I came closest to breaking out in tears.
Sylvia Sheffield glanced around. Their taxi was still waiting, but no one else was within
earshot. “Do you think this was an accident?” she asked, looking at Monk. “I know it sounds crazy, but all these bits of vandalism … and now this.”
During our working lives, Monk and I had seen so many accidents that hadn’t been accidents. In this case, given the position and speed of the car, the direct impact without the squeal of brakes, the tourist plates, the quick disappearance of the vehicle, it looked bad. We hadn’t shared any of our suspicions with Captain Alameda.
“I’m sixty-four percent sure it wasn’t,” Monk told the Sheffields.
Sylvia frowned. “Wasn’t what? Wasn’t vandalism or wasn’t an accident?”
“Sixty-four percent that it wasn’t an accident. And seventy percent that it wasn’t part of the vandalism spree.”
“Percent?” said the captain, tilting his head. “We ask your opinion and you’re answering us in percentages?”
“Yes, I am. A hundred percent answering you in percentages. It’s sixty-four.”
“That’s just the way he talks,” I said. “There’s a better than even chance this was murder.”
“Murder?” Sylvia gasped. “Who would want to kill one of our passengers? Do you think it might be drug related or a robbery? After all, this is Mexico.”
“That’s a ten-percent chance,” said Monk. “Six percent for drugs and four percent for robbery.”
“Are you just making this up?” asked the captain. “You’re making this up.”
In a way he was; in a way he wasn’t. The numbers weren’t exact but they weren’t arbitrary, either. It was Monk’s way of keeping all the possibilities open but keeping them in perspective. Don’t ask me how it works.
“I’m a hundred percent sure I’m not making it up.” Okay, now Monk was just being contrary.
“Fine,” said the captain. “So, you’re saying the odds are it wasn’t an accident and the odds are it’s not related to the things on the ship.”
“Sixty-four and seventy percent respectively,” Monk repeated.
“Do you know what happened at all?” asked Sylvia who was fifty percent confused and fifty percent frustrated.
