Mr. Monk is Cleaned Out
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
CHAPTER ONE - Mr. Monk and the Economy
CHAPTER TWO - Mr. Monk and the Impossible Murder
CHAPTER THREE - Mr. Monk and the Black Market
CHAPTER FOUR - Mr. Monk in Therapy
CHAPTER FIVE - Mr. Monk and the Perfect Balance
CHAPTER SIX - Mr. Monk and the Rerun
CHAPTER SEVEN - Mr. Monk and the Magic Trick
CHAPTER EIGHT - Mr. Monk Cuts Back
CHAPTER NINE - Mr. Monk Is Cleaned Out
CHAPTER TEN - Mr. Monk Visits His Money
CHAPTER ELEVEN - Mr. Monk and the Zapper
CHAPTER TWELVE - Mr. Monk Gets a Job
CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Mr. Monk Rounds Up
CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Mr. Monk Cashes Out
CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Mr. Monk Goes to a Party
CHAPTER SIXTEEN - Mr. Monk Makes a Pizza
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - Mr. Monk Moves In
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - Mr. Monk and the Never-Ending Nightmare
CHAPTER NINETEEN - Mr. Monk Works for Free
CHAPTER TWENTY - Mr. Monk Shares the Moment
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - Mr. Monk Is Unappreciated
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - Mr. Monk Goes Home
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE - Mr. Monk Has Style
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR - Mr. Monk Returns a Favor
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE - Mr. Monk Has a Breakthrough
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX - Mr. Monk Makes a Deal
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN - Mr. Monk Gets Wet
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT - Mr. Monk Breaks the Perfect Alibi
The Monk Series
Mr. Monk Is Cleaned Out
Mr. Monk in Trouble
Mr. Monk and the Dirty Cop
Mr. Monk Goes to Germany
Mr. Monk in Outer Space
Mr. Monk and the Two Assistants
Mr. Monk and the Blue Flu
Mr. Monk Goes to Hawaii
Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:
Goldberg, Lee 1962-
Mr. Monk is cleaned out : a novel / by Lee Goldberg.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-45723-8
1. Monk, Adrian (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Private investigators—Fiction. 3. Eccentrics and eccentricities—Fiction. 4. Psychics—Fiction. I. Monk (Television program). II. Title.
PS3557.O3577M778 2010
813′.54—dc22
2010009190
Set in ITC New Baskerville
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To Valerie & Madison
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND AUTHOR’S NOTE
This book takes place before the events in the final season of the Monk television series.
For many years on the TV series, and in all of my books except Mr. Monk in Trouble, Monk only drank Sierra Springs bottled water, a brand that really exists. The producers of the show abruptly changed Monk’s water to Summit Creek without explanation or any acknowledgment that he ever drank anything else. I have done the same.
I am, as always, indebted to Dr. D. P. Lyle for his assistance on medical and forensic matters, to my friend Andy Breckman for entrusting me with his characters, to Kerry Donovan for her unwavering support and enthusiasm, and, finally, to the mysterious Dave, who gave me the title for this book in a comment on my blog.
I look forward to hearing from you at www.leegoldberg. com.
CHAPTER ONE
Mr. Monk and the Economy
Some guys showed up the other day at the house next door, mowed the dead lawn, and spray-painted it green. The banks were doing that to a lot of the foreclosed homes in my neighborhood. I was current with my mortgage payments and my grass wasn’t dead, but I was tempted to ask the guys to paint my lawn just so it would look as good from a distance as everybody else’s.
The great detective Adrian Monk, my obsessive-compulsive employer, also liked the idea of spray-painting my lawn, but that was because he loves uniformity. It didn’t matter to Monk that there was something inherently absurd about painting dead plants and that it might be a symptom of a much bigger problem than dying lawns.
For instance, Monk has an amazing eye for detail, but I’m sure he didn’t notice that the gourmet cheese shop on Twenty-fourth Street had closed. The delightfully snooty maître fromager affineur told me that his business had plummeted because—with the exception of those individually wrapped, perfectly square slices of processed blandness that Monk liked so much—cheese had become a luxury in a world where people were having trouble affording the necessities.
It was a world that I, as a single mother raising a teenage daughter, had been living in for years. I’d never been able to afford gourmet cheese. But suddenly it seemed like everybody else was joining me. The state of California itself was now just like me—a free-spirited liberal with a mostly sunny disposition teetering on the edge of financial ruin.
But while everybody around me was losing their jobs and their homes, I took guilty comfort in the fact t
hat as long as people kept killing one another, Monk would continue as a consultant to the San Francisco Police Department and I would remain gainfully employed as his assistant.
Monk was oblivious to the suffering, economic or otherwise, of those around him because he was totally preoccupied with his own. For him, suffering was a way of life, a vocation and an art form, something to wallow in with misery and, as odd as this may sound, a certain amount of comfort. Suffering was as familiar and pleasurable to him as happiness is to the rest of us.
Even so, it was my job to ease his suffering as much as possible so that he could function in society and concentrate on solving murders.
It was up to me to make sure that the people around him, and the places he visited, met his incredibly arcane rules of order and cleanliness.
There was nothing scarier to Monk than change. For example, every day he wore the same thing: a brown sports coat over an off-white, one hundred percent cotton shirt buttoned up to the collar. The shirts all had eight buttons, of course. His tailored slacks had eight belt loops around the waist.
Monk aspired to a rigidly structured, symmetrical, and antiseptic life. I did my best to help him achieve that impossible and unappealing goal.
But as hard as Monk tried to exert absolute control over his environment, he still couldn’t isolate himself from the global financial crisis, which he discovered for himself early one weekday morning at his neighborhood Safeway supermarket.
We went to replenish his supply of Summit Creek bottled water, the only beverage that he would drink. I’m not exaggerating—that’s all he drank. No other liquid ever passed his lips. He even brushed his teeth with it.
So he was very unsettled to discover that there weren’t any bottles of Summit Creek on the shelves. The space it usually held was occupied by bottles of Arrowhead and Evian.
He looked at me. “Where’s my water?”
“I guess they sold out.”
Monk cocked his head from side to side, studying the shelf the way he would a crime scene.
“No, that’s not it. They’ve removed the product tag from the shelf.”
“Maybe they aren’t stocking it at this store anymore.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Natalie. Summit Creek bottled water is a basic human necessity.”
“For you, Mr. Monk.”
“For all of mankind,” he said. “Nobody can live without water.”
I motioned to the dozens of other brands of bottled water. “There’s plenty of other water for sale here.”
“That swill is not water.”
“It sure looks like water to me.”
“That’s exactly what they want you to think.”
“They?” I asked. “Who are they?”
“Don’t be fooled just because it’s clear liquid. It could be anything. It could be spit.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You are so naive,” Monk said. “There are labor camps where starving slaves spend their miserable lives filling bottles with spit, which are then sold worldwide as counterfeit water to people like you.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It’s a cruel world,” Monk said. “There’s no end to the depravity.”
“Think about it logically, Mr. Monk. Instead of going to the effort of enslaving people to spit in bottles, wouldn’t it be a whole lot easier to just fill the bottles with tap water?”
“Tap water is treated sewage and sewage treatment plants cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build and operate,” he said. “Do you really think they have treatment plants there?”
“Where?” I said. “Where is there? Who are they?”
“Grow up, Natalie.” He shook his head and started marching down the aisle toward the back of the store.
I hurried after him. “Where are you going?”
“To find the manager and demand an explanation.”
“Why don’t we just try another supermarket?”
“This is my store,” he said. “It’s taken me years to get it properly organized.”
“It has?”
“I come in late at night and arrange everything by product and expiration date. It’s a job that’s never done, but I enjoy it.”
Of course he did. That wasn’t a surprise. The revelation is that I knew nothing about this nocturnal pastime. I’d worked for Monk for years and yet there were still things I didn’t know about him. It seemed that he had a secret life, one even duller and sadder than the one he lived in the open.
“They really let you do that?” I asked.
“I also scrub the scuff marks off the linoleum,” Monk said. “Shopping carts are brutal on flooring when operated recklessly. People should be much more careful.”
Now it made sense why the store employees let him rearrange the merchandise. It was a small price to pay for free cleaning services. They could spend their nights on permanent break.
We found the manager, a portly fellow in a red apron, stacking a display of cereal boxes at the end of one of the aisles. His name tag read Arthur Upton.
“Arthur,” Monk said. “We need to talk.”
The manager turned around with a weary sigh. “I’ve told you before, Mr. Monk, we aren’t going to stop selling chewing gum just because some people spit it out on the street.”
“What have you done with the Summit Creek bottled water?”
Arthur winced. “I thought you knew. We don’t carry it anymore.”
“You have to,” Monk said.
“Nobody carries it anymore.”
Monk shook his head and waved his hands in front of him, as if to dismiss the whole thing. “No, no, no, that’s not allowed. You have to sell it.”
“Summit Creek has gone out of business,” Arthur said.
Monk kept shaking his head and waving his hands in frantic denial. “That’s impossible. Unthinkable.”
“Summit Creek borrowed millions of dollars to acquire an energy drink company a couple of years ago,” he said. “The energy drink line bombed, driving Summit Creek even deeper into debt. They put the company up for sale, but nobody was interested in buying it. So they had to shut down.”
“The government didn’t step in to save them?” Monk asked.
“It’s bottled water,” Arthur said.
“It’s the essence of life,” Monk said.
“There’s other bottled water. Hell, you could just turn on the tap and drink from there.”
That remark was so offensive to Monk that it actually stopped his head shaking and hand waving. He looked Arthur in the eye.
“I would rather drink my own sweat but that won’t be possible,” Monk said, “because I will be dying of dehydration.”
“Have juice,” Arthur said. “Or milk.”
“Milk? Do you know where milk comes from?”
“Cows,” Arthur said.
“And you’re honestly suggesting I should drink that?”
“Why not?”
“It’s another animal’s bodily fluids, Arthur. Maybe I should lap up some cow pee while I’m at it, too. Or some dog drool. How about a cool, delicious glass of pig mucus? Mmm, that sounds good.”
“Milk is perfectly healthy,” Arthur said.
“What you’re suggesting is disgusting, unsanitary, perverted, and sick!”
“Okay, have a Coke. Or a Gatorade,” Arthur said. “I really don’t care.”
“How can you deprive people of drinking water, tell them to drink bodily fluids, and call yourselves Safeway?” Monk yelled in exasperation. “That isn’t the Safeway. That’s the Deathway.”
I took Monk firmly by the arm. “Let’s go.”
“Deathway!” he yelled, pointing his finger accusingly at the startled manager. “Deathway!”
I dragged Monk away. “Keep your voice down, Mr. Monk, or they will call the police.”
“If they don’t, we should, because a heinous crime is being committed here,” Monk said, then screamed some more, “Deathway! Deathway!”
“Calm down, Mr. Monk. It’s not Safeway’s fault that Summit Creek has gone out of business.”
“It’s a travesty,” Monk said. “A crime against humanity.”
“Maybe it is but there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s done. Summit Creek is gone.”
He swallowed hard and looked at me as if he might cry. When he spoke again, his voice was barely above a whisper.
“How will I survive? What am I supposed to drink?”
“I’m sure you can find another brand of bottled water that is every bit as good as Summit Creek.”
“What do you know about Summit Creek?”
“It’s water,” I said. “In a bottle.”
“It is much more than that,” Monk said. “It is water of unmatched purity that predates the existence of mankind. It is water that fell from the heavens more than twenty thousand years ago and has been sealed in limestone caverns deep below the Uinta Mountains ever since, unsullied, uninfected, and untouched.”
“I’m surprised that you’d drink something so old,” I said. “Didn’t it pass its expiration date a long time ago?”
“There’s nothing more pure on this earth than Summit Creek bottled water. It is water as God originally intended it. God’s water, Natalie, that’s what it is. And you would have me drink this instead?”
He waved dismissively at the bottles of water on either side of us.
“You don’t have a choice, Mr. Monk.”
“I don’t accept that,” Monk said. “There must still be some Summit Creek on the black market.”
“What black market?”
“It’s where they sell scarce and illegal goods,” Monk said. “We just have to find it.”
“I know what a black market is, Mr. Monk. But I didn’t know there was one for bottled water.”