by Lee Goldberg
“How did it go last night?”
“How do you think it went?” He paced in front of my couch, his hands shoved in the pockets of his wrinkled slacks.
“I don’t know. You laid down some pretty strict ground rules that didn’t leave much wiggle room for him to cause trouble.”
“I thought so, too. After you left, he wanted to talk with me about the Haxby murder, so I said good night and went right back to bed.”
“That was nice of you.”
“What was I supposed to do?”
“You could have talked with Mr. Monk about his troubles and offered him some sympathy and advice. The man just lost everything he has except you and me. He’s feeling very scared and vulnerable right now.”
“We’re men. We don’t sit around whining. We take action.”
“Like running into your room, closing the door, and hiding under your sheets, hoping the problem goes away.”
“I had a long day and I was tired.”
I sat down on the couch. “So far it doesn’t sound to me like you had such an awful night.”
“Hell began at daybreak,” he said.
“That could be the title of a western.”
“More like a disaster movie,” he said, and then he told me his story.
Stottlemeyer woke up at dawn because he had to go to the bathroom. Still half asleep and not accustomed to having guests, he’d completely forgotten that Monk was in his apartment.
He went into the bathroom, stood in front of the toilet, and began to pee when someone screamed.
Stottlemeyer yelped and staggered back, stunned to discover Monk lying in the bathtub, fully dressed.
“What are you doing in there?” Stottlemeyer demanded, turning back to the toilet and continuing to empty his bladder.
“Stop,” Monk screamed. “For God’s sake, stop.”
It took Stottlemeyer a moment to remember why Monk was at his apartment, but it still didn’t explain why Monk was in the bathtub, curled into the fetal position, and hiding his face in his hands.
“I pee, you pee, everybody pees, especially in their own bathroom toilets.”
“Not in front of other people!”
“Men pee in front of other men all the time.”
“And those men are in lunatic asylums where they belong. It’s barbaric! Inhuman! Disgusting!”
Stottlemeyer pulled up his sweats and flushed the toilet. “Haven’t you ever been in a men’s room and seen the row of urinals?”
“Once,” Monk said.
“Haven’t you ever used one?”
“Never,” Monk said.
“But you are familiar with what urinals are and how they are used.”
“I am also familiar with cannibalism but that doesn’t mean I engage in the practice.”
“What happened here is your own fault for hiding in my bathtub.”
“I was sleeping,” Monk said. “Or at least trying to.”
“Why in my bathtub?”
“Because it is a contained area, comprised of tile and fiberglass, with a curtain for privacy. I was able to thoroughly clean the tub with a minimum of effort. I didn’t think some insane barbarian would come running in and urinate all over the place.”
“You startled me,” Stottlemeyer said. “Besides, what did you think the toilet was for? Decoration?”
“You should have knocked first!”
“The bathroom door was open.”
“It makes no difference! Before you relieve yourself you are required to take every possible precaution so that innocent bystanders aren’t placed in physical danger or traumatized for life.”
“It’s my bathroom,” Stottlemeyer said.
“And now it’s my never-ending nightmare.”
My laughter interrupted Stottlemeyer’s story. He stopped pacing and glowered at me.
“It’s not funny, Natalie.”
“It is hilarious,” I said.
“Not if it’s happening to you.”
It took me a moment to catch my breath. “That’s the beauty of it. I’m always the one it’s happening to. I never get to be the one who hears about it from a safe distance.”
Stottlemeyer nodded and sat down next to me. “You have a point.”
“So, where did you leave it with him?”
“I’m letting Monk clean my entire apartment, but I told him he couldn’t throw out anything without my approval first,” he said. “We have to get him back into his place.”
“How do you suggest we do that? Mr. Monk is broke and owes three months of back rent.”
“Hire a lawyer. What the landlord is doing can’t be legal.”
“Mr. Monk can’t afford a lawyer,” I said. “If you’re so sure the landlord is breaking the law, arrest him.”
“I can’t.”
“But he probably doesn’t know that. Maybe you can convince him to at least let you in to get Mr. Monk some water, sheets, and fresh clothes.”
Stottlemeyer glanced at me. “You might have better luck with that.”
“You’re big and brawny and have a badge.”
“You have a pretty face and cleavage. You might even get dinner and a date out of it.”
“He’s missing a tooth,” I said.
“So?”
“Would you date a woman who is missing teeth?”
“It depends on how many,” he said.
“You’re that desperate?”
Stottlemeyer sighed and got to his feet. “Sadly, yes.”
“I’ll go see the landlord, but I’m doing it just because I feel sorry for you.”
“Thanks,” the captain said.
“But if it doesn’t work, it’s your turn.”
“You have a deal.” Stottlemeyer went to the door. “While you’re doing that, I’ll call around and see if I can find some legal aid agency that will take on Monk’s case.”
I got up and went to the door with him. “You’d do that for him?”
“I’d take a bullet for Monk,” Stottlemeyer said and walked out.
And I knew, regardless of how casually he tried to say it, that he meant it.
I went to Monk’s apartment and met with the landlord, Phoef Sutton, who must have lost the tooth when somebody slugged him. I don’t know that for sure, but since I wanted to slug him, I figured others before me had experienced the urge, too.
Phoef was in his midthirties, wore tortoiseshell-framed glasses, a vintage bowling shirt, cargo pants, and canvas tennis shoes. He had carefully maintained stubble on his pale cheeks and seemed quite taken with himself, which also made me want to smack him.
We met in his apartment, which was decorated in prints and movie posters from the 1970s and furnished with reproduction sofas, lamps, and tables from the same era.
He refused to let me into Monk’s apartment to get any of his things, despite my winning smile and the extra button I’d opened on my blouse.
“Depriving that crazy man of access to his possessions is an incentive to get him to pay his overdue rent,” Phoef said. “Without that leverage, I doubt that the cheapskate will ever pay.”
“He’s been a good tenant,” I said. “He’s quiet, clean, and courteous.”
“One day, he stripped all the odd numbers off of the apartment doors, and when I confronted him about it, he said it was no different than rescuing people from a burning building.”
“That was an isolated incident.”
“He circulated a petition to have the tenant in the apartment above his evicted because one of his legs was amputated.”
“Perhaps Mr. Monk has made a few mistakes, but you have no right to lock him out of his apartment and deprive him of his possessions,” I said. “He’ll sue you.”
Phoef laughed in my face. “If he had the money for lawyers, he would have paid his rent. I’ll unlock his doors the day the back rent is paid and the moving trucks show up. Otherwise, I’ll auction off his belongings to settle his debts.”
I didn’t punch him.
&nb
sp; Instead, I acted in a reasonable and thoughtful manner. I waited until dark, broke into Monk’s apartment, and stole a set of sheets, a change of clothes, and as many bottles of water as I could carry.
I dropped them off that same night at Stottlemeyer’s apartment. The captain wasn’t back from work yet and Monk was very happy to see me. He was wearing an apron and gloves and holding a mop when I arrived. I could see all of the furniture was pushed up against the wall alongside dozens of moving boxes, each securely taped shut.
“What is all that?” I asked, gesturing to the boxes.
“Garbage,” Monk said. “The captain wouldn’t let me throw anything out without his approval first.”
“It looks like you’ve packed up everything he owns.”
“There was a toxic spill this morning. Nothing could be saved. You don’t want to know.”
I didn’t tell him that I already did, nor that he was right about it being knowledge that I didn’t want to have. I gave him the stuff that I’d stolen from his apartment but I told him that I’d talked Phoef into giving it to me.
Monk nodded. “Here’s what happened. You covered the kitchen window of my apartment with a towel to protect your hand and muffle the sound while you broke the glass with your fist. You unlocked the latch and climbed in, took only what you could grab in two minutes and hold in both hands, and ran out the back door.”
I stared at him. “How did you know that?”
“It’s obvious. The evid—”
“Never mind,” I interrupted. “It was a dumb thing to ask you.”
“Don’t you want to hear my summation?”
“There’s no need. You got me. I confess.”
“But you don’t know how I knew how you did it.”
“I don’t care,” I said. “Are you going to call the police?”
“A conviction for breaking and entering could lead to imprisonment and ruin your chances of finding future employment, plus you were mentally and emotionally incapacitated by your female troubles, so I won’t press charges . . .”
“That’s a relief,” I said.
“. . . on the condition that you let me do my summation.”
“There’s nobody here to be impressed by it.”
“There’s you,” he said.
So I let him do his summation. He gleefully, and I thought rather smugly, pointed out all of the dumb mistakes that I’d made committing what I thought was the perfect crime. But there’s no reason you have to know about them—I’m embarrassed enough as it is.
I learned something, though, from the experience. Now I know what it feels like to be unmasked by the greatest detective on earth.
It’s humiliating.
And makes you want to murder somebody.
Him.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Mr. Monk Works for Free
I forgot to mention to you that after I left Phoef Sutton’s place, and before I broke into Monk’s apartment, I spent the day at my kitchen table polishing my résumé and Monk’s.
I’d had so many jobs before becoming Monk’s assistant that I could pretty much slant my résumé to fit whatever open position I applied for. But Monk’s résumé took some creative writing talent. I stressed his skills, his attention to detail, his dependability, and his dedication to cleanliness, rather than his experience as a police officer and Homicide consultant.
If you’re applying for sales, clerical, secretarial, and service positions, the people doing the hiring don’t really care about how many homicides you’ve solved. But they do value cleanliness, education, reliability, and intelligence, and Monk had all those attributes.
After I left Stottlemeyer’s condo, I went back home and logged on to every job- hunting site on the Web and submitted myself and Monk for every opening in San Francisco that didn’t require degrees, certifications, licenses, or extensive experience in a particular field or profession.
That didn’t leave a lot of great opportunities. For instance, there was an opening for a dishwasher at a Fisherman’s Wharf restaurant. I thought Monk had a pretty good shot at that one if he could just get in for an interview and demonstrate his talents.
I also knew it would have been a tragedy if Monk got the job. Sure, he would be ridiculously content washing dishes, but the pay would be crap and it would be a waste of his talent and abilities.
It just wasn’t right.
I found myself hoping some brilliant serial killer would strike, murdering a ton of people and terrifying the public, so that the police would have to hire Monk again out of sheer desperation.
That was how bad I was feeling. I was actually wishing for a massacre just so I could have my job back and not have to worry about losing my house.
Maybe Monk’s worldview wasn’t so wrong after all.
I gave up on applying for lousy jobs around midnight, turned off the laptop, and dragged myself to bed, depressed and scared. I was sure that I was so anxious that I’d never get to sleep, but I was unconscious in about sixty seconds.
My phone rang at 3:33 in the morning. If Monk saw those numbers flashing on his clock radio, he’d assume he was having a waking nightmare, hide his head under his pillow, and wait until 4:44 to peek at the clock again.
I foolishly answered the phone instead. It was Captain Stottlemeyer.
“There’s been a murder in San Mateo,” Stottlemeyer said. “You need to meet us there.”
“Us?”
“Me and Monk,” the captain said. “He says he can’t do his thing without you.”
“Have you rehired him as a consultant?”
“No,” he replied.
“Too bad. Tell Mr. Monk that if he wants to tag along with you to look at some putrid corpse in the middle of a cold, dark night, that’s his stupid, self-destructive decision, not mine. I don’t work for him anymore. And you can remind him that I don’t work for him because he can’t pay me, and he can’t pay me because you—the man he is now consulting with for free—fired him. Have fun.”
I hung up the phone and put my face back into the warm spot on my pillow. I was beginning to slip back into sleep when the phone rang again. I grabbed the receiver.
“San Mateo is out of your jurisdiction,” I said, turning my head but keeping my face in the warm sunken spot in my pillow.
“Yes, it is,” Stottlemeyer said.
“So what makes this murder so special that you’re schlepping all the way out there and you’re letting Monk come with you?”
“The victim is Lincoln Clovis,” the captain said. “He was Bob Sebes’ accountant and was responsible for auditing the Reinier Investment Fund.”
I’d read about him. He’d been charged with a ton of stuff, including securities fraud, and was facing a hundred years in prison if convicted on all the counts against him.
Bob Sebes had victimized both the wealthy and the poor, individual investors as well as pension funds and charities. It was a crime that outraged the public, not just in San Francisco but across the country. There was enormous pressure on law enforcement agencies to win a conviction. But that wouldn’t be easy to do with coconspirators and potential prosecution witnesses getting killed left and right.
Whoever murdered Haxby and Clovis—and I assumed it was one guy—wasn’t a serial killer, at least not the kind that terrifies the general public. Even so, I realized that this could be the case I was hoping for.
The pressure on the police to solve these murders, and to do it quickly, had to be intense.
The police department wasn’t paying Monk yet, but they soon could become desperate enough to cave in, especially if he started to make headway in the case and then abruptly stopped working for free (even if it meant I had to tie him up and lock him in my attic to do it).
We’d have a gun to their head. They’d have to hire him again.
So I didn’t hang up the phone this time. Instead, I asked for the address and told Stottlemeyer that I would be right there.
San Mateo is a southern suburb of San
Francisco and was once part of a massive Spanish land grant known as Rancho de las Pulgas, which in English means “Ranch of Fleas.” I could have torpedoed Monk’s presence at the crime scene and his involvement in the investigation just by letting him know that little historical fact.
But I am not that spiteful.
Lincoln Clovis lived in a two-story Cape Cod-style house with blue-shingle siding and a wraparound deck overlooking the lagoon that snaked through the Mariner’s Island and Seal Slough neighborhoods of San Mateo. The street was clogged with the usual official vehicles. The house was cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape and was illuminated with portable floodlights like a movie set.
I identified myself to the uniformed police officer stationed on the street and he led me to the back of the house, where the lawn sloped down to the water and a small boat dock.
Monk and Stottlemeyer were standing beside a woman who looked to be about my age and had the slender toned body of a runner or a ballet dancer. She wore casual clothes, a T-shirt and jeans, but there was nothing casual about the gun and badge clipped to her belt.
The three of them were looking up at the back of the house. I followed their gaze and saw a man hanging from a noose tied to a thick wooden railing post on the second-story deck. His face was bloated and dark red, his eyes bulging, and his tongue was sticking out of his gaping mouth.
Aside from the fact that he was dead, Clovis seemed physically fit and well off. He was dressed in slacks, a shirt with a buttoned-down collar, and a V-neck cashmere sweater. The Rolex on his wrist glimmered in the glow from portable floodlights.
“You must be Natalie Teeger,” the female cop said, offering her hand to me. “I’m Captain Erin Cahill, San Mateo Homicide. Thanks for coming out.”
She made the comment without a trace of sarcasm, as if my presence was an honor and I actually had some professional expertise to offer the investigation.
“I’m afraid I’m not going to be of much help to you,” I said, shaking her hand.
Cahill tipped her head toward Monk. “He seems to think you will be. He wouldn’t let us tell him anything about the case until you got here.”
