Mr. Monk is Cleaned Out

by Lee Goldberg

“I like Natalie to know what I know,” Monk said. “Sometimes I miss things.”

  “You never miss anything,” Stottlemeyer said. “You just like having someone to run interference for you.”

  “What sort of interference are you concerned about?” Cahill asked Monk, but Stottlemeyer answered for him.

  “There’s a list,” Stottlemeyer said. “It’s in several volumes and comes with an index. He gave me a copy one year for Christmas.”

  “That reminds me,” Monk said. “I didn’t see it in your apartment.”

  “My wife got it in the divorce,” Stottlemeyer said. “She cherishes it. Can we focus on the murder now?”

  The mention of divorce seemed to catch Cahill’s interest. She gave Stottlemeyer a long, appraising look that he missed entirely. Men are so stupid.

  “How do you know it’s a murder and not a suicide?” I asked. “He’s got plenty of motivation for killing himself.”

  “Like what?” Monk asked.

  Cahill turned to him. “Don’t you know who Lincoln Clovis is?”

  “I know he was Bob Sebes’ accountant,” Monk said. “But that’s all I let Captain Stottlemeyer tell me until Natalie got here.”

  “I know who he is,” I said.

  “How?” Monk asked.

  “Because I’m an engaged member of our society. I keep up on the news so that I am well informed on matters that might impact my life or enrich my understanding of myself and others.”

  “It sounds exhausting,” Monk said.

  Cahill cleared her throat and spoke up. “Clovis ran a one-man accounting business in a strip mall here in San Mateo. Before Sebes found him, Clovis made his living doing simple income tax returns for walk-in customers.”

  “I don’t know how Sebes found him,” Stottlemeyer said. “But he bought Clovis some fancy stationery and paid him two hundred thousand dollars a year to falsely certify that he’d audited the books and reviewed the securities.”

  “Did Clovis know it was a Ponzi scheme?” Monk asked.

  “I don’t think Clovis ever opened the books,” Stottlemeyer said. “But if he did, he obviously didn’t understand what he was looking at.”

  Monk cocked his head. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because Clovis invested most of the money Sebes paid him into the fund and even convinced his family and friends to invest in it, too.”

  “He was supposed to be an independent auditor,” Cahill said. “So the investment and his soliciting other investments in the fund were also violations of the law.”

  “The guy was an imbecile,” Stottlemeyer said.

  “So Clovis not only lost everything,” I said, “but he was looking at a hundred years behind bars for aiding and abetting the scheme that swindled him. Is it any surprise that the dope hung himself?”

  “He didn’t,” Monk said.

  “How can you tell?” Cahill asked. “The medical examiner hasn’t arrived yet and the crime scene unit hasn’t finished collecting their forensic evidence.”

  “If he killed himself, he would have stood on the rail and jumped,” Monk said. “But there are splinters in his cheek and on his sweater, indicating that he was rolled facedown over the railing.”

  She took a step closer to the body and squinted up at it. “I’ll be damned. You’re right. Maybe the rope will give us some leads.”

  “It won’t,” Monk said. “It came from his boat.”

  “How do you know that?” she asked.

  “It’s exactly the length you’d need to tie a boat to those cleats on the dock,” Monk said, gesturing to the water. “And his boat is gone.”

  “I’ve been with you since you got here. You haven’t measured the rope or the distance between the cleats. How can you possibly know it’s the right size?”

  “I’m not blind,” Monk said.

  “I can guarantee you that his eyeball measurements will be correct,” Stottlemeyer said. “Within an eighth of an inch.”

  “I wouldn’t be that far off,” Monk said. “Have a little faith in me.”

  Cahill waved over an officer. “Send a patrol boat down the lagoon. I want his boat found, secured, and examined by a forensics unit.”

  The officer nodded and went off. Cahill stared at Monk as if he was some kind of extraterrestrial. I turned to Stottlemeyer.

  “When you called me, you said that Clovis was murdered. But Mr. Monk didn’t prove it until just now. So why did you jump to that conclusion before you had any evidence?”

  “Clovis agreed yesterday to a reduced sentence in exchange for his testimony against Sebes. He would have done ten years in a minimum-security prison. And he’s the second indicted conspirator to the Sebes scheme to die this week. I don’t think it’s a coincidence.”

  “Neither do I,” said Cahill. “I’d love to take this homicide off my desk and put it on yours.”

  “Gee, thanks,” Stottlemeyer said.

  “It’s not that I don’t care about the death of one of our citizens, but our budget has been slashed to the bone and our limited resources are already stretched to the max.”

  “I know the feeling,” he said.

  “Maybe we could commiserate,” she said.

  Stottlemeyer seemed startled by the suggestion. He stuck his hands in his pockets and found something to look at on the water.

  “I haven’t commiserated in a while,” he said. “There hasn’t been much opportunity.”

  “We could commiserate about that, too.”

  He was smiling when he turned back to her. “I’d like that, Captain.”

  “Call me Erin,” she said.

  Standing in front of a bloated corpse at a quarter to five in the morning, and surrounded by crime scene techs and police officers, seemed like an odd and inappropriate time and place to be arranging a hookup. But perhaps it was precisely that circumstance, and the many like it, that filled their days and nights, that made it hard for them to find somebody to commiserate with. They practiced a lonely profession. Come to think of it, it had become mine and it had been a long time since I’d commiserated with someone, too.

  But all of this was lost on Monk. He walked around the yard, framing the scene between his hands, looking for incongruities, yet missing the congruence that Stottlemeyer and Cahill were attempting to establish with each other.

  “Did Clovis live here alone?” Monk asked.

  “Yes,” Cahill said.

  “I’d like to see inside the house.”

  Cahill led us up the path to the front yard. A question occurred to me as we approached the front door.

  “If he lives alone, how was the body discovered?”

  “By patrol officers,” she said. “His neighbors called to complain about a barking dog that was keeping them up.”

  We went inside the house, which was decorated like an upscale seafood restaurant with lots of nautical and fishing-related paraphernalia on the walls. Monk stopped to examine the alarm console on the wall beside the front door.

  “Was this activated?”

  “Nope,” Cahill said. “And the door was unlocked when the officers arrived.”

  “So Clovis knew his killer and didn’t feel threatened by him,” Stottlemeyer said. “He invited him in.”

  “One last, dumb mistake,” Cahill said.

  The entry hall led into an open kitchen and large living room that faced picture windows and the wraparound deck. There was a shag carpet and a large stone fireplace with a swordfish mounted over it. Monk froze and let out a little terrified squeal.

  The source of his anxiety was a large Dalmatian sitting docilely on the white couch beside a young police officer, who was petting the dog and holding its leash.

  “It’s all right,” Cahill said. “The dog is tame. She was on the deck barking when the officers arrived. But she ran up and licked them when they came in.”

  “How are they doing?” Monk asked.

  “Who?”

  “The officers,” Monk said.

  “One of them
is sitting there on the couch,” Cahill said. The cop on the couch waved. He didn’t look old enough to drink alcohol. I thought about offering to commiserate with him.

  “Why isn’t he on his way to the hospital?” Monk asked.

  “Because he hasn’t been hurt,” Cahill replied.

  “He was licked by a wild animal,” Monk said. “The officer may look fine now, but in a few days, when he’s foaming at the mouth and shooting civilians, you’ll wish you’d listened to me.”

  Monk lifted his hands and started scanning the room, but he made a point of never turning his back on the dog.

  “You’d better go get yourself checked out,” I said to the officer. “I’ll handle the dog.”

  The officer shot a look at Cahill, who nodded her approval.

  “Yes, ma’am.” The officer got up and left. I sat down next to the dog and held her leash.

  “Interference,” Stottlemeyer whispered to Cahill.

  “You have an observation?” Monk asked Stottlemeyer.

  “I was just saying to Captain Cahill that there are no signs of a struggle. Nothing seems to have been disturbed at all.”

  “There’s a huge disturbance.” Monk squatted by the fireplace and examined the wrought-iron tools, which were hanging individually from hooks on a special stand.

  “Where?” Cahill asked.

  “On the couch,” Monk said. “The animal will have to be euthanized.”

  “Why?” Cahill asked.

  “Look at it,” Monk said. “It’s in agony.”

  “She looks fine to me,” Cahill said.

  “How can you say that?” Monk replied, continuing to move around the room, hands out in front of him, one wary eye cast at the dog. “She’s a mess, neither black nor white, wearing a coat of schizophrenia. Imagine how she feels.”

  “She’ll feel worse being killed,” I said.

  “I sincerely doubt it,” Monk said.

  Cahill looked aghast. “You can’t put down a dog for having irregular spots.”

  “It’s an act of mercy to end its suffering.”

  “You’re suffering,” Stottlemeyer said to Monk. “The dog’s not.”

  Monk suddenly froze, as if he’d stepped on a land mine. “Nobody move.”

  “What’s wrong?” Cahill asked, her hand instinctively going to the butt of her gun.

  “I’ve got dog on me,” Monk said. “You probably all do, too. The important thing now is not to panic.”

  I glanced at Monk’s pants and saw barblike strands of black and white dog hair sticking to his pants. Stottlemeyer looked at his own legs and brushed the hair off.

  “Stop!” Monk yelled. “Are you insane? Do you want us all to die?”

  “What’s the problem?” Stottlemeyer asked innocently.

  “Now the hair and dog particles are in the air.”

  “Dog particles?” Cahill said.

  “It’s like asbestos,” Monk said, “with added dog.”

  “Added dog?” Cahill said.

  “Just stand very still until help arrives,” Monk said. “Try not to breathe.”

  We were all silent and very still for a moment.

  “Isn’t somebody going to call for help?” Monk asked.

  “Not until you tell us what happened to Lincoln Clovis,” Stottlemeyer said.

  “Talking requires breathing,” Monk said.

  “Cover your nose and mouth with your hand,” Stottlemeyer said.

  Everyone covered their noses and mouths except for Stottlemeyer.

  “Here’s what happened,” Monk said, his voice muffled by his hand. “Bob Sebes hit Clovis on the back of his head with an ash shovel and dragged him out onto the deck. Sebes tied the rope around the railing post, slipped the noose over Clovis’ head, lifted him onto the rail, and rolled him off. You’re not covering your nose and mouth, Captain.”

  “I have a mustache,” Stottlemeyer said. “It filters dog particles.”

  “How do you know it was Bob Sebes?” Cahill asked.

  “He doesn’t,” Stottlemeyer said. “Sebes is under constant observation and electronic monitoring. The man hasn’t left his house.”

  “It was Sebes,” Monk said.

  “The GPS strapped to his ankle is tamperproof, Monk, and there are a dozen officers and a hundred reporters camped outside his door. It wasn’t Sebes.”

  “It was him,” Monk said.

  “How do you know Clovis was smacked with the ash shovel?” Stottlemeyer asked, abruptly changing the subject. “I don’t see any blood on it.”

  “Or dust,” Monk said.

  “What does dust have to do with it?” Cahill asked.

  “Clovis hasn’t made a fire in ages,” Monk replied. “There’s a fine layer of dust on top of the firewood in the basket and on top of all the fireplace tools—except the shovel.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Cahill said.

  “Will you call for help now?” Monk whined. “Please?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Mr. Monk Shares the Moment

  Monk’s rescue was reluctantly accomplished by two crime scene investigators armed with lint brushes, which they used to remove the dog hair from his pants, and a roll of plastic sheeting, which they unfurled on the carpet to give us a safe path to the door.

  Monk insisted on accompanying Stottlemeyer back to the police station to personally examine the readings from Bob Sebes’ GPS ankle bracelet. So the captain called ahead to rouse the police tech expert from his bed to come down to the station and walk us through the data.

  By the time we got to the station, a surprisingly perky and alert Disher was there to meet us, along with Ingo Koenig, a bleary-eyed, scrappy-haired man with a neck that seemed too short and narrow to support his massive head. He was like Charlie Brown come to life, only without the shirt with the zigzag stripe.

  They were at Disher’s desk, huddled over a laptop computer. There were several windows open on the monitor. One window showed a map of Pacific Heights, another showed a multicolored graph that looked like a flatline EKG, another had raw stats that meant nothing to me, and yet another seemed to be a timeline of some kind.

  Stottlemeyer made the introductions, then asked Ingo to tell us about the GPS monitoring unit and bracelet that Sebes was wearing around his ankle.

  “The judge would probably have locked Sebes up if his lawyer hadn’t convinced him that the Triax XG7 8210, out of all the brands out there, is the ultimate in constant, tamperproof monitoring technology,” Ingo said.

  “Nothing is tamperproof,” Monk said.

  “I suppose you could wrap the unit in aluminum foil or lead to block the unique wireless signal from being emitted. Or you could use a bolt cutter, or a blowtorch, or even the actual key to remove the bracelet.”

  “So how can you say it’s tamperproof?” Monk said.

  “Because the beauty of the Triax XG7 8210 is that any attempt to tamper with it will be instantly detected. There’s an infrared beam between the unit and your leg. If you try to slip anything between the bracelet and the skin, or to move the unit away from your body beyond its preset range, we are alerted. If the strap is broken, cut, or unlocked, we are alerted. Any time the transmission of your unique signal is broken, for any reason, we are alerted. But that’s only a fraction of the XG7 8210’s ingenious monitoring features. . . .”

  Ingo then explained the XG7 8210’s other features with a passion that approached reverence. We learned that the unit utilized GPS technology to not only track the offender’s movements but also to enforce individual inclusion and exclusion zones.

  For instance, if the person is a stalker or sex offender and is not allowed within two thousand feet of schools, or a particular home or place of business, the unit will alert authorities the instant he breaks those boundaries or is in the vicinity. Sebes was under house arrest; therefore his unit would alert authorities the moment he stepped outside of his property line or, as Ingo called it, his inclusion zone.

  The unit could also analyze c
hanges in the skin and sweat to detect any drug or alcohol use.

  “Some people buy these units by mail order to keep tabs on their troublesome kids or their philandering spouses,” he said.

  I could understand the temptation. I’d worry a lot less about Julie if she had an XG7 8210 strapped to her ankle.

  “So you’d know if Sebes ever tampered with the unit or left his house?” Stottlemeyer asked.

  “Me and the half dozen other law enforcement agencies that are constantly monitoring his unit,” Ingo said. “Even if we weren’t watching twenty- four-seven, the system is designed to call my house if there is any breach of the established protocols.”

  “Have you received any alerts?” the captain asked. “Has Sebes tampered with his device in any way?”

  “We’ve detected no irregularities of any kind.” Ingo pointed to the readouts on his laptop screen to prove it.

  The captain nodded. “Has Sebes left his house in the last twenty-four hours?”

  “No, he hasn’t. In fact, I can even tell you which rooms of the house he’s been in.”

  Stottlemeyer turned to Monk with a look of smug satisfaction.

  “See, Monk? There’s no possible way the killer could be Bob Sebes. So you can stop fixating on him and open your mind to other possible suspects.”

  Monk cocked his head from side to side and then pointed to the screen and a spike on an otherwise flat line on a graph.

  “What is this blip,” he asked, “around ten forty-five last night?”

  “Sebes had a drink or two,” Ingo said. “We forgot to deactivate the alcohol-monitoring function on his unit.”

  “What kind of drink?” Monk asked.

  “I would say a strong martini or several glasses of wine, judging by the traces of ethanol the unit detected.”

  I felt a tingle of realization at the base of my neck, as if someone was standing right behind me, breathing on my skin.

  “What difference does it make what Sebes was drinking?” Disher asked. “He’s not under arrest for being a drunk.”

  Monk smiled. And everyone in the room but Ingo knew what that smile meant. Me, most of all, because I’d miraculously made the same connection, at the same moment, that Monk did.

  “Because it proves Sebes wasn’t in the house,” Monk said. “And that he killed Lincoln Clovis.”