by Lee Goldberg
Disher referred to his notebook. “Ordinarily in these kinds of accidents, where someone falls asleep while smoking, it’s not the fire that kills them but the smoke.”
“Did the medical examiner find smoke or soot particles in the victim’s lungs or nasal passages?” Monk asked.
“No,” Stottlemeyer said. “Meaning Esther Stoval was dead before the fire started.”
“There you go,” Monk said. “It’s murder. You solved it. What’s the unsolvable part?”
“We’re getting to that,” Stottlemeyer said. “Go on, Randy. Tell him the rest.”
“The ME found bits of fabric in her windpipe and petechial hemorrhages in the conjuntivae of her eyes that come from increased pressure in the veins when—”
“Yadda, yadda, yadda,” Stottlemeyer interrupted him. “In other words, she was smothered with a pillow.”
“But we’ll never get anything off the murder weapon because it was incinerated in the fire,” Disher said. “Along with any fingerprints or other trace evidence that the killer might have left in the room.”
“We’ve got no witnesses, either,” Stottlemeyer said. “We canvassed the neighborhood. Nobody saw or heard anything.”
“So you’re saying you can prove it was murder but not who did it,” Monk said. “And you’ll never be able to prove who did it because all the evidence went up in flames.”
“You got it,” Stottlemeyer said. “We’re looking at the perfect murder.”
Monk tilted his head from one side to the other. I’ve seen him do that before. It’s like he’s trying to loosen up a stiff neck, but I think what really goes on is that his mind refuses to accept some fact he’s seen or heard.
“I don’t think so,” Monk said.
“You already see the mistake the killer made?” Stottlemeyer said.
Monk nodded. “He shouldn’t have killed Esther Stoval.”
“You got anything more substantial than that for us to run with?” Stottlemeyer asked.
“Not yet,” Monk said. “But I’m working on it.”
“That’s good to hear,” Stottlemeyer said. “It’s a start.”
“What do you know about the victim?” I asked.
“From talking to the neighbors, we know that Esther was a miserable, chain-smoking harridan whom nobody liked,” Stottlemeyer said. “Worse than that, she stood in the way of everybody on her block getting stinking rich.”
He explained that Lucas Breen, a developer known for rejuvenating tired neighborhoods with innovative mixed-use developments, wanted to demolish those six ugly town houses and build a Victorian-style condominium and retail project. Esther Stoval was the only homeowner on the block who wouldn’t sell, enraging her neighbors, who’d already sold their places to Breen and whose deals were contingent on her selling as well.
“Looks like there’s no shortage of suspects,” I said.
“They all could have done it,” Stottlemeyer said. “They could have stood in a line and taken turns holding the pillow to her face. But we have no way of proving any of them were in that house the night it burned down.”
“Maybe because none of them did it,” Disher said.
“Where are you going with this, Randy?” Stottlemeyer asked.
“I have a theory,” Disher said. “It’s a little out-of-the-box.”
“That’s okay,” Stottlemeyer said.
“What if it’s the cats?” Disher said.
“The cats,” Stottlemeyer said. “How could it be the cats?”
“There was this great Robert Culp movie. There are these scientists doing research in a remote lab in the Arctic on the effects of isolation on monkeys. The scientists are getting killed one by one, and no one knows who the killer is. The surviving scientists are afraid to turn their backs on one another,” Disher said. “Pretty soon, it’s down to just Robert Culp and one other guy and—”
“It’s the monkeys,” Monk said. “They turned the tables on the scientists and manipulated them into killing one another.”
“How did you know?” Disher said.
Stottlemeyer sighed. “Because you started telling us that endless story to support your inane theory that the cats killed Esther Stoval.”
“What if the cats purposely tipped the pillow onto her face and, while one of them sat on it, another one knocked the cigarette onto the newspapers?” Disher said. “What if it was an act of feline rebellion against their cruel master?”
“That isn’t out-of-the-box thinking, Randy,” Stottlemeyer said. “It’s out-of-your-mind thinking.”
“Cats are very clever, Captain,” Disher said.
“Stop,” Stottlemeyer said.
Disher started to speak again, but Stottlemeyer held up his hand to halt him.
“One more word and I’ll shoot you,” Stottlemeyer said, then looked imploringly at Monk. “Now do you see how badly we need you on this?”
7
Mr. Monk and the Buttons
The fog lifted Sunday afternoon, but dark clouds gathered over the city, pushed by a cold wind that made the torn, yellow caution tape outside Esther Stoval’s scorched house dance in the air like party streamers.
Although there wasn’t actually a party going on, the young couple living next door, Neal and Kate Finney, definitely had a skip to their step as they loaded up a U-Haul truck with moving boxes. They lived in one of the five town houses slated for demolition to make way for Lucas Breen’s proposed condominium and retail complex.
“We only had minor smoke and water damage, but now that Mrs. Stoval is dead, there’s really no reason to stick around another day.” Kate wheeled a hand truck stacked high with boxes down to the U-Haul. “The house belongs to Lucas Breen’s company now, which means we’ll finally get our check.”
“Honolulu, here we come,” Neal said from inside the truck. He wore a loud Hawaiian shirt and cargo shorts despite the chilly weather. That’s how enthusiastic he was.
“You aren’t even trying to hide how happy you are that she’s dead,” Monk said.
“Nope,” Neal said.
“You were her next-door neighbors. She stood between the building of the new condo complex and your big payday. Now she’s dead and you’re on the next plane to Hawaii,” Monk said. “Aren’t you concerned about how this makes you look?”
“We’ll be sure to leave the police our forwarding address.” Kate wheeled the boxes up to her husband, slid the hand truck out from under the stack, and headed back to the house for another load.
“You have the best possible motive for killing her, and you aren’t even bothering to hide it,” Monk said.
“It’s our best defense,” Neal said as he organized the boxes in the truck. “With all we had to gain, we’d have to be complete morons to torch her place.”
“That could be your cunning plan,” Monk said. “It’s so obvious that you did it that nobody would think you did it, even though you did do it.”
“We were out to dinner at Ruggerios with two other couples when the fire happened,” Neal said. “Had I known what was going on, I would have ordered two more bottles of wine and picked up the check for everybody.”
“A lonely old woman was killed in that fire,” I said. “Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
“You don’t know anything about Esther Stoval or what it was like living next door to her. So don’t judge me, lady.”
I didn’t like these people or their selfishness and unadulterated greed. Did they sell their souls to Lucas Breen along with their home?
I thought about my own house and what it meant to me. Mitch and I found it, fell in love with it, and bought it together. Our daughter was born under its roof. I can still feel his presence in the walls, in the air, in the light streaming through the windows. Next to Julie, it’s the last true attachment to him I have left. I couldn’t sell it, no matter how much my neighbors pressured me.
“Did it occur to you for even one second that she might have refused to sell not just to be obstinate or for
the evil pleasure of denying you wealth?” I said. “Maybe her house had deep, sentimental value to her. Maybe she loved living here and didn’t want to move.”
“She could have stayed,” Kate said, wheeling some more boxes out of the house. “The developer offered to give her one of the condos in the new complex rent-free for the rest of her life, in addition to the good money he was paying her for her house. You can’t get much more generous than that. And she still said no.”
“It’s not the same thing.” Disgusted, I walked away until I was out of earshot but still within sight of Monk if he needed me. I couldn’t stand to be near these people for another minute.
Monk stuck around and asked a few more questions. I don’t know what they were. Maybe he asked them what it was like living without a soul. Maybe he asked them what it was like to value money more than another person’s right to happiness. But knowing Monk, he probably asked them to rearrange the boxes in the truck into even stacks of eight with the same sides facing out.
Aubrey Brudnick was a professional intellectual in his forties who worked at a San Francisco think tank and lived next door to the late Esther Stoval.
“I’m paid for my thoughts,” he said, talking through his nose and chewing on his pipe. “If I can’t think, I starve, and that is why I loathed Esther Stoval.”
Judging by his double chins and potbelly, it wouldn’t have hurt him to starve a little. He wore a blue cable-knit sweater over a white T-shirt, brown corduroy slacks, and black leather Ecco running shoes. His feet were up on his book-cluttered desk, which faced a window that looked out on the charred rubble of Esther’s house.
“You couldn’t think with her around?” Monk asked.
“It wasn’t so much her,” Brudnick said. “It was her cats.”
“We heard she took in a lot of strays,” I said.
“There were dozens of them. And they weren’t simply strays,” Brudnick said. “They were exotics. She trolled the shelters looking for rare breeds. Just a few days ago she brought home a Turkish Van, a fluffy breed also known as the White Ring-tail and the Russian Longhair.”
He reached for a large book on his desk, found the page he was looking for, and passed it to me. It was a book on cat breeds, and he’d turned to the listing for the Turkish Van, a white cat with a cashmere-like coat.
“You kept track of her cats?” Monk said.
“It’s a failing of mine. If a bird flies by, I need to know what it is. If a car is parked out front, I need to know its history. If I hear someone whistling a tune, I need to know the name and the complete biography of its composer,” Brudnick said. “My intellectual curiosity is my great failing as well as my gift.”
“I know the feeling,” Monk said.
“That’s one of the reasons I found her cats so distracting. Every time I saw one, I had to research the damn animal,” Brudnick said. “The other thing, of course, was the smell. Her house was like an enormous litter box, and on breezy days the smell carried, along with all that dander.”
“Did you do anything about it?” Monk said.
“I spoke to her,” Brudnick said. “But she told me to mind my own business, which, coming from her, I found rather ironic.”
“Why is that?”
“Because the old crone was always peeking in my windows, sorting through the mail in my box, and reading my magazines,” Brudnick said. “I started walking through my house naked just so I could get a little privacy.”
Monk shuddered at the thought, and so did I.
“You never thought about taking more direct action?” Monk said.
“You mean like burning her house down?”
Monk nodded. Brudnick smiled.
“I thought about it every day,” Brudnick said.
“Instead I sold out to Lucas Breen and looked forward to a new home in the near future, far away from Esther and her feline menagerie.”
“So Esther wasn’t just making your life a living hell,” I said. “She was also standing between you and a fortune.”
“She wasn’t my favorite neighbor on the block; that’s true. But I didn’t wish any violence upon her.”
“Where were you between nine and ten P.M. on Friday night?” Monk asked.
“Enjoying a hot bath and the latest issue of American Spectator,” Brudnick said.
That was an image that would haunt me.
“Were you alone?” Monk asked.
“Sadly, yes,” Brudnick said. “It’s been some time since I’ve found a lady who’ll share a bath and American Spectator with me.”
He looked at me and smiled. I think it’s a credit to me and my astonishing powers of self-control that I didn’t vomit or run screaming out of his house at that moment.
“Did you see or hear anything unusual that night?” Monk said.
“Not until her house went up in flames,” Brudnick said. “That was certainly unusual.”
It was depressing. Esther’s other neighbors on her side of the street had the same attitude about her as the Finneys and Brudnick did. Nobody saw anything, nobody heard anything, and nobody cared. They were all eagerly awaiting their checks and the wrecking ball.
We went across the street to see what the other neighbors had to say, the ones without the sales of their homes on the line, who didn’t profit quite so directly from Esther’s death.
We found Burton Joyner, a scrawny, unemployed software engineer, in his garage, working under the hood of an old AMC Pacer, a car that looked like a pregnant Ford Pinto—which was, by the way, the first car I ever owned, until my dad heard they could explode if a bug hit the windshield and bought me a Plymouth Duster instead. Joyner also had an AMC Gremlin and an AMC Ambassador parked at the curb.
“I’ll be honest with you, Mr. Monk. I’m glad she’s gone,” Joyner said, tightening something with his wrench.
“She’s not gone,” I said. “You make it sound like she moved to Palm Springs. She was murdered.”
“Esther was a victim of the bad karma she created,” Joyner said. “She was a mean, vindictive person who made life unpleasant for everybody in the neighborhood. You can feel the difference on the street already. The stress level has gone way down.”
“And the property values will go way up,” Monk said. “Once the new development is built.”
“The development isn’t really important to me. It won’t change my circumstances much, so I’ve stayed out of it. I’m the kind of guy who likes to get along with people.” Joyner leaned back and wiped his hands on his jeans, smearing them with grease. “Live and let live is what I say.”
“Me too,” Monk said. “You wiped your hands on your pants.”
“Esther wasn’t like you and me. She’d sit at her window with binoculars, taking notes and pictures, intruding on things that were none of her business. She saw me watching a ball game on ESPN, so she called the cable company and ratted me out for hijacking their signal with an illegal converter box.”
“Were you?” I asked.
“That’s not the point,” Joyner said. “How was sitting in my recliner in my living room, watching a ball game on TV, hurting her?”
“You stained your pants,” Monk said.
“It’s okay; they’re my work pants,” Joyner said.
“I’ll give you another example. My hobby is collecting and restoring old AMC cars. I’ve had to sell a couple of them to create some cash flow until I can find another job. Esther took pictures of people buying cars from me and filed a complaint with the city clerk, who fined me two thousand dollars for operating a business out of my home without a license.”
“What did she have against you?” Monk said.
“Absolutely nothing. I never did a thing to her. She treated everybody that way. She had a certain view of life and expected everyone to conform to it. How crazy is that?”
“Super crazy,” Monk said. “You can go change your pants. We’ll wait here.”
“I don’t want to change my pants.”
“You really s
hould,” Monk said.
“I’m fine in these.”
“You’ll thank me later.”
“No, I won’t,” Joyner said. “Do you have any more questions? I’d like to get back to my work.”
“Where were you Friday night between nine and ten P.M.?” Monk asked.
“I was here at home, doing my laundry.”
“I see,” Monk said. “So you don’t deny you have a pair of clean pants you could change into?”
“What’s the matter with you?” Joyner said.
“Think about the karma your pants are creating,” Monk said. “Did you see anybody visit Esther Friday night?”
Joyner shook his head. “I don’t spy on my neighbors; I don’t keep track of who comes and goes or what they’re watching on TV.”
He wiped his hands on his shirt—deliberately, I think—picked up his wrench, and got back to work.
“Why did you do that?” Monk said to him. “Now you have to change your shirt, too.”
“Let’s go, Mr. Monk,” I said. “We have other neighbors to talk to.”
“But we can’t just leave him like that,” Monk said.
“Let’s go.” I tugged on his overcoat and led him away.
Monk came along, but he wasn’t happy about it. He kept looking back at the house we’d just left. “I don’t know how you can turn a blind eye to other people’s suffering.”
“He’s not suffering,” I said.
“I am,” Monk said.
After hearing Joyner’s story, and those of his neighbors, I was beginning to wonder if I was being too hard on Neal and Kate Finney. It appeared that Esther Stoval didn’t do much to encourage warmth and understanding from the people around her. I wondered how I’d feel about Esther if I had to live on the same street with her year after year. Maybe I’d be dancing with glee over her death, too.
There was one last neighbor whom Monk wanted to question, if only because there were six houses on each side of the block and he couldn’t bear to leave on an odd number.
Lizzie Draper lived in the Victorian on the corner—her house also doubled as her art studio. It was a bright, open, and airy space, filled with colorful bouquets of flowers, one of which she was using as model for the still life she was painting. I could see why. The bouquet was a stunning mix of green orchids, blue hydrangeas, red and yellow lilies, orange roses, coral peonies, purple trachelium, yellow celosia, and red amaryllis.
