Mr. Monk in Outer Space

by Goldberg, Lee

  He spilled out into the lobby and leaned against the security desk for support, breathing hard, his back to the revolving door as Stottlemeyer, Archie, and I came in after him. The officer went back outside to enforce the laws of nature.

  Monk caught his breath and turned to us.

  “If there’s an entrance to hell,” he said, “I guarantee it has a revolving door.”

  I’m pretty sure he’s right about that.

  3

  Mr. Monk and the Body

  We took the stairs to the fifth floor and emerged into the corridor, which was crowded with crime scene photographers and forensic technicians who were going in and out of one of the offices.

  “We’re on the fifth floor,” Monk said.

  “Yes, Monk, I know that,” Stottlemeyer said.

  “It feels awkward,” Monk said and glanced at me. “Don’t you feel awkward?”

  “No more than usual,” I said.

  I’d been to a lot of crime scenes since I’d met Monk, but I still felt like I didn’t belong there. I wasn’t a cop, for one thing. I had no purpose except to assist Monk, which usually meant doing what I could to limit distractions and keep him focused on the case at hand.

  “I think we’d both feel more comfortable on the fourth floor,” Monk said. “Or the sixth. I’m sure the victim would, too.”

  Stottlemeyer grabbed Monk by the arm and led us into the outer office across from the stairwell.

  “The victim is Brandon Lorber and he was CEO of Burgerville,” the captain said. “He was working late last night. The killer came in the front door using a key card while the security guard was doing his rounds. Archie didn’t know there’d been an intruder or that anything had happened until he found the body.”

  The walls were covered with framed photos of a man I presumed to be Brandon Lorber standing in front of various Burgerville restaurants in dozens of cities, though I wouldn’t have known the shots were taken in different places if the locations hadn’t been engraved on each picture frame.

  “The guard didn’t hear the gunshots?” Monk asked.

  Stottlemeyer shook his head. “The killer must have used a silencer.”

  From the pictures, I could see that Lorber was one of those men whose gray hair made him look distinguished, intelligent, and rich rather than old. He was in his fifties and wore the years well, at least until he got killed.

  “What about the video surveillance cameras?” Monk asked. “You must have the killer on tape.”

  “We do,” Stottlemeyer said. “But he was wearing an overcoat and a cap pulled down low over the face. He also turned his body in such a way that we couldn’t get a clear view. He knew where every single camera was from the lobby to the fifth floor.”

  “We’re dealing with a professional killer who was efficient and well prepared,” Monk said.

  “A dispassionate professional who knows how to cover his tracks isn’t going to leave the kind of traces that your garden-variety killer will,” Stottlemeyer said. “He’s probably gotten away with murder many times before. I don’t want him to get away with this one. That’s why I called you, Monk.”

  We went past the secretary’s desk into Lorber’s inner office, which reeked of cigar smoke. On the plus side, the odor was so strong it nearly masked the smell that came from Lorber’s dead body in the chair behind the large oak desk.

  Monk started to cough, which attracted the attention of Randy Disher, who was standing beside the desk, jotting down notes.

  “What took you so long?” Disher asked.

  “Look who I am with and use your imagination,” Stottlemeyer said. “The possibilities are endless.”

  Disher scrunched up his face as he thought about it. “Was it the broken parking meter?”

  “There’s a broken parking meter?” Monk turned to go, but Stottlemeyer grabbed him by the arm and pushed him back into the room.

  “Randy was joking,” Stottlemeyer said, looking hard at Disher. “Weren’t you?”

  “I was joking,” Disher said.

  Monk faked a laugh. It sounded like his cough. “Right. Good one.”

  Since Monk had no sense of humor and was self-conscious about it, he wasn’t going to question Disher’s lie. Instead, he began surveying the crime scene, if only to hide his embarrassment at not getting the joke.

  “Any new developments while I was gone?” Stottlemeyer asked Disher.

  “I’ve got it all figured out except whodunit,” Disher said.

  “You do?” Stottlemeyer asked skeptically.

  I glanced at Monk, who’d already begun wandering around the room, doing his Zen thing, holding his hands out in front of him like a director framing a shot.

  “The body tells the story,” Disher said. “You’ll notice he’s been shot twice in the chest and once in the head.”

  “Yeah,” Stottlemeyer said. “I noticed.”

  “But did you see that he’s also got a through-and-through gunshot wound to his right hand?” Disher asked.

  I peered over the table and saw Lorber’s right arm dangling over the edge of the chair, a bullet hole through the middle of his palm.

  “Yep, I saw that, too,” Stottlemeyer said.

  Looking at a wound like that used to make me sick. I still felt uncomfortable, but I was slowly becoming more analytical and less emotional in my reactions to the bodies of people who’d met a violent end. I guess it was an inevitable psychological adjustment, considering how many corpses I ended up seeing in a typical month.

  I glanced at Monk, who was studying a cigar box that had fallen off the table near Lorber’s feet, spilling its contents on the floor.

  There was a big bowl of individually wrapped coffee candies on the desk. Between the cigars and the candy, it seemed to me that Lorber was a guy with an oral fixation. I wondered if he’d been breast-fed as a child.

  “It’s the deadly triangle,” Disher said.

  “Excuse me?” Stottlemeyer said.

  “The two shots to the chest and the coup de grâce to the head,” Disher said. “It’s the deadly triangle a hit man uses to assure that he’s made his kill.”

  “So why did he shoot Lorber in the hand?” I asked.

  “That wasn’t his target,” Disher said. “Lorber looked up, saw the killer standing in front of him with a gun, and held up his hands in a halting motion, as if to say ‘stop, please don’t kill me.’ The killer shot through his hand to his heart.”

  Disher held up his hands in front of him to demonstrate. It made sense to me. Even Stottlemeyer was nodding with approval.

  “Good thinking, Randy.” Stottlemeyer looked over at Monk, who was squinting at the top desk drawer, which was open slightly. “What’s your take?”

  “There’s one big problem with your theory,” Monk said to Disher. “Brandon Lorber wasn’t murdered.”

  “There are bullet holes in his chest and head,” Stottlemeyer said.

  “The deadly triangle,” Disher said again.

  “Yes,” Monk said. “I can see that.”

  “Then how can you say that it isn’t a murder?” Stottlemeyer asked.

  “Because it’s not,” Monk said. “He died of natural causes.”

  “I’m not a detective, Mr. Monk,” I said, “but I don’t think there’s anything natural about getting shot three times.”

  “That’s not what killed him,” Monk said.

  “Nobody could survive getting shot between the eyes and right in the heart,” Stottlemeyer said. “Those are definitely fatal wounds.”

  “If he was alive when he was shot,” Monk said. “But Lorber was already dead. He died of a heart attack.”

  We all stared at Monk. We do this a lot.

  “How do you know that?” Stottlemeyer said.

  “His shirt is wrinkled,” Monk said.

  “So is mine,” Stottlemeyer said. “And I’m not having a heart attack.”

  “I’m feeling some palpitations,” Monk said, looking at the wrinkled shirt.

&nb
sp; “If you can convince me you’re right about this,” Stottlemeyer said, “I’ll get my shirt ironed.”

  Monk took a pen from his pocket and used it to point at Lorber’s chest.

  “Lorber was right-handed,” he said. “When he felt the stabbing pain, he instinctively grabbed his chest with his right hand, wrinkling his shirt.”

  Stottlemeyer, Disher, and I all leaned over the desk to look at Lorber’s shirt. It was wrinkled at the chest, which I didn’t notice before. I was paying attention to the bullet wounds. I think Stottlemeyer and Disher were, too.

  “He flailed around in desperation,” Monk explained. “He knocked his box of cigars off the table with his left hand as he tried to reach the top desk drawer, where he kept his nitroglycerin tablets, but he didn’t make it.”

  Disher opened the drawer with his gloved hand and, sure enough, there was a prescription bottle full of tablets inside.

  “It was almost worth the trouble of getting you in the building for this,” Stottlemeyer said to Monk. “So you figure that the shock of seeing a guy with a silenced gun aimed at him gave Lorber a heart attack.”

  “It would give me one,” I said.

  Monk shook his head. “He had the heart attack before that.”

  “How can you be sure?” Disher asked.

  “There isn’t enough blood here,” Monk said. “If his heart was still pumping when he was shot, there would be a lot more of it. I’m certain the medical examiner will confirm my observation.”

  “Of course you are,” Stottlemeyer said.

  “What about the bullet wound in the hand?” Disher said. “Doesn’t that prove he was pleading for his life with the killer?”

  “If you look more closely,” Monk said, “you’ll see that the exit wound is in the palm, not the back of the hand, which indicates he was still clutching his chest when he was shot. If he’d been holding his hand up, the entrance wound would be in his palm.”

  Stottlemeyer took a piece of coffee candy from the bowl, unwrapped it, and popped it in his mouth while he considered what Monk told him. I cringed.

  “So this isn’t a murder,” Stottlemeyer said.

  “No, it isn’t,” Monk said.

  “It certainly looks like a murder to me,” Disher said. He ate a piece of candy and shoved a couple more in his pocket for later. I cringed again.

  “But it’s not,” Monk said.

  I stared at Stottlemeyer and Disher. “How could you put those candies in your mouth?”

  Stottlemeyer shrugged. “Well, I guess it’s because we like coffee candy, Natalie.”

  “But a man died in here.” I tipped my head towards the corpse behind the desk for emphasis. “He’s sitting right there.”

  “Yes, I can see that,” Stottlemeyer said. “So what?”

  I couldn’t believe they couldn’t see the problem.

  “There’s deadness all over it,” I said.

  “Deadness,” Stottlemeyer said. “I can’t say that worries me. How about you, Randy?”

  “Nope,” he said.

  “Okay, fine,” I said. “How do you know the candy isn’t poisoned? Maybe that’s what killed Lorber.”

  “If he’d eaten a candy before his death, there would be a wrapper somewhere,” Monk said. “There isn’t one.”

  I looked at him. “I thought you, of all people, would agree with me on this.”

  “Deadness?” Monk said. "C’mon, Natalie. That’s just silly.”

  As opposed to, say, running your doorknobs through the dishwasher once a week. But I didn’t bring that up. I had better ammunition.

  “Then how come you aren’t having some candy?”

  “It causes tooth decay,” Monk said, examining a piece of candy and putting it back as if it had scalded his fingers. “Decay and I are mortal enemies.”

  “I’m surprised, Monk. Everything decays. It’s a natural law,” Stottlemeyer said. “Like gravity.”

  Stottlemeyer grinned, pleased with himself. Monk gave him a cold look.

  “Why would someone shoot a man who was already dead?” Disher asked.

  “I don’t know and I don’t care,” Stottlemeyer said.

  “If the medical examiner can establish that Lorber was already dead when he was shot, then there’s no crime here.”

  “Yes, there is,” Monk said. “Someone has desecrated a corpse.”

  “What I meant, Monk, is that it’s not a homicide and therefore it’s not a crime that I’m responsible for investigating.”

  “So who is?” Disher said.

  Stottlemeyer shrugged. “I don’t know, Randy. The Desecration Squad, I suppose.”

  “Do we have a Desecration Squad?”

  Stottlemeyer looked at Disher for a long moment. “Yes, we do.”

  “We do?”

  “In fact, you’re in charge of it,” Stottlemeyer said.

  “I am?”

  “You are now,” Stottlemeyer said.

  “My own squad,” Disher said, beaming. “Do I get a raise?”

  “The honor is its own reward, don’t you think?”

  “Can we call it a special unit instead of a squad?” Disher asked.

  “Call it whatever you want. Just get the medical examiner to rush the autopsy on Lorber so I can clear this case off my desk,” Stottlemeyer said, then turned to us. “We’re not going to need your services on this one, Monk. You can go home and work on that carpet stain.”

  “It’s a hopeless cause,” Monk said with a groan.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Stottlemeyer said.

  Not as sorry as I was.

  “Now you can go get the wrinkles ironed out of your shirt,” Monk said.

  “I will,” Stottlemeyer said. “The first chance I get.”

  “This is it,” Monk said.

  “I can’t just drop everything to get my shirt ironed,” Stottlemeyer said. “I’ve got a job to do.”

  “But this is a personal emergency,” Monk said. “And we had an agreement.”

  “Yes, we did.” Stottlemeyer sighed and glanced at Disher. “You’ll have to wrap things up here without me, Randy. I’ve got to go get my shirt pressed.”

  “You’ll thank me later,” Monk said.

  “Don’t count on that,” Stottlemeyer said as he walked out of the room.