Mr. Monk in Outer Space

by Goldberg, Lee

  So what was I doing sitting here?

  I wondered if Julie and Monk were as lost without me as I apparently was without them. I doubted it. It made me wonder who really needed whom. Maybe Scooter was right about me.

  The artist finished my caricature, slipped it into a cardboard frame shaped like a cable car, and proudly presented it to me like it was a priceless heirloom.

  I gave it a glance. I suppose the drawing could have been me. It also could have been Barbara Bush, Nicole Kidman, Eddie Murphy, or any of the tourists waiting for the cable car. The face was characterless and unmemorable.

  Maybe that’s how I really looked to him. It was certainly how I felt. Perhaps it was my soul and not my face that he’d captured.

  I wondered if I looked different when I was with Monk or Julie. I’d have to come back sometime and see Mr. Puckerface when I was with one of them.

  I gave him ten bucks, walked back to Boudin Bakery for another loaf of bread, and then drove home.

  I did laundry, paid some bills, and for dinner I made myself a tuna fish sandwich and had a glass of white wine that cost almost as much as my caricature.

  Do I know how to live or what?

  I refilled the wineglass and took it with me for a nice long bubble bath, where I settled in with Ambrose’s installation guide for low-voltage outdoor lighting.

  It wasn’t thrilling bubble-bath reading material, but I was impressed by his imagination. You wouldn’t know from the writing that he’d never actually seen a low-voltage lighting system in someone’s yard, much less installed one himself. His descriptions were clear, colorful, and written with authority. The inscription wasn’t bad either: To Natalie, You’re a high-voltage system as far as I am concerned.

  Considering that I was spending my first free night in ages sitting in tepid bathwater, sipping cheap wine, and reading an instruction manual, it was reassuring to know I could set off sparks somewhere.

  I was at Ambrose’s front door at nine a.m. sharp, ready for work. You might even say I was eager.

  “Good morning,” I said. “How was your night?”

  “We watched Jeopardy! and then I made linguine for dinner,” Ambrose said. “Adrian measured the noodles.”

  “Didn’t that drive you nuts?”

  “Yes, it did,” Ambrose said. “But what could I do? It makes him happy.”

  “I know exactly how you feel.”

  I was impressed. Ambrose was a guy who struggled with his own crippling psychological problems, but they hadn’t blinded him to his brother’s unique needs nor made him any less compassionate about them. I looked at Ambrose in an entirely new light.

  “It was an excruciating experience,” Ambrose said, stepping aside to let me in.

  “I can imagine, believe me,” I said. “I live with it every day.”

  “I much prefer to measure the noodles myself.”

  I was about to laugh, but choked it back when I saw the look on his face. He wasn’t joking.

  “You measure your noodles?”

  “It’s not like there’s anyone else around to do it for me,” Ambrose said. “I’m not used to trusting someone else with that responsibility anymore, even though it was Adrian’s job when we were kids.”

  I couldn’t imagine what it was like growing up in that house, but I was beginning to understand why their father had fled, not that I approved of his doing it, of course.

  “You’re a good brother, Ambrose,” I said. “Where’s Mr. Monk? Is he in the kitchen, counting the Wheat Chex in his bowl?”

  “He did that hours ago,” he said. “Adrian is hanging out in his room.”

  I went upstairs and found the door to Monk’s room wide open. He was lying on top of his tiny single bed, grinning to himself over a book of Marmaduke cartoons. They were his favorites.

  “Found a good one, Mr. Monk?”

  “They’re all good, but this one is a classic.” He turned the book so I could see the panel.

  Marmaduke, the enormous dog, was licking the roof off a car. Behind the dog, a child stood on a street corner holding a sign that read CAR WASH $5.

  “Isn’t it hilarious?” Monk said. “I can’t stop laughing.”

  “You aren’t laughing,” I said.

  “Yes, I am. Look at me.”

  “Trust me, you aren’t. You just have a big grin on your face.”

  “That’s laughter,” he said.

  “No, that’s a grin. Laughter is different. There are sounds.”

  “I must be laughing inside.”

  “That’s probably it,” I said.

  “Uproariously,” he said.

  “If you say so.”

  I looked around the room. It was sparsely decorated. There was a 49ers banner, a hand-drawn map of the fire exits, the periodic table, and a family photo of Monk, Ambrose, and their parents, all standing rigidly, arms at their sides, about two feet apart from one another. They were like statuary. It was scary.

  He had a shoe-shining machine, something you don’t usually see in a kid’s room—or anybody’s room, for that matter. There was also a floor mat for wiping your feet. He had two matching umbrellas in a stand, a rock-shining kit on his desk, and a complete collection of Encyclopedia Brown mysteries on his bookshelf.

  I was heading over to look at the books when I noticed that his closet door was ajar. The edge of a woman’s smile caught my eye. I opened the door and was stunned to see a Farrah Fawcett poster taped to the other side.

  “You like Farrah Fawcett?” I asked him.

  “I’m not familiar with that company,” he said. “Keebler faucets are the best. They have great knobs.”

  “I’m talking about her.” I tapped the poster with my knuckle. “Farrah.”

  “Oh yeah,” Monk said. “She was a baby.”

  “You mean a babe,” I said.

  Monk nodded. “She really knows how to rock.”

  He obviously had no idea who she was. My guess was that he had the poster in his room only because all the other boys had one. They all thought she was hot and Monk wanted to fit in. I found it sweet and also achingly sad.

  I decided not to embarrass him by pressing the point.

  “How does it feel to be back home and sleeping in your old room again, Mr. Monk?”

  He put his book down and looked at me. “Strange. I used to sit in this bed and dream about what life would be like when I grew up. And now here I am.”

  “Did things turn out the way you imagined they would?”

  “Not exactly,” Monk said. “I thought I’d be an inspector with the California State department of weights and measures. I used to go down to the gas station on the corner and check the pumps for accuracy, just for fun. Those were some wild, wild times.”

  “It sounds like it,” I said. “What changed your mind?”

  “They wouldn’t take me. They said I was overzealous. How can you be too exacting for the department of weights and measures?”

  “It’s mind-boggling,” I said.

  “So I became a police officer instead. It’s not that different from weights and measures. I maintain the proper balance of things.”

  “You certainly do.”

  “Last night, I measured the linguine for Ambrose,” Monk said, lowering his voice. “He’s never really gotten the hang of it. Even if he could leave the house, he clearly lacks the basic survival skills necessary to exist in the outside world.”

  “Like measuring noodles,” I said.

  “It’s so sad,” he said.

  Yes, it was, for both of them.

  What kind of mother makes her kids confirm that all the noodles on their plates are the same length? Mrs. Monk must have been crazy. But I know that they loved her anyway.

  Thinking about what childhood must have been like for Monk and Ambrose made me want to cry, and to take back every bad thing I ever said about my own parents. They’d never asked me to measure my noodles.

  My cell phone rang. I glanced at the caller ID and knew without
answering the phone that some unfortunate person in San Francisco wasn’t going to be celebrating any more birthdays.

  6

  Mr. Monk and the Final Frontier

  The San Francisco Airporter Motor Inn was a decaying example of early-1960s architecture.

  The name of the hotel was written on peeling plywood script across a lava rock facade. The entire front of the building was slightly angled to evoke a tail fin and a sense of motion. Instead, it looked like the place was about to tip over—if it wasn’t flattened first by one of the incoming planes that were flying in so low their landing gear nearly scraped the roof.

  The hotel was not only in the airport’s flight path but it was also right off the 101 Freeway, and I was pretty sure that the only person enjoying a quiet stay was the dead guy that we’d come to see.

  So I couldn’t figure out why the parking lot was full of cars and the NO VACANCY sign was lit up in the lobby window. I’d rather sleep in my car than stay in a place like this.

  There was a taxi parked close to the loading dock at the rear of the hotel’s “convention center,” a converted factory warehouse attached to the main building by a long breezeway. The right rear passenger door of the car was open, and just beside it was the body.

  Crime scene techs were taking pictures of everything and scouring the immediate area for forensic evidence. Two bored guys from the morgue stood beside a gurney with an empty body bag, waiting for the okay to take the corpse away.

  Disher was interviewing the taxi driver, an Asian man who talked rapidly in Chinese and gestured even faster. The lieutenant had his pen in hand, ready to write something down in his notebook the instant he understood any of what the taxi driver was saying.

  Stottlemeyer stood by the body, his hands in his pockets, and chewed on a toothpick, watching us as we approached.

  “Thanks for coming down.”

  At least I think that’s what he said. The words were drowned out by the sound of a landing airplane.

  I saw some movement out of the corner of my eye. The taxi driver was pantomiming a man popping up and shooting a gun. It was very vivid. The taxi driver would have been great to have as a partner in a game of charades. At least now Disher had something to put in his notebook.

  Monk circled the body, examining it from various angles. I did too, for lack of something better to do. After a moment or two, I looked up and saw Stottlemeyer studying me. He waited to speak until the plane passed over us.

  “So what do you think happened here?”

  I felt a shiver of anxiety. It was seventh-grade French class all over again. I used to sit in the back of the room and pray that the teacher, Gino Barsuglia, wouldn’t call on me.

  “I’m really not qualified to offer an opinion,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t say that. You’re sharp, you’ve been to a lot of crime scenes, and you’ve been hanging around cops for a while now. I bet you know more about this job than you think you do.”

  Maybe he was right. Judging by the taxi driver’s dramatization of the shooting, the location of the taxi, and the position of the body, it seemed obvious to me what had happened, so I gave it a try.

  “Okay. It looks to me like the taxi pulled up and the minute the victim got out of the car, someone jumped out from behind the Dumpster there and shot him.”

  I walked over to where I thought the shooter had stood and I turned to look at the scene from his perspective.

  I was facing the car head-on.

  “If the killer was standing here,” I said, “the taxi driver must have had a real good look at him.”

  I saw a security camera mounted over the loading bay, another one above the door to the convention center, and one more on a tall light in the parking lot.

  “And if those cameras were working, you should have no problem getting a good look at him yourself, considering that the shooting happened in broad daylight and the killer was standing out here in the open.”

  Stottlemeyer nodded. “Not bad.”

  “You gave me an easy one. This wasn’t exactly the work of a criminal mastermind,” I said. “It’s just a straightforward shooting.”

  “It certainly seems that way,” Stottlemeyer said and turned to Monk, who was leaning inside the backseat of the taxi. “Unless there’s anything else you’d like to add.”

  “There’s fresh gum under the seat.” Monk stood up straight and pointed accusingly at the corpse. “And I’m certain that he was responsible.”

  “That’s good to know,” Stottlemeyer said. “That’ll be one less question keeping me up at night.”

  Disher joined us, shoving his notebook into his inside jacket pocket. “The taxi driver picked Stipe up at the Belmont Hotel in Union Square and brought him straight here. He confirms what we know and what the other witnesses told us. Well, at least I think he does. My Chinese is a little rusty.”

  “You speak Chinese?” Stottlemeyer asked.

  “No,” Disher said. “That’s why it’s rusty. From lack of use.”

  “There were other witnesses?” I asked.

  “A few people in the parking lot saw it and so did some others from the windows of their hotel rooms,” Disher said. “We would have had even more witnesses if the gunshot hadn’t been muffled by an airplane coming in for a landing.”

  “If you’ve got all those witnesses and the shooting on tape,” I said, “what do you need Mr. Monk for?”

  “We don’t know who did it or why,” Stottlemeyer said. “Or where to find him.”

  “Isn’t that true at the outset of most murder investigations? I thought you only brought Mr. Monk in for the really tough ones.”

  “This one is a little more complicated than it seems, Natalie,” Stottlemeyer said.

  “Much more.” Monk scowled at the corpse. “This man had a lot of enemies who wanted him dead. It could take us the rest of our lives to find them all.”

  “Why do you say that?” Stottlemeyer asked.

  “Because he was a nasty, foul, disgusting human being,” Monk said. “And nasty, foul, disgusting human beings make enemies.”

  “You don’t know anything about him yet.”

  “He chewed gum,” Monk said, as if that said it all.

  “Lots of people chew gum, Monk. That doesn’t make them bad people.”

  “This man stuck a glob of cud soaked in his putrid bodily fluids under the seat of a taxi. If he hadn’t been killed here today, this taxi would have driven off, picked up another fare, and some innocent, unsuspecting, clean-living person would have sat on that seat. God only knows what might have happened then.”

  “I’ll grant you that he wasn’t very considerate. But that’s not what makes this case a challenge.”

  Monk glared at the corpse. “I hope you burn in hell.”