Perhaps the fans were working through their grief by buying mementos from the show. I know that my mother often deals with stress by shopping. When I eloped with Mitch, she immediately ran out and spent three grand on clothes.
I stopped at the table of a dealer who was selling Beyond Earth lunch boxes, board games, and action figures, most of which appeared to be in their original packaging.
There were even unopened packs of Beyond Earth bubblegum, the ones with trading cards featuring pictures of the cast and scenes from the show. The price tag showed the packs were $350 each. I figured the decimal had to be in the wrong place.
I reached out to examine the price tag more closely when the woman behind the table lightly slapped my hand and gave me a stern look.
She was my age and twice as wide, wearing a Confederation uniform that was too tight to hold her girth.
“Don’t touch. These are antiques,” she said. “They can only be handled with gloves. Moisture from your fingertips could harm the packaging.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know.”
“Didn’t you get the ’FAQs for Newbies’ at the registration desk?”
“No, I’m afraid not.”
“It’s required reading,” she said. “It also has recommendations for newbies on how to begin building a collection. Beyond Earth plates are a fun and inexpensive way to start.”
“Why couldn’t I start with Beyond Earth toys?” I gestured to some plastic spaceships that were still in their original wrapping.
“That’s like starting your art collection with a Picasso. You really have to be an expert to appreciate their value and understand how to care for them,” she said. “These are very rare, museum-quality pieces.”
I couldn’t imagine what museum would be interested in them.
“They are? What makes them so rare?”
“The only way you could get one of these was by purchasing a Burgerville kid’s meal in February 1978. These have been kept in pristine condition in a dust-free, temperature-controlled room ever since.”
“I used to treat my toys the same way,” Monk said.
He was on the far side of the table, looking at some Beyond Earth cereal boxes.
“It was more fun than a barrel of monkeys,” he said. “If there aren’t actually any monkeys in the barrel, and never were any monkeys in the barrel, because monkeys make a mess and they are very unsanitary. In fact, it’s the most fun of all when the barrel is untouched and the monkeys are on another continent.”
I gave him a look. “So you’re saying that keeping your toys hermetically sealed was as much fun as an empty barrel.”
“Those were good times.”
I turned back to the Beyond Earth kid’s meal toys.
“It’s a shame they were never opened,” I said to the woman. “I think it’s cruel to give a toy to a child but not let them play with it.”
“I didn’t want to,” she said. “I never played with any of my Beyond Earth toys.”
“Why not?”
“I didn’t want to break them,” she said.
“But toys are meant to be played with and broken,” I said.
“That’s just crazy talk,” Monk said to me.
“It’s fun, Mr. Monk. It’s part of growing up. It’s called childhood.”
The dealer held up one of the toys in her gloved hand. “You wouldn’t say that if this was a Ming vase.”
“But it’s not,” I said.
“It is to me,” she said.
That was when she was distracted by a movement at the other end of the table. And then she let out an anguished wail, an expression of pain and fury that seemed to claw its way out from the depths of her soul. In fact, it sounded just like the cries people made when they were being devoured by the Sharplings.
She was staring in horror at Monk, who was standing in front of a trash can at the far end of the table.
“What have you done?” she yelled at him.
“I just cleaned up a few things,” Monk said. Then he motioned to me. “Wipe. Wipe.”
I gave him two.
The woman’s wail drew dozens of people, who gathered around the garbage can to see what the fuss was about. I joined them and we all peered inside.
On top of a bunch of hot dogs, melted ice cream, and other sticky garbage were four unopened cartons of Beyond Earth breakfast cereal. The front of each box showed a smiling Captain Stryker about to joyfully eat a spoonful of glittering, sugar-coated cereal shaped like stars. Mr. Snork stood at his side, enthusiastically snorting up cereal with his trunk.
At least that’s what the boxes looked like before they were tossed in the trash on top of catsup, chocolate, whipped cream, and soft drinks.
The saleswoman’s lip trembled with rage, her eyes filled with tears.
“Those were authentic boxes of Beyond Earth cereal,” she said. “They survived three earthquakes, a flood, two marriages, three moves, and six cats. They have never been opened.”
“It’s a good thing they weren’t,” Monk said. “That cereal expired thirty years ago.”
“Do you know how much those boxes were worth? I could have gotten a thousand dollars for the set.” Her whole body shook with fury. “Now they’re ruined. No one will ever buy them.”
“You were selling them?” Monk was dismayed. “You should be ashamed of yourself. What if someone had eaten that cereal? It would have killed them faster than rat poison.”
“You want to know what kills fast? I’ll show you.” She grabbed a curved knife off her table. “An Umgluckian ceremonial dagger!”
She leapt up on the table and threw herself at Monk, but I grabbed her by the ankle in midflight and sent her toppling into the trash can instead.
“Time to go,” I said, leading Monk away.
Monk looked back at her. “You’ll thank me later.”
9
Mr. Monk and the Galactic Uprising
"I think she did it,” Monk said as I hustled him into the crowd and across the convention floor as fast as I could. “I think she killed Stipe.”
“Just because she grabbed a knife and tried to kill you?”
I could still hear her wailing. Her cries seemed to echo through the entire place.
“She was trying to poison people with thirty-year-old cereal,” he said. “She almost had me fooled with that story about keeping her toys in pristine condition.”
“I’m not a world-famous detective, but I think she was heavier than the shooter we saw in the surveillance video.”
“But she definitely has violent tendencies,” Monk said. “She’s a danger to society.”
“Only if you trash the cereal boxes that she’s been saving for decades.”
“What kind of person saves a box of cereal for that long?”
“What kind of person feels uncontrollably compelled to throw it out?”
“A Good Samaritan,” Monk replied. “I was acting in the public interest. Those expired boxes of deadly cereal were within reach of children.”
“Do you see any children?”
“I see people acting like children,” Monk said. “That’s just as dangerous.”
I led Monk towards the back door, which, incidentally, was the one the killer had most likely used to escape into the convention center after shooting Stipe. It was the only way to leave the building without encountering that woman and her ceremonial dagger again.
We passed table after table selling Snork noses and Confederation uniforms, underscoring for me Stottlemeyer’s point that it would be close to impossible to trace the killer through the purchase of his costume.
We went down the aisle of autographing booths, where Beyond Earth celebrities signed autographs and took photos with conventioneers for a fee.
There was a woman, easily in her seventies, surrounded with photos of herself from an appearance as Yeoman Curtis, who was reduced to a cube of foam and crushed in episode 17. There were a dozen middle-aged men in Confederation uniforms li
ned up to pay $20 to have their picture taken with her.
In the next booth were a turnip-shaped man with a bad comb-over and a midget. They were signing autographs and answering questions for three conventioneers. I recognized the actors as Bill Wheatley and Ricardo Sanchez, who played teenage stowaway Bobby Muir and Glorp, the interstellar slug.
“Ricky and I stayed in touch after the show, and a couple of years ago we got together to perform in a dinner theater production of The Odd Couple,” Wheatley was saying. “But in our Beyond Earth personas, so to speak.”
“Being the slug,” Sanchez said, “obviously I played Oscar Madison.”
“All the dialogue was the same, because Neil Simon is a genius, and you don’t mess with perfection,” Wheatley said. “But we have a history, you know, and we tapped that in our performances. And I wore my Confederation uniform.”
“And I wore my makeup,” Sanchez said.
“It was a riff on popular culture, very self-referential and culturally hip.”
The midget sighed. “It could have gone to Broadway if only we’d found a producer with some vision and some guts.”
Monk and I moved on.
In the next booth was Willis Goldkin, the writer of the “Nagging Nanobots” episode, which I vaguely remembered. It was about these little robot mosquitoes that attacked the Discovery crew and took over their minds.
Goldkin had a stack of xeroxed autographed scripts in front of him that he was selling for $15 each. There were no takers.
There were more Beyond Earth guest stars and production personnel along the aisle selling their wares and their memories, but I avoided them. It was too depressing and pathetic.
Instead, I turned my attention to a dealer who was selling books, comic books, novelizations, and magazines about Beyond Earth as well as the DVDs and videos of the original series and the Saturday-morning cartoon.
I was tempted to buy Monk a DVD, just so he could see the show, but the boxed set was fifty dollars and I wasn’t sure the SFPD would consider the purchase a legitimate expense.
The last booth—the one closest to the exit—was devoted to the Galactic Uprising. A couple dressed up like Mr. Snork and Starella were standing behind the table handing out leaflets to conventioneers as they passed by.
Behind the couple was an enormous poster depicting the starship Discovery and the original cast, covered with bold type that demanded that the UBS Network immediately halt production on the show and bring back the “true classic” with the “beloved original actors.”
The poster touted that the campaign was endorsed by “superstars” Kyle Bethany and Minerva Klane, as well as “famed writer” Willis Goldkin, which made me wonder why he wasn’t sitting with his comrades in the rebellion rather than by himself two booths away.
I took one of the leaflets from the woman and stuck it in my purse.
“If you go to our Web site, you can download the JPEG of the poster and e-mail or text-message it to everyone in your address book, put it on your site, your blog, your MySpace page, your Facebook profile, and your Yahoo group,” she said. “It’s the individual responsibility of every single member of fandom to stand up and be counted in this epic struggle.”
Mr. Snork spit and growled and coughed up something.
“My name is Natalie Teeger and I work for this man, Adrian Monk.” I tipped my head to Monk, who was involved in his own epic struggle to avoid looking at the woman’s four breasts. “He’s a consultant to the San Francisco Police Department. Can you tell me who is in charge of the uprising? We’d like to talk with him.”
Mr. Snork hacked and grunted and gurgled.
“Ernie is,” she said, referring to the guy in the Snork makeup. “He’s the one who first heard about what Stipe was going to do and he’s been fighting the fight ever since. His dedication to fandom is unbelievable. Never say die!”
She looked at him with unabashed admiration.
“And you are?” Monk asked.
“His girlfriend, Aimee Gilberman,” she said. “Before I met Ernie, I knew nothing about Beyond Earth. But now that I do, for the first time in my life I know what it really means to love.”
“Aimee, I have a very, very dumb question for you, so please be patient with me,” I said. “Aside from the fact that the producers aren’t using the original cast, what’s your problem with the new version of Beyond Earth?”
Ernie coughed and barked and made some choking sounds while waving his arms around.
The woman nodded in agreement with Mr. Snork and turned to me.
“They are changing everything,” she said. “They are turning the characters, and I quote, into ‘deeply flawed individuals.’ Captain Stryker wasn’t deeply flawed. He represented the very best of what it means to be human. They all did, even the aliens. But worst of all, they are turning Mr. Snork into a woman. Can you imagine that?”
“I assume you know by now that Conrad Stipe was murdered right outside that door.” Monk motioned to the nearby exit. “Did you hear or see anything unusual this morning? By that I mean, above and beyond the twisted behavior that’s occurring all around us at this very moment.”
Ernie grunted and gagged and heaved and gestured wildly with his hands.
“Does anyone here know the Heimlich maneuver?” Monk said. “This man is choking.”
Ernie stood up and gurgled and growled and coughed some more.
“He’s not choking,” Aimee said. “He’s speaking in Dratch.”
“Dratch?” Monk said. “What is that?”
She looked at Monk like he was a complete imbecile.
“Mr. Snork is a Dratch,” Willis Goldkin said, stepping out from his booth and approaching us. “Ernie here is speaking the language of their home-world. You can blame me for it.”
“You put him up to this?” Monk said.
Goldkin shook his head. “I wrote the episode where the crew visited a settlement of Dratch refugees. We were running a couple of minutes short, so I stuck in a pointless scene where Mr. Snork talked to his people in his native tongues.”
“Tongues?” Monk said.
“The Dratch have three tongues,” Aimee said. “One for catching insects, one for grooming themselves, and one for love. They speak with all three—hence the unique sound. It takes incredible skill for a human to speak it, but Ernie has achieved it.”
“It was gibberish that I wrote in a drunken stupor. I was too wasted to write a real scene with actual dialogue, ” Goldkin said. “We recorded it twice and laid it over the original track to create the unusual sound. If you’d told me back then that thirty years later some linguist would analyze those lines, write his thesis on it, and extrapolate that into an entire language, I would probably still be a drunk today.”
“Ernie has vowed to only speak in Dratch until either they do Beyond Earth right or cancel the current abomination,” Aimee said. “He’s doing it to show his solidarity with the character of Mr. Snork and the ideals that he represents.”
Mr. Monk in Outer Space Page 8