Mr. Monk in Outer Space

by Goldberg, Lee

  Ernie gesticulated wildly, made some guttural sounds, and spit on the floor. Monk recoiled.

  “What’s Ernie saying?” Monk asked.

  “If you want to understand him, and the values of Beyond Earth, learn Dratch,” Aimee said. “If everyone would do that, if we all just made the effort to learn how other people think, the world would be a much more peaceful and accepting place to live.”

  “So by refusing to translate for us, you’re making a statement,” I said to her. “You want us to try to understand him and, by doing so, see the necessity of working hard to understand our fellow man.”

  Aimee nodded proudly. “We’re living the values and the message of every episode of the original Beyond Earth.”

  This prompted Ernie to gurgle and gag and bark like a sea otter.

  Monk turned to Goldkin. “Do you know what he’s saying?”

  “Hell no,” Goldkin said and reached for an enormous book on the dealer’s table. “But if you want to, you’re going to need this.”

  Monk looked at the book and gasped. It was as if he’d stained his carpet all over again.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  I assumed the sticker price was an odd number, or the price tag was crooked, or the symmetry of the cover was out of whack.

  He held the book up so I could see it.

  The title of the book was The Dratch Dictionary: Words, Phrases, and Grammar of the Most Evolved Language in the Universe.

  The author was Ambrose Monk.

  “Sweet Mother of God,” Monk said. “My brother is one of them.”

  10

  Mr. Monk Is Thrown for a Loupe

  Monk had had enough. He left the building.

  I stuck around for a few more minutes and looked through some of the other nonfiction books on the dealer’s table. There were a lot of them, with titles like The Official Beyond Earth Episode Guide, The Beyond Earth Compendium, and even The Ultimate Book of Beyond Earth Facts.

  Ambrose had written them all.

  The good news was this meant that Monk wouldn’t have to return to the convention to learn more about the show. All he had to do was go home. When I told Monk that during the drive to the Belmont Hotel, it didn’t make him feel any better.

  “I always knew my brother was mentally ill,” Monk said, “but I had no idea that he was a freak.”

  “He’s not a freak, Mr. Monk.”

  “Did you see what he wrote?” Monk exclaimed.

  “What’s the difference between writing a book like Beyond Earth and an owner’s manual for a blender?”

  “You don’t see people dressing up like blenders and speaking puree, do you?” Monk said. “It’s a good thing my brother never leaves the house—he’d be locked up.”

  Monk glanced over his shoulder.

  “What are you looking for?” I asked.

  “I’m making sure we aren’t being followed.”

  “Why would anyone want to follow us?”

  “Because they’re freaks, and freaks do freakish things,” Monk said. “I don’t want any of them knowing where I’m going.”

  “One of them might show up at your door and offer you a bowl of thirty-year-old cereal.”

  “Exactly,” Monk said and shivered.

  He kept to himself the rest of the drive.

  The Belmont Hotel was right in the heart of Union Square and was one of the oldest, grandest, and stodgiest places to stay in the city. It was a five-star hotel with a six-star attitude. So they probably weren’t too happy to have vehicles from the police department, the crime scene unit, and the morgue parked in front of their lobby.

  Obviously, someone else had been killed. I wondered why nobody had called Monk.

  I parked with the rest of the official vehicles and we went inside to find Stottlemeyer. It wasn’t hard. We just asked the concierge where we could find the corpse.

  Luckily for me and for Monk, the body was in a room on the sixth floor, an even-numbered room, with only a dozen flights of stairs for us to climb. It could have been worse for Monk. The dead body could have been on the nineteenth floor. It wouldn’t have been so bad for me; I would have taken the elevator.

  The sixth floor was cordoned off by police officers, but Disher was in the hallway, interviewing a maid at her cart, so he stepped away from her and cleared us to go through.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “We were just beginning to interview some of the convention’s special guests who are staying here when the hotel manager came rushing over to us,” Disher said. “A maid found a guy bludgeoned to death in one of the rooms. So we dropped what we were doing, secured the scene, and began an investigation.”

  “Two Belmont guests killed in one day,” I said. “That can’t be good for business.”

  “Stipe wasn’t killed here,” Monk said, “so technically his death doesn’t count in the official tally.”

  “There’s an official tally?” I said.

  “There is now,” Monk said. “I’m the official and I’ve just tallied. Why didn’t anybody call us?”

  “I guess it never occurred to anybody that we needed an official tally,” Disher said.

  “I meant why didn’t anybody call us to aid in the investigation?”

  “Because this is a simple case and you were occupied on the Stipe thing.”

  “But this is a murder,” Monk said.

  “So is that,” Disher said.

  “But this is a real murder.”

  “Stipe’s murder looked real to me,” I said.

  “Do you see anybody here with an elephant nose?” Monk said to me before turning to Disher. “Let’s trade.”

  “No,” Disher said.

  “I bet the captain will say yes.”

  Monk shouldered past Disher and marched into the hotel room.

  “I bet he won’t,” Disher called after him.

  I turned to Disher. “How’s the Lorber case going?”

  “The Special Desecration Unit has made some progress in between the Stipe shooting and this murder.”

  “I know it’s not a murder, but I’m really curious why someone would bother shooting a dead person. Would you mind telling me about it later?”

  “Sure, of course.” Disher smiled, clearly pleased that someone was taking an interest in what he and the Special Desecration Unit were doing. “I’d be glad to.”

  “It’s a date,” I said, then immediately regretted my choice of words. “Not a date date, but an understanding that we’ll meet at some future time in a purely non-romantic way.”

  “Right,” Disher said. “I knew that.”

  I followed Monk into the hotel room before I could embarrass myself any further.

  Stottlemeyer was at the far end of the narrow room, standing by the window and looking down at one of the two beds, where a very hairy dead man in his underwear lay tangled in the blood-spattered sheets.

  A half-empty bottle of wine and two glasses were on the table. Monk was examining one of the glasses.

  “There’s lipstick on the rim of this glass,” Monk said.

  “Yes, Monk, I know that,” Stottlemeyer said with a weary sigh.

  “Who is the victim?” Monk asked.

  “The front desk says his name is John Bozadjian and that he checked in yesterday afternoon.”

  “Did he pay with a credit card?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “So where is it?” Monk asked.

  “I would say it’s probably in his wallet,” Stottlemeyer replied.

  “His wallet is missing,” Monk said. “Isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “And he isn’t wearing a watch or any jewelry,” Monk said. “But he’s got tan lines on his wrists and around the base of his ring fingers that suggest that he had some.”

  “Believe it or not, I noticed that too,” Stottlemeyer said. “You know how I became captain of Homicide? I’ll tell you how. By solving a lot of homicides. On my own.”

  Monk c
ocked his head and looked at the victim. Then he cocked his entire upper body and looked again. I didn’t see how that changed his perspective, but I didn’t understand most of what Monk did.

  “It looks like a robbery,” Monk said.

  “Unfortunately, I see cases like this all the time,” Stottlemeyer said. “An out-of-towner picks up a hooker for a night of whoopee and she rolls him for his cash and jewelry. Usually, it ends there and we never hear about it. Most guys are too embarrassed, or too married, to report it.”

  “So if the prostitute knew that the odds were her victim wasn’t going to report the theft anyway,” I asked, “what was the point of killing him?”

  “The hooker probably only meant to hit him hard enough to put him out for a while. But clobbering someone on the head is a crapshoot. If you do it too lightly, they could hit you back. Do it too hard and you could put them down for good.”

  “Picking up a prostitute and bringing her back to your room is such a huge risk to your health and safety in so many ways,” I said. “What are men thinking?”

  Stottlemeyer gave me a look. “What do you think they are thinking?”

  “Men are idiots,” I said.

  “Men are men,” Stottlemeyer said.

  “What are you going to do now?”

  Monk squeezed past Stottlemeyer to examine the clothes on the other bed.

  Stottlemeyer sighed. “We’ll question the hotel door-men, concierges, and busboys—they’re usually the guys who put the clients in touch with the ladies in exchange for a commission. They’ll give us a name. We’ll round up all the hookers in the area and question them. And we’ll talk with the escort services. Meanwhile, we’ll keep our eye on the pawnbrokers and fences who’d be most likely to move the stolen merchandise.”

  “It sounds like a lot of work,” I said.

  “That’s how it gets done most of the time,” Stottlemeyer said, watching Monk, who took out his pen and began to examine the clothes with it. “How did things go at the convention?”

  “We met some interesting people and learned a lot about the show.”

  “What did you learn about Stipe’s murder?”

  “You’d have to ask Mr. Monk about that,” I said.

  Stottlemeyer looked at Monk, who was using his pen to lift up one of the sleeves of the victim’s discarded shirt.

  “Well?” Stottlemeyer said.

  “When did the maid discover the body?” Monk said.

  “After lunch. She came in to clean the room and there he was,” Stottlemeyer said. “I was asking you about your investigation of the Stipe murder.”

  “So she hadn’t cleaned the room since yesterday.”

  “Yes, Monk, that would be the logical assumption.”

  “Actually, sir, she didn’t clean the room yesterday,” Disher said, stepping in. “Emilia, the maid who ordinarily handles this floor, called in sick today with a stomach flu. Paola—that’s the maid who found the body—usually cleans on the seventh floor. Paola took a double shift to cover for Emilia today.”

  “Thank you, Randy,” Stottlemeyer said, then turned back to Monk. “The ME is waiting to take the body.”

  Monk nodded and stepped between Stottlemeyer and me to examine the clothes in the closet. I peered behind Monk to look at the captain.

  “Which other Beyond Earth people are staying here besides Stipe?”

  The captain peered behind Monk to answer me.

  “Kingston Mills, the executive producer of the new show, and Judson Beck, the star. But the really interesting thing is that Stipe’s ex-wife Arianna showed up here last night with her divorce lawyer, Howard Egger.”

  “Why did she do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Stottlemeyer said. “We were going to ask her about it when this came up. In fact, we were just about done with this crime scene when you arrived.”

  Monk leaned back from the closet.

  “The victim has antacids, a jeweler’s loupe, sixty-five cents in change, and three bits of lint in the left front pocket of his overcoat.”

  “That’s fascinating,” Stottlemeyer said.

  Monk held his hand out to me. “Do you have any lint?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “We need another piece of lint and I’m lintless,” Monk said. “I’m always lintless.”

  Stottlemeyer narrowed his eyes at Monk. “You want to put another piece of lint in Bozadjian’s coat pocket?”

  “And one penny,” Monk said.

  “That’s bizarre even for you.”

  “It’s the right thing to do,” Monk said.

  “Monk,” Stottlemeyer said, “you can’t.”

  “I’m respecting the dead.”

  “You’re contaminating the crime scene. You can’t add stuff to the victim’s personal belongings.”

  “I know that.” Monk took an evidence bag out of his pocket. “We’ll put our lint and our penny in here so it’s with the other stuff, but separate.”

  “What does it matter if he’s got three pieces of lint and sixty-five cents? He’s dead.”

  “So that means we stop caring? What about this man’s family? What would they think if they knew we showed such callous disregard for him?”

  Stottlemeyer took a deep breath, let it out slowly, then jammed his hand in his pocket. He pulled his hand out, sorted through his loose change, and dropped a penny in the evidence Baggie.

  “Happy now?”

  “You don’t have any lint?”

  Stottlemeyer looked down at his open palm. “Isn’t that lint?”

  “That’s a crumb,” Monk said.

  Disher dug around in his pockets. “I have lint.”

  He opened his hand and showed it to Monk, who took a pair of tweezers from his breast pocket, carefully picked up the lint, and dropped it into the Baggie.

  Monk placed the Baggie in Bozadjian’s coat, patted it gently, and smiled at us.

  “There,” he said. “That’s better. Can’t you feel it?”

  “I feel cracks forming in my skull,” Stottlemeyer said. “Are we done here?”

  “Not quite.” Monk went into the bathroom and looked into a large toiletry bag that was on the counter near the sink.

  We watched as Monk took out a separate vinyl case from the toiletry bag and unzipped it to reveal several tiny syringes, some vials, and a red box that was marked NEEDLE CLIPPER/BIOHAZARDOUS WASTE and had a pinhole at one end.