“Don’t we all,” I said and passed him, continuing down the stairs. I was too hungry to stand around in a stairwell. “Besides, even if you did trade, you wouldn’t have been able to walk away from the Stipe investigation.”
“Yes, I would.”
“Not as long as the case remained unsolved. You wouldn’t have been able to stop thinking about it.”
“I would have gladly endured the mental anguish,” Monk said. “It would be easier than having to be around those crazy people.”
“People like Ambrose?” I said, opening the door to the lobby and, metaphorically speaking, a whole lot more.
Monk ignored the question, as I knew he would, and walked past me to the bar, which was off to one side of the lobby.
It was a very masculine space, all dark woods and leather and bookcases filled with leather-bound literary classics, which were glued into place in case, God forbid, someone was gripped by the mad desire to actually read one of them.
I had no idea what Kingston Mills or Judson Beck looked like. But I knew that Beck was an actor, and probably something of a celebrity, so I looked for two men sitting alone and other people stealing furtive glances at them.
Using that strategy, I spotted the men in about ten seconds. They were sitting at a table in the back, where they could be seen by everyone in the room and, at the same time, could see everyone who came in. There were several empty glasses on the table and two bowls of mixed nuts.
Mills wore an untucked aloha shirt in a futile attempt to hide his big belly, which spilled over his khaki slacks. His shirt was so colorful that it seemed illuminated in the dim light of the bar.
Beck was in form-fitting Abercrombie & Fitch clothes that were stylishly pre-faded, pre-torn, and pre-stained and showed off all of his muscular build. He seemed acutely aware of everyone who was looking at him, which included himself, since he kept admiring his reflection in the mirror behind the bar.
I marched up to the two men with as much authority as I could muster, Monk trailing me.
“Mr. Mills, Mr. Beck, I’m Natalie Teeger and this is Adrian Monk, a special consultant to the police. Captain Stottlemeyer sent us down to talk to you.”
“You’re the famous Adrian Monk?” Kingston Mills stood up and offered his hand to Monk, who shook it. “Somebody pitched me a series about you.”
“A series?” Monk motioned to me for a wipe. I gave him one.
“A weekly detective show for TV.” Mills grinned and gestured at Monk cleaning his hands. “You really do that?”
“What?” Monk gave me the used wipe, which I put into a Baggie and shoved in my purse.
“Clean yourself with a disinfectant wipe every time you shake hands with somebody.”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
Mills chuckled and glanced at Judson Beck. “I thought it was just a gimmick the writer came up with for his pitch. The writer even rearranged the papers on my desk and put the magazines on my coffee table into chronological order.”
“I hope you thanked him,” Monk said.
“It was a good pitch,” Mills said, “but I said the series would never work.”
“Why not?” I asked as we sat down with them at the table.
“Who wants to watch a clean freak every week? It would be too damn irritating. So we worked on it over lunch and came up with something a lot better—a detective who is a sex addict. Can you see it?”
Monk’s eyes widened in horror. “Oh God, I can.”
“And his assistant is a stripper. We’re going to Showtime with it next week,” Mills said. “It fits right in with their shows about the dope-dealing mother, the Vancouver lesbians, the bigamist, and the cop who is a serial killer.”
“What are you calling it?” Beck asked.
“Murdergasm.”
“Cool,” Beck said. “If Beyond Earth tanks, think of me for that part.”
“I think of you for every part, Jud. You’re that versatile and unique.”
Monk looked at me with a pained expression. “I can still see it.”
“Think of something else,” I said, then turned to Mills. “We’re more interested in Beyond Earth and who might have had a motive to kill Conrad Stipe.”
“Who?” Beck asked.
“The creator of the show you’re starring in,” I said.
“Oh, you mean the old guy,” Beck said.
“Jud didn’t have much interaction with him,” Mills explained to me. “Stipe was really on the creative periphery of the show.”
“But he created it,” I said.
“Yes, but I reimagined it,” Mills said.
Monk grabbed my arm. “Help me. It won’t go away.”
“Look.” I pointed to the two bowls on the table.
“Mixed nuts. And pretzels, too.”
It worked. Monk immediately forgot about the sex addict detective and focused instead on this urgent public health crisis.
“What were they thinking?” Monk reached into his jacket for rubber gloves and prepared to deal with the problem. “You might want to push your chairs away from the table. This could get ugly.”
I turned to Mills. “So what was Stipe’s role on the show?”
“We were contractually obligated to give Stipe a consulting producing credit, but it was meaningless. He wasn’t actually part of the day-to-day production,” Mills said. “We only kept him around for publicity purposes and to draw the niche viewers.”
“Niche viewers?” I asked.
Monk laid out napkins on the table, emptied the bowls onto them, and began sorting the nuts and pretzels.
“The original fans,” Mills said, watching Monk. “We’re only using them as a publicity hook. It gets us press. But it’s just a launching pad for a larger promotional offensive. Our goal is to expand the franchise to a much broader, mainstream audience of intelligent, educated, free-spending consumers who have heard of the original show but probably never saw it.”
“Don’t you think the fans know what you’re doing and resent being used?”
“They’re morons who dress up in Halloween costumes and speak a fictional language from a crap TV show,” Mills said. “Who cares what they think?”
I waved the waitress over. I ordered a hamburger and fries for myself and six empty bowls for Monk to use for sorting and sent her away before he could lecture her on the dangers of mixing nuts and baked goods.
“If you have such disdain for Stipe, the fans, and the original series, why are you bothering with Beyond Earth at all?”
“Because it’s a pre-sold franchise,” he said. “A brand.”
“But it was a failure,” I said.
“That doesn’t matter,” Mills said. “It existed before and people know that.”
“Why not just come up with something new?”
“New is old school. It’s too risky for the networks and for the audiences. People are much more comfortable with the familiar,” Mills said. “Reimagination is the new new.”
“It’s more authentic,” Beck said.
I glanced at Monk, who was carefully organizing the almonds, peanuts, cashews, and pretzels into individual piles.
I knew better than to assume from his silence and preoccupation with his task that he wasn’t absorbing every word. But it irritated me anyway, since I was doing all the talking and I had no idea what to ask that was relevant besides “Did you kill him?”
So I just asked whatever interested me, hoping they’d say something that would help Monk later.
“How could it be more authentic?” I said. “It’s a remake.”
“A reimagination,” Mills corrected me.
“What’s the difference?”
“We’re not remaking what was, we’re going back and making Beyond Earth the show that it should have been,” Mills said. “It’s a new beginning. A fresh imagining of a preimagined concept. We’re making it real.”
“It’s a show with inside-out aliens,” I said. “That’s not real.”
“We�
��re giving it an internal, unflinchingly honest reality consistent with the reality we experience every day,” Mills said.
“Authenticity,” Beck said, nodding sagely.
“The premise of the show is that humanity was destroyed and now all that’s left of mankind are these people trapped in a spaceship,” Mills said. “They should be miserably depressed, filthy, and barely scratching out an existence. But when you watch the original show, everything is bright and colorful and everybody is happy-go-lucky. That’s not being true to the internal reality of the fictional universe.”
“It’s inauthentic,” Beck said.
“Our show is more visceral,” Mills said. “You can smell the sweat.”
Monk looked up, disgusted. “Why would you want to smell sweat?”
“It’s the scent of authenticity,” Beck said.
“I wouldn’t want to smell that either,” Monk said and started brushing the piles of nuts into individual bowls. I told you he was listening.
“The characters are more psychologically complex now,” Beck said. “Take my character, Captain Stryker. The only way he can deal with his inner turmoil, the conflict between his despair and his need to be a strong leader for mankind, is to mate with every female alien he can, no matter what they look like. They just have to be the female of their species.”
“So, basically, he’s a pervert,” I said.
“But that’s okay,” Mills said. “He’s a noble pervert that the audience can relate to.”
“Because he’s authentic,” Beck said.
“Not many actors have the chops to pull off an edgy character like this and make him sympathetic and heroic, ” Mills said, putting his arm around Beck. “But Jud has chops to spare.”
“How did Stipe feel about his series being reimagined into a crew of noble perverts?”
“All he cared about was getting a check,” Mills replied. “He hasn’t had a career since Beyond Earth was canceled. He saw this as an opportunity to make some money and maybe get back in the game. If Beyond Earth is a hit, everybody wins.”
“Except the original fans,” I said.
“They are only a small fraction of the audience that we’re aiming for,” Mills said.
“But it’s more than a show to them,” I said. “You’re messing with their lives. Weren’t you worried they might get really pissed off?”
“Not really,” Mills said.
“Did Stipe get any threats?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Are you getting any?” I asked.
“Just some hate mail and petitions from the Galactic Uprising,” Mills said. “But I don’t take it seriously.”
“Even after what happened today?”
“Stipe betrayed the fans, not me,” Mills said. “They got the guy they were angry with. I’m just a hired gun doing his job, which is making a TV show that will reach the widest possible audience.”
“They might not see the distinction,” I said.
“They do. I’m an outsider. I don’t know anything about the Beyond Earth culture and I don’t care. They know that. I’m exactly who they think I am. They don’t have anything invested in me,” Mills said. “But they were devoted to Stipe. They listened to his stories again and again and again and supported him for decades with their comic book money. They thought he was one of them, that he lived in their same little world and was as passionate about it as they were. Well, somebody finally noticed that he wasn’t, it was all an act, and Beyond Earth was just a paycheck to him. That’s certainly all it is to me, too.”
“Speaking of money,” I said, “if Beyond Earth succeedsyou won’t have to share the credit or the money with him now that he’s dead.”
“I wouldn’t have shared the credit anyway,” Mills said. “Stipe was, and would have remained, a has-been. He had a pay-or-play deal, so the salary checks come whether he’s alive or dead and the back-end profit formula doesn’t change, either. The money will just go to his estate now.”
“So who controls his estate?” I asked.
Mills shrugged. “I don’t know. We didn’t talk about his personal life. Actually, we didn’t talk at all. I told my secretary to ignore his calls.”
Monk stood up and carried away his bowls of sorted nuts and pretzels.
“Hey,” Beck said, “where are you going with those?”
“I’m putting them into individual Baggies, sealing them, and throwing them away, of course.”
“Why?” Beck said.
“Because the nuts are contaminated,” Monk said.
“No, they aren’t,” Beck said. “They’ve been right here in the bowl.”
“Mixed together,” Monk said gravely.
“To put it in Beyond Earth terms,” I said, “it’s like mixing matter with anti-matter.”
“If that wasn’t bad enough, countless numbers of strangers have touched those nuts with their bare hands,” Monk said. “Who knows where those hands have been and what they’ve been doing?”
Monk shuddered at the thought. So did I. When he put it like that, the idea of eating those nuts did sound pretty disgusting.
“But I’m hungry,” Beck said. “I haven’t finished eating them.”
“It would be healthier to eat a bowl of rat droppings,” Monk said while walking away with the bowls. “You’ll thank me later.”
Beck stared after him. “What’s his problem?”
“He’s just being authentic,” I said. “Authentically Monk.”
13
Mr. Monk and the Eye
Kingston Mills and Judson Beck left, and while I ate my lunch, Monk went from table to table, gathering up the bowls of mixed nuts, sorting them into Baggies, and throwing them all out.
This did not go over well with the patrons, the waitresses, or the bartender. Someone called security, but I guess the guards had been briefed that Monk was with the police, so the bartender was told to let it drop.
Monk, however, felt it was his duty to instruct the bar staff and the security guards in the proper procedure for distributing nuts to diners, which is as follows:
Each type of nut or cracker must be in its own bowl. The bowls can be shared as long as all the patrons at the table are wearing rubber gloves.
“It’s your duty to rigorously enforce this,” Monk told the security staff. “For the good of humanity.”
The security guards didn’t look to me like they were ready to shoulder the burden of protecting humanity. And rather than follow Monk’s draconian rules, the bartender chose not to offer nuts and pretzels at all, at least not while Monk was in the building.
It was a wise decision.
I didn’t intercede in the fracas because I was tired, hungry, and wanted to eat my late lunch in peace.
Mr. Monk in Outer Space Page 11