Mr. Monk in Outer Space

by Goldberg, Lee

  “We haven’t even started,” Monk said.

  “Not only have we started,” Dr. Kroger said, standing up. “We’ve finished.”

  “But Natalie was here,” Monk said. “It doesn’t count.”

  “Think of it as a group session and a very productive one, too. Thank you for participating, Natalie.”

  “My pleasure,” I said.

  “But we didn’t talk at all about me,” Monk said.

  “It was all about you, Adrian.”

  “I don’t see how,” Monk said.

  “Think about it,” Dr. Kroger said, leading us to the door and opening it. “It will give us something to discuss at our next session.”

  “You’re not going to charge me for this,” Monk said.

  “Of course I am,” Dr. Kroger said.

  “You’re lucky I’m not a police officer,” Monk said.

  “Why?” Dr. Kroger asked him.

  “Because I’d arrest you for robbery,” Monk said and walked out in a huff.

  17

  Mr. Monk Speaks Up

  Captain Stottlemeyer and Lieutenant Disher were starting their day at a crime scene at the foot of the Filbert Steps, so that’s where we had to go to tell them about our new leads.

  Filbert Street dead-ends at the base of Telegraph Hill, where a concrete and steel stairway crisscrosses the weedy cliff up to Montgomery Street. From there, wooden steps climb the rest of the way among cottages and a lush, beautiful garden that’s home to wild parakeets.

  It’s a place I usually associate with solitude and beauty. But today, the dead end was living up to its name and casting its shadow over everything else.

  Seeing a corpse in the morning puts a damper on my entire day, but unfortunately it was becoming increasingly typical for me. Even so, I wasn’t getting so blasé about it that I could stand over the corpse and sip my morning coffee, which was exactly what Stottlemeyer and Disher were doing. They both held Starbucks cups in their hands. Stottlemeyer had a little foam in his mustache.

  The corpse was in a narrow, weedy patch beside the steps between the sheer face of the hill and a windowless side of an office building that abutted it.

  There was an empty taxicab double-parked at the curb near the lot, the driver’s-side door ajar, which led me to brilliantly deduce that the victim was the cabbie.

  Monk and I stepped over the yellow crime scene tape and joined the captain and Disher beside the body. The victim was lying faceup, his legs curled underneath him in an unnatural way. He appeared to me to be in his early thirties. He’d been shot once in the head.

  “Good morning,” Stottlemeyer said.

  “It’s hard to feel good about it when you’re looking at a dead man,” I said.

  Stottlemeyer nodded and took a sip of his coffee. “If I let every murder get to me, there wouldn’t be any of me left.”

  “And if you don’t,” I said, “are you still the person that you want to be?”

  “That’s the last time I’m ever going to say good morning to you,” Stottlemeyer said. “What brings you here?”

  I wiped my upper lip. Stottlemeyer got the message and dabbed at his mustache with a napkin from his pocket. “The Stipe case,” I said.

  “Who is the victim?” Monk asked, walking carefully around the body, looking at it from various angles.

  “His name is Phil Bisson,” Disher said. “He’s a cabbie. A tourist walking down the Filbert Steps spotted the body two hours ago and called 911. The ME puts the preliminary time of death around one a.m.”

  Monk looked up at the staircase, then back down at the body.

  “What do you think happened?” I asked Disher.

  “A robbery-homicide,” he replied.

  Monk cocked his head from side to side. He was processing the information. It wasn’t tracking for him. He was a man whose body language gave away just about everything he was thinking and feeling. It’s a good thing he never played poker.

  “Here’s what we think happened,” Disher said. “The cabbie gets flagged down by a guy, who pulls a gun on him and forces him out of the car. The guy leads the cabbie over to the lot behind the building, out of sight of the street, and shoots him. The robber takes the cabbie’s cash and runs.”

  I tried to imagine what this dead end must have looked like at one a.m. under the dim glow of the street-light with the office buildings empty and the street deserted. It was a nice area but I still wouldn’t stop my car here under those conditions.

  “The cabbie must have been desperate for a fare to stop here,” I said.

  “Or new at the business,” Stottlemeyer said. “Or fatally stupid.”

  Monk rolled his shoulders. “You’re assuming the cabbie was driving along Sansome Street when the robber caught his attention.”

  “Yeah,” Stottlemeyer said.

  “Are you sure the cabbie wasn’t responding to a call?” Monk asked.

  Disher nodded. “We checked with his dispatcher. There was no call. And the cabbie didn’t call in that he was picking someone up. The dispatcher says that’s not unusual. The cabbie wouldn’t have called in until he knew his destination.”

  Monk stepped back over the police tape, went to the sidewalk, and looked to his right at Sansome Street, Levi Plaza, and the bay beyond.

  “If someone tried to flag the cab down from here, the cabbie wouldn’t have been able to see him,” Monk said. “The robber would have had to be standing on the corner.”

  “Okay,” Stottlemeyer said, “so he was at the corner.”

  “But look at how the cab is parked,” Monk said. “The driver pulled in and turned around so he’d be facing the street again. Why would he do that if he was picking someone up at the corner?”

  The three of us stepped over the police tape and joined Monk on the sidewalk.

  “Simple. The cab was going the opposite direction when the robber flagged him down,” Stottlemeyer said. “While the cab was making the U-turn to pick him up, the robber walked back here.”

  “Wouldn’t that have made the cabbie suspicious?” Monk asked.

  “It should have,” Stottlemeyer said. “Apparently it didn’t and he paid for his mistake.”

  Monk frowned. Stottlemeyer frowned. So did Disher.

  I was pretty sure that they were each frowning for very different reasons.

  Monk was frowning because something didn’t seem right to him about the murder.

  Stottlemeyer was frowning because he thought he had it all figured out and he didn’t want Monk complicating things.

  And Disher was frowning because if Monk made things more complicated it would mean more work for him and more time away from investigating the Lorber case.

  Monk held out his hand to me. “Baggie, please.”

  I reached into my purse and gave Monk one. I carry around a lot of Baggies in my purse for disposing of his used wipes and for collecting any evidence that he finds at crime scenes.

  He walked back to the lot and disappeared behind the building. I turned to Stottlemeyer and Disher.

  “Have you come up with any new leads in the Stipe investigation?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t call them leads, but we have some interesting information.” Disher referred to his notebook. “A writer named Willis Goldkin filed a lawsuit a couple of days ago against Stipe, claiming half the profits from the show.”

  “On what grounds?”

  “That he co-created it and that Stipe ripped him off,” Disher said. “Now that Stipe is dead, Goldkin might stand a better chance of winning.”

  “Why did he wait so long to sue?”

  “There wasn’t any money in it before,” Stottlemeyer said. “Now there is.”

  “That’s not all,” Disher said. “Stipe was granted a restraining order a month ago against Ernest Pinchuk, the leader of the Galactic Uprising, for stalking him and sending him threatening e-mails.”

  “Were they in English or Dratch?”

  “What’s Dratch?” Stottlemeyer asked.


  That was when we heard a loud pop that sounded like a gunshot. The sound came from the vacant lot. Two uniformed officers instinctively reached for their guns. We hurried over to find Monk standing beside the body, holding the Baggie, which was now torn.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Stottlemeyer asked.

  “Proving a point,” Monk said.

  “You could have gotten yourself shot,” Stottlemeyer said.

  “There’s a big echo in this pocket created by the building and the side of the hill. If blowing up a plastic bag and popping it made that much noise with all the traffic on Sansome, imagine what a gunshot would have sounded like last night. But none of the residents up there along the Filbert Steps reported hearing anything, did they?”

  “No, they didn’t,” Stottlemeyer said with a groan.

  “So the robber used a silencer,” Disher said.

  Stottlemeyer shook his head. Monk walked over to the taxi. Stottlemeyer sighed with resignation.

  “We’ve got to face it, Randy,” Stottlemeyer said. “This wasn’t a robbery. It was staged to look like one.”

  “Why do you say that?” Disher asked.

  “Because robberies like this are done by desperate people, and they don’t usually carry around silencers, ” Stottlemeyer said. “I knew I shouldn’t have taken decaf this morning. I’m sleep-walking through this investigation.”

  Stottlemeyer was often too hard on himself for missing the things that Monk saw. I’m sure the captain would have come to the same conclusion as Monk. It just would have taken him a lot longer.

  “My coffee is caffeinated,” Disher said. “What’s my excuse?”

  “I don’t know, Randy,” Stottlemeyer said. “Maybe you were distracted by the demands of the Special Desecration Unit.”

  “Yeah,” Disher said. “That must be it. I don’t need to tell you how overwhelming a command position can be.”

  Stottlemeyer turned to Monk, who was walking around the cab, a scowl of disgust on his face.

  “Thanks, Monk. We’ll take it from here.”

  “This car is filthy,” Monk said. “When was the last time the cabbie washed it?”

  “I don’t know, but I promise you that we’ll wash it when the lab guys are done.”

  Monk took out a handkerchief and used it to open the rear door of the car.

  “There’s no need to do that, Monk. I appreciate your help, and for setting us on the right track, but we’ll handle this one ourselves. I need you to concentrate on finding Conrad Stipe’s killer.”

  But Monk ignored him and leaned into the backseat of the taxi.

  “That’s why we’re here,” I said. “We’ve got some new leads.”

  “You do?” Stottlemeyer said, looking hopeful.

  “The uniform that the killer was wearing was from season one,” I said. “But his ears were from season two.”

  The hope I saw in Stottlemeyer’s face disappeared. “How is that a lead?”

  “I’ll show you,” I said.

  I led them over to my car, opened the back door, and pulled out the poster boards. I pointed to one of the blowups of the killer.

  “Look closely and you’ll see that it’s not just any season-one uniform. It’s from the pilot episode. There’s only one person making and selling uniforms with that design. Her name is Ursula Glemstadt and she has a booth at the convention.”

  I pointed to the photos that Ambrose had arranged to illustrate the typical fading of a uniform over time and multiple washings. As I did, I noticed a tiny footnote referencing Ambrose’s book The Encyclopedia of Confederation Uniforms and Other “Beyond Earth” Clothing.

  “Based on the color and lack of fraying on the killer’s uniform,” I said, “there’s a good chance he’s wearing it for the first time.”

  “Meaning he could have bought it a day or two before the shooting,” Stottlemeyer said, catching on. The expression of hope was back on his face. “Randy, contact this Ursula woman and see if she can tell us anything about her recent customers. Bring a sketch artist with you.”

  “I’m on it,” Disher said.

  Stottlemeyer looked at me. “It’s pure Monk to come up with a lead based on when someone last laundered their clothes, but I’ve never seen him do a presentation before.”

  “He didn’t,” I said. “His brother did.”

  “Ambrose?” Stottlemeyer said. “Since when does he help Monk on investigations?”

  “Ambrose is an expert on Beyond Earth.”

  “He’s an Earthie?” Disher said.

  “Earther,” I corrected.

  Stottlemeyer grinned. “Monk must love that.”

  Monk emerged from the back of the cab. “I know who killed this cabdriver.”

  We all turned around, shocked.

  It wasn’t the first time Monk had solved a case at the crime scene—we’d seen him do it yesterday at the Belmont—but it still never ceased to be startling.

  “You do?” Stottlemeyer said.

  “It’s the same person who shot Brandon Lorber,” Monk said.

  “You solved my desecration case, too?” Disher said, a tinge of disappointment in his voice. “They’re connected?”

  “Without a doubt,” Monk said.

  “Wait a minute,” Stottlemeyer said. “You’re saying that whoever murdered this cabbie and made it look like a robbery also snuck into Burgerville headquarters two nights ago and put three bullets into a dead man?”

  “That’s what I am saying.”

  “That’s saying a lot,” Stottlemeyer said.

  “There’s more,” Monk said.

  “Don’t tell me,” Stottlemeyer said. “You know who did it.”

  Monk didn’t say anything. He just looked at us.

  “Well?” Stottlemeyer prodded.

  “You just said not to tell you,” Monk said.

  “It’s an expression, Monk. It means ‘tell me.’ ”

  “How can ‘don’t tell me’ mean ‘tell me’? Wouldn’t it make more sense to say ‘tell me’?”

  “Tell me!” Stottlemeyer said.

  Monk didn’t say anything.

  "I’m waiting, Monk,” Stottlemeyer said. “Spit it out already.”

  “You said not to tell you,” Monk said.

  “I just said ‘tell me,’ ” Stottlemeyer said.

  “If ‘don’t tell me’ means ‘tell me,’ then doesn’t it follow that ‘tell me’ means ‘don’t tell me’?”

  Stottlemeyer massaged his temples. “If you don’t reveal the name of the killer this instant, I am going to tie one of my shoes in a double knot and leave the other one in a single knot for the rest of the day.”