Mr. Monk in Outer Space

by Goldberg, Lee

  “Could I just hang out here?” Monk said. “My apartment is being recarpeted.”

  “There was a coffee stain,” I said.

  Monk nudged me hard. Apparently I’d revealed too much.

  “Don’t worry, Lieutenant Chase. I wouldn’t bring coffee in here,” Monk said. “I’m not drinking it ever again. I’m not even thinking of coffee. Coffee is banned from my existence.”

  “I appreciate that,” she said. “But I’m afraid this is a restricted area. You probably shouldn’t even be here now.”

  “My wristwatch has more RAM than the computers that the detectives are using upstairs,” I said. “How come you get all the cool stuff down here?”

  “Combating financial crime takes a different breed of cop, entirely new methods of investigation, and the latest technology,” she said. “The resources we receive are in direct proportion to the amount of revenue we’ve brought in.”

  “I thought you were supposed to enforce the law,” I said. “I didn’t realize you were supposed to turn a profit, too.”

  “Last year we recovered nearly twenty-two million dollars in cash, stocks, and other assets earned by various criminal enterprises,” Chase said. “After the cases we investigate are adjudicated and any victims are reimbursed for their losses, a significant percentage of what remains of those ill-gotten gains is apportioned to the police department to fund our continuing law enforcement efforts.”

  “Why can’t some of that money make its way upstairs to Homicide?” Monk said. “Particularly for the housekeeping budget.”

  “I’m sure some of it does,” she said. “But we need these tools to do our job effectively and keep up with the technological strides made by the criminals we pursue,” she said. “That costs a lot of money.”

  “It takes money to make money,” I said.

  “Or to follow money,” Chase added.

  “It doesn’t seem fair,” Monk said. “Everybody in the building should be able to enjoy this blissful environment. Especially me.”

  “I’m assuming you two didn’t come down here to debate how the police department allocates its resources, ” Chase said.

  “We’d like to know what you’ve learned from the document that was found on Brandon Lorber’s desk,” Monk said. “It’s just numbers to us.”

  Chase smiled at Monk. “It is far more than mere numerals on a page. Numbers are a lot like people. They each have a story. They interact with one another. They entertain. They inform. They deceive. They can create happiness or inflict enormous pain. You have to know how to get them to talk.”

  I could have cheered. She was helping me reinforce the argument I tried to make to Monk at Ambrose’s house and in the interrogation room. Maybe hearing it from her, someone he obviously admired, would have some impact on him. But I wanted to make sure he didn’t miss the point.

  “In other words, Mr. Monk,” I said, “she’s saying that what’s insignificant or meaningless to you can have great importance to someone else. Numbers are her second-season ears.”

  Chase and Monk both looked at me quizzically. Or gave me withering stares. I don’t know for sure. It was hard to tell in that light, but even in the nearly pitch-dark room it was obvious to me that neither one of them saw my point with the same startling clarity as I did.

  “Never mind,” I said. “Lieutenant Chase, what did those numbers have to say to you once you got them into the interrogation room and beat them with a phone book?”

  Chase shook her head and turned to Monk.

  “Ears and a phone book?” she said. “What do they have to do with anything?”

  Monk shrugged. “She’s been babbling nonsense like that all day. Please go on, Lieutenant Chase.”

  “To put it simply, that document is a secret internal financial report that reveals that years of financial irregularities,mismanagement, and impropriety are about to catch up to Burgerville. The company is on the verge of total collapse.”

  “But it’s one of the biggest fast-food chains in the country, ” I said. “They’ve got restaurants everywhere.”

  “That aggressive expansion has cost a lot of money in the midst of a downturn in popularity of their product. The company has been trumpeting its success but the truth is that average store sales have been plummeting for years. They fell twenty-one percent in the last fiscal quarter alone. The company is generating a pitiful cash flow and will take a net loss of more than a hundred million dollars this year.”

  “They hid all of that from the public?” Monk asked.

  “And from their investors and the government,” Chase said. “But the real crime is what will happen to the employee pension plan, which was sponsored by Burgerville and was made up almost entirely of company stock.”

  “When word gets out about their financial problems, the value of the stock will nose-dive,” I said. “Thousands of lives will be ruined.”

  “It’s Enron all over again, only on a smaller scale,” Chase said.

  “It won’t seem small to the people who’ve lost their life savings,” I said. “It’s catastrophic. How could this happen without anyone noticing?”

  “What’s going on is no secret from the Justice Department. They’ve been quietly building a case against Burgerville for months,” Chase said. “But it was a secret from the employees.”

  “Maybe not to all of them,” Monk said. “There was at least one person who knew.”

  “A person with a gun and a message for Lorber,” I said.

  Monk nodded. “Only he got there a little too late to deliver it.”

  Lieutenant Chase went on to tell us more about Lorber’s financial misdeeds. He convinced the company to buy out the seven restaurants of a Burgerville regional franchisee for far more than the market value. It turned out the franchisee was his brother-in-law.

  She also told us that Burgerville overcharged franchisees for supplies and misappropriated the money that the restaurants contributed to a marketing and promotion fund.

  The list of financial irregularities seemed to go on and on, and the shredded document on Lorber’s desk was the Rosetta stone to discovering it all.

  Now that Lorber was dead, attention would focus on Andrew Cahill, the company’s longtime chief financial officer, who had been named acting CEO after Lorber died.

  It was clear that Brandon Lorber had been on the verge of being outed as a greedy, dishonest scumbag who’d ruthlessly plundered the futures of his employees for his own personal gain. He was facing public humiliation, criminal prosecution, and the fury of thousands of employees.

  It was no wonder, then, that he’d had a heart attack or that someone wanted to kill him.

  The desecration made sense to me, too. I could see why someone who’d lost everything would fire a few bullets into the body of the guy who was responsible. He did it from fury and frustration at the cruelty and unfairness of being cheated yet again—this time cheated out of the opportunity for justice or revenge.

  I didn’t see how Burgerville’s financial problems and Lorber’s death—and subsequent desecration—fit in with Conrad Stipe and the cabbie, but we now had thousands of possible suspects in the shootings.

  I just wasn’t sure whether that made the case easier to solve or a whole lot harder.

  We went back upstairs to share what we had learned with Stottlemeyer and Disher.

  The contrast between the Homicide Department and the Forensic Accounting Unit was startling. The squad room was bathed in the off-white glow of fluorescent bulbs and the diffused sunlight streaming through the dirty windows and crooked blinds.

  The light made the stained white walls look yellow and somehow made the gray metal desks seem even more dented, scratched, and old than they were. The big, cumbersome computer monitors on all the paper-cluttered desks appeared bloated, beat-up, and fifty years old.

  Yes, I know desktop computers haven’t been around that long, but somehow when electronic equipment becomes dated, it seems far older than it actually is. Of co
urse, most electronic equipment becomes dated two months after it comes out, but you get my point.

  Even the people in Homicide seemed older, fatter, wearier, and less organized than the black-clad ninja accountants in the basement.

  Monk looked depressed. “This is a cesspool.”

  “You never minded it here before,” I said.

  “That was before I glimpsed heaven,” he said. “Now there’s no going back.”

  I’m sure most of the cops in the Homicide Department would feel the same way. Maybe the real reason that the accountants carried weapons was to protect themselves from the fury of their jealous coworkers.

  Disher was sitting at his desk. He’d replaced the placard with his name on it with one that read SPECIAL DESECRATION UNIT.

  “Where have you been?” he asked.

  “Talking with Lieutenant Chase,” I said. “Have you ever been down to her office?”

  Disher lowered his voice. “They’re not real cops, if you catch my drift. They are stuck in some windowless pit in the basement. I had her come up here and visit the big boys so she’d realize just how important this assignment was.”

  “I’m sure it was very exciting for her,” I said.

  “She got the message,” Disher said. “That’s what counts.”

  “When did you start playing office politics?”

  Disher tapped his new nameplate. “It comes with the job, baby.”

  I didn’t see the point of reminding him that his unit had been effectively disbanded the moment Monk deduced that the desecration was part of a homicide case. Disher deserved to enjoy his new position for as long as it lasted. I even let him get away with calling me “baby”—that’s how sensitive I was being.

  “It’s a good thing you’re here,” Disher said, rising from his seat. “The captain and I have lots of news for you.”

  “We have some for you, too,” I said and we followed him into Stottlemeyer’s office.

  “You were right, Monk,” the captain said from behind his desk. “Stipe was in that cab.”

  “You got the DNA back on the gum already?” Monk asked.

  “We took the low-tech approach,” Stottlemeyer said. “We went through Stipe’s personal effects again.”

  “We found a taxi receipt in his wallet for the ride from the airport to the Belmont Hotel,” Disher said. “It was from Phil Bisson, the cabbie who was shot.”

  “You were also right about the candy wrapper,” Stottlemeyer said. “Lorber’s shooter was in that cab, too.”

  “You confirmed the lot number and twist of the wrapper?”

  “I checked with the dispatcher and got all of Bisson’s fares for the last week,” Disher said. “The cabbie picked someone up two blocks from the Burgerville headquarters the night of the shooting and took him to the airport, where the cabbie picked up Stipe and took him to the Belmont.”

  “And you were onto something with those Beyond Earth uniforms,” Stottlemeyer said.

  “I was?” Monk said.

  “Ambrose was,” I said.

  “The seamstress remembers selling uniforms during the convention to Morris Hibler, the convention organizer, and Ernest Pinchuk, the leader of the Galactic Uprising,” Disher said. “She sold a dozen to other people she didn’t know, so we’ve got her looking at photos of convention attendees and we’re going to sit her down with a sketch artist.”

  Monk rolled his neck and shoulders and smiled. I knew that smile. We all did.

  It got us smiling, too.

  “You’ve got it all figured out,” Stottlemeyer said. “Don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Monk said. “I do.”

  20

  Mr. Monk and the Deadly Triangle

  This was the part that I liked best, when everything about the case seemed so clear and I felt stupid for not seeing how everything fit together. But Monk was taking his sweet time getting to it.

  “I owe you an apology, Lieutenant,” Monk said.

  “For what?” Disher asked him.

  “You were way ahead of me on this one,” Monk said.

  “I was?” Disher said.

  “I was still so emotionally disturbed by my stained carpet that I wasn’t thinking clearly enough to appreciate that you’d seen the key to the whole case.”

  “It’s completely understandable, Monk,” Stottlemeyer said. “Who among us wouldn’t be completely rattled by a coffee stain on the carpet?”

  “Thank you, Captain,” Monk said, totally missing that he was being patronized.

  “So what was it that I saw?” Disher asked.

  “The deadly triangle—the two shots to the chest and the one to the head,” Monk said. “You noticed right away that Lorber was shot by a coldly efficient, professional killer.”

  “So I was right,” Disher said.

  “Yes, you were,” Monk said.

  “I actually solved a case before you,” Disher said proudly, then glanced at Stottlemeyer. “Have you ever done that?”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Stottlemeyer said.

  “I don’t like to flaunt my deductive skills. That way people will underestimate me and let their guard down,” Disher said. “But beneath the surface thrives a keen intellect. I’m like Columbo, only without the overcoat, the cigar, and the glass eye.”

  Stottlemeyer glared at Disher. “What I meant was that a professional killer would have known that Lorber was already dead.”

  “That’s why he shot him,” Monk said.

  “I don’t follow you,” Stottlemeyer said.

  “Have you had some caffeine?” Monk asked.

  “It won’t help,” Stottlemeyer said.

  “Here’s what happened,” Monk said. “The hit man was hired to kill Lorber. He was to be paid half up front and half when the deed was done. But when he got there, Lorber was already dead, cheating the killer out of his payday.”

  “So he made it look like a man who died of natural causes was actually murdered,” I said.

  “Exactly,” Monk said.

  “Isn’t it usually the other way around?” I said.

  “That’s why nobody would have questioned that it was murder,” Monk said.

  “You did,” I said.

  “But nobody else would have, including me and Columbo over there,” Stottlemeyer said, glancing at Disher. “When we find the corpse of someone who has been shot twice in the chest and once in the head, it’s usually a safe assumption that it’s murder.”

  “Not anymore,” Disher said sadly. “Now the easy ones aren’t even going to be easy.”

  “We’ll just have to count on your keen intellect to see us through,” Stottlemeyer said. “Does anyone know besides us and the medical examiner that Lorber died of natural causes?”

  “No,” Disher said.

  “Let’s keep it that way,” Stottlemeyer said.