Mr. Monk in Outer Space

by Goldberg, Lee

  The front door, the size of the entrance to Oz, was opened by a uniformed butler. He looked like a turtle who’d evolved into a man fifty years ago and traded his shell for a tuxedo.

  “Your lions only have one ball,” Monk said.

  The butler raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

  “This is Adrian Monk and I’m his assistant, Natalie Teeger,” I said. “Captain Stottlemeyer of the San Francisco Police arranged an appointment for us with Mrs. Lorber.”

  “Indeed,” the butler said, stepping aside. “She’ll see you in the study. This way, please.”

  We stepped inside and followed him down a marbled corridor. My grandfather was right about everybody having teeth, but it looked to me like there was more money to be made in selling the food they chewed with them.

  The butler led us into a massive room with a ceiling high enough to accommodate the space shuttle.

  Monk staggered back from the study in horror and revulsion. I’ve seen him do the same thing when confronted with a bowl of granola.

  It wasn’t the ceiling that freaked him out, it was the decor. It looked like the trophy room of a hunter’s lodge. The walls were crowded with mounted fish and the decapitated heads of deer, elk, antelopes, bears, and God knows how many other creatures. There were animal skins on the floors and draped on the furniture. An enormous stuffed bear stood in one corner in an eternal snarl at a glass-eyed tiger across the room.

  I wondered if Brandon Lorber had personally shot every cow that Burgerville used for its beef. But he didn’t limit his killing to the animal kingdom. There was even a colorful collection of butterflies spread out in display boxes on a few of the tables.

  Veronica Lorber sat in a chair beside the bear. She was probably the only trophy Lorber had bagged that wasn’t dead and stuffed.

  If Dolly Parton fell into a vat of Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey ice cream and ate her way out, she’d look like Brandon Lorber’s widow.

  Her eyes were red, her cheeks tear-streaked. She clutched a balled-up tissue in her fist like a lifeline. It was a good thing the tissue was in her hand and not on the floor or Monk might have called in a strike team from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

  The butler announced us as if we were arriving at some grand ball. “Mr. Adrian Monk and Ms. Natalie Teeger are here to see you, madam.”

  “Thank you, Maxwell,” Veronica said.

  The butler gave a slight bow and shuffled away.

  “Do come in, Mr. Monk,” Veronica said with a sniffle.

  “I can’t,” Monk whispered to me.

  “Just a moment, please,” I said to Veronica with a smile, then turned to Monk. “What’s wrong?”

  “What isn’t?” Monk said.

  I looked back at the room and tried to see it from Monk’s point of view. Animal heads of all sizes, shapes, and species everywhere. Nothing matched.

  In Monk’s worldview, it was complete chaos. If they were going to have deer heads on the wall, there should have been an even number of the same size heads lined up in a neat row, not mixed with elk and antelope. Every animal should have had its own row. And don’t get me started on the butterflies. They shouldn’t even have been in the same room.

  “I know that it’s a mess, Mr. Monk, and that the deer shouldn’t mingle with the elk and the butterflies,” I said, “but you can do this.”

  “Who cares about the mess?”

  “You do,” I said. “You always do.”

  “That’s the least of the problems,” Monk said.

  “Is it her sniffling that’s bothering you?”

  “Open your eyes, woman!” Monk pointed into the room. “It’s a slaughterhouse!”

  “What did you say?” Veronica asked.

  “He says it’s a beautiful house,” I said, then lowered my voice to Monk. “Please keep your voice down. It’s just a trophy room.”

  “I don’t see any trophies. All I see are body parts splattered everywhere,” Monk said, raising his voice again in his exasperation. “The walls are dripping blood.”

  “Did he say something about dripping blood?” Veronica asked. “What blood?”

  “You must have misheard him. He said ‘ripping good.’ It’s a British expression, a compliment. We need another moment,” I said and pulled Monk out of her earshot.

  I couldn’t believe that he was so rattled by some animal heads. He was a homicide detective. He’d seen a lot worse. And since I’d become his assistant, I had, too.

  “What’s the big deal?” I whispered. “You see dead bodies every day.”

  “I’ve never been in a room where hundreds of mutilated corpses were nailed to the walls, spread out on the floors, and draped over the furniture. It’s revolting, not to mention extremely unsanitary.”

  “What about the morgue? You love it there. And there are bodies, and body parts, everywhere.”

  “But they are clean bodies and body parts that are meticulously organized in a sterile environment,” he said. “Clean, organized, and sterile. The way everything in life should be.”

  I groaned and leaned back into the study.

  “Would you mind if we moved this discussion to a different room?” I asked Veronica. “It seems that Mr. Monk is allergic to elk.”

  “I’m staying right here,” Veronica said. “I haven’t left this room since I got the awful news that Brandon was killed. I may never leave.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “When I sit here,” she said, “I feel close to him.”

  “Is his head on the wall, too?” Monk asked.

  Veronica gasped and so did I.

  “Mr. Monk!” I said, then turned back to Veronica, who had the same startled look as the deer on the wall. “Please forgive him. He’s not himself today.”

  “That’s because I’m choking on the overwhelming stench of death,” he said.

  Veronica’s face turned bright red. Her cheeks puffed with fury. She looked like a terrified blowfish with collagen injections.

  “This was my husband’s favorite room in the house. The only reason I don’t have Maxwell throw you out right now is because I know you are a brilliant detective and that you will find my husband’s killer,” she said. “So tell me, Mr. Monk, what’s your problem? Are you one of those animal rights wackos who picket outside our restaurants because we serve beef?”

  “No,” Monk said.

  “Then I don’t understand how you can be so cold and insensitive,” she said. “I’ve just lost my husband in a brutal murder. Do you have any idea how I feel right now?”

  “I do,” he said. “That’s why I can’t understand why you’d want to surround yourself with death. You’re even sitting on an animal skin.”

  “It’s leather,” she said.

  “You shouldn’t sit on it,” Monk said. “You should bury it.”

  We were off to a very bad start, and we hadn’t learned anything that would be useful to our investigation. At least I didn’t think we had. Maybe there was an animal hair or something that would prove decisive. Even so, I thought it best to try to save this disastrous meeting from getting any worse.

  “Since you two can obviously carry on a conversation without being in the same room together, I suggest that Mr. Monk stay out here in the hall, you stay in the study, and we discuss the homicide. Finding your husband’s killer is, after all, our common goal.”

  “It’s easy,” she said. “Arrest Andrew Cahill.”

  “What makes you think he killed your husband?” Monk asked.

  “Brandon discovered that Andrew was running some sort of devious financial scheme and was going to expose him this week.”

  “The evidence suggests that it was the other way around,” Monk said.

  “Of course it does,” she said. “Andrew was the CFO. He was in the best position to manipulate the numbers to tell any story he wanted. I told Brandon not to say a word to Andrew and just go straight to the authorities. But once my husband has a target in his sights, he always pulls t
he trigger.”

  “But Cahill wouldn’t really gain anything by killing your husband,” Monk said. “He’s already been granted immunity in exchange for his testimony. The only one who would gain is you.”

  “I’ve lost my husband,” she said.

  “But you’ve kept his fortune,” Monk said. “And you will probably get to keep whatever remains of Burgerville after all the lawsuits and prosecutions are settled.”

  “Money means nothing to me compared to what I have lost,” she said. “My husband’s love was priceless.”

  “So why were you sleeping with Andrew Cahill?” Monk asked.

  “How can you say such a thing!” she exclaimed, rising to her feet.

  “Because of the evidence,” Monk said. “You collect butterflies; your husband didn’t. The butterfly in the paperweight on Cahill’s desk is a rare Panamint swallowtail, like the one in the collection on that table beside you. The Panamint swallowtail is so rare that even the National Museum of Natural History doesn’t have one. But you gave one to Cahill. It’s not something you would give to a man you loathed. Quite the opposite. I’ll bet Cahill didn’t dare put it on his desk until after your husband’s body was wheeled out of the building in a body bag. And if it meant that much to him, his feelings for you must be pretty strong, too.”

  “You are an awful little man,” she hissed.

  “I’m not the one sitting on dead flesh in a room full of animal heads,” Monk said. “I hope you’re at least going to wash your hands.”

  “If you and Cahill didn’t hire a hit man to kill your husband,” I asked her, “then who did?”

  “There are those awful little animal rights wackos,” she said. “And there was that awful little man who spilled coffee in his lap and blamed my husband for it. And there are those awful little environmentalists who accuse us of polluting the environment with our packaging materials. The world is full of awful little people.”

  Hearing her talk, I imagined this mass of angry elves carrying torches and marching towards her house.

  “None of those people hired an assassin to kill your husband,” Monk said.

  “How would you know?” Veronica snapped.

  “They wouldn’t have had access to your husband’s security key card,” Monk said. “But whoever hired the hit man did and knew exactly when the security guard would be on patrol and away from his desk in the lobby. That person was someone close to Brandon Lorber. And no one was closer to him than you.”

  Her lower lip quivered with rage—or perhaps the collagen had suddenly drained out into her chin, which would explain why she had two of them.

  “Get out,” she said.

  “Gladly,” Monk said. “Would you be offended if we ran?”

  “It’s far too late to be concerned about offending me,” she said. “You awful little man.”

  I’m tall, but as we hurried out of Veronica Lorber’s house of horrors, I couldn’t help wondering if I would always be remembered by her as that “awful little woman.”

  23

  Mr. Monk and the X

  Once we were outside, I asked Monk a few questions that were bugging me.

  “How did you know that the butterfly collection was Mrs. Lorber’s and not her husband’s?”

  “It was an educated guess,” Monk said. “I have a hard time believing that a man who likes to shoot things would run around chasing butterflies with a net. And if Brandon Lorber was going to give Cahill a trophy, it would be an animal head, not a colorful insect.”

  “How did you know which butterfly that was?”

  “The Panamint swallowtail has a chemical composition that will make any animal that swallows it regurgitate immediately,” Monk said. “I want to know about anything that will make me regurgitate. Throwing up is about as close as you can get to dying without already being dead.”

  “What are the odds of a Panamint butterfly taking a wrong turn and flying into your mouth?”

  “You never know,” Monk said, and seemed to notice the two artists at their easels for the first time.

  He glanced at their works-in-progress as we passed the two men on our way to my car. The artist painting the bay was doing the kind of rudimentary work you find at those traveling art shows that pop up on weekends in shopping center parking lots.

  But the other artist, the one doing a painting of the painter, had real skill and a sense of humor. He’d even managed to capture the amateurish quality of the painting his subject was working on.

  Monk seemed very interested in this painting, too. But before he got too distracted, I still had a few more questions for him.

  “If Veronica Lorber and Andrew Cahill are sleeping together, why did he put the blame for Brandon Lorber’s murder on her and why did she put it on him?” I asked. “Are they so cold and self-centered that they would betray one another right away?”

  “They did it to cancel each other out,” Monk said, looking over the artist’s shoulder.

  “Cancel each other out? What does that mean?”

  “They figured if they each accused the other of murder, we would never suspect the two of them of having an affair and conspiring together,” Monk said. “But it backfired. We see them as the calculating and greedy people that they actually are.”

  “So with Brandon Lorber dead, and Cahill’s immunity, they can both walk away from the financial scandal with their assets more or less intact,” I said. “That’s a pretty good motive for murder.”

  “Money and sex usually are,” Monk said.

  They were certainly the things that were driving AriannaStipe and Veronica Lorber. They were both selfish, greedy, man-hungry predators.

  Granted, Arianna had just gone through a bitter divorce, so I couldn’t really fault her for sleeping with her lawyer and pursuing her share of Conrad Stipe’s money. But I still didn’t like her.

  Veronica Lorber at least put on a show of grief, but that’s all it was. She’d betrayed her husband while he was alive and might even have paid for his murder so she could get all his money.

  The two women had a lot in common.

  I was sure that if I introduced them to one another they would become good friends—at least until they inevitably stabbed each other in the back over money or men.

  While I was musing about that, Monk cleared his throat to attract the artist’s attention.

  The painter was a very thin man whom I guessed to be in his forties, with a weather-beaten face that attested to all the time he’d spent outside. He was wearing a paint-spattered T-shirt. There were flecks of paint tangled in the hairs on his tanned hands.

  “Excuse me,” Monk said, “but you’ve made a mistake.”

  The painter turned. “There is no right and wrong in art, sir.”

  “That’s also a mistake,” Monk said. “There’s always right and wrong. The artist you are depicting is clearly wearing a checked shirt with twenty-four squares on his back. But you have only fourteen squares in your painting. He’s not wearing anything on his head, but you have given him a sailor’s cap. It’s inaccurate.”