by Lee Goldberg
Monk got right to work that afternoon and so did Danielle, who stuck around after she delivered the car. They sat on opposite ends of his dining room table. While he went through the files, she read his indexed lists of personal phobias and made copious notes. I read the Lexus owner’s manual and People magazine.
“The case of the missing diamonds was an inside job,” Monk said, closing a file and sliding it down the table to Danielle, who looked up, stunned.
“Was it the cleaning lady, the pool man, their son with the online gambling problem, her sneaky ex-husband, his bitter ex-wife, or the contractor who was building their home theater?”
“It was none of them,” Monk said.
I didn’t know any of the facts of the case but I didn’t need to. I was more interested in Danielle’s reaction to her first experience with Monk’s process, which has less to do with deduction and more to do with noticing the mess.
“Who else is left?” she asked.
“The dog trainer.”
“But the trainer worked with the dog in the backyard,” Danielle said. “He didn’t have any access to the house.”
“The dog did,” Monk said. “The trainer taught the dog to steal the diamonds and bury them in the backyard.”
“The dog?” she said incredulously.
“That explains why there was dirt in the house,” he said. “The dirt really bothered me.”
“That’s a surprise,” I said.
“I don’t remember seeing any dirt,” Danielle said.
“There were some grains,” he said.
“Grains?” she said.
“Mr. Monk can detect dirt that isn’t visible to the naked eye,” I said. “Or even the most powerful electron microscopes.”
“The trainer plans to retrieve the diamonds the next time he works with the dog,” Monk said, and checked his watch. “Which is in two hours.”
“Incredible,” she said, reaching for her phone. “I need to call Nick so we can catch the trainer in the act.”
“While you’re at it, you should tell Mr. Slade that the insurance company is right: The tennis pro is faking his arm injury,” Monk said, sliding her another file. “His sling is on his right arm.”
“That’s because that’s the arm he injured when he tripped over the crack in the country club’s parking lot,” she said. “He can’t bend or extend it. His doctors say his arm is locked at a ninety-degree angle.”
“And yet in the surveillance photos, you can clearly see his keys are in his right pocket,” Monk said. “How does he get them out if he can’t straighten his arm?”
She opened the file and squinted at the picture. We both did. If I had a bionic eye, I might have seen the keys, too.
“How could we have missed that?” she asked.
“You’ll find yourself asking that question a lot around Mr. Monk,” I said. “But there’s another question you’ll be asking even more often…”
Monk picked up another file. “And you can tell Mr. Slade that the spy at Joha Helicopters who is selling trade secrets to the competition is Ulrich Sommerlik, the disabled engineer.”
“How do you know?” she asked.
“That’s the one,” I said to her. “I’m thinking of putting the question on a little sign that we can just hold up.”
Monk opened the file and held up a photograph of a slender man in a cardigan sweater sitting in a manual wheelchair.
“He claims that he’s been in a wheelchair since a cop ter accident four years ago. But in this picture taken for his photo ID when he was hired six months ago, he has blisters on his hands. If he’d been pushing himself in his wheelchair all that time, he’d have calluses by now.”
We both squinted at that photo, too. I couldn’t see the blisters, but I knew that when it comes to open sores, Monk has an eagle eye.
“My guess is that he’s using secret compartments in the wheelchair to smuggle out drawings, disks, and anything else he can get his blistered hands on,” Monk said, putting the photo back into the file.
“I’ll call the security chief at Joha Helicopters and have Sommerlik detained and his wheelchair seized,” she said. “We’ll take it apart.”
“Notify them that the entire facility needs to be evacuated and decontaminated,” Monk said.
“Why?”
“Because Sommerlik’s hands are blistered,” Monk said. “God knows what else he’s touched. The whole place is probably dripping with his bodily fluids.”
Danielle stared at him, not quite sure what to say. I couldn’t blame her. I probably looked the same way the first few days I’d worked with Monk.
“You are amazing, Mr. Monk,” she said. “You catch details that nobody else sees. You’ll have to teach me how you do that.”
“It’s a gift,” Monk said. “And a curse.”
“I’ll take my chances,” she said with a smile, flirting ever so slightly. It was cute and probably calculated to be. The flirtation was wasted on him but not the flattery.
He gave her the file and she added it to the stack in her arms. She took the files and went off to call Slade. Monk turned to me.
“I think we’re going to be very happy at Intertect,” he said.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Mr. Monk Solves a Mystery
Julie nearly fainted when I showed up at home that night with the new Lexus. The first thing she wanted to do was drive it. I let her drive all over San Francisco with the windows rolled up, because we didn’t want to lose one precious whiff of that new-car smell.
She also insisted that we cruise up and down Twenty-fourth Street, the main drag of our Noe Valley neighborhood, for an hour on the off chance that one of her friends might see us.
It was the first car we’d ever had that she wasn’t ashamed to be seen in, so she wanted to be seen. I did, too. I was hoping word would get around that we had a Lexus and that it might delay any plans to drive us out of the neighborhood with torches.
“Please don’t ever lose this job,” Julie said as she steered us on our twelfth pass down the street.
“Now that we have two cars, you can have the Buick all to yourself.”
She looked at me in horror. “Why don’t you drive the Buick and let me drive this?”
“Because this is the company car,” I said. “Technically, you shouldn’t be driving it now, but I am in a charitable mood.”
“I would rather walk to school than arrive there in a Buick,” she said. “I might as well show up wearing Grandma’s housedress and clutching a colostomy bag.”
“Grandma doesn’t have a colostomy bag,” I said.
“You’re missing the point,” she said.
“I’m just teasing you,” I said. “I totally understand your embarrassment. I’m not thrilled about driving the Buick either. It’s not a car that makes men take a second look at you.”
“Unless you’re driving up to a retirement home,” she said.
“I’ll drop you off at school in the Lexus,” I said. “We can keep the Buick for emergencies.”
“Like what?”
I shrugged. “Grandma might want to borrow it to impress a man on a date.”
“She’s got a BMW,” Julie said.
“I’m thinking of a man her own age,” I said.
“You may be but she’s not.”
I was afraid to ask Julie exactly what she meant by that, or what she knew about Grandma’s love life, so I didn’t.
Sometimes ignorance really is bliss.
The rolling cabinet was nearly empty of files and Monk’s dining room table was covered with photos when I walked in the next morning.
He was studying the photographs very carefully, moving methodically from one to another.
I glanced at the pictures. I saw a dead man sitting in a leather easy chair in his home study. There was a knife buried to the hilt in his chest. He looked to be in his forties and well-off, judging by his monogrammed shirt and the wood paneled study where he’d been killed.
“You
’ve gone through just about all the cases that Danielle brought you,” I said.
“This is the last one,” he said.
“You must have gotten an early start this morning.”
“I didn’t stop,” Monk said, cocking his head from side to side as he examined the pictures.
“You stayed up all night?”
“I had a lot of work to do,” he said.
“But you didn’t have a deadline,” I said. “There was no reason you had to do an all-nighter.”
“I tried to go to bed,” Monk said. “But I could feel all those unsolved cases out there. I couldn’t leave them like that.”
“It was like leaving behind a mess without cleaning it up,” I said.
He nodded. I would have to talk to Danielle about giving Monk only a few cases at a time. At this rate, he’d exhaust himself within days.
I gestured to the pictures on the table. “These look like official crime scene photos.”
“They are,” Monk said.
“Then how did Slade get them?”
Monk shrugged. “I don’t know. He must be very well connected.”
“So what’s the case?”
“A home-invasion robbery and murder that happened six months ago in a mansion off Skyline Boulevard in Oakland. The killers got away with jewelry worth about two hundred thousand dollars. The culprits still haven’t been caught, though the police are pretty sure they know who is responsible. The victim, Lou Wickersham, was in considerable debt to a lot of very unfriendly people. The police believe those people lost patience and came to collect.”
There were close-up photos of Wickersham’s wound, the knife, a cut on his hand, a bloodstained handkerchief on the floor, a broken window, shards of glass on the rug, and his ransacked study. And there were some photos of the rest of the house, which had also been thoroughly ransacked.
“So why don’t they arrest the people that Wickersham owed money to?” I asked.
“There’s no evidence,” Monk said. “The knife was wiped clean of prints. The case has gone cold. So Wickersham’s widow, who was in Europe when the killing happened, hired Intertect to investigate.”
“What’s your theory?”
Before Monk could answer, there was a knock at the door. I went to answer it. Danielle was standing outside with another rolling file drawer.
“Good morning, Ms. Teeger,” she said, pushing the cart right past me.
“Danielle,” I said, closing the door and catching up to her. “You can’t keep wheeling files in here.”
“He asked me for more,” Danielle said.
“I’m all out,” Monk explained.
“But you haven’t slept,” I said to him. “You can’t keep working like this. You have to pace yourself or you’re going to get fried and make mistakes.”
Monk ignored my comment and turned to Danielle. “Did you get the information on the Judge Stanton case?”
“Of course, Mr. Monk.” She took a notebook out of the file drawer and referred to some pages.
“You’re not supposed to be meddling in that case,” I scolded him.
“Professional curiosity, that’s all,” Monk said.
I motioned to the new cart full of files. “Don’t you have enough to keep you busy already?”
“I just want to make sure the captain is on the right track.”
“You don’t work for him anymore,” I reminded him. “You are under exclusive contract to Intertect.”
Danielle spoke up. “The police believe that the killer is a woman, based on the type of bicycle she was riding and the impression left in the dirt by her running shoes. They’ve identified the shoes as a woman’s Nike model that’s sold by the thousands in stores all over the country, so that’s a dead end. But they have determined the assailant’s weight and height based on the measurements taken from the bike and the depth of the shoe prints in the dirt.”
Monk nodded. He was impressed, though I wasn’t sure whether it was with the progress of the investigation or the confidential information that Danielle was able to dig up.
“Do they have any suspects?” Monk asked.
“They are concentrating on violent offenders that Judge Stanton sent to prison and who have recently been released,” she said. “And the possibility that mobster Salvatore Lucarelli had him killed to avoid trial.”
Monk frowned. “Why would any of them ask a woman to do their killing?”
“Women kill just as well as men do,” I said.
“It could be the mother, girlfriend, or daughter of someone that he sent to prison,” Danielle said.
“It’s possible,” he conceded with a nod.
And my theory wasn’t?
Monk had never conceded that one of my alternative theories might be possible. But I wasn’t a twentysomething hottie who told him he was amazing.
“Did you take care of that other thing?” Monk asked Danielle.
She flipped a page in her notebook. “Of all the Nobel categories, I think the Peace Prize is the one you want.”
“You think that you deserve a Nobel Prize?” I asked him.
“Not me,” Monk said. “John Hall.”
“Who is he?”
“The inventor of the Diaper Genie,” Monk said.
“You honestly believe that creating the Diaper Genie deserves the Nobel Peace Prize?”
“I do,” Monk said. “Don’t you?”
“Unfortunately, Mr. Monk, what you believe won’t be enough,” Danielle said. “The only people allowed to submit nominees are professors of social sciences, law, and philosophy; government leaders; directors of peace organizations; members of the Nobel committee; and past winners of the prize.”
“Who do we know who has won a Nobel Prize?” Monk asked us both.
“No one,” I said.
“How about professors?”
“There’s Professor Cowan,” I suggested flippantly.
“Good idea,” Monk said.
“You just proved him guilty of murder, Mr. Monk. I doubt that he’s in the mood to do you a favor.”
“But it’s for a good cause,” Monk said.
“Even if he agreed with you about that, I doubt that the Nobel Committee would accept a nomination from a murderer.”
“Then let’s create a peace organization,” Monk said. “How hard could that be?”
“I’ll look into it,” Danielle said, writing a note to herself. I bet it was something like, Monk is crazy.
“I believe in peace.” Monk made a peace sign with his fingers. “You can’t have peace without cleanliness. The Diaper Genie could unite the world.”
“Did you have any luck with the home-invasion murder case?” Danielle asked.
“It’s not a home invasion,” Monk said. “And it’s not a murder.”
She looked baffled. “Then what is it?”
“Suicide,” Monk said.
He motioned us over to the table and gestured to the photographs.
“Look at this. Lou Wickersham was stabbed in the heart while sitting in his easy chair. That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Why not?” she asked.
“If he’d walked in on robbers and they attacked him, then his body would be on the floor, not in the chair. And if they came at him from the front, why doesn’t he have any defensive wounds?”
“There’s the cut on his hand,” I said.
“It’s on the back of his hand,” Monk said. “If he grabbed for the knife, the wound would most likely be across his palm. Besides, the cut is superficial.”
“You’re saying that Wickersham stabbed himself in the chest?” Danielle said.
“Yes,” Monk said. “He sat down in what is probably his favorite chair in his favorite room and plunged the knife into his heart.”
“Then why aren’t his fingerprints on the knife?” she asked.
“Because he held it with the handkerchief that’s on the floor,” Monk said. “The police assumed the killers used the handkerchief to grip the
knife and that the spot of blood came from the chest wound. It didn’t. The blood came from the cut on his hand.”
“How did he get the cut?” I asked.
“When he broke the glass on the French doors to his study,” Monk said. “Here’s what happened. He ransacked the house to hide the fact that he’d sold his wife’s jewelry and everything else of value to pay off the loan sharks while she was away. But it wasn’t enough and he knew it. All he bought was some time. The best he could hope for was to secure his wife a comfortable life. So he staged a home invasion and made his suicide look like murder so that his wife would get his life insurance money.”
“He sacrificed himself for her,” I said.
Monk nodded. “And it was all for nothing. She won’t see a penny of the money.”
“Not necessarily,” Danielle said.
“The insurance company won’t pay her off for a suicide,” Monk said.
“The only way they’ll know it wasn’t suicide is if she decides to tell them,” Danielle said.
“We’ll tell them,” Monk said.
“We can’t. We were hired by the widow and are bound by our contract with her to maintain her privacy,” she said. “Nick will give her our report and what happens after that will be up to her.”
“If she doesn’t inform the police, and cashes the insurance company’s check, then we will be accessories to a crime,” Monk said.
“Not necessarily, and only if they discover the truth, if that’s what it is,” she said. “You’re the only one who thinks it wasn’t murder. With all due respect, what if you’re wrong?”
“Mr. Monk is never wrong about murder,” I said.
“That’s for our client to decide,” she said. “As Nick always says, we provide information and our clients decide what to do with it.”
“I can’t accept that,” Monk said.
“Then maybe Intertect isn’t the right place for you,” Danielle said.
I suddenly had a horrifying vision of my Lexus, my corporate credit card, my comprehensive health coverage, and my big, fat salary evaporating after just one day.