by Lee Goldberg
Danielle came by late that afternoon with a file under her arm. When I saw the file, I involuntarily tensed up. But it wasn’t another case to add to the pile Monk was dealing with. It was her research into Bill Peschel, his daughter, Carol, and her husband, Phil.
Monk set aside his remaining cases for the moment to listen to what Danielle had dug up.
“Your instincts were right, Mr. Monk,” she said. “Carol and her husband are living a lie. They aren’t a prosperous, upper-middle-class family.”
“They’re communist sleeper agents who’ve infiltrated American society,” Monk said.
Danielle and I stared at him.
“You are aware that we are in the twenty-first century,” I said. “And that the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union collapsed, and the Cold War is over?”
“Yes,” Monk said.
“That’s not it,” I said.
“How do you know?” he said.
“Because the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union collapsed, and the Cold War is over.”
“Okay,” Monk said. “They’re wanted fugitives.”
Danielle and I stared at him.
“They’re brother and sister,” Monk said.
Danielle and I stared at him.
“They’re illegal aliens,” Monk said.
“Have you been possessed by Randy Disher?” I asked.
“Why do you say that?” Monk replied.
“They’re broke,” Danielle said. “Their personal bank accounts are nearly depleted and they’ve reached the spending limit on their credit cards.”
“That’s not nearly as interesting a lie to be living as the others,” Monk said.
“We’ll have to tell them to work on that,” I said.
“Phil lost his job as a sales rep for a pool equipment company four months ago,” Danielle said. “He leaves the house each morning in a jacket and tie but spends his day sitting in an easy chair at a Barnes and Noble in San Rafael doing crossword puzzles.”
“How do you know all this?” I asked.
“We traced his credit card usage,” she said. “I also put him under surveillance.”
“You can do that?” Monk said.
“I can’t but you can,” Danielle said. “I hope you don’t think that I abused your authority.”
“I didn’t know I had any authority,” Monk said. “What else can I do with it?”
“Let’s concentrate on the case,” I said. I didn’t want Monk thinking too hard about the resources that were available to him or he’d assign Intertect’s operatives to watch the streets for people spitting out their gum on the sidewalks. “Does Carol know that he’s out of work?”
“The bank accounts and credit cards are all under his name, so the statements go to him,” Danielle said. “So it’s possible that she doesn’t. But I do know that they’ve been living on the money her father has been giving them from his savings and stocks.”
“What are they worth?” I asked.
“The combined value is nearly one million dollars,” she said. “Now that Peschel is dead, they can add the one-point-five-million-dollar life insurance payoff to the pot.”
“Not if her husband killed him,” Monk said.
“Phil certainly had a strong financial motive for murder,” Danielle said.
I nodded in agreement. “And he knew better than anybody exactly when Carol and the kids were going to be out of the house that morning.”
“So would anyone who looked at her refrigerator,” Monk said.
I was surprised that Monk had noticed her calendar on the refrigerator, but I shouldn’t have been. He notices everything, even when it appears he isn’t paying any attention at all.
“I wouldn’t rule Carol out as a suspect just yet,” Monk said. “She might have known that her husband was out of work. The two of them could have planned the murder together.”
“But they were already living off her dad’s money,” I said. “What did they have to gain from killing him?”
“Taking care of him was a burden,” Monk said. “And there was the danger posed by his warts.”
“What warts?” Danielle asked.
“Carol told us at the wake that he was covered with them,” Monk said.
“She wasn’t being literal,” I said. “ ‘Warts and all’ is an expression.”
“That means he’s covered in grotesque, blistering tumors created by a highly contagious virus.”
“It means she loved him despite the fact that he wasn’t a perfect person,” I said, then turned to Danielle. “Maybe you could elaborate on that.”
She explained that Peschel dropped out of high school and drifted up and down the state, working as a manual laborer in agriculture and construction for a few years, before landing back in San Francisco, where he did all kinds of odd jobs, like taxi driver, short-order cook, ditchdigger, and, finally, bartender at a Tenderloin dive called Lucky Duke’s.
Along the way, Peschel built up a police record of minor offenses, like assault, petty theft, and drunk-and-disorderly conduct. He also did some “debt collection” for Bobby Fisset, a big racketeer in the city during the late fifties, early sixties.
In 1967, Peschel met Clara, a salesgirl at Capwell’s department store, and got her pregnant. They were married a few months before she started showing.
“How did you find out all of this?” Monk interrupted.
“For starters, the police maintained a confidential file on him.”
“If it was confidential,” I asked, “how did you see it?”
“Nick has sources in the SFPD,” Danielle said. “I also looked at all relevant federal, state, county, and local records and, posing as an obituary writer for the Chronicle, I interviewed Carol Atwater for details on his early life.”
Monk nodded, impressed.
I hoped he wasn’t drawing any comparisons between her efforts and mine on his behalf. I’d never done any research like that for him. For one thing, I wouldn’t know how to begin. For another, she had resources I couldn’t hope to match.
Even so, I felt a pang of insecurity and a cramp of jealousy. I tend to internalize my anxieties.
Danielle continued briefing us on what she’d learned: Lucky Duke’s luck ran out in 1970 and he was stricken with throat cancer. Peschel took over running the bar. And when Duke died nine months later, Peschel borrowed money from Fisset to buy the business from Duke’s widow and rename it Bill’s Tavern.
To pay off the debt, Peschel let Fisset use a back room at the bar to run a private poker club.
After Fisset was gunned down outside of Alioto’s restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf in 1973, Peschel secretly gave the police tips that helped nab the shooter and avert a mob war.
“By working in the Tenderloin for years and associating with Fisset, Peschel established his street cred with the low lifes and criminals,” Danielle said. “They saw him as one of them.”
“He was,” Monk said. “And warty, too.”
“By helping the police catch Fisset’s killers and prevent a lot of bloodshed, he earned the trust of the police, who showed their gratitude by making him a paid informant and turning a blind eye to his various nickel-and-dime illegal activities to make ends meet.”
Something didn’t make sense to me. “If the tavern was such a dive, and Peschel was scratching and scraping for money his whole life, how was he able to sell his business for enough money to retire with his wife to Florida?”
“He sold the tavern for thirty-five thousand dollars,” Danielle said. “He became rich off of his InTouchSpace-dot-com stock and the sale of his Florida condo.”
“How did he luck into buying shares of InTouchSpace before it went big?”
“Word on the street, I guess,” she said.
“He was on the wrong street for that word,” Monk said, shrugging his shoulders. “Something doesn’t fit.”
“So what’s next?” I asked.
“We talk to the suspects,” Monk said. “But we don’t touch them u
nder any circumstances.”
“Why not?” Danielle asked.
“Warts could run in the family,” he replied.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Mr. Monk and the Ties That Bind
The surveillance footage from the Dorchester Hotel was delivered by Lansdale to Disher’s desk on several CDs. The lobby, all the entrances and exits, the stairwells, and the elevators were covered by cameras. The various floors themselves were not.
“What kind of half-assed security system is that?” Disher said.
“I asked them the same thing,” Lansdale said. “Their reply was that they are a hotel, not a Vegas casino, and this isn’t a totalitarian state.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“They’re cheap and irresponsible,” Lansdale said. “But nobody could have gotten in or out of the hotel without being caught on camera.”
“Unless they climbed up the face of the building and entered through Braddock’s window.”
“Do you really think that’s possible?”
“Never rule out any possibility, even if it’s impossible,” Disher said. “The impossible is only impossible until it becomes possible. Why aren’t you writing that down?”
“Because it doesn’t make any sense.”
“It would if you had my years of experience on the mean streets. I’m giving you pearls of wisdom here. You’ll want to remember them.” Disher handed half of the CDs to Lansdale. “You look at these, I’ll go through the rest.”
Lansdale retreated to his desk and Disher stuck a CD into his computer.
For the next hour, Disher scanned through footage of the loading dock and the stairwell, but didn’t see any activity. There were no deliveries and nobody used the staircase.
When he was finished with those CDs, he started going through footage from the lobby. He was twenty minutes into that when he saw someone come in at ten p.m., go up the grand staircase to the conference area, and then disappear.
Disher glanced around to see if anyone was watching him. Lansdale was slouched in his seat, staring at his screen, going through elevator footage and taking notes. Disher turned back to his screen and fast-forwarded until he saw the same man come down the staircase and leave about thirty minutes later.
“Hey, Jackal, do we have any surveillance footage of the conference floors?”
Lansdale shook his head. “Nothing on the second and third floors, except the stairwells.”
“Anything unusual show up on the elevator footage?”
“Yeah, I was just about to tell you about it,” Lansdale said. “Around ten fifteen one of those guys in the beefeater costumes got on at the second floor and went up to the seventh, got off, then came down again about twenty minutes later.”
“Can you see his face?”
“Nope,” Lansdale said.
This wasn’t good, Disher thought. Not at all.
He got up and knocked on the captain’s door. Stottlemeyer waved him in from behind his desk.
Disher stepped in and closed the door behind him.
“How’s the investigation going?” Stottlemeyer asked, looking up from his work.
“Is there anything you want to tell me, Captain?”
“About what?”
“About you and Braddock?”
“It’s all in the file,” Stottlemeyer said. “Except the part about me punching him yesterday at Bill Peschel’s wake, but I assume you’ve heard all about that.”
“You also didn’t mention that you were at the Dorchester Hotel last night.”
Stottlemeyer sighed wearily. “I didn’t think it was relevant.”
“What were you doing there?”
“I got a call around nine thirty last night from a guy who said he was a cop attending the conference. He said he had evidence that Braddock was taking bribes from a gang that’s running meth labs out of mobile homes in the desert. He asked me to meet him in one of the small conference rooms at the hotel.”
“Who was the cop?”
“He wouldn’t tell me until we met face-to-face, which didn’t happen,” Stottlemeyer said. “I got there at ten, waited around for twenty minutes, and when he didn’t show, I left.”
“And you didn’t think that was relevant to the investigation?” Disher asked, failing to hide his irritation with his boss.
“I was one of hundreds of cops and tourists in the hotel last night. I was only there for a half hour and then I left. I didn’t see what it had to do with your investigation.” Stottlemeyer narrowed his eyes at Disher. “But since you think it’s relevant, I’m guessing that Braddock’s time of death was ten-ish.”
“It could have been,” Disher said. “The killer jacked up the air-conditioning in Braddock’s room to make it harder for us to pinpoint the exact time of death.”
Stottlemeyer stroked his mustache, a nervous habit he had while he was thinking. “Do you suppose that the call I got might have been a ruse to get me to the Dorchester at the same time that Braddock was being killed?”
“I don’t think so. Like you said, there were lots of other people there at the same time, including some of the best homicide detectives in the nation,” Disher said, heading for the door. “I wouldn’t worry about it, sir.”
Disher walked out of the office. But he could feel Stottlemeyer’s gaze on his back like a heat lamp.
I picked up Monk at nine on the dot and we drove over the Golden Gate Bridge to Marin County.
The lanes going into San Francisco from Marin County were clogged with the last of the rush-hour commuters, Starbucks coffee in their dashboard cup holders, Bluetooth devices in their ears, and NPR playing on their radios.
How do I know what station they were listening to on their radios? Because I know Marin County residents are well educated, own at least one Bob Dylan or Van Morrison album, and are notoriously liberal for people with so much money.
And because I like to embrace clichés that have some truth to them and I enjoy making broad generalizations that support my biases. If you haven’t learned that about me by now, you haven’t been reading very closely.
The Barnes & Noble smelled more like a coffeehouse than a bookstore. The tables of their café were full of young, well-dressed people hunched over their MacBooks, idly picking at pastries and sipping their hot drinks, trying to look busy and deep in deep thoughts.
Phil Atwater wasn’t among the self-consciously studious in the café, probably because the menu was too expensive for a man whose unemployment checks had just run out. He was getting his gourmet coffee from McDonald’s and slipping a Starbucks cardboard heat sleeve around the cup that didn’t entirely hide the Golden Arches. We found him drinking his coffee in an easy chair at the farthest corner of the store, where he was reading a book entitled The Thirty Steps to Becoming a Millionaire in Thirty Days.
“Is one of the steps murdering your father-in-law?” Monk asked.
Phil looked up at us, dropped the book, and started to get up.
“Mr. Monk, Ms. Teeger, fancy bumping into you here. I just stopped in to browse a bit before work. I’d rather spend my time here than stuck in traffic. But I’d better get going-”
“You can sit down, Phil,” I interrupted. “We know you were fired from your job months ago.”
“I wasn’t fired, I was downsized,” he said, sitting down again. “There’s a difference. It had nothing to do with my job performance.”
“Does your wife know?” Monk asked. I noticed Phil had ignored Monk’s first, provocative question.
“I can’t bring myself to tell her. It’s humiliating.”
“So you have been hiding out here,” I said.
“I’ve been using this as my base of operations, reading the want ads and applying for jobs. I’ve had a few interviews, but nothing has come of it. There’s not a big demand for guys like me.”
“What do you have to lose by telling your wife the truth now?” I asked.
“Her respect,” Phil replied. “I still have my pride.
”
“Or you don’t want her to find out your darker secret,” Monk said. He drifted over to a cardboard display riser of Murder, She Wrote paperbacks that were stacked cover-out, four or five books to a pocket shelf.
“Like what?” Phil asked.
“That you murdered your father-in-law so you could get his inheritance,” Monk said, adding and subtracting paperbacks from one shelf to another so there were an equal number in each stack.
“I’m unemployed,” Phil said. “That doesn’t make me a killer.”
“You knew when your wife was leaving the house with the kids,” I said. “So you went back home, hit Peschel over the head, and tossed him in the pool, then tried to make it look like he jumped in himself in a fog of dementia.”
“Fog of dementia?” Phil chuckled ruefully. “You make it sound so mild, almost poetic. You try living with a delusional, gutter-mouthed old coot who thinks he’s still tending bar in a Tenderloin dump filled with hookers and drunks. I’d sit across from him and he wouldn’t know if I was one of his scumbag boozers, or someone shopping for a killer, or a cop he could sell them all out to.”
“So you killed him to put him out of his misery and yours,” I said.
“If I killed him, which I didn’t, what makes you think I’d admit it to you now?”
“Because if you did murder him, I’ll find out anyway,” Monk said, still shifting books around. “I was hoping you’d save me the trouble. I have a lot of cases to deal with as it is.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, but the only thing I’m guilty of is pride and cowardice.”
“And shoplifting,” Monk said.
“That’s not true,” Phil said.
“Then why did you peel the price tag off that book and remove the magnetic theft strip from the spine?”
“I didn’t,” he said.
Monk gestured to the floor with the Murder, She Wrote paperback that was in his hand. “You tried to kick them under your seat but the sticker stuck to your shoe.”
Phil looked down. Sure enough, the price sticker was stuck to the heel of his scuffed leather dress shoe.
“So what? The guy who wrote this book has already made his million bucks,” Phil said. “He doesn’t need twenty more from me.”