by Lee Goldberg
“What does that have to do with me?” Wurzel asked.
“We think his murder might have something to do with the killing of Bill Peschel.”
She shook her head. “I still don’t see how I can help. I don’t know either one of them.”
“You bought Peschel’s tavern in the Tenderloin ten years ago,” I said. “There’s a Jamba Juice there now.”
“Oh, yes, I remember the building,” she said. “You’ll have to forgive me; I own so many properties.”
“Why did you buy that one?” Monk asked without taking his eyes off of the fish.
“I buy properties throughout San Francisco in areas that I think will eventually become prime residential and shopping districts,” she said. “So far, I’ve been right more times than I’ve been wrong.”
“Did your husband ever visit Peschel’s tavern or have any kind of relationship with him?” I said.
“Of course not,” she said. “Why would you think so?”
“Because Peschel’s early investment in InTouchSpace made him very well-off.”
“That’s true of hundreds of other people,” she said.
“And you bought his building,” I said.
“I don’t see what you’re getting at,” she said.
Frankly, neither did I. But I had that ticklish feeling in my chest again and I didn’t know why.
A Chinese woman approached holding a bowl of white cream. She looked like a slightly older version of the Chinese androids we saw when we came in. She must have been the original model.
“Hello, I am JoAnne,” she said. “Welcome to my salon.”
I was right.
“May I?” JoAnne asked Wurzel.
“Please do,” Wurzel replied. JoAnne started to apply the cream to her face. “Have you ever had a geisha facial, Miss Teeger?”
“It’s a little out of my price range.”
“It’s heaven,” she said.
“You’ll be there soon if you keep letting creatures feed on you,” Monk said.
“There’s nothing dangerous about it,” JoAnne said. “It’s certified by the health department. It’s totally natural.”
“So is letting vultures and maggots pick at your flesh,” Monk said. “Is that your next beauty treatment?”
I gestured to the white cream. “Why is this called a geisha facial?”
“Because Kabuki actors and geishas would use the cream to remove their makeup and replenish their skin,” JoAnne said. “The Chinese have also used it for centuries. I’m using my great-great-great-grandmother’s mixture.”
“What’s in this that isn’t in my jar of Noxzema?”
“Milled nightingale guanine mixed with rice bran,” JoAnne said.
Monk looked up. “You must be mistaken. Guanine is-”
“Bird poop,” she interrupted. “This is made from nightingale droppings.”
Monk froze and his face went almost as white as Mrs. Wurzel’s.
“You’re putting avian excrement on this woman?” He looked at Wurzel. “And you’re letting her?”
“It feels wonderful,” Wurzel said.
“The guanine has been sterilized with ultraviolet light to kill the bacteria,” JoAnne said. “It cleans and revitalizes your skin better than anything else.”
“You’re cleaning people’s skin with excrement instead of soap,” Monk said.
“I wouldn’t put it quite like that,” JoAnne said. “But yes, I suppose you’re right.”
Monk turned his head and looked at all the other women in the salon with the cream on their faces. He swallowed hard.
“Excuse me, I need to leave,” he said slowly, measuring his words. “Natalie, could I borrow your cell phone, please?”
I handed him my phone and he immediately started dialing as he walked away. He was probably making an emergency call to Dr. Bell. All in all, I thought he was showing admirable restraint. I was prepared for him to tackle JoAnne and wrestle the cream from her grasp.
JoAnne and Mrs. Wurzel watched him go. They didn’t realize they’d gotten off lucky.
“What’s his problem?” Wurzel asked.
“He can’t accept that putting bird poop on your face is good for you. It offends his sensibilities,” I said. “I have to admit I’m skeptical, too.”
“I’m glad I didn’t tell him about our kitty litter exfoliation treatment or our Egyptian cleanse,” JoAnne said.
I could guess what the kitty litter exfoliation was but not the Egyptian option.
“What’s an Egyptian cleanse? Camel pee?”
JoAnne laughed and so did Mrs. Wurzel. It was nice to know that I hadn’t offended them.
“Cow bile, ostrich eggs, and resin,” Joanne said.
“I think I’ll stick with Noxzema,” I said, and turned to Mrs. Wurzel. “If anything occurs to you about Bill Peschel or Paul Braddock, please give us a call at Intertect.”
I didn’t have a card to give her but I figured Intertect was in the book.
“I will,” she said.
I walked outside and found Monk standing across the street. I assumed that he wanted to put some distance between himself, the poop facials, and the flesh-eating carp.
Monk said good-bye to whomever he was talking to and handed me the phone.
“That’s a chamber of horrors.”
“I wouldn’t pay two hundred bucks to have bird crap smeared on my face,” I said. “But maybe it works. Women wouldn’t be coming from all over to have it done if it didn’t.”
“JoAnne must be using some form of mind control on them,” Monk said.
“It’s not mind control. It’s insecurity and futility. They just want to look young and pretty as long as they can and keep the pimples and wrinkles away forever. I’m the same way. I think it’s hardwired into us.”
“Those women are in mortal danger,” Monk said. “It took all of my willpower not to do something about it on the spot.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because it’s a dangerous, volatile situation. JoAnne and her evil minions are practically holding loaded guns to the heads of those women. I didn’t want to cause a panic. So I played it cool.”
“I’m glad that you did, Mr. Monk. I think that taking a relaxed, low-key approach was exactly the right thing to do.”
“I’m leaving it to the professionals,” he said.
“What professionals?”
That’s when I heard the sirens. Within moments, fire trucks pulled up in front of us and firefighters in hazardous materials suits charged into the salon.
“You called a haz-mat team?” It was a rhetorical question, of course, since the team was right there.
“And plenty of backup,” he said.
“Backup?” I asked. “What kind of backup?”
No sooner were the words out of my mouth than two black, windowless vans screeched to a stop behind the fire trucks, the back doors flew open, and dozens of men in full paramilitary gear and carrying automatic weapons spilled out and stormed into the building.
“Who are they?”
“Homeland Security,” Monk said.
Linda Wurzel and the other customers were hustled outside at gunpoint in their bathrobes and white face masks. That would have been embarrassing enough, but then the satellite broadcast vans from the local TV stations began to arrive.
I hustled Monk away before Wurzel or any of the reporters or cops spotted him.
“Why are we leaving?” Monk said. “I want that Red Chinese poop terrorist to know who took her down.”
“I don’t think that Nick Slade would appreciate the publicity,” I said.
“Why not?” Monk said. “Who knows how many people we’ve saved today.”
“Because the women might not see it that way and could sue for intentional and malicious infliction of emotional distress,” I said, thinking in particular of Mrs. Wurzel and her deep pockets. “Intertect could be tied up in litigation for the next ten years.”
Monk froze. I turned to
yank him along when I saw that sparkle in his eyes, that goofy grin on his face, and that tell-tale rolling of his shoulders.
He’d solved the mystery.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Mr. Monk and the Tickle
“You know, don’t you?” I said as we headed back to the Lexus.
“Know what?” he asked.
“Who killed Bill Peschel and Paul Braddock and framed Captain Stottlemeyer for murder.”
“You don’t need me to tell you,” Monk said. “You figured everything out this morning.”
“I haven’t figured out anything,” I said.
“You had a tickle.”
“I don’t know what the tickle meant.”
“Yes, you do,” Monk said. “That’s why you insisted that we meet Linda Wurzel. She is the key to everything.”
“She’s the killer?”
“No, but she’s pure evil.”
We reached the car. I unlocked the doors and we got inside. But we weren’t going anywhere until he explained himself.
“I really hope you’re not just saying that because she has poop facials and fish pedicures.”
“That’s a big, big, big part of it,” Monk said. “Because usually when you meet someone who cleans themselves with excrement and bathes with flesh-eating fish it means that you’re in hell and that person is Satan.”
“As convincing an argument as that is, do you have anything more to go on?”
“What more could anyone possibly need?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Evidence, maybe?”
“That’s all I have. Everything else that I know can’t be proven. She’s the only person who can clear the captain of murder. There’s only one problem.”
“What’s that?”
“She’ll never do it,” he said.
I rubbed my forehead. I could feel a Monkache coming on. “But you know Captain Stottlemeyer is innocent.”
“Yes,” he said.
“And you know who killed Bill Peschel and Paul Braddock and why.”
“Yes,” Monk said. “And I know who killed Steve Wurzel.”
“He was murdered?”
“Of course he was,” Monk said. “But you already knew that.”
“I did?”
“Peschel sold his business and retired ten years ago, right after Steve Wurzel disappeared on his way to Mendocino,” Monk said. “There was a connection.”
I felt the tickle coming back in my chest as strong as my beating heart.
“What was it?”
“You knew what it was. Linda Wurzel,” Monk said. “Satan’s concubine. But that’s not all that happened ten years ago.”
The tickle was those three words. Ten years ago.
Suddenly I experienced the same strange mental and physical sensation that I had after meeting Phil Atwater. I could almost feel the synapses in my brain firing, forging new connections, drawing together disparate facts and memories to create one cohesive understanding.
And, for a moment, I knew what it was to be Adrian Monk, to experience a world where everything is even, symmetrical, and fits perfectly into its natural place.
It was beauty and it was bliss.
In that moment of clarity, I realized why I almost figured out the mystery before he did. It was because I knew some facts that Monk didn’t until he met Linda Wurzel. Now that he had those facts, too, the answer came to him almost immediately.
“Nick Slade left the San Francisco Police Department ten years ago,” I said. “And he opened up Intertect using money he received from his InTouchSpace investment.”
Monk learned days ago that Slade left the police force ten years back but until he met Linda Wurzel, he didn’t know that the detective opened Intertect with money that he’d earned from his early InTouchSpace investment.
But I did.
On the day Slade hired us, Danielle told me that he’d used his investment revenue as the capital to start his business and later I saw the InTouchSpace Invitational putter in his office. I just never put the two facts together. Monk would have in an instant if he’d been there or if I’d only been smart enough to tell him what I knew.
But now that Monk had all the facts, he’d come to the inescapable conclusion that I’d just reached myself.
“Nick Slade killed Steve Wurzel, Bill Peschel, and Paul Braddock,” I said. “What I don’t know is why.”
“Yes, you do,” Monk said. “Bill Peschel told us and probably Braddock, too. That’s why Slade had to kill them both and frame Stottlemeyer for the crime.”
Monk didn’t have to be so damn oblique. He could have come right out and told me whodunit and why. But he never did. My theory was that he liked to savor his summation and enjoy the way everything fit together.
Only this time, I got the sense that he was doing it for an entirely different reason.
Monk was doing it for me.
Somehow he knew I was capable of solving this murder on my own and that was what he was making me do. He was guiding me the way a good, understanding teacher would with a promising student.
It may have been the kindest, most sensitive thing he had ever done for me.
I rolled down the window for some air and went through a mental checklist of what I knew about Peschel. He ran a sleazy tavern in the Tenderloin. He made a few extra bucks as a police informant, selling tips on crimes to Stottlemeyer, Slade, and Braddock. Ten years ago, he sold his place to Linda Wurzel and retired, living the high life on his InTouchSpace investment ever since.
When we met Peschel, he was living in his daughter’s house and suffering from dementia. He thought that it was ten years ago, the kitchen was his tavern, and that Stottlemeyer and Monk had come to see him for information.
Of course, all the tips he had to sell us were a decade old. There was something about a jewelry heist and something else about a woman who-
Aha!
“Linda Wurzel went to Peschel’s tavern to find someone she could hire to kill her husband,” I said. “Peschel gave the tip to Slade, who was still a cop back then. Slade pretended to be a hit man and met with her.”
“But instead of arresting her, which was his sworn duty, Slade decided the deal was too good to pass up,” Monk said. “He ran Steve Wurzel off a cliff somewhere between here and Mendocino.”
“Do you think Peschel helped him?”
Monk shrugged. “Whether he did or not, they both got paid. Linda bought Peschel’s bar and gave them both InTouchSpace stock.”
“She got stinking rich, Peschel retired, and Slade got his detective agency,” I said. “Everybody was happy.”
“Until Peschel became senile and started calling his old cop buddies with ten-year-old tips,” Monk said. “Slade couldn’t take the chance that Stottlemeyer or Braddock would start thinking about what Peschel had told them and put it all together.”
“Slade had to clean up the mess and silence all three of them,” I said, knowing that Monk would appreciate the metaphor. “Taking care of Peschel was the easy part. But what about Stottlemeyer and Braddock? How was he going to do that?”
“That must have been worrying him until saw us at the conference,” Monk said. “Watching Braddock humiliate the captain in front of everybody was a godsend for him. So he stole the captain’s glass to use later.”
“Things got even better for Slade when Stottlemeyer fired you and then took a swing at Braddock at the wake,” I said. “He probably couldn’t believe how lucky he was.”
“Then he hired me,” Monk said.
“He purposely kept you so busy that you couldn’t think straight.”
“But you could,” Monk said. “You saw all the clues.”
“I felt them more than saw them,” I said, touching my chest.
“That’s even more important. It’s instinct and a natural sense of order,” Monk said. “That’s how you solved three murders.”
“I didn’t,” I said. “You did.”
“You did before I did,” Monk said.
“But I didn’t know I did it until you did it,” I said. “You had to do it before I knew I did it so I didn’t actually do it even though you let me do it just now.”
“You still did it,” he said. “And you did it first.”
“But I couldn’t do it,” I said. “So you solved it.”
Monk shook his head. “We solved it.”
I gave him a big kiss on the cheek and my eyes filled with tears.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. Tears scared him almost as much as germs. Maybe more. He knew how to deal with germs.
“Nothing,” I said, handing him a disinfectant wipe from my purse. “These are happy tears. I know exactly who I am.”
“You’re Natalie Teeger,” Monk said.
“Adrian Monk’s assistant,” I said, wiping his cheek where I’d kissed him.
“And this was a mystery to you before?”
“In a way it was,” I said. “But not anymore.”
“I’m glad we solved one mystery today,” he said.
“Are you forgetting about the one we were just talking about?” I put the used wipe in a tiny plastic bag and stuffed it in my purse. News choppers were flying overhead.
“I’m afraid that’s all it is, just talk,” Monk said. “We can’t prove any of it.”
He was right. The only ones who knew the truth were Linda Wurzel and Nick Slade and they certainly weren’t going to confess. Even worse, now they would know that we were onto them.
“Nick is going to know that we talked to Wurzel,” I said. “If she doesn’t call and tell him, he’ll figure it out himself from tracking our car.”
“We’re under surveillance?”
I told him about the tracking device on the Intertect cars, the keystroke monitoring of their computers, and my suspicion that even the phones at the company were bugged.
“Slade is obsessed with keeping track of his operatives,” I said.
“Especially us.” Monk glanced up at the news choppers. There were three of them hovering over Chinatown now. “I just hope the car isn’t bugged, too. You need to call Julie and ask her to meet us at my apartment right away.”
“Why?”
“We’re going to switch cars with her and let her drive this one all over the Bay Area,” Monk said.