by Lee Goldberg
“She didn’t look like she was in much pain to me.”
“Maybe it’s because of the glasses,” he said, motioning to my face.
I had forgotten I was still wearing them. I took them off and grinned to hide my embarrassment. “I was just reading some of the articles in Sports Illustrated.”
“Those glasses certainly help the words spring off the page, don’t they?”
“And a lot of other things too,” I said. “If these glasses worked on all magazines, I bet men would read a lot more.”
“I certainly would,” Disher said. “I meant to tell you back at the crime scene that I did that favor for you. Joe Cochran was one of the firemen who got hurt last night.”
I know this is a cliché, but it felt like my heart dropped down to the floor. I guess people use that expression a lot because that’s the only way to describe what bad news feels like. Tears started to well up in my eyes. Disher must have noticed, because he quickly spoke up again.
“He’s fine, he’s fine,” Disher said. “It was just a mild concussion and a few bruises. They sent him home this morning.”
I was relieved and wiped the unspilled tears from my eyes, but I still felt a tremor of worry. What would happen the next time he ran into a burning building? Would he be so lucky? That was his job, and if I kept seeing him, I would have to get used to it.
“Thank you,” I said. “I really appreciate it.”
“By the way,” Disher said, lowering his voice to a whisper and opening his notebook, “his record is clean, no arrests or outstanding warrants, but he does have three unpaid parking tickets. He’s never been married, at least not in this country, but he lived with a woman three years ago. Her name was—”
I interrupted him. “You ran a background check on Joe?”
Disher nodded proudly. “I figured as long as I was checking his health, I’d check out everything else.”
“I don’t want to know about everything else.”
“But everything else is who he is.”
“Which is why he should be the one to tell me about it,” I said. “Or I should discover it for myself.”
“That’s taking a big risk, Natalie. I’ve been burned too many times,” Disher said. “I never go out on a date anymore without knowing everything about a woman.”
“That’s why you don’t go out on dates anymore,” I said. “Every relationship needs a little mystery. Discovery is half of romance.”
“That’s the half I don’t like,” Disher said.
I made him rip out the pages that contained the details of Joe’s past from his notebook and tear them up. Disher wasn’t pleased but I didn’t care. Even though I wasn’t the one who snooped into Joe’s past, I felt guilty for violating his privacy.
Disher looked past me and noticed, for the first time, what Monk was reading. He rushed in and snatched the case files from Monk.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Disher said.
“Passing the time,” Monk said.
“By reading confidential case files of open homicide investigations?”
“You didn’t have the latest issue of Highlights for Children,” Monk said. “You really should renew your subscription.”
“We never had one,” Disher said.
“I love to spot the hidden objects in the drawings,” Monk said to me. “It keeps me sharp.”
Disher started to put the files back on the desk one by one.
“Wait,” Monk said and pointed at the file in Disher’s hand. “The gardener.”
“What?” Disher said.
“The gardener is the killer,” Monk said. “Trust me on this.”
“Okay, we’ll keep that in mind,” Disher said dismissively, set the file down and started to put down the next one.
“The mother-in-law,” Monk said.
“You read the file just once and you know that for a fact?”
“Definitely the mother-in-law,” Monk said. “It’s a no-brainer.”
Disher set another file on the desk.
“The twin brother,” Monk said.
And another.
“The shoe-shine man.”
And another.
“The bike messenger.”
Disher plunked down the rest of the stack on the desk all at once.
“The beekeeper, the long-lost aunt, and the podiatrist,” Monk said in a rush. “You dropped a file.”
Disher bent down and picked it up.
“The nearsighted jogger,” Monk said. “He couldn’t possibly have seen the woman in the window. He wasn’t wearing his glasses.”
“I hope you were taking notes,” Stottlemeyer said as he entered the office with a scowl on his face.
“Didn’t have to,” Disher said, tapping his forehead. “It’s all right here.”
“Write it down,” Stottlemeyer said.
Disher nodded, took out his notebook, and started writing.
“How did it go with the deputy chief?” Monk asked.
“It didn’t,” Stottlemeyer said. “He won’t let me authorize the search.”
“Why not?” Monk asked.
“Because he doesn’t think we have a case,” Stottlemeyer said. “In fact, I’ve been ordered to stop harassing Breen, a respected member of the Police Commission, with baseless and offensive accusations. I’ve been told to start looking in other directions.”
“He got to them,” Monk said.
“Big-time,” Stottlemeyer agreed, then looked up at Disher. “Randy, have the crime lab go down to the firehouse and check the firefighting gear on the off chance they might find Breen’s fingerprints or DNA remaining on whatever coat, helmet, boots, or gloves he borrowed.”
“Sir, we don’t even know which ones Breen used.”
“I’m aware of that,” Stottlemeyer said. “But we can at least eliminate the ones that the on-duty firemen were wearing the night of the fire.”
“But another shift has come on since then, so there’s a good chance that all the gear has been used and cleaned more than once since the murder.”
“I didn’t say it was going to be easy. It’s a long shot and a hell of a lot of work, but that’s how you, and me, and everybody who isn’t Adrian Monk break cases. It takes sweat and dogged determination.”
Monk stood up. “Lucas Breen killed Esther Stoval and Sparky the dog. If we don’t find that overcoat, Breen will get away with murder. Captain, we have to search that garbage.”
“I can’t,” Stottlemeyer said. “But there’s nothing stopping you from searching the trash.”
“Yes, there is,” Monk said. “There’s me.”
“My hands are tied. Of course, all of that could change if you were to stumble on, say, a scorched overcoat that belongs to Lucas Breen.”
“It could take us weeks to go through all that garbage,” I said.
“I’d really like to help; you know that. But I can’t,” Stottlemeyer said. “You’re on your own.”
Before we left Stottlemeyer’s office, I shamed the captain into calling Grimsley at the dump and asking him to hold the thirty tons of trash for a couple of days so we’d have a chance to search it. Stottlemeyer was careful, though, to say it wasn’t an official request but more along the lines of a personal favor.
Grimsley said he was he was glad to do whatever he could to help the police in their investigation.
But we weren’t ready to go out to the dump that afternoon. Monk had an appointment with his shrink, Dr. Kroger. Facing the likelihood of having to dig around in a mountain of trash, Monk really needed some help with his anxieties, so canceling the session was out of the question.
I had some anxieties of my own. I don’t have Monk’s aversion to germs, but I certainly wasn’t looking forward to spending a day wading in other people’s garbage.
I called Chad Grimsley and told him we’d be out in the morning.
While Monk was having his session, I waited outside the building and gave Joe a call at home. He answered on the first r
ing, his voice full of energy and good cheer.
“How can you sound so peppy after a burning warehouse collapsed on your head?”
“It’s just another day at the office,” he said.
“Is there anything I can do for you?”
“You’re doing it,” he said. “How’s your investigation going?”
I told him the broad strokes, but I left out Lucas Breen’s name and occupation. I didn’t want Joe doing something stupid like beating the crap out of Breen.
My subtle omission of key details wasn’t lost on Joe. “You’ve neglected to mention the name of the guy who killed Sparky and who belongs to that overcoat.”
“I did,” I said.
“You don’t trust me?”
“Nope,” I said. “But I mean that in the nicest possible way.”
“What happens if you don’t find that overcoat?”
“The killer gets away with killing Sparky and the old lady.”
“If that happens,” Joe said, “will you tell me his name then?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“You’re a smart lady,” he said. “And pretty, too. Are we still on for tomorrow night?”
“I am if you are,” I said, “And if you don’t mind being with someone who has spent the day in thirty tons of garbage.”
“Stop,” Joe said. “You’re getting me all excited.”
I laughed and so did he. It had been a long time since I’d met a man who made me laugh with him instead of at him. Even so, I felt a tickle of anxiety in my chest as I flashed on the image of him charging into a fire.
It’s just another day at the office.
We agreed to meet at my house the next night for our date, and then we said our good-byes.
I parked the Jeep in the driveway. Monk and I got out and saw Mrs. Throphamner on the other side of my low fence. She was in her backyard, kneeling on a rubber pad in the wet mud, toiling over her patch of vibrant roses. They were blooming, and the fragrance was overwhelming.
“Your roses are beautiful,” I told her.
“It’s hard work, but it’s worth it,” she said, holding a little shovel in her hand.
“They smell wonderful.”
“Those are the Bourbons,” she said and pointed her shovel at the large, raspberry-purple flowers. “The Madame Isaac Pereire variety. They’re the most fragrant rose there is.”
I opened up the trunk, we got out the groceries we bought on the way home, and we carried them into the house.
“Do roses bloom all year?” Monk asked me.
“They do in her yard,” I said. “Mrs. Throphamner constantly switches them out since she started her garden a few months ago. She likes lots of color all the time.”
While I unpacked the groceries, Monk got the water boiling and insisted on making dinner for the three of us. I didn’t argue. It’s not often I get a night off, and besides, I knew he wasn’t going to leave a mess for me to clean up.
When Julie got home, I helped her with her homework at the kitchen table while Monk prepared what he called his “famous” spaghetti and meatballs. Pretty soon, though, Julie and I were too captivated by Monk’s unusual preparations to pay any attention to textbooks.
The sauce was out of a jar from Chef Boyardee (“Why bother competing with the master?” Monk said), but he made his meatballs by hand (gloved, of course, as if performing surgery), carefully measuring and weighing them to ensure that they were perfectly round and identical.
He boiled the spaghetti noodles, poured them into a strainer, and then selected individual noodles, laying them out on our plates to make sure they were equal in length and that we had exactly forty-six noodles apiece.
When we sat down to dinner, Monk served us our spaghetti on three separate plates: one for the noodles, one for the sauce, and one for our four meatballs each. We barely had room on the table for all the plates.
“Aren’t the noodles, sauce, and meatballs supposed to be mixed all together?” Julie asked.
Monk laughed and shook his head at me. “Kids—aren’t they precious?”
And then he took a noodle on his fork, wound it around the prongs, stabbed a meatball, then dipped it all in the sauce and put it in his mouth.
“Mmmm,” Monk said. “That’s cooking.”
After dinner, we each relaxed in our own way. Julie went to the living room to watch TV. I sat at the kitchen table, sipping a glass of wine and leafing through an issue of Vanity Fair. And Monk did the dishes.
I like reading Vanity Fair, but I’m thinking of canceling my subscription anyway. There are fifty pages of ads before you even get to the table of contents, it sheds an endless number of subscription postcards all over the house, and the magazine smells like a cheap hooker. Not that I’ve ever smelled a hooker, cheap or otherwise, but I imagine they’re drenched in perfume.
“The night is young,” Monk said. “Let’s party.”
I was sure I’d misunderstood him, dazed as I was by the wine and perfume.
“Did you just say you wanted to party?”
“Call Mrs. Throphamner; ask her to come over and watch Julie.” Monk pulled off his apron and tossed it on the counter in a show of devil-may-care abandon. “We’re going clubbing. I mean that in the party sense, not the baby-seals sense.”
I set down my magazine. I couldn’t imagine why Monk would want to go somewhere filled with loud music and writhing people pressing their sweaty bodies against one another.
“You want to go dancing?”
“I want to go to Flaxx and talk to Lizzie Draper, Breen’s mistress,” Monk said.
“You sure you don’t just want another look at her enormous buttons?”
“I think I can turn her,” Monk said.
“You really believe Lizzie is going to help us get her super-rich lover?” I said.
“It’s worth a try,” Monk said.
I knew what was really going on, and I told him so. “You’re desperate to try anything that could help you avoid rummaging through mountains of trash tomorrow.”
Monk gave me a look. “Hell, yes.”
The interior of Flaxx was industrial chic—lots of exposed beams, air ducts, and water pipes against sheets of brushed aluminum, corrugated metal, and scored steel. The spinning, multicolored lights in the ceiling reflected wildly off the silver surfaces, creating a kind of retro psychedelic effect.
Lots of twentysomething men and women, trying their best to look disaffected and cool, lounged on deeply cushioned, brightly colored divans the size of king-size beds. They’d come here straight from their offices and cubicles, dressed for success but with their garments loosened to show off the cleavage, piercings, or tattoos that proved they were still bad boys and girls. They came to escape one grind by indulging in another; that much was clear by the way some of them danced and made energetic use of the divans.
Monk tried to avert his gaze from the grinders and the gropers, but it wasn’t easy. If he looked away from the dance floor, he saw the divans. If he looked away from the divans, he saw the flat-screen monitors on the walls, which showed music videos that featured a lot of coy, soft-core, girl-girl action. I didn’t find it very shocking. Lesbian sexuality has become a very stylish and hip marketing tool to sell everything from lingerie to underarm deodorant. In the process, it has lost its shock value and edgy eroticism. Well, at least to me. Certainly not to Monk.
The music was loud and percussive and pummeled my body and ears. I liked it and found myself swaying instinctively with the rhythm, but Monk winced as if each beat were a beating.
“This is a bad, bad place,” Monk said.
“It seems pretty tame to me,” I said.
“Oh, yeah? Take a look at that.” He motioned to a bowl in the middle of one of the tables.
“What?”
“Mixed nuts,” he said gravely, implying all manner of danger.
“So?”
“Cashews, walnuts, peanuts, almonds, all in one bowl. It’s a crime against natur
e.”
“We can call the Sierra Club on our way out.”
“That’s bad enough, but to put them out in a bowl for people to share . . .” He shivered. “Think how many hands have been in that bowl, strange hands that have been”—that’s when his gaze fell on one of the couples on a divan—“God knows where.”
Monk quickly looked away from that shocking sight and back to the bowl. He gasped and staggered back.
“What?” I said.
He couldn’t bring himself to gaze again at whatever had offended him. All he could do was jerk his head in the general direction of the table.
“The bowl,” he said, whispering as if it might hear him and take offense.
“I know, mixed nuts,” I said. “A crime against nature.”
He shook his head. “Look again. Tell me I didn’t see crackers and pretzels in that bowl,” he said, adding with dire significance, “with the mixed nuts.”
I glanced at the bowl, knowing even before I did that he was right. Nut and crackers cohabitating.
“It’s a trick of the light,” I said.
He started to look again but I stopped him. “Don’t torture yourself. Remember what we’re here for. Focus.”
Monk nodded. “Right. Focus. Wet Ones.”
I handed him several packets of wipes, and we made our way toward the bar, which snaked along the back of the room and looked more like a stripper’s catwalk than a place to elbow up for a brew. The gleaming poles at either end of the curving bar, and the men pressed up against it, tongues barely in their mouths, added to the effect.
We managed to find a space at the bar, though it meant we were shoulder-to-shoulder with the people beside us. Monk squirmed and crossed his hands in front of his chest so they didn’t touch anything or anyone.
I didn’t have his phobias, but I did the same thing. The way the guy beside me was bumping into me, his arm brushing against my breast, I was certain he was doing it on purpose to cop a quasi-feel. One more time, and he was going to feel my elbow in his kidney.
Three bartenders, all women, all enormously endowed, all wearing bikini tops and short skirts, danced to and fro as they prepared drinks. One of the bartenders was Lizzie. At least Monk wouldn’t have any buttons to fixate on this time. Name tags on the other two women identified them as LaTisha and Cindy.