Mr. Monk Goes to Germany

by Lee Goldberg

  “I don’t see any blood or signs of violence,” Stoffmacher said. “No cuts, not even a bruise.”

  Geshir looked back at Monk. “You were wrong. He wasn’t shot.”

  “Maybe he was poisoned,” I said.

  “Whether he was poisoned or not,” Stoffmacher said, “this doesn’t fit with Monk’s theory of what happened in the house at all.”

  “It fits mine,” Geshir said.

  “That Leupolz accidentally killed Vigg while trying to shoot himself,” Stoffmacher said.

  Geshir nodded. “Leupolz was so distraught over what he’d done that he ran into the woods and poisoned himself.”

  “Why not do it in his apartment?” I asked.

  “He was trying to distance himself from what he’d done,” Geshir said. “That’s why he made it look like Vigg killed himself. Leupolz didn’t want to die a murderer.”

  Stoffmacher nodded approvingly. “You may be on to something.”

  “The only thing he’s on is a feather,” Monk said.

  “What?” Geshir said.

  “Lift up your left foot,” Monk said. Geshir did. There was a feather in the mud. “That feather is the same as the ones we found in Leupolz’s apartment.”

  “So what?” Stoffmacher said. “It makes sense that he might track things with him from his own apartment.”

  “The pillow exploded when the killer used it as a silencer,” Monk said. “That’s why there were feathers all over the apartment. That feather proves I was right.”

  “But there weren’t feathers all over the apartment,” Geshir said.

  “Because the killer cleaned most of them up,” Monk said.

  “But Leupolz wasn’t shot,” Stoffmacher said. “So there was no killer, no silencer, and no exploded pillow. This body proves that you were wrong.”

  Monk shook his head. “We’re missing something.”

  “What’s missing is a coherent explanation for these two deaths,” Stoffmacher said. “We need to go back to the beginning and rethink all of our assumptions.”

  “You mean his assumptions.” Geshir gestured to Monk.

  “Yours, too,” Stoffmacher said. “Mine as well.”

  “You have assumptions?” Geshir said.

  “I do, occasionally, think about the investigations I am conducting,” Stoffmacher said. “I just don’t feel the need to share with you everything that runs through my head.”

  “You are both getting lost in irrelevant details,” Monk said. “You need to step back and concentrate on what’s truly important here.”

  “And what would that be?” Stoffmacher asked.

  “My shoes,” Monk said. “They are covered with mud.”

  “There is a dead body in front of us,” Stoffmacher snapped. “Your dirty shoes don’t matter!”

  “What about his?” Monk said, motioning to Leupolz. “How did he get up here without getting a speck of dirt on them?”

  We looked at Leupolz’s running shoes. They were bright white and perfectly clean, the laces tied in a neat double bow.

  That certainly complicated things.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Mr. Monk Gets Some News

  Geshir rubbed his chin. Stoffmacher curled the end of his enormous mustache. And I swatted at the flies that were buzzing around me while we considered the implications of Monk’s observation.

  Leupolz didn’t walk there.

  So how did he get on the trail? If he didn’t float there, then it meant he was carried somehow. And the odds are he wasn’t alive when that happened.

  But that explanation raised even more questions.

  Why not leave him at his house? Why dump his body on a hiking trail? How did he die? Why weren’t there any signs of violence? How was his death connected, if at all, to the violent end of Axel Vigg? Or was it just one more bizarre coincidence in a day filled with a record-breaking number of them?

  Those were just a few of the questions going through my mind and were probably among the ones that Stoffmacher and Geshir were thinking about, too.

  “There’s more,” Monk said.

  Stoffmacher sighed. “Of course there is.”

  “Look at how his laces are tied. The starting knot and finishing bow are perfectly balanced. It’s a textbook example of the Norwegian Reef Knot. But, as I am sure you recall, the shoes he kicked off in his bedroom were tied with sloppy Granny Knots.”

  I remembered the shoes, but not the knots. I don’t pay attention to the things that Monk does. I also couldn’t tell you how many parking meters there are on Market Street, how many sesame seeds there are on a hamburger bun, or if there are any hangers in my closet that aren’t facing the same direction.

  “You’re suggesting that someone else put on his shoes,” Stoffmacher said.

  “And dressed him in that jogging outfit,” Monk said. “It was probably the same person who dumped his body here. This whole scene has been staged.”

  “To tell us what?” Geshir said.

  “I don’t know yet,” Monk said. “But it was improvised in a hurry. If the killer had planned this in advance, he wouldn’t have been so sloppy.”

  “You keep saying ‘the killer,’ ” Stoffmacher said. “But there is no indication yet that Leupolz was murdered.”

  “He was,” Monk said.

  I heard the sounds of people approaching. I turned and saw a dozen people in matching yellow plastic overalls marching up the trail. They carried metal cases, cameras, a body bag, and a stretcher. I assumed that they were the coroner and the first wave of crime scene technicians.

  “You should dredge that pond,” Monk said, tipping his head towards the muddy brown watering hole a few yards from the trail.

  “What for?” Geshir said. “We aren’t looking for anything.”

  “There’s the missing laptop,” Monk said. “My guess is that’s where the killer tossed it, in a vacuum cleaner bag stuffed with feathers and a pillowcase, after removing the hard drive.”

  The technicians began to take pictures and set up shop around the body. A man I took to be the coroner squatted beside Stoffmacher and began to examine the body.

  “I think we can take it from here,” Stoffmacher said to Monk. “We appreciate all the advice you’ve given us.”

  “What about my problem?” Monk said.

  “We’ll contact you at your bed-and-breakfast if we have any developments in our investigations,” Stoffmacher said.

  “That’s easy for you to say,” Monk said. “How am I supposed to get there?”

  Stoffmacher looked confused, so I explained things to him.

  “Mr. Monk is referring to his muddy shoes,” I said. “If he takes a step, he risks getting even muddier.”

  Stoffmacher sighed and said something in German to the two men with the stretcher. They brought the stretcher over to Monk.

  “They’ll take you back to the car,” Stoffmacher said.

  The two men held up the stretcher and Monk carefully eased himself onto it.

  “I knew this was how I would be leaving here,” Monk said miserably. “At least I’m not in the body bag.”

  Monk had to change his shoes the moment we returned to the bed-and-breakfast. He came out of his room a few minutes later wearing an identical pair of Hush Puppies, his dirty pair in a sealed plastic bag that he held at arm’s length.

  “You’re throwing out your shoes?” I said.

  “What other choice do I have?”

  “You could clean them.”

  “There’s only one thing that will clean these shoes.” Monk handed the bag to Heiko Schmidt on our way out. “Incinerate this immediately.”

  We headed out for an early dinner at the same place we’d visited the night before. This time I was a bit more daring. I ordered the Wienerschnitzel and was pleasantly surprised when they didn’t deliver a hot dog to the table.

  When I was growing up in Monterey, there was a chain of fast-food places in California called Der Wienerschnitzel that served a wide array of
lousy hot dogs that looked even worse than they tasted.

  I assumed, like every other ignorant Californian, that Wienerschnitzel was the German term for hot dog. But no, it’s not. It’s actually a lightly battered and fried veal cutlet that’s similar to a country-fried steak, only a lot more light and tasty.

  So why would somebody call a hot dog stand the Fried Veal? It would be like calling a hamburger place the Chow Mein.

  It made no sense.

  Trying to understand the logic behind Der Wienerschnitzel was the depth of intellectual thought I was capable of after the long day that I’d had.

  As tasty as dinner was, it took all the willpower I had not to fall asleep at the table. Monk was fighting fatigue, too. We left the instant we finished eating.

  I was back in my room and in bed by eight p.m. I was so exhausted, I was certain that I would sleep through until breakfast. But jet lag was still messing with my internal clock and I woke up, refreshed and fully alert, at three a.m.

  I was lying in bed, trying to decide what to do with myself for the three or four hours until breakfast, when my cell phone rang. I answered it, grateful for something to do.

  “That’s a surprisingly energetic and cheerful greeting for someone who was rudely awakened from a deep sleep,” Stottlemeyer said to me.

  “That’s because I was wide-awake,” I said.

  “It is three a.m. there, right?”

  “Yep,” I said.

  “And you’re awake,” he said.

  “Sorry to disappoint you, Captain.”

  “Are you kidding? I’m relieved,” Stottlemeyer said unconvincingly. “The last thing I want to do is disturb your rest.”

  “Were you able to find out anything about Dr. Martin Rahner?”

  “I was,” Stottlemeyer said. “Is Monk awake?”

  “How would I know?” I said. “We aren’t sharing a room.”

  “Find out,” Stottlemeyer said. “If he’s asleep, you’d better wake him up.”

  “Can’t whatever you have to say wait until morning?”

  “He’s waited too long already,” Stottlemeyer said.

  “It’s that big?”

  “It’s that big,” he said.

  I put on a bathrobe and, carrying my cell phone, went down the hall to Monk’s room. I knocked on the door and hoped I was loud enough to wake him but not the rest of the guests.

  He answered the door in his pajamas. His eyes were closed. He might even have been sleepwalking.

  “What is it?” he asked groggily.

  “The captain has some information about Dr. Rahner,” I said.

  Monk motioned me inside and closed the door. We sat down side by side on the edge of his bed; I put Stottlemeyer on the speaker and held the phone up between us.

  “We’re both here, Captain,” I said.

  “How are you holding up, Monk?” Stottlemeyer asked.

  “The whole world is conspiring against me,” Monk said. “With the possible exception of you, Natalie, and Randy Disher.”

  “Possible exception?” I said.

  “I like to keep an open mind,” Monk said.

  “That’s what you are famous for,” Stottlemeyer said, his sarcasm completely lost on Monk. “Here’s what I’ve learned. Dr. Rahner is a respected psychiatrist and author in Germany who has lectured at several colleges in the United States over the years, including UC Berkeley.”

  “When was he in the Bay Area?” Monk asked.

  There was a long pause. For a moment I thought we’d lost our connection.

  “The two weeks before Trudy was killed,” Stottlemeyer said.

  Monk took the news stoically, nodding slightly, as if Stottlemeyer was only confirming what he already knew.

  “What was he doing there?” Monk asked.

  “He delivered a couple of lectures,” Stottlemeyer said. “They were underwritten by a grant from Dale Biederback.”

  Dale the Whale. The obscenely obese madman who tried to ruin the Monks after Trudy wrote a series of unflattering investigative reports about his business dealings.

  The significance of the news nearly knocked me off the bed, but once again Monk took it all with astonishing calmness. He just nodded.

  “Did you find any connections between Dr. Rahner, Dr. Kroger, and Dale?” Monk asked.

  “Not so far, but we haven’t dug very deep,” Stottlemeyer said. “We’ll need lots of search warrants for that.”

  “So get them,” Monk said.

  “We don’t have any evidence of a crime.”

  “You know where Trudy is buried,” Monk said.

  It was like a slap. There was a long silence on the phone. For a moment I wondered if maybe Stottlemeyer had hung up. I wouldn’t have blamed him if he had. Monk didn’t appreciate how hard his friends worked for him. Or if he did, he rarely showed it.

  “That’s not fair,” Stottlemeyer said softly.

  “Neither was her murder,” Monk replied, without a trace of remorse for his cutting remark.

  “I want to get the sonofabitch who killed Trudy and I’ll do whatever is within my power to do. But I can’t convince a judge to give me search warrants based on what we’ve got. It’s all circumstantial and adds up to nothing.”

  “It adds up to me,” Monk said.

  “Lots of things add up to you that don’t to anybody else,” Stottlemeyer said.

  “But they do in the end,” Monk said.

  “Okay, then maybe you can tell me what Dr. Rahner’s motive was for hiring someone to plant a bomb in Trudy’s car.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t have one,” Monk said.

  “If you want to commit a random murder, you don’t seek out a bomber and hire him to do it,” Stottlemeyer said. “You do it yourself, fast and simple.”

  “What I meant was that maybe he did it for Dale,” Monk said. “The same way that Dale’s doctor murdered a judge for him.”

  “You think that Dale blackmailed Dr. Rahner into it?” I asked. “And also blackmailed Dr. Kroger into playing with your mind to keep you off the police force?”

  “That’s one possibility,” Monk said.

  “You haven’t got any evidence,” Stottlemeyer said.

  “That’s what we need the search warrants for,” Monk said.

  “A judge is going to want a lot more than possibilities before he’ll give us warrants to rummage through everyone’s phone, travel, and bank records,” Stottlemeyer said. “All I can tell a judge now is that Dr. Rahner was in San Francisco in the weeks preceding Trudy’s death, giving a lecture that was sponsored by Dale the Whale, and that your shrink might have attended. There’s nothing even remotely criminal about that.”