by Lee Goldberg
"Shameful," Kelton said. "Did Bob get the guy's name?"
"No," I said. "But he's going to stop in to see you on his way to work and give you a description of the man. All Gorman could tell us was that he was driving a sixty-four Thunderbird."
"That's something, I guess," Kelton said. "We'll see if that matches anything in the files. What's your game plan for the day?"
"We'd like to talk to Clifford Adams, the engineer of the Golden Rail Express," I said. "Can you tell us how to get out to where he lives?"
Kelton drew a map on a piece of paper and gave me the directions.
"The Adams place is about five miles outside of town at the end of an unpaved dirt road," Kelton said.
"Why isn't it paved?" Monk asked.
"Because nobody paved it."
"Roads should be paved," Monk said. "Everything should be flat, smooth, and even."
"Wouldn't that make life pretty bland?" Kelton said.
"Yes," Monk said. "As it should be."
"Paving isn't one of my responsibilities," Kelton said.
"You enforce the law, don't you?"
"There's no law on the books requiring paved roads."
"It's a matter of basic human decency," Monk said.
"That's out of my jurisdiction, too. Don't wander off the road if your car breaks down. The land out there is dotted with abandoned mine shafts and unstable tunnels held up with decaying timbers."
"We'd never leave the road, even an unpaved one," Monk said. "Otherwise we'd run the risk of encountering nature."
"How can you have a problem with nature?" Kelton asked. "It's everywhere."
"Exactly. It's out of control."
"You mean it's out of your control," Kelton said. "Welcome to life."
"I don't find life all that welcoming," Monk said.
"I wouldn't have guessed," Kelton said.
The drive out to Clifford Adams' place was slow-going, bumpy, and dusty, and we ran through that superhighway of butterflies again, splattering my windshield with bug goo.
Monk whimpered in misery the whole way.
I turned on the radio to drown him out but the only signal I could get was from an outlaw radio station run by some crackpot who was convinced that the migration of butterflies was the omen of an imminent alien invasion.
Maybe he was right. In fact, it looked like the alien invasion had already come and gone. As we drove across the broad, desolate landscape, I didn't see any indications of life, only the remnants of it. There were a few dilapidated houses, the rusted hulks of abandoned cars, and the weed-choked entrances to a couple of mines dug into the ragged hillsides. It was a bleak, sun-bleached, rocky, and totally uninviting place.
The road ended at a weather-beaten Quonset hut, one of those prefabricated, corrugated metal structures that was mass produced for the military during World War II and later sold as surplus to the public. There were Quonset huts all around Monterey and Salinas when I was growing up. They were cheap, durable, and could be used for anything from warehouses to restaurants.
This particular hut was about twenty feet wide and fifty feet long and looked like an enormous pipe half buried lengthwise in the dirt. It was surrounded by scrapped cars and trucks, oil drums, appliances, sheets of corrugated metal, stacks of railroad ties, and assorted junk.
Underwear and socks and a set of pin-striped, denim overalls dangled from a clothesline strung between the hut and a wooden water tower that was probably as old as Trouble.
On the other side of the water tower was a tangle of pipes, engine parts, duct tape, pulleys, and conveyor belts that ended in a funnel that spilled out over several piles of gravel. The contraption was erected at one end of a set of rail tracks that ran ten yards up a hillside and into a mine opening. A trolley full of rocks was parked at the top of the track.
I expected Monk to leap out of the car the instant we came to a stop, but he didn't move.
"What's wrong?" I asked.
He looked at me sorrowfully. "Everything."
"Could you be a little more specific?"
"If Trouble is hell," Monk said, "this is hell's hell. The man who lives here must be a Neanderthal. I can't decide what's deadlier, staying in this rolling bucket of pestilence or going out there."
"Let me see if I have this straight," I said. "I'm a tornado of filth and my car is a rolling bucket of pestilence."
"They tend to go hand in hand," Monk said.
"You're not winning any points with me today, Mr. Monk."
"I'm the employer and you are the employee," Monk said. "I'm the one who has all the points and you're the one who is supposed to earn them."
"I'm the one who is supposed to earn money," I said. "Employers pay employees and you still owe me last week's paycheck."
That would have shut him up if we hadn't both been silenced by the snap of a door slamming.
The sound came from a tiny wooden shack set out by itself a good twenty-five yards away from the Quonset hut.
Clifford Adams stood in front of the shack, adjusting the shoulder straps of his faded bib overalls. He took a pin-striped, pleated engineer's cap out of his chest pocket and put it snugly on his head and then walked purposefully towards the hut.
Adams was a trim, tough-looking man in his seventies with a fine layer of dust on his clothes and his leathery skin. His eyes were flinty, his face as craggy as the land he lived on.
"What do you suppose that tiny shack is for?" Monk asked.
It was obvious to me and probably would be to anyone else but Monk. I could never understand how a man who knew so much about so many esoteric subjects had so little common knowledge.
And yet Monk often saw things that nobody else did, obscure details that would turn out to be the key clues to solving a murder.
So I guess in the cosmic scheme of things, it all evened out, which, if you were to ask Monk, was all that mattered. Life for him was the pursuit and maintenance of balance, symmetry, and order.
"It's an outhouse," I said.
"A what?"
"A shack for a toilet."
"He put a toilet way out there, far away from where he lives." Monk nodded appreciatively. "That shows a real dedication to sanitary conditions. I may have misjudged him. It must have taken considerable effort to run a water line out that far in this wasteland."
Monk started to open his door.
"He didn't run plumbing to the outhouse," I said.
Monk paused, the door open a crack. "That's ridiculous. If he didn't do that, what kind of toilet could he have in there?"
"A seat with a hole in it placed over an open pit."
Monk let out a little horrified squeak and then slammed the door shut and locked it.
"I'm staying in the car," he said.
"How do you intend to talk with him from inside the bucket of pestilence?"
"You can bring him to the window," he said. "But not too close."
I got out and Monk immediately locked my door. I met Adams halfway between the outhouse and his hut.
"Mr. Adams?"
"Are you a bill collector? Because if you are, you'll have to wait here while I go get my rifle."
"I'm not a bill collector," I said. "If I was, would you shoot me?"
"That depends if you're still here when I come back with my rifle and how fast you can drive away. Are you a process server?"
"Do you shoot them, too?"
"I try," he said.
"Do you shoot the police?"
"Are you a cop?"
"I'm not, but my boss is, sort of." I motioned to the car. Monk slunk down a little bit in his seat. "Adrian Monk is an investigative consultant to the San Francisco Police Department."
"I haven't been to San Francisco in ten years," Adams said.
"We're helping the police in Trouble investigate the murder of a guard at the Gold Rush Museum."
Adams squinted at me. "What happened?"
"It was after-hours. The guard was doing his rounds. Somebody jumped o
ut from behind the Golden Rail Express and hit the guard over the head with a pick."
"What was stolen?"
"Nothing," I said.
Adams shook his head. "Makes no damn sense."
"That's why Mr. Monk is here. He specializes in making sense of things that make no sense," I said. "As part of his investigation, Mr. Monk learned about the train robbery and thinks he can solve that case, too."
Adams squinted at Monk. "Why bother with that after all this time?"
"It's what he does," I said. "He can't help himself."
Adams nodded. The explanation seemed to have struck a nerve with him.
"I know what that's like. I've been trying to get gold out of that old mine up there for fifty years even though it's pointless."
"You must have found some gold or you wouldn't have kept at it."
"Just enough to keep me alive and thinking I'm finally close to that big strike," Adams said, looking up wistfully at the mine. "She's a tease, has been since the Gold Rush, but I keep coming back for more. I can't help myself, just like all the men who owned this godforsaken hole before me."
I pointed to the big contraption beside the water tower. "Does that have something to do with mining?"
"That machine grinds up the rocks so I can sort out the gold," he said. "At least, it's supposed to. I spend half my time going through scrapyards for parts to keep it running. If you look closely at that, you'll see mattress springs, an outboard motor, the blades of a combine, and the innards of a Mr. Coffee."
"What does the coffeemaker do?"
"Nothing, that's why I threw the damn thing into the maw," he said.
He trudged to the car, went to the passenger door, and knocked on the window. "What do you want to know?"
Monk waved me over and motioned for a wipe. I took one out of my purse and he pantomimed washing the window with it where Adams had knocked. I shrugged to indicate my helplessness and pointed to my purse on the seat. He grimaced and leaned away from the window, as if the germs from Adams' knuckles could leach through the glass.
"Is he going to get out or what?" Adams asked me.
"I don't think so. Mr. Monk is allergic to dirt and there's a lot of it out here."
Adams shrugged and faced Monk again. "If you've got a question, mister, spit it out. I've got things to do."
"Tell me what happened the night of the robbery," Monk said, his voice muffled by the glass.
"I wish I knew," Adams said.
"You were there, weren't you?" I said.
"The train never stopped from the time we left Sacramento until we arrived in Trouble. I didn't know there'd been a robbery until we got to the station. Lenny McElroy--he was the boiler man--and I were up front, oblivious to the whole thing, just keeping the train chugging along. The passengers had been warned under threat of death by the masked robbers not to say or do anything to slow the train down."
Monk tucked his hand into his sleeve and knocked on the window with his covered arm. "I didn't hear you. Could you speak up and repeat what you just said?"
"No." Adams looked at me. "Is that all?"
"Do you think Ralph DeRosso was in on the robbery?" I asked loudly so Monk could hear me.
Adams shook his head. "I'm not convinced he was killed by those two robbers, either."
"What other explanation could there be for him falling off the train?"
"Sometimes I wonder if he jumped off the train before the robbery even happened."
"Why would he do that?"
"It was the final run of the Golden Rail Express. It was the end of an era that was long overdue. All Ralph ever wanted to be, all he knew how to be, was a conductor. I think he felt his life was over," Adams said. "Of course, the sad irony is that because of the notoriety from the robbery, the train kept on running for another twenty years for tourists. Maybe if it hadn't, Lenny might have lived longer."
"What makes you think so?"
"Lenny spent more than half of his life shoveling coal into that boiler and breathing in the soot," Adams said. "I hear that when he died, his lungs were black. If he'd left in sixty-two, his lungs might've cleaned out some and he'd still be alive. But he considered that boiler his and wouldn't go until the train's last day. The stubborn bastard died a few years before that day came."
"Why did you stay?"
"I was the last of a dying breed. I figured I might as well see it through to the end. Besides, all I had going for me was this hole in the ground and the one that's waiting for me someday. Maybe it's the same one. My luck, that'll be the day I hit my pay streak."
Monk knocked on the window to get Adams' attention and spoke up loudly. "How do you think the robbers got the cash and the gold off the train?"
"People have all kinds of outrageous theories, but the simple explanation makes the most sense to me. They threw the bags to somebody on the ground."
"Without spilling anything?" Monk said.
"What makes you think they didn't spill some of it?"
"Because nothing was ever found," Monk said.
Adams waved off the remark. "So they say. Let me tell you something. The town was dying in sixty-two. There were a lot of people searching for the loot, most of 'em dirt poor. If anybody found cash, I guarantee you that they shoved it in their pockets and spent it and nobody was the wiser. If they found any gold coins, they kept them and didn't say a word about it."
"But you'd think one of the coins would have turned up by now," I said.
"I'm sure they have," he said.
"And nobody recognized them?"
"Because they weren't coins anymore. They were rings, necklaces, or nuggets," Adams said. "Gold is almost indestructible and yet it's easy to pound into something else without losing any of its rarity, allure, or value. Why do you think people want it so damn bad?"
"Because they're crazy," Monk said, practically yelling.
"There's all kinds of crazy, mister," Adams yelled right back, his face so close to the glass that his nose was nearly touching it. "You've got yours and I've got mine."
And with that, Adams took a pair of rubber gloves out of his pocket and trudged up the hill to his mine.
CHAPTER TEN
Mr. Monk and the Permanent Record
The instant we hit the two-lane highway my cell phone rang, and when I saw that the caller ID read "Stottlemeyer," I pulled over to the shoulder to answer it.
"Hello, Captain."
"How's the investigation going?" he asked.
"It's progressing," I said.
"What's that mean?"
I glanced at Monk, who was looking at me. I was pretty sure that the volume on my phone was high enough that he could hear what Stottlemeyer was saying to me.
"It means Mr. Monk hasn't caught the murderer yet," I said. "But he will."
Monk nodded approvingly.
"Before or after he solves a forty-seven-year-old train robbery?" Stottlemeyer asked.
"You've been talking to Chief Kelton," I replied.
"I didn't have to. I tracked down Jake Slocum for you and discovered that he spent thirty years in San Quentin and I found out why," Stottlemeyer said. "And I know Monk."
"Then you know there's nothing you can do about it," I said.
"You could encourage him to prioritize."
"I don't have that kind of influence," I said. "I'm a tornado of filth."
"That again?" Monk said. "It's a common expression. You're obsessing over nothing."
I nearly dropped the phone in disbelief. "You're telling me not to obsess about something?"
"You'll feel much better if you don't fixate on things."
"You fixate all the time," I said.
"Only on important things," he said. "I don't sweat the small stuff."
"You don't sweat at all," I said.
"Exactly," he said. "Maybe if you could learn not to obsess over every little thing, you wouldn't sweat, either. Which, I might add, many of us would appreciate."
"Many of us?" I said. "You
mean you."
"Many times over," he said.
"Is this your subtle way of telling me that I stink?"
Monk rolled his shoulders. "I'm sure in this instance it's the car and not you."
"This instance?"
"Though being in a car for long periods of time means that we are in pretty close quarters and you do get moist."
"Moist?"
"Are you going deaf?" Monk asked. "You keep repeating everything I'm saying."
I could hear Stottlemeyer laughing. I brought the phone back to my ear.
"What are you laughing about?"
"Nothing, I was just clearing my throat," Stottlemeyer said. "Slocum is living in the Cypress Active Senior Suites in Angel's Camp, which is one of those Gold Rush towns north of Trouble. Maybe you should roll down the window on the way."
I hung up on him.
"That was rude," Monk said.
"Says the man who called me a stinking tornado of filth."
"With affection and deep respect," Monk said.
"It's taken me a few years, but I am beginning to understand why Sharona was so surly," I said, referring to his former nurse and assistant.
"Sharona obsessed over nothing, too," Monk said.
I looked over my shoulder to make sure there were no cars coming and I floored it, peeling rubber as I sped onto the highway.
I knew that leaving a stain on the road would haunt Monk forever.
He looked back. "Wait, we left a mark."
"So?"
"We have to go back and clean it off," Monk said.
"Don't sweat the small stuff," I said, smiling to myself.
It was a pyrrhic victory.
He complained about that tread mark for the next thirty minutes, right up until I pulled in front of the Cypress Active Senior Suites, which resembled a budget hotel for business travelers.
Monk took out his notebook and pen, glanced at something on the instrument panel, and made a notation in his pad.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
"Writing down the miles on the odometer so we can back-track to the exact spot where you scarred the landscape and your immortal soul."
"I didn't scar anything."
"You left a mark on the highway that might never fade," Monk said. "If we can't clean it up ourselves, we might need to get a crew to sandblast it off. And if that doesn't work, I suppose we'll have to demolish that section of highway and lay fresh asphalt."