Mr. Monk Helps Himself

by Hy Conrad

As Monk went to fetch his cleaning supplies from the closet, I switched on the TV and began to flip through to the music channels. Monk was fond of Bach when he cleaned. There was a mathematical precision to Bach’s music that he found soothing. We had tried Mozart once, but Mozart can get a little crazy.

  On my way to the classical end of the dial, I happened to slowly flip by CNN. A handsome, big-featured face was on a split screen with Wolf Blitzer and I made the mistake of stopping.

  “Our books are open,” Damien Bigley told the CNN host. “We intend to cooperate fully with any investigation. It is inconceivable that Miranda would have done anything to hurt the good name of BPM. Ours is a philosophy based on ethical behavior and honesty.”

  Wolf seemed unimpressed. “We have reports from an unnamed source that your wife admitted to these financial misdeeds in her suicide note.”

  “That is totally untrue,” Damien replied, handling it more calmly that I would. Where do reporters ever get these inside sources? “Miranda mentioned the pain and heartache her actions would cause her family and friends. Nothing more.”

  “So, are you denying these charges?”

  Damien brushed a hand through his salt-and-pepper hair and looked sincerely at the camera. “As far as I know, no charges have been filed. We are going through an audit, scheduled months ago. And we’re cooperating fully with the state district attorney.”

  Wolf looked straight ahead on the split screen, which was his version of looking Damien in the eyes. “Mr. Bigley, do you believe your wife capable of embezzling from her company?”

  Damien looked away. “The economy has been hard on everyone,” he said. “But Best Possible Me was Miranda’s life. How could anyone steal part of their own life?”

  “He’s lying.” The voice startled me.

  Monk stood behind me, his arms loaded with a lightbulb-cleaning kit he had bought online from Japan. “You can tell by his eyes. He knew what was going on, whatever it was.”

  “Exactly.” I snapped off the set. To hell with Bach. “That’s the great thing about her suicide. For him. His wife takes the blame and he gets to be with his mistress.”

  “It was still a suicide,” Monk pointed out.

  I cringed. “You don’t think he could have hypnotized her?”

  “It doesn’t work that way. Even under hypnosis, you maintain control.”

  I guess Monk should know. He had once gone to a hypnotherapist for treatment. This was years ago. Through some mistake that only seems to happen to him, he found himself regressing to the age of seven, the last time in his life when he’d been truly happy.

  For days, he’d gone around as an emotional seven-year-old, carefree as a puppy, playing in the trees and even adopting a frog. We thought he was under the spell of his hypnotism and didn’t know what to do. But along the way, he solved a murder and, when he needed to, pulled himself out of his trance.

  “Okay. Not hypnotism,” I said. “But it had to be something. He knew she was going to do it—on that particular day. How do you explain that?”

  “I don’t have to. I was there when she jumped. It was her choice.”

  Monk circled around my chair to the coffee table. “Do you want to start on one side of the apartment and work across, or should we start with the twenty-five-watt bulbs and work up to the three-ways? You’re the guest.” He pointed. “What’s that?”

  He was talking about the state of his coffee table. His binder of phobias had been pushed aside and replaced by a manila envelope.

  “Oh.” I’d completely forgotten. “When I came to pick you up, I brought in your mail. This was the only thing.” I hadn’t mentioned it to him at the time because we’d been on a mission and I didn’t want him distracted. “Who’s it from?” I asked.

  “No return address.” He retrieved two wipes and held the padded envelope at an angle to the light. “Gum residue,” he announced. “There was a return address label but it came off. Handwriting isn’t familiar. The postmark is smudged and almost out of ink.” He held it out and I inspected the blocky letters, addressed to a “Mr. A. Monk.”

  “You open it,” he said, which is his usual reaction to getting something unexpected in the mail.

  I grabbed a pair of scissors from the scissor sanitizer in the kitchen (another online purchase from Japan) and slit it open. “It’s money,” I said, peering inside. Without thinking, I dumped the contents onto the coffee table.

  It was money, all right, but not American. The bills were old and of various shades of brown and gray and green, all basically the same size as U.S. bills. The denominations ranged from one to one hundred. “What country are they from?”

  Monk peered down at them. “From right here,” Monk said. “Confederate money.”

  “Confederate? From the Civil War?” I was instantly fascinated. “Who would send you Confederate money?” I checked the envelope again but there was nothing more inside except two pieces of stiff cardboard to keep it from bending. I had expected at least a note. “Are they valuable?”

  “Depends on the rarity. Ambrose used to collect them as a kid, until mother made him wash them all with Ajax. Then the bills disintegrated and he lost interest.”

  I turned over a five-dollar bill and found a beautiful engraving of an “Indian Princess.” On the back of a fifty was a portrait labeled “Jeff Davis.” I began to gently sift through them. Stonewall Jackson. A woman I’d never heard of named Lucy Pickens. “They’re like little pieces of history.”

  “Natalie, what are you doing?”

  “I’m playing with money.”

  “Stop!”

  It never even occurred to me, not until I heard the panic in his voice. Money in a manila envelope, sent through the mail with no return address. Sent to the detective genius heading up the poisoned-money investigation. And here I was playing with it, like a kid in a sandbox.

  “Augh!” I dropped the bills and froze.

  “Go wash your hands. Don’t touch anything. Here, follow me.”

  I held up my hands and followed him into the kitchen, where he quickly turned on the hot tap, unwrapped a bar of soap, and dropped it in my palms. “Scrub like the wind. Like the wind. And keep the water hot.”

  While I scrubbed away, he ran back into the living room and dialed 911.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Mr. Monk and the Headache

  Obviously, I didn’t die.

  This is kind of embarrassing, so I don’t want to drag it out and build up a lot of suspense. But it was totally a false alarm. The EMTs showed up at Monk’s apartment, this time with their own hazmat masks and gloves. Stottlemeyer and Devlin showed up a few minutes later to take the money and envelope into custody. Meanwhile, Monk and I were whisked away to the emergency room at San Francisco General.

  By midnight, we’d been released with a clean bill of health. There was no poison on the bills or on the envelope. Never had been. And that was a point I had to continue making to Monk as the captain dropped him off in front of his place. I could see him eyeing the window of his second-floor sanctuary.

  “You don’t have to spend all night cleaning,” I told him. For the tenth time.

  “People in hazmat suits were in there. Hazmat!”

  “Yes, but they didn’t find anything.”

  “But they were wearing them. Imagine where those suits were before they came here. Those men don’t wear them to tea parties.”

  “Fine.” I sighed. “Do what you want. Just be bright-eyed and brilliant when the captain picks you up. We’re revisiting Dudley Smith’s house. You promised us you’d find a clue.”

  All three of us got out of the car, and the captain and I watched as Monk disappeared into his building. “He’s going to clean all night, isn’t he?” the captain said.

  “I’m not my partner’s keeper.”

  “I’m glad you guys are okay. That’s the important thing.” He brushed his mustache, which was his tell for being sincere.

  “I feel so guilty wasting everybody’s
time.”

  “No, you were right. It was a weird situation. Any idea who might have done it?”

  I’d spent the last few hours mulling that question. “If the money had been poisoned, I could understand—a murder attempt. But this was totally harmless. Maybe the killer had meant it as a warning. Get off the case or next time you’re dead.”

  Stottlemeyer frowned. “An odd warning. And why Confederate money? It’s harder to get and more expensive. I could understand if he wanted to poison you. Sending Confederate money would almost guarantee that it gets handled.”

  “Exactly the way I did,” I said, still a little embarrassed.

  “But it wasn’t poisoned, so what’s the point?”

  I didn’t have an answer. “Can’t you do something with the envelope?” I asked. “At least figure out where it was postmarked?”

  “We have our tech guys trying to lift residue ink. I’m not sure how much that will tell us.”

  I stretched and yawned. I couldn’t help it. “Well, I should get home. If Mr. Monk … I mean, Adrian. If Adrian has a big day tomorrow, then I have a bigger one.”

  The captain chuckled. “I like the way you’re doing this.”

  I smiled, took my keys from my bag and crossed to my Subaru. I was parked in Monk’s private spot, which he never uses because he has a chauffeur instead of a car.

  • • •

  The next morning started early, at least for Devlin and me. The stress from yesterday’s poison scare and the lack of a full night’s sleep had combined to give me a headache that only seemed to get worse. I took two Tylenols, my last two from the bottle, and hoped for the best.

  We met at the seedy apartment on Willow Street with our supplies and worked from the front door inward. Along the way we checked on the canaries in the bedroom. After Monk’s visit, Devlin was going to take them to her niece and nephew in Alameda, where they’d be sure to get a good home.

  The trick was to prepare the crime scene, hiding or minimizing the clown references without compromising anything that might be critical. The business sign by the front door was easy, as was the circus painting in the hall. We draped them in black plastic, cut from garbage bags, making sure that all the corners were cut straight and the tape evenly spaced. It wouldn’t be smart to cover them up, only to have Monk fixate on the covering.

  The clown shoes under the bed took more thinking. We decided to hang a sheet of construction paper in front of their offensive presence and write ”shoes” on it in big letters. If Monk wanted to lift up the paper and examine the yellow monstrosities, he could. Otherwise, they’d be out of sight.

  Devlin and I wore plastic booties and rubber gloves, since the place was an active crime scene and might still have some atropine residue lying around. By ten o’clock we’d finished, just in time for the captain and Monk.

  “I know this is a clown house,” Monk whispered to me as soon as he saw the covered-up sign.

  “I know. But you’re powering through it. Out of sight, out of mind.”

  He rolled his shoulders, put on his booties and gloves, and walked into the building. “You’ll tell Ellen I’m trying, right? I’m capable of change.”

  “You’re doing great, Adrian. Great.” My morning headache, which had never really left, was starting to work overtime.

  The captain led our little parade into the front hallway. “Okay, Monk, what are we looking for?” It was what we all wanted to know.

  “We’re looking for a reason,” he said. “The reason the killer felt safe.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Put yourself in his position. He’s being blackmailed by someone who’s been in his house. It could be a maid or a repairman or a friend. He doesn’t know. All he has is a post office box where he’s supposed to send the money—”

  Devlin interrupted. “The boxes are protected under the Privacy Act. Our guy could have hung around the O’Farrell Street branch to see who opened box eight forty-nine. But that’s far from a sure thing, and he’d only get one shot.”

  “Why didn’t he hire someone to monitor the post office twenty-four-seven?” I asked. “Some sleazy PI,” said the woman who hadn’t even passed her PI exam.

  “Involving someone else is a loose thread,” said the captain. “So, instead, our guy poisoned the money, hoping it would do the job, which it did. What did you mean about the killer feeling safe? Monk?”

  Monk had walked right past the plastic-covered painting and into the living room. “Mr. Smith took something from that garage, some piece of evidence he could send to the police or the guy’s wife or whatever … in case Harriman refused to be blackmailed.”

  “Sure,” said Devlin. “You always need leverage.”

  “So, the killer knows there’s evidence floating around. But he still feels safe enough to go through with his anonymous plan.”

  “So, what is this invisible evidence we haven’t been able to find?” I think I was speaking for everyone.

  “I’ll know it when I see it.”

  The rest of the morning was a fascinating type of torture. The four of us squeezed our way from room to room, avoiding contact with everything, staying out of Monk’s framed sight lines and, most important, keeping his eyes and mind away from anything remotely clownish.

  “Do you have any aspirin?” I asked Devlin as we made our way out of the living room. She didn’t. So I asked Stottlemeyer. “Aspirin, Cemedrin, Tylenol … ?” He didn’t either. What is it with cops? Don’t they ever need pain relievers?

  In the bathroom we had another close call when Monk opened a cabinet and found the top shelf lined with clown makeup. His face instantly froze. I called him Adrian and begged him to concentrate. But we only really got through the moment when Devlin suggested that he visualize it as Kabuki makeup.

  “Smith was a Japanese actor in traditional white face,” she said.

  “Or a drag queen,” Stottlemeyer said. “Maybe Smith did a drag show somewhere in the Castro. Don’t even think clown.”

  “Clown?” Monk gasped.

  “Not a clown,” I corrected him. “Think of a drag queen … who does Kabuki.”

  The two detectives managed to rush him out of the clown’s claustrophobic bathroom. I could hear him wheezing in the hall as they talked him down. Meanwhile, I had a head that was ready to explode.

  “Aspirin, Cemedrin, Tylenol …” I said to myself, repeating the words like a mantra. If I could just get hold of some aspirin, Cemedrin or Tylenol. And then I saw it. It was on the top shelf, beside the row of makeup. A single lifesaving bottle of Cemedrin lying sideways in a ziplock baggie.

  I was sorely tempted. That tells you just how much pain I was in. I was inches away from tampering with a crime scene and filching a couple of Cemedrin from the victim’s bathroom. My hand was halfway up to the baggie when a thought struck in the very back of my brain. Why did he keep his Cemedrin in a baggie? It struck but it didn’t stick.

  Suddenly I found the baggie in my hand, my other hand fiddling with the zipper. “Natalie, don’t.” I nearly jumped out of my skin.

  It was Monk, right behind me. He was focused now, not a whiff of fear or distraction about him. He held out his hand for the ziplocked bottle.

  “This is it,” he said, turning to face the others in the bathroom doorway. His face was triumphant. “I was distracted by some Kabuki drag queen’s makeup. That’s why I didn’t notice. Stupid, stupid.”

  “Notice what?” asked the captain.

  “This. A 2009 bottle of Cemedrin,” he announced. “Early 2009.”

  “If you’re telling me it’s past its expiration,” I said, “I don’t care.”

  “You should.” He was serious. “They redesigned the bottle in 2009. Four months later, they were forced to redesign it again. Do you remember why?”

  There was maybe a five-second pause. “Dear Lord,” said Stottlemeyer.

  “Oh, my God,” I said a second later. And to think, I’d been this close to taking one. “You don’t mean
…” My head began to throb even more.

  “What? People didn’t like the first design?” Devlin laughed. We didn’t laugh.

  She hadn’t been living in San Francisco back then, hadn’t lived through it. It was an FBI case that Monk hadn’t been involved with, given his testy relationship with the bureau at the time. If he had, the homicides might not have gone unsolved.

  “You never heard of the Cemedrin murders?” the captain asked his lieutenant. “Three deaths in one week, all in the Bay Area. It was like the Tylenol murders in Chicago back in the eighties.”

  “Yes, of course I’ve heard of them.”

  Everyone had. In response to the seven Tylenol deaths in Chicago, the industry had invented tamper-proof containers. Two decades later, some sicko copycat in San Francisco figured out how to bypass the plastic cap seals on a few bottles of Cemedrin and place them in stores. Two children and an older man died.

  I remembered it vividly. Julie was a senior, and at her high school, there were posters showing the bottle and telling everyone to turn them over to the FBI. Two more poisoned bottles were discovered, one in a grade-school nurse’s office.

  Cemedrin’s parent company nearly went bankrupt as a result. And the sicko was never caught, just like in Chicago.

  “It was a solid cyanide compound,” Monk told us, holding up the plastic baggie and the bottle. “If I’m not mistaken—and I’m not—that’s what’s in here.”

  “You’re saying this is what Dudley Smith found in the Harriman garage?” asked Devlin. “When he was changing into his … entertainer uniform.”

  Monk nodded. “John Harriman, maybe his wife, tampered with the bottles back in 2009 in the garage. Somehow he or she didn’t dispose of all the evidence. That’s how it is with garages. They’re insidious.”

  “And when Dudley Smith saw this, he knew what it was?” Devlin asked.

  “It was on every channel. In every paper,” said Stottlemeyer. “I would have recognized it myself if I hadn’t been so distracted by Monk getting so distracted.”

  “Now we know why the killer was willing to take a chance,” said Monk. “Without someone’s eyewitness testimony about finding the bottle, it doesn’t mean much.”