Mr. Monk and the Blue Flu

by Lee Goldberg

  Porter wore an oversize cardigan sweater, a checkered shirt, and corduroy pants with crumbs caught in the ridges. His head reminded me of a vacant lot, dry and empty, with weedy patches of rangy hair. Drool spilled over the edge of his thin, chapped lips like water over an earthen dam.

  “Frank Porter, reporting for duty.” He offered me his age-spotted hand.

  “I’m Natalie Teeger, Captain Monk’s assistant.” I shook his hand lightly, feeling all twenty-seven brittle bones under his thin skin like twigs wrapped in tissue. “I’m not a police officer.”

  “Technically, neither am I. This is my granddaughter Sparrow,” Porter said. “I guess you could say she’s my assistant. She looks out for me.”

  Sparrow shrugged. “Beats slinging burgers at McDonald’s.”

  “I hear you,” I said.

  Sparrow was barely out of her teens, wore too much eyeliner, had a dozen studs lining each of her ears, and was working really hard to radiate boredom and discontent. I knew the look. I’d perfected it when I was her age.

  I excused myself and hunted Monk down. He wasn’t in the interrogation room anymore. I found him in the evidence room, sitting at a table, looking at three right-foot running shoes that must have been recovered from the dead women. Each shoe was in a plastic evidence bag, and they were laid out in front of him in a vertical row.

  “I can’t live with this,” Monk said.

  It was true that three innocent women had been killed, but this wasn’t the first time Monk had dealt with murder. I didn’t understand why these deaths were affecting him so strongly.

  “What happened to those women is a terrible thing,” I agreed. “But is this really any different from the other murder cases you’ve solved?”

  “I’ve never seen such depravity. This is a crime against nature,” he said. “Wasn’t it enough to take their lives? Did he have to take one of their shoes, too? He’s upset the entire balance of the universe.”

  “By taking three shoes?”

  “Shoes come in sets of two; that’s the natural order,” Monk said. “Until those shoes are recovered and this madman is caught, life as we know it is over.”

  “So you’re saying that not only do you have to catch a killer—you have to restore the balance of the entire universe.”

  “It’s my awesome responsibility now.”

  “At least you’re not putting too much pressure on yourself,” I said. “One of your detectives is here.”

  Monk rose from the table and pointed at the shoes. “That is going to haunt my every waking moment.”

  “I believe it,” I said.

  “And my unawake moments,” he said as he walked out. “And the nanoseconds in between.”

  I followed Monk into the squad room, where he strode right up to Porter and Sparrow with a smile on his face.

  “Hello, Frank,” Monk said. “It’s been a long time.”

  “You two know each other?” I asked.

  “Frank is one of the best investigators I’ve ever met,” Monk said. “He can follow a paper trail to the tree it was milled from.”

  I’d never heard Monk lavish such praise on anyone’s detective skills. Except his own, of course. I’d also never heard him use such a colorful metaphor. Or any metaphor, for that matter.

  “Really?” I asked. “To the actual tree?”

  “Of course,” Monk said. “Why else would I have said it?”

  “I thought it might be a figure of speech.”

  Monk looked at me as if I were insane.

  “I haven’t had a bowel movement in three days,” Porter announced. “I need an enema.”

  “Now?” Monk’s voice trembled.

  “I can’t think when I’m stuffed up.”

  “No one is asking you to think.” Monk looked at me. “Did you ask him to think?”

  Porter narrowed his eyes at Monk. “I remember you. You’re the nut job who kept reorganizing my desk.”

  Monk smiled. “Those were good times.”

  “He’s afraid of milk,” Porter said to Sparrow.

  “You are?” she said, momentarily showing interest in something besides looking uninterested. “Why?”

  “It’s a bodily fluid in a glass that some twisted person intends to drink.” Monk cringed just thinking about it. “It’s unnatural.”

  “It’s the most natural thing on earth,” Sparrow said. “Babies suckle their mother’s breasts for milk. That’s what breasts are for.”

  “I breast-fed Julie,” I said.

  Monk flushed with embarrassment and looked away from me.

  “Maybe you were breast-fed, Mr. Monk,” I said.

  “That’s impossible. I wouldn’t drink my own bodily fluids—why would I drink someone else’s?”

  “Breasts aren’t just a fashion accessory,” Sparrow said. I was beginning to like this kid. Until she lifted her shirt and flashed Monk.

  I thought Monk might scream. I noticed that her ears weren’t the only thing she’d pierced.

  Porter slapped the desktop. “What’s my assignment?”

  Monk filled Porter in on the Golden Gate Strangler case and asked him to double-check the victims’ credit card purchases. He also asked Porter to put together a board with all the crime scene photos and a map indicating where each murder took place.

  “Gladly,” Porter said. “And you are?”

  “Adrian Monk.”

  “I remember you,” Porter said, and glanced at Sparrow. “He’s afraid of milk.”

  Sparrow sighed—the sound was infused with all the frustration, boredom, and weariness she could possibly muster. She almost broke out in a sweat from the effort.

  Officer Curtis walked up and handed Monk a slip of paper. “There’s been a homicide in Haight-Ashbury. There’s a detective waiting for you at the scene.”

  “Who’s the victim?” Monk asked.

  “Allegra Doucet, an astrologer,” Officer Curtis said. “You’d think she would have seen it coming.”

  5

  Mr. Monk and the Astrologer

  Ever since the mid-1960s, Haight-Ashbury has been mythologized as ground zero of the counterculture movement, home of psychedelic drugs, free-spirited sex, flower children, and the Grateful Dead. A lot of effort went into maintaining the illusion that it hasn’t changed, even though Jerry Garcia is dead, the Vietnam War is over, and Mick Jagger is getting the senior-citizen discount at Denny’s.

  The Haight today is the sixties packaged and sanitized for retail sale. The street is lined with stores selling vintage clothing, “underground” comics, used records, and incense and crystals; and there are even a few head shops where you can buy tie-dyed shirts and Deadhead souvenirs for the folks back home in Wichita. What little edge there is comes from the tattoo parlors, bondage emporiums, and stores with fetish paraphernalia, but let’s face it, even kink has become mainstream these days.

  Even so, it’s possible to fool yourself into thinking you’ve hurtled back in time to the summer of 1967, but the illusion is shattered if you wander onto the side streets, where the real estate values of the restored Victorian and Edwardian homes are in the millions, and most of the parking spots are taken by Range Rovers and BMWs. These flower children downloaded their free love from the Internet and got a psychedelic high from bidding on eBay.

  The late Allegra Doucet lived on a side street that hadn’t been completely gentrified. A few houses and shops remained that looked as if they hadn’t been painted since Jefferson Starship was still an Airplane. Doucet’s wasn’t one of them. Her Victorian house was freshly painted blue with white trim. It had wide bay windows above flower boxes brimming with colorful, blooming roses. A sign in the window said ALLEGRA DOUCET—ASTROLOGER AND SEER. BY APPOINTMENT ONLY, in elegant calligraphy.

  When we drove up, the street in front of her house was clogged with police vehicles, a coroner’s wagon, and a van from the scientific investigation unit. I didn’t bother trying to find a place to park. Monk was the captain now, so I just stopped in
the middle of the street, handed the keys for my Jeep Cherokee to a police officer, and told him to make sure nothing happened to the captain’s ride.

  Monk hurried out of the car while I was talking to the officer. He hadn’t looked at me since I mentioned at the station that I had breasts. I think he preferred to think of me as some kind of asexual creature.

  He was met outside Doucet’s door by a striking Asian woman in her thirties with sharp features and a piercing gaze that gave her an unsettling intensity. She was dressed entirely in black except for the SFPD badge hanging from her neck, the cap of aluminum foil on her head, and the transistor radio attached to it with duct tape. I could hear the low, static crackle of the local news from the speaker. I didn’t think it was taped to her head so she could keep up on current events.

  A bespectacled man stood beside her, completely absorbed in whatever he was rapidly text-messaging into his PDA. He looked like he’d fallen out of bed onto the pile of clothes he wore yesterday and decided, what the hell, he’d wear them another day. He wore an untucked, unbuttoned, wrinkled blue oxford over a wrinkled red T-shirt and wrinkled cargo pants. There was something undeniably academic about him. I don’t know whether it was the glasses, the rumpled clothes, or just a general sense of studiousness.

  “Who are you?” she asked Monk, her voice barely above a whisper.

  Monk cocked his head and studied her with scientific curiosity.

  “I’m Adrian Monk,” he said.

  “Prove it,” she said.

  Monk pulled out his badge and proudly showed it to me, to her, and to the man at her side.

  “A badge like that can be bought in Union Square for spit,” she said. “If you really are who you say you are, then you won’t object to giving me a swab of your DNA to confirm it.”

  She reached into the inside pocket of her leather jacket and pulled out a long Q-tip in a sterile package. This action inspired a flurry of excited thumb-typing by the guy beside her.

  “You must be Detective Cindy Chow,” I said.

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “Who do you work for?”

  I tipped my head to Monk. “Him. Your boss. The captain of homicide.”

  “She’s my assistant, Natalie Teeger,” Monk said.

  “Who do you really work for?” Chow asked me.

  “Nice hat,” I said.

  “It’s crude but it effectively blocks the signal.” She smiled. “And that just frustrates the hell out of you and your puppet masters, doesn’t it?”

  Monk looked incredulously in my general direction, but not exactly at me. He still hadn’t forgotten I had breasts. “She’s a detective?”

  “You’re the one who didn’t want to read the files,” I said.

  “What files?” Chow said.

  The guy standing next to her couldn’t input this stuff into his PDA fast enough.

  “Who is your buddy?” I asked.

  The man paused in his typing. “Oh, I’m sorry. I should have said something, but I was trying not to influence the natural course of the interaction. I’m Jasper Perry, Cindy’s psychiatric nurse.”

  “You can drop the charade,” Chow said. “I know you both work for them.”

  “Them?” Monk said.

  “The extraterrestrials occupying the shadow government,” she said, getting a blank look from him. “The ones who designed the CIA’s Operation Artichoke program to control the masses with fast food laced with mind-control drugs, subliminal messages in television shows, and transmissions from orbiting satellites to microchips implanted in our brains.”

  “Oh,” Monk said. “Them.”

  “They wouldn’t let me back on the force unless I agreed to let their spy here dope me up and keep me under constant surveillance.”

  “I’m curious about something,” Monk said. “When you got your badge back, did it also come with a gun?”

  “Of course,” she replied. “Didn’t yours?”

  “No,” Monk said.

  “I’m not surprised,” Chow said. “Word is that you’re nuts.”

  I turned to Jasper, who was giving his thumbs a workout on his PDA keyboard. “Who are you e-mailing?”

  “I’m sending notes to myself.”

  “About what?”

  “Me,” Chow said. “Letting his handlers know about everything I think, say, and do.”

  “Actually, I’m doing my doctoral thesis on the commonality of certain facets of complex, recurring conspiratorial delusions, which form an almost Jungian shared unconscious among paranoid schizophrenics, regardless of language, race, sex, or ethnicity, but that and this is the really surprising thing—incorporates mythological iconography from—”

  “Where’s the body?” Monk interrupted.

  “Inside,” Chow said.

  Monk went into the house, and we all followed, though Jasper looked a little hurt that we’d so quickly lost interest in the topic of his doctoral thesis, whatever the hell it was.

  The front room of Doucet’s house was devoted to her business, but there was nothing about the sleek, contemporary decor that was related to astrology. No crystal balls or tarot cards. No beaded curtains or incense. This could easily have been the office of a shrink, a lawyer, or an accountant. There were two leather chairs facing a white wooden desk with a keyboard and a flat-screen monitor on top. The computer screen displayed a circle filled with multicolored numbers, crisscrossing lines, and strange symbols.

  Doucet was facedown on the floor, her long black hair fanned out around her head and stuck in the brownish pool of dried blood.

  When Officer Curtis said that the homicide victim was an astrologer, I immediately imagined a clichéd old crone with warts, cataracts, and a toothless grin.

  But Doucet could have been a fashion model. She had smooth, darkly tanned skin, a slim figure, and was impeccably dressed in a Prada suit with the skirt cut just a bit too short to be professional.

  Monk walked around her desk, tilting his head this way and that, holding his hands in front of him as if framing a shot for a movie. His footsteps echoed on the hardwood floor.

  Jasper watched Monk in fascination. “What is he doing?”

  “His thing,” I said.

  My gaze was on the Louis Vuitton handbag on a side table. The bag was worth more than my car. Doucet must have been very good at her job. I wondered if the money came from her clients or from using her soothsaying powers to successfully wager on stocks, horses, and the lottery.

  “The ME says she was killed sometime last night, stabbed multiple times in the chest and stomach with an ice pick or letter opener,” Chow said, standing behind the computer monitor. “One of her clients came by this morning, peeked in the window, and saw her body.”

  Monk looked at the image on the computer screen. “What is this?”

  Chow took out a mirror from her pocket. She reached over the monitor and angled the mirror so she could see the reflection of what was on the screen.

  “Why don’t you just look at the screen?” I asked her.

  “Because I don’t want it looking back at me.”

  I had no idea what she was talking about. Jasper seemed to sense my confusion.

  “Her fear is that computers allow the government to spy on us,” Jasper whispered to me. “That they log our keystrokes and watch us from cameras hidden in the screens.”

  “It’s a computer-generated, personal astrological star chart based on how the planets and stars were aligned at the precise time and location of a person’s birth,” Chow explained to Monk. “The symbols represent zodiac signs, planets, and elements like fire, earth, air, and water. The circle is broken into sections called houses, representing different aspects of your physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional life. She could look at this, figure in the current alignment of the planets, and advance the chart mathematically to predict whether this is a good week to ask your boss for a raise.”

  “You’re very knowledgeable about horoscopes,” Monk said. “Do you believe in astrology?�
�

  “Hell, no,” she said. “But they do.”

  “They?” Monk asked.

  “Them,” she said.

  “Oh,” Monk said.

  “There are probably hundreds of charts just like this one on her hard drive,” Chow said. “Every client will have one.”

  “I’d like to know who those clients are. Maybe one of them had a motive,” Monk said. “Do you think you could find out?”

  Monk was a deductive genius and had an incredible eye for detail, but I’d never seen him do any digging for facts. He gladly left that grunt work to others.

  “I can tell you who they are, who they’re sleeping with, how they voted in the last election, and if they pick their noses while they drive their cars.”

  “People clean their noses while operating heavy machinery?” Monk said incredulously. “Yeah, right.”

  Monk shot me a look and rolled his eyes. As far as he was concerned, that was the craziest thing Chow had said yet. It was so crazy to him that he forgot he was afraid to look at me.

  “I think her murder could be part of something much, much bigger,” she said.

  “Here it comes,” Jasper said.

  “Her scrutiny of the alignment of stars and planets on someone’s chart led her to accidentally discover the date, time, and location of an alien landing,” Chow said. “So they immediately dispatched a local agent to kill her.”

  “They?” I asked.

  “Them,” she replied.

  But Monk wasn’t listening anymore. Something had distracted him. He walked into the center of the room, head at an angle, his hands held up in front of him.

  “Do you hear that?” he asked.

  “What?” I said.

  “A low whine,” Monk said. “No, a whistle. A whistling whine.”

  “I don’t hear anything,” Chow said.

  “Maybe you could if you turned down your radio,” Jasper said.

  “Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Chow said accusingly. “You can’t wait to get inside my head again.”

  “Ssshhh,” Monk said.

  We were all silent. I heard the hum of the computer, the voices from Chow’s radio, and a sound that I recognized immediately.