Mr. Monk and the Two Assistants

by Goldberg, Lee

  I was really troubled about Sharona coming back into Monk’s life. I won’t lie to you, I felt threatened.

  Monk wasn’t an easy man to work with. I was hired to take care of him, to be his caretaker, his driver, his shopper, his secretary and his companion. It was a real struggle at first.

  Over time, though, that relationship had changed and things got easier for both of us. I wasn’t just taking care of him anymore—he was taking care of me, too. I had come to rely on Monk, and he on me, in ways that went beyond employer and employee.

  If you set aside Monk’s phobias and hang-ups, we had a lot in common. We’d both lost a spouse to a violent death— my husband, Mitch, was a Navy pilot shot down in Kosovo. I never found out exactly what happened to Mitch and Monk is still haunted by his wife Trudy’s unsolved murder.

  When Monk and I met, we were both reeling from our losses and trying to cope. We still were, but at least we had each other to lean on. We understood each other’s pain without having to explain a thing. It was nice to know that someone did and that meant a lot to me. It made me feel less alone and I think it did for him, too.

  Monk had also become the only dependable, constant man in my daughter’s life since Mitch was killed. Sure, I’d dated some men, but there hadn’t been any real romances (though I almost fell for a firefighter once, a guy named Joe Cochran, who still pursues me. Sometimes I wish I’d let myself get caught, but I was afraid I’d lose him to a fire the way I lost Mitch to a war). I didn’t introduce Julie to many of the men and I never brought any of them home to spend the night. I didn’t want Julie to get attached to a man only to have her heart broken when he left.

  I never thought that she’d see Monk as anything but my strange boss or that she would come to care for him so much. I guess that, despite all his eccentricities, Julie knew she could count on him.

  Monk was the ultimate creature of habit and a man who strenuously resisted change. Sometimes, where kids are concerned, that can be a good thing.

  The three of us spent a lot of time together doing mundane, domestic things that had nothing to do with my job. It was comfortable, and it was safe, and I didn’t want to lose it.

  And I knew that I would if Monk fired me and gave Sharona her old job back.

  But Sharona had a big edge over me. She was the one who’d saved Monk and she always would be. No matter how long I worked for him, or how close we became, I couldn’t beat that. He’d forgive her for just about anything. I would always be in second position.

  It scared me.

  But like Julie said, I’m a Teeger. I wasn’t going down without a fight. And I’d pretty much decided at the hospital that my relationship with Adrian Monk was something worth fighting for.

  I would have gladly let Julie stay home from school on Monday but she insisted on going anyway. I think she wanted to show off her cast and prove how tough she was, which was fine by me. I promised to take her around our bohemian Noe Valley neighborhood that night to offer the merchants along Twenty-fourth Street the chance to advertise on her arm. In the meantime, Julie was going to give some thought to the advertising rates she wanted to charge.

  I thought she had a pretty good chance of finding some takers. We were living in San Francisco, after all, where people enthusiastically embraced the weird, the radical and the crazy. It was no wonder that Monk was so comfortable here and found so much around him that needed straightening, balancing and organizing.

  San Francisco. Home of the crookedest street in the world and Adrian Monk. Somehow that just seemed right to me and was proof that God has a terrific sense of humor.

  I dropped Julie off at school and headed straight to Monk’s apartment on Pine. There was an old, beat-up Volvo station wagon in my spot with a hospital-employee parking permit stuck to the windshield.

  I found the symbolic value of that very unnerving. Sharonacertainly hadn’t wasted any time moving in on me. This was going to be war. I could see that now.

  I flung open Monk’s front door and marched in like a jealous wife hoping to catch her husband cheating on her.

  The two of them were sitting at Monk’s dining room table, eating bowls of Wheat Chex, without milk, of course. Monk was afraid of milk, even when it was in someone else’s bowl.

  “Perfect timing, Natalie,” Monk said. “Sharona just stopped by with breakfast. She brought Chex!”

  “How nice,” I said, meaning, of course, How terrible.

  “I was on my way home from work and thought I’d drop in and say hello,” Sharona said. “I know Adrian can always use more Chex.”

  “You just finished work?” Monk asked. “But it’s nine a.m.”

  “The Sunday hell shift was the only one I could get,” Sharona said. “All the good ones were already taken by nurses with more seniority than I have. But what could I do? I needed the job.”

  Which I was sure was her oh so subtle way of saying she wanted her old one back. It was bad enough she was bribing Monk with Chex.

  “So who got Benji off to school?” Monk asked.

  “My sister. We’re living with her until I can get on my feet again,” Sharona said. “But with Trevor’s legal problems, that could be a while.”

  “I thought you’d turned your back on him,” I said.

  “I did, but we still have a joint bank account and he’s already taken what little we had left in our savings to pay his defense lawyer.”

  “I’m sure Mr. Monk could help,” I said.

  “I couldn’t borrow money from Adrian,” Sharona said.

  “No,” Monk said, “you couldn’t.”

  “What I meant was that you wouldn’t have to live with your sister, or pay any legal fees, if Mr. Monk gets Trevor out of prison,” I said, turning to Monk. “You don’t have any cases right now anyway.”

  “If Sharona says he’s guilty,” Monk said, “then I’m sure he is.”

  “How do you know?” I said.

  “Because the police arrested him and he’s in jail,” Monk said. “That means he’s guilty until proven innocent.”

  “It’s the other way around,” I said.

  “Not in this case,” Monk said.

  “You haven’t even looked at the evidence,” I said.

  “Nobody has asked him to,” Sharona said.

  “Maybe somebody should,” I said.

  “Maybe somebody should butt out of things that are none of her business,” Sharona said.

  “Mr. Monk has figured out murders that everyone else thought would be impossible to solve.”

  “I know,” Sharona said tightly, “because I was at his side for most of them.”

  “You were there for the early, less interesting cases before he really hit his stride,” I said. “I’ve worked closely with him on the classic mysteries that have made him famous. They even tried to make a movie out of one of them—the one with the astronaut whose alibi for the murder of his lover was that he was orbiting the earth in the space shuttle.”

  “I heard about that,” Sharona said. “But wasn’t Adrian’s assistant in the movie going to be an Asian-American hot-tie with incredible martial-arts skills?”

  I like Chinese food, I’m easy on the eyes and I can throw a mean punch, so it wasn’t that big of a change for the movie. But even so, screw her for mentioning it.

  “The point I’m trying to make is that solving your husband’s case would be a no-brainer for Monk,” I said. “Why don’t you want your husband to be freed?”

  “You don’t know the first thing about me or Trevor,” she said.

  “I know he’s in jail and you want to keep him there,” I said.

  “So do I,” Monk said. “He’s a threat to society.”

  He was a threat to Monk. If Trevor got out of prison, it would mean Sharona would leave Monk again. Monk was so selfish, he’d rather let an innocent man rot in prison than jeopardize his own comfort.

  “His whole life Trevor has been a scammer and a petty thief, always looking for the scheme that would make
him rich,” Sharona said. “He’d take advantage of anyone, even his own family, to do it. I told you he had this landscaping business, right? Well, he’d go back to the houses when no one was there, break in and steal stuff. Then he’d sell the stolen goods on eBay—under his own name.”

  “If he’s such a dimwit,” I said, “what did you see in him?”

  “He’s not stupid. He just doesn’t think,” she said. “There’s a difference. The problem with Trevor is that he lives entirely in the moment. He never considers the consequences. That’s also part of his charm. I certainly fell for it. Twice.”

  “She has terrible taste in men,” Monk said. “She once dated someone in the Syndicate.”

  “The Syndicate?” I said.

  “It’s how we law enforcement professionals refer to organized crime,” Monk said.

  “If you were a cop in 1975,” Sharona said.

  “Trevor doesn’t sound very dangerous to me,” I said. “What makes you think he’s a killer?”

  “Because he killed someone,” Sharona replied testily. “A woman he worked for came home early and caught him in her house. He panicked, grabbed a lamp and hit her with it. I’m sure he didn’t mean to kill her. But that doesn’t excuse what he did.”

  “What he did was unforgivable,” Monk said. “Luring you away to New Jersey with his smooth talk and false promises, forcing you to abandon the people who needed you most, plunging them into the impenetrable darkness and despair that lies in the pitiful depths of their tormented souls.”

  Monk noticed us both staring at him and then hastily added, “And Trevor murdered someone, which is also very bad.”

  Sharona glanced at me. “You know what? It’s a lot later than I thought. I’d better be going.”

  She was right about that.

  “What’s the rush?” Monk said. “We could measure my ice cubes to be sure they are perfectly square. Remember how you loved to do that every morning?”

  “You loved it, Adrian,” Sharona said. “For me, it was a chore.”

  “And what’s the definition of a chore?” Monk said, like he was asking everyone to sing along. “Something you love to do.”

  “I don’t think so,” Sharona said.

  “It’s in the dictionary,” Monk said. “Look it up.”

  “Okay, let’s do that,” Sharona said. “Go get your dictionary. I’ll wait.”

  Monk grinned at me. “Isn’t she a kidder? This was our thing, this witty repartee. We’ve fallen right back into it as if she’d never thoughtlessly abandoned me. We fit like a comfortable pair of new shoes.”

  “Don’t you mean old shoes?” she said.

  “Who would want to put on old shoes?” Monk said, shaking his head and looking at me. “See what I mean? This is gold. You should really be writing this down.”

  Maybe I should just have fallen to my knees and genuflected in front of her, too. I didn’t say that of course, but the gist of my thoughts must have been evident on my face, at least to Sharona. She picked up her handbag and headed quickly for the door.

  “I’ve really got to go,” Sharona said. “If I don’t leave now, I’ll fall asleep at the wheel.”

  “You need to get a new job,” Monk said.

  “Like what?” Sharona asked, pausing at the door. “Supermodel? Chef? International spy? This is all I know how to do.”

  “You could go back to being a private nurse,” Monk said. “You could devote yourself to the simple needs of a single, disinfected person as opposed to dozens of unwashed strangers who spew germs and bodily fluids all over you.”

  I stared at him in disbelief. Did he really just say what I thought he said? Didn’t he see me standing there? Didn’t he care at all about my feelings?

  Obviously, the answers were yes, no and no.

  If those were the questions on a test measuring sensitivity and basic decency, Monk would have just flunked.

  “That’s a big responsibility, one I’m not sure I can handle right now,” Sharona said. “But I’ll think about it, Adrian. See you around.”

  And then she left.

  See you around? What did she mean by that?

  It’s not like they lived in the same neighborhood or moved in the same social circles. They weren’t going to just bump into each other at the grocery store while Monk was reorganizing every bottle of wine by date and shape.

  The only way she was going to see him was if she planned it. And yet, less than twenty-four hours earlier, she was hiding from Monk. Now she was promising to be a regular character in his life again. What had changed?

  I’ll tell you what changed. She discovered that, contrary to her fears, Monk didn’t hate her for abandoning him. And that fact opened up all kinds of possibilities she hadn’t considered before, like re-creating her old life in San Francisco as if the last few years hadn’t happened . . . as if I hadn’t happened.

  “Isn’t it great that she’s back?” Monk said.

  “I’m overcome with joy.”

  “I’m sensing a little resentment from you,” he said.

  “Really?” I said. “You must be a detective.”

  "What do you have to be upset about on such a happy, happy day?”

  “That,” I said, pointing at him. “You’re absolutely giddy.”

  “You don’t like to see me happy?”

  “Of course I do, Mr. Monk. I just don’t like what this burst of joy implies.”

  “That I’m not sad?”

  I couldn’t believe how dense he was. “Has your life been that miserable with me as your assistant?”

  “No more miserable than usual,” he said.

  “Then why do you want to fire me?”

  “I don’t,” he said.

  “Twice now, right in front of me, you’ve not so subtly offered Sharona my job.”

  “How can you say that? I couldn’t possibly fire you,” he said. “Not after everything we’ve been through together.”

  I felt tears welling up in my eyes. “Really?”

  “I need you in my life, Natalie. Don’t you know that by now?”

  “You don’t know what a relief that is to me and how much I needed to hear you say that,” I said, feeling embarrassed, ashamed and stupid. How could I have so seriously misjudged him? “When I saw how thrilled you were that Sharona was back, I was sure that you were going to give her my job.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Monk said. “There’s plenty of me for both of you.”

  My heart skipped a beat. “What do you mean by that?”

  “You can share me,” Monk said. “I’ve always needed more time and attention than one person can give. This is the perfect solution.”

  “You want to hire us both as your assistants?”

  “Isn’t that wonderful? You could alternate days. Or days and nights. Or weeks. I’m a flexible guy. I’m sure you two gals will work it out.”

  I wiped the tears from my eyes and felt my cheeks flushing with anger.