Mr. Monk and the Two Assistants

by Goldberg, Lee

  “Are you going to pay each of us ‘gals’ a full salary?”

  “Why would I pay you a full salary for only doing half the work? Get real.”

  “Okay, here’s the reality. I can barely live on what I get paid now working full-time for you,” I said. “I can’t live on half of that.”

  “You could get a second job,” Monk said.

  “I don’t want a second job,” I said.

  “Then you can use all of that free time to get your house in order,” Monk said. “God knows there’s plenty of organizing you can do.”

  “I’m not going to share my job, Mr. Monk.”

  “She came back, Natalie. The people who leave me almost never do. I can’t let her go now.”

  Emotionally, I could sympathize with his feelings. His father had abandoned him when Monk was a child and only recently reappeared. Monk lost his wife and was never going to get her back. And then Sharona, someone he relied on every day just to survive, abruptly left him. I’m no shrink, but it was obvious to me that he needed to bury his anger and accept her back in order to ease his own insecurities.

  Pretty perceptive, huh? Call me Dr. Natalie and give me my own TV show.

  But on a practical level, I had to face facts and so did he.

  “You’re not listening to me, Mr. Monk,” I said. “I can’t afford a fifty percent pay cut and I’m not going to juggle two jobs just to accommodate you.”

  “Then what am I supposed to do?”

  “Make a choice,” I said. “Sharona or me.”

  “That’s not fair,” Monk said.

  “Fair?” I said. “How can you stand there and talk to me about fair?”

  “Because I’m being rational and you’re not?”

  I wish I could say that I responded with a brilliant rejoinder that put him in his place and made him confront his own insensitivity. Instead, I totally reinforced his point of view by marching out of his house and slamming the door behind me.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Mr. Monk’s Assistant Takes a Trip

  I was fairly certain that I had a much closer relationship with Captain Stottlemeyer than Sharona had. I can’t say that was much of a consolation.

  Our mutual concern for Monk was what initially drew Stottlemeyer and me closer together. But what really changed things between us was his divorce. We didn’t date or anything—he just started to open up to me about his troubles.

  I guess there wasn’t anybody else he could unload on. He couldn’t turn to Lieutenant Disher, as that would have irreparably undermined Stottlemeyer’s authority in their professional relationship. And outside of Monk, he didn’t seem to have that many friends, at least not that I knew of.

  I was flattered that Stottlemeyer trusted me with his problems but, until Sharona showed up in Monk’s life again, I didn’t feel equally comfortable sharing my woes with him.

  But that day I went straight from Monk’s house to the captain’s office and told him everything that happened. I didn’t even mind that Disher listened in.

  “I’ve got to say, I never expected her to come back,” Stottlemeyer said, leaning back in his desk chair.

  “Sharona and I had this erotic tension between us,” Disher said, standing in the doorway. “A hot ‘will they/ won’t they’ thing.”

  “More like a ‘will never happen’ thing,” Stottlemeyer said.

  “It was palpable,” Disher said.

  “It sure was,” Stottlemeyer said.

  “So it was sort of like the relationship that we have,” I said to Disher.

  “It is?” he said.

  “A ‘will never happen’ thing,” I said.

  “Right,” he said. “But it’s searing. People can feel the heat.”

  “I sympathize with your situation, Natalie,” Stottlemeyer said. “But I don’t know what to tell you. It’s Monk’s decision and it’s going to be a hard one for him.”

  “You can help me,” I said.

  “I’m not going to choose sides,” Stottlemeyer said. “I’ve got a lot of respect for Sharona. She went through hell with Monk.”

  “I know that, and I don’t want you to get in the middle of this,” I said.

  “Then what do you want from me?”

  “I’d like you to find out the details of the murder that Trevor is accused of committing down in Los Angeles.”

  “I can do that,” Stottlemeyer said, then glanced at Disher. “Take care of it, Randy.”

  “You just said that you were.”

  “I am,” he said, “through you. It’s one of the privileges of being captain.”

  “So you should have said, ‘I’ll ask Randy if he can do that,’ ” Disher said. “And I would have checked my calendar.”

  Stottlemeyer just stared at him.

  “Which happens to be wide-open at the present moment, ” Disher said and went to his desk.

  Stottlemeyer turned to me. “Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”

  “That would be great,” I said.

  We went to a coffeehouse across the street, chatted a bit about his kids and how things were going with his girlfriend, a successful Realtor I’d inadvertently introduced him to in my disastrous attempt to turn Monk into a private eye, but that’s a long story.

  Stottlemeyer’s sons were doing well, the relationship with his girlfriend was moving comfortably along and he was happy and relaxed for the first time in ages.

  “Life is good,” he said.

  I was pleased for him. He’d had a rough year or two and deserved a little peace, at least as much as a guy who looks at dead bodies every day can have.

  When we returned to Stottlemeyer’s office, there were some faxes from the LAPD waiting for him on his desk. Stottlemeyer flipped through the pages while Disher and I sat and waited. After a moment or two, Stottlemeyer sighed and leaned back in his chair.

  “They’ve got a strong case here, Natalie.”

  “What does that mean?” I said.

  “They found Trevor’s fingerprints all over the house,” Stottlemeyer said.

  “Of course they did,” I said. “He worked there.”

  “He worked outside,” Stottlemeyer said. “Why would the mow-and-blow guy’s fingerprints be inside the house?”

  Oh. Right. So much for my detective skills.

  “Maybe he was one of those full-service landscapers,” Disher said, “and was also watering her houseplants.”

  “That’s possible,” I said.

  “No, it’s not,” Stottlemeyer said. “The police also found jewelry belonging to the victim hidden in his truck.”

  “So you’re telling me he gets caught by the lady as he’s stealing her jewelry, he kills her and, instead of getting the hell out of there, he sticks around to gather up the bling?” I asked. “Doesn’t that seem odd to you?”

  “Not really,” Stottlemeyer said. “That’s why he was in the house to start with.”

  “But then he leaves the incriminating evidence in his truck instead of ditching it the first chance he got?” I said. “How stupid is this guy?”

  “The jewelry was too valuable to throw away,” Stottlemeyer said. “He couldn’t bring himself to do it, especially after what it cost him to get. He was only holding on to it until he could sell it on eBay.”

  “Did Trevor have an alibi?” I asked.

  “He claims he was parked in his truck on the side of a road somewhere, having burgers with a couple members of his crew at the time of the murder.”

  “There you go,” I said. “He has witnesses who can prove he’s innocent.”

  “His crew was usually day laborers he’d pick up on Sepulveda Boulevard and pay in cash. He didn’t know any of them. They were all Hector and Jésus to him, if you know what I mean.”

  “They were illegal aliens,” I said.

  Stottlemeyer nodded. “If these corroborating witnesses exist, which I sincerely doubt, they’re in another state or back over the border by now. The last thing they’d want to do is get involved in a
murder investigation.”

  “So that’s it?” I said.

  “Until the trial and the likely conviction, yeah, that’s it,” he said. “What’s it to you?”

  “I don’t know Sharona at all, but if she’s the woman you’ve all told me that she is, I have to believe that as bad as her taste in men might be, she wouldn’t marry a guy, have a child with him, divorce him, then remarry him if he was capable of murder.”

  “I have to agree with Natalie on that, Captain,” Disher said.

  “How can you agree with something that doesn’t make any sense at all?” Stottlemeyer said to him.

  “I have faith in Sharona’s instincts,” Disher said, “even if she may not have it herself.”

  Stottlemeyer looked at Disher as if he was seeing him for the first time. “I’ll be damned.”

  “Could you arrange for me to see Trevor?” I asked.

  Stottlemeyer shifted his gaze to me. “Why would you want to do that?”

  “I want to hear his side of the story.”

  He studied me for a long moment. “Okay, I suppose I can do that.”

  “You mean that I can,” Disher said.

  “I meant that I could,” Stottlemeyer said.

  “So how am I supposed to know when you say, ‘I can do that,’ whether you really mean that I can do that, as in me not you?” Disher said.

  “Have faith in your instincts,” Stottlemeyer said; then he turned to me. “I’ve never met Trevor, but judging by his rap sheet, he’s done a lot of stupid things. Sometimes you mix stupid and bad luck and you get murder. Do you really think that he’s innocent and that Monk can help him, or are you just afraid of losing your job?”

  “I’m exercising my right to remain silent,” I said, “to avoid self-incrimination.”

  “You haven’t been arrested,” Disher said, “or charged with a crime.”

  “That’s true,” Stottlemeyer said, reaching for his phone. “But she’s guilty.”

  He was right.

  It only takes about an hour to fly down to LA and you can get cheap flights leaving out of Oakland Airport all day long. So I arranged for the mother of one of Julie’s friends to pick up her up after school and take care of her until I got back that night.

  Julie was going to be upset that I was reneging on my promise to take her out to look for advertising clients, but I’d make it up to her.

  I drove over the Bay Bridge to Oakland, stowed my car in short-term parking and took a Southwest Airlines flight to the Burbank airport, which was closer to downtown LA than LAX was.

  On the plane, I thought about what I wanted to ask Trevor and couldn’t come up with anything. I was somewhere over San Jose when I realized that this was a pointless trip, but it was too late to turn back.

  So I thought instead about the real reason I was going. About my relationship with Monk. And, for some reason, my mind kept wandering to the Cement Ship.

  In the 1970s, my parents bought a painting of the Cement Ship at a gallery in Capitola, a quaint seaside village not far from where I grew up in Monterey. They hung the painting in the living room over the fireplace and I’ve spent countless hours just sitting and staring at it.

  On those rare occasions when I visited my parents, I’d curl up in front of the painting with a hot cup of coffee and gaze at the ship like it was the view out of a window.

  The Cement Ship was actually a shipwreck at the end of a fishing pier in Aptos, a beach town between Monterey and Capitola. The real name of the ship was the Palo Alto, one of two concrete tankers constructed in San Francisco during World War One.

  I’ve often wondered whose brilliant idea it was to build a cement ship.

  Why not one made of bricks, too?

  How could they have been surprised when the thing didn’t float?

  Okay, that’s not entirely true.

  It floated. Once.

  The Palo Alto made one short voyage before she was towed down to the Monterey Bay seventy-five years ago and deliberately beached to become a dance hall.

  A couple years later, the ship was torn apart by a big storm, and the wreckage has been left there to rot ever since.

  The Cement Ship on the canvas above my parents’ fireplace was a broken hulk, fading into the mist like a lost memory.

  It enthralled me.

  Monk couldn’t look at it. For one thing, just looking at the ocean, even in a painting, made him seasick. But I think what bothered him the most was that it was a shipwreck. It was something that needed to be put back together but was instead forever captured in the painting in a state of disorder.

  For Monk that image was like what Kryptonite is for Superman, or what a crucifix is to a vampire.

  It was a painting of a mess that could never be cleaned up, a thought Monk simply could not reconcile himself with. We had to cover the painting with a sheet whenever he visited the house.

  For me, I found peace in the Cement Ship. It relaxed me and centered me somehow. Sure, the painting was creepy, and a little bit sad, but there was a beauty in it, too.

  The Peralta, the sister ship of the Palo Alto, was also a wreck. It was one of ten rotting ships strung together to form a breakwater on the Powell River in British Columbia. I’ve never seen it, but I wonder sometimes if anyone has ever done a painting of it.

  If so, I’d like to have it.

  There’s something I find beautiful, captivating, and scary about shipwrecks. But the Cement Ship wasn’t just any shipwreck. It was my shipwreck.

  Sometimes, it felt like my life was a cement ship and that I was constantly battling not to end up beached.

  Maybe Monk’s life was a cement ship, too.

  We were the Palo Alto and the Peralta, leaving port together in San Francisco.

  And I believed that if we were separated now, we’d both become grounded somewhere and end up slowly eroded by the relentless surf.

  I arrived in Burbank in time for lunch, but I didn’t have time to go out to eat, so I bought an overpriced bag of potato chips and a Diet Coke in the terminal. It’s a good thing I don’t gain weight easily. I wolfed down that healthy snack on my way outside of the airport, where I snagged a taxi and told the driver to take me to the jail downtown. Between the plane ticket and the taxi fare, I’d burned through most of my personal fortune.

  Captain Stottlemeyer had called ahead and arranged everything for me, so things went very smoothly. The security staff was expecting me and my pass was ready. So after I went through security, which was almost as tight as what I’d gone through at the Oakland airport, I was led directly to the visiting room.

  It was just like what you’ve seen on TV. The room was divided by a Plexiglas wall with cubicles on either side. Each cubicle had a telephone receiver attached to a long cord. It could have been 1967. You’d think they’d have come up with something more sleek and high-tech since then, something like those force fields they used in the brig on Star Trek. I was lost in big thoughts like that when Trevor sat down on the other side of the Plexiglas, startling me.