Mr. Monk and the Two Assistants

by Goldberg, Lee

  Before I met Monk, I never noticed details like that. Then again, before I met Monk, I never imagined anybody ran their doorknobs through the dishwasher every week.

  The bed faced a flat-screen TV mounted on the wall above a waist-high entertainment center.

  On one side of the room was a set of French doors that opened out onto a backyard patio. On the other was a wall lined with a dresser and vanity.

  Monk stood by Ellen Cole’s dresser, studying the blood-stained carpet at his feet.

  “We found her laying right there,” Dozier said. “The back of her head was a bloody mess.”

  “Could you show me exactly what her position was on the floor?” Monk said.

  Dozier hiked up his pants and curled up on the floor, facing the dresser, careful not to actually lay his head on the bloodstain.

  Monk crouched beside Dozier and studied the detective’s position. Then he got up. He held his hands out in front of him, palms up, as if warming himself by a fire, and did a little pirouette, coming to a stop facing the closet.

  He went over to the closet and opened the double doors.

  The clothes that were hanging on the wooden bar had been pushed aside. Behind the clothes, there were several file boxes stacked against the back wall. On the floor, there were shoes, which had been cleared away to make room for one of the boxes.

  Monk shook his head and groaned.

  “What’s wrong, Adrian?” Sharona asked.

  "Everything,” Monk said sadly. “Trevor didn’t kill Ellen Cole.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Mr. Monk Takes the Case

  I was glad that I was right about Trevor and relieved that my job might no longer be in jeopardy. But at the same time I felt terrible for Sharona, who sat down on the edge of Ellen’s bed and hugged herself.

  “Oh my God,” she said softly, “what have I done?”

  Dozier scrambled to his feet. “He’s wrong.”

  Sharona shook her head. “He’s never wrong about murder. Never.”

  “There’s no Styrofoam in this case,” Dozier said. “Trevor killed her. All the evidence points right to him.”

  “Only if you don’t see all the evidence that points somewhere else,” Monk said.

  “Like what?” Dozier said.

  “Your theory is that Ellen came home early and caught Trevor in the act of stealing her things. So he hit her with the lamp and fled.”

  “That’s how it went down,” Dozier said.

  “Why didn’t Trevor run out into the backyard when he heard her coming in?”

  “Maybe he didn’t hear her,” Dozier said. “Or he didn’t think he could escape from the backyard without her seeing him. So he hid in the closet.”

  “That’s impossible,” Monk said.

  “Why?” Dozier said. “The closet was right behind him.”

  “Why didn’t he just wait in there until she left again?” I asked.

  “Maybe he panicked. Or maybe she opened the closet and caught him,” Dozier said. “She ran to the phone to call the police, so he grabbed the lamp and hit her.”

  “All you have are ‘maybes,’ ” I said.

  “That’s because Trevor won’t talk,” Dozier said. “But the evidence clearly shows what happened.”

  “Yes, it does,” Monk said. “Have you thought about getting your eyes checked?”

  “Someone was obviously hiding in the closet,” Dozier said.

  “Yes, that’s true,” Monk said. “But look at how the boxes are arranged. Someone moved the clothes aside and put a box down on the floor to give him something to sit on. That means the killer was taking his time. He was waiting for her to show up long before she got here and he wanted to be comfortable.”

  “Or the boxes were already like that,” Dozier said. “And Trevor moved the clothes to make space for himself when he hid.”

  “But she was hit on the back of the head and fell forward. If he’d jumped out of the closet and then grabbed the lamp off the nightstand by the bed, she would have had time to turn around and face him. That means she should have been hit on the side of her head, not the back,” Monk said. “If he hit her as she was running out of the room, her body would have been in the doorway or the hall, not in front of the dresser. The fact that she was hit from behind proves that whoever killed her already had the lamp in his hands when he went into the closet. We aren’t talking about a man doing a desperate act. This is what we in the detective trade call ‘premeditated murder.’ ”

  I had to smile at that last, patronizing comment. Monk had obviously been paying a lot more attention than I thought to what Dozier had been saying before.

  “I’m the most horrible wife in wife history,” Sharona said. “I wouldn’t blame Trevor if he never wanted me back.”

  I sat down next to her and took her hand. “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Sharona. Trevor is partly to blame for the way you reacted. If he hadn’t misled you so many times before, you wouldn’t have had any reason not to believe him this time.”

  “Instead I believed the worst about him, the absolute worst,” Sharona said. “It’s as if I wanted him to be guilty.”

  “He is guilty,” Dozier said.

  “I know how you feel,” Monk said to Dozier. “I wish he was, too.”

  “That’s an awful thing to say,” I said. “Why would you wish that?”

  “He’s a bad influence,” Monk said.

  “What terrible thing has he ever made me do?” Sharona said.

  “He made you marry him again and move back to New Jersey,” Monk said.

  “You are the most selfish man I have ever met,” Sharona said. “You should be ashamed of yourself, Adrian.”

  “Not only that—he’s wrong,” Dozier said. “We found Ellen Cole’s jewelry in Trevor’s truck. He was stealing jewelry from his landscaping clients and auctioning it off on eBay. The payments for those sales went directly into his personal checking account. If he’s innocent, how do you explain that?”

  “I didn’t say he wasn’t a thief,” Monk said. “But he didn’t kill Ellen Cole.”

  “He didn’t steal those things, either,” Sharona said. “This whole thing is a setup.”

  “Who would want to set up your husband?” Dozier said. “He’s a nobody.”

  “I don’t know who, but it wouldn’t have been too hard to pull off,” Sharona said. “Anybody could have created an e-mail account for him on Yahoo!, got his checking account number somehow and used it to open an account in his name on eBay. Give me your name and one of your checks and I could do it in ten minutes.”

  “Was it the eBay auction of stolen goods that led you to Trevor?” I asked Dozier.

  “We found out about the auction after we got the lead on Trevor,” Dozier said. “It was Ian Ludlow who put the clues together. It made sense to me then and it still does now.”

  “Even after everything Monk just told you?” I said.

  “It’s all speculation,” Dozier said. “I see the evidence one way and he sees it another. Nothing he’s said makes me think we arrested the wrong guy.”

  “You did and we’re going to prove it,” Sharona said, standing up. “Aren’t we, Adrian?”

  “Yes,” Monk said mournfully, “we are.”

  Whodunit Books was located in a storefront underneath a large parking structure in the middle of Westwood Village, right on the edge of the UCLA campus.

  There was a casket outside filled with bargain paper-backs. The front windows were cluttered with poster-sized blowups of book covers advertising the upcoming signings of various mystery authors, all of whom seemed to have shopped at Leather Jackets R Us before having their author photos taken.

  The first thing we saw when we came in the store was a large table filled with stacks of Ian Ludlow’s previous books in hardcover and paperback and a pile of his newest one, Death Is the Last Word.

  “What’s with him?” asked the woman behind the counter. Her name tag read LORINDA.

  I guess she didn
’t get many customers wearing gas masks.

  “Asthma,” Sharona said.

  Lorinda was a thin brunette in a low-cut tank top who had a safety pin in one nostril.

  Yeah, just one nostril.

  I could see the trouble ahead.

  Monk immediately started to organize Ludlow’s books on the table into even stacks. He opened each book to check the copyright date so he could arrange them in chronological order. I only know this because he did the same thing to my bookcase.

  I looked over his shoulder and saw that the books were signed and dated by Ludlow on the title page. This seemed to stump Monk for a moment, but then he came to a decision and continued his arranging.

  There were about twenty people there to meet Ian Ludlow, who sat at a desk in the back corner of the store, signing books with surprising speed.

  The Tolstoy of the Mean Streets was in his early thirties, with buzz-cut hair and a day’s worth of stubble on his cheeks. He was dressed in a black leather jacket, a black T-shirt, faded jeans and a Dodger baseball cap that I suspected was hiding a prematurely receding hairline. I don’t know who men think they’re fooling with those caps.

  At the front of the line was a man with a rolling suitcase full of books for Ludlow to sign. He had dandruff and his breast pocket was bulging with pens, papers and business cards.

  “I’ve got every book you’ve ever written,” the man said, presenting a stack to Ludlow. “Even those Jack Bludd paperbacks you wrote under a pseudonym.”

  “It’s nice to know my mother isn’t the only one with a complete collection,” Ludlow said as he signed the books. “You ought to hold on to them. They might be worth their cover prices again someday.”

  “I don’t know how you keep churning them out,” the man said, shaking his head.

  “I’m a natural storyteller,” Ludlow said. “It’s what I was born to do. It’s all I know how to do.”

  “But you write four books a year,” a large woman said, clutching Ludlow’s latest mystery protectively to her bountiful bosom as if someone might try to snatch it away from her. “Aren’t you ever afraid that you’re going to run out of stories?”

  “Perhaps I would be if all I had to rely on was my imagination, ” Ludlow said. “But the world around me gives me endless material. There are millions of people out there, each with a story to inspire me. And my deadlines are a great motivator. If I don’t deliver, I have to give back my advance.”

  Sharona gave Ludlow the once-over from a distance and frowned. “He looks a lot taller and a lot tougher in his author photo.”

  “They always do,” said Lorinda. “They take those moody photos and try to look mysterious and rugged so readers will think they prowl the dark streets looking for stories,” Lorinda said. “The only place Ludlow prowls is bookstores to sign his stock and hit on women.”

  “You don’t sound like a fan,” I said.

  “We’ve supported him from the start, before he was anybody, but after he leaves here today, he’s going to head down the street to sign stock at Borders,” she said. “They sell his books at thirty percent off, which we can’t afford to do, so he’s undercutting us when he does that. But he can’t help himself. He can’t pass a bookstore without signing his books. It’s like a compulsion.”

  “Someone should tell him to get a grip,” Monk said, busily rearranging the books on the table. “He doesn’t have to sign every book that has his name on it. How hard could it be to just ignore the unsigned books?”

  Sharona and I turned and looked at him.

  “It’s as easy as walking past a crooked painting without straightening it,” Sharona said.

  “That’s different,” Monk said. “That’s a public safety issue.”

  There was no way Sharona or I was going to convince Monk that a crooked painting didn’t pose a danger to humanity, so I turned back to Lorinda.

  “If Ludlow is working against you by signing down the street,” I asked, “why do you keep inviting him back?”

  She shrugged. “He’s a big name in mystery. Our customersexpect us to have his books, though it’s getting to the point that an unsigned Marshak is harder to find and more valuable than a signed one.”

  The whole store rumbled. My first thought was an earthquake, but I quickly realized it was just a car driving into the parking structure overhead. I hoped the rent was cheap.

  “Voilà,” Monk said, stepping back from the table. It looked pretty much as it had before, except every stack was even. “Done.”

  “What did you do?” Lorinda asked.

  “Someone completely messed up the books on this table. I put them back into their original order.”

  “Original order?”

  “The way you had them before,” Monk said. “Arranged by copyright, the number of printings, and the date they were signed, with the most recent book on top and the oldest on the bottom.”

  “Right,” Lorinda said. “The original order. Thanks.”

  Monk seemed to notice her for the first time and was troubled by what he saw. Sharona and I shared a weary look. We both knew what was coming. It was inevitable.

  “You’re missing a safety pin,” he said, gesturing to her nose.

  “No, I’m not,” she said.

  “You’ve lost the one in your other nostril,” Monk said.

  “My other nostril isn’t pierced,” she said.

  “It should be,” Monk said.

  “One is cool,” she said. “Two would look ridiculous.”

  I didn’t see the distinction myself. I think anybody with a paper clip, a nose ring, a bone or anything else in their nose looks stupid.

  “Faces are symmetrical. It’s a law of nature. You don’t want to break a law of nature.” Monk nodded toward Sharona. “She’s a nurse. She’d be glad to stick another safety pin in your nose for you.”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” Sharona said.

  While they argued, the last of the readers who’d come to have their books signed by Ian Ludlow filed out of the store with their purchases. The man with the rolling suitcase was so distracted by Monk’s gas mask that he nearly ran over my feet.

  “You took the Hippocratic oath,” Monk said. “It’s your duty as a nurse to save this poor woman.”

  “There’s no medical reason to stick a safety pin in her nostril, Adrian.”

  “Have you taken a good look at her face?” Monk said. “It’s hideous.”

  “Hideous?” Lorinda said.

  “You better be careful, Monk. They keep a shotgun behind the counter,” Ian Ludlow said, a cocky grin on his face as he strode up to us. “And Lorinda has been looking for an excuse to use it.”

  “You know Mr. Monk?” I asked.

  “Of course I do. I’m a huge fan of his work. I was teaching a creative writing course up in Berkeley during the police strike six months ago when Monk solved the Golden Gate Strangler case,” Ludlow said. “I toyed with turning it into a book, but the serial killer genre is getting stale.”