Mr. Monk and the Dirty Cop

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I sat on the beach at Paradise Island, letting Daniel Craig slather suntan lotion all over my bare back. The lotion smelled like coconuts and I could feel some grains of sand gently scratching my skin as he applied the cool cream. His hands were rough, but he was using them softly, and I found hands were rough, but he was using them softly, and I found the contrast intoxicatingly exciting. It was all I could do not to purr like a cat. Or maybe I did, but it was drowned out by the sound of the ringing phone.

I grabbed the phone, fully intending to throw it into the ocean, but then I opened my eyes and saw that the beautiful, white sandy beach that stretched out into eternity was actually the pillow beside my head.

“Hello?” I said, my consciousness still half in San Francisco, half on the beach with Daniel Craig.

“I’m glad you’re still up,” Monk said. “I was thinking about those files.”

I glanced at the clock on my nightstand. It was two twenty-four a.m. I wasn’t in the Bahamas anymore.

“Go to bed, Mr. Monk,” I said.

“You know what would be fun? If you brought those files back to my apartment.”

“You want me to drive over to your house at two thirty in the morning and deliver a bunch of case files so you can work all night again?”

“You’re exaggerating,” Monk said. “It’s two twenty-six.”

“I’m going back to the beach,” I said, and hung up. I put my face in the warm spot on my pillow, closed my eyes, and tried to transport myself back to Paradise Island.

The phone rang again.

I opened my eyes, rolled over, reached behind the nightstand, and yanked the phone cord out of the wall. The phone was silenced. In my room but not the rest of the house.

A moment or two later my door flew open and Julie stood there in her nightgown, holding her portable phone.

“It’s Mr. Monk,” she said. “He wants me to drive to his apartment with some files.”

“Tell him no and turn off your phone,” I said, and put the pillow over my head.

“I’ll be glad to take the files to him,” she said. “If I can drive the Lexus.”

I tossed the pillow aside and sat up in bed. “Do you actually think that I’m going to let a seventeen-year-old girl drive alone in the city at two thirty in the morning?”

I heard some squawking from the phone, like one of those adult voices from a Charlie Brown cartoon. Julie held the phone up to her ear, listened for a few seconds, and then covered the mouthpiece with her hand.

“Mr. Monk says you could come, too. We can make toast and have a party.”

I motioned to her to bring me the phone. She handed it to me. I turned the phone off and gave it back to her.

“Good night,” I said.

“How am I supposed to get back to sleep now?” she whined.

“You can count Lexuses.”

I buried my face in my pillow and hoped that Daniel Craig was still waiting for me in the Bahamas.

He wasn’t. By the time I got back to dreamland, Daniel was gone and the Bahamas had washed away, too. I found myself in some postapocalypse hell, living in a subterranean bunker filled with Diaper Genies, Wet Ones, and evidence Baggies. All I had to eat were Wheat Thins and Sierra Springs bottled water.

I woke up after nine, sticky with sweat, my throat dry and my right arm numb from being crooked at an odd angle under my pillow.

Ah, what a glorious morning.

I dragged myself out of bed. Julie had gotten herself to school somehow and had kindly left her half-eaten bowl of cereal, crusts of toast, and an empty coffee cup on the table for me or a member of our household staff to clean up.

I guess I deserved that for being such a bad mother.

I wasn’t much of an assistant, either. I was late for work but I was in no hurry to make up for lost time. Monk had no one to blame but himself for my tardiness.

I refilled Julie’s cup of coffee with what she’d left simmering in the pot, put a frosted cinnamon Pop-Tart in the toaster for my breakfast, and sat down to browse the Chronicle, which Julie had thoughtfully left spread out all over the table.

When it comes to reading a newspaper, I’m kind of Monkish-I like all the sections folded and in order so I can start at the front page and work my way through. I gathered up all the sections and put them back together.

The front-page section was the last one that I came to, and when I did, I got an unpleasant surprise.

The Judge Carnegie story had made the front page. This is how it began:

Police arrested Rhonda Carnegie, the wife of Judge Alan Carnegie, and charged her with the murder yesterday of her husband and the gangland-style execution of Judge Clarence Stanton in Golden Gate Park earlier this week. Judge Carnegie was gunned down half a block from his home while walking his dog and Judge Stanton was shot multiple times the day before while jogging. Sources within the department tell the Chronicle that the investigation, led by Captain Leland Stottlemeyer, was focused on reputed mob boss Salvatore Lucarelli, who was facing trial this week before Judge Stanton. After that jurist’s murder, Judge Carnegie was slated to take his place at the bench. A new trial date has not been set. The crucial break in the investigation came from famed detective Adrian Monk, who was a consultant to the police department until his contract was suddenly dropped a few days ago. Monk was immediately hired by Intertect, a San Francisco-based private detective agency. “Mr. Monk was deeply shocked by this attack on our judiciary system and took an immediate interest in the case, but his assistance was spurned by the police,” said Nicholas Slade, president and founder of Intertect. “Undeterred, and with the full support of our experienced professionals, he pursued the case and found compelling evidence that the police missed in their blind zeal to prosecute Mr. Lucarelli.” Capt. Stottlemeyer confirmed that Monk’s participation in the investigation “played a decisive role” and led to Mrs. Carnegie’s arrest at her home, a short distance from the scene of her husband’s murder a few hours earlier. She is being held without bail pending trial. Capt. Stottlemeyer refused to comment any further or divulge any additional details regarding the investigation or the nature of the evidence against Mrs. Carnegie. The captain was criticized on the opening day of the Conference of Metropolitan Homicide Detectives this week at the Dorchester Hotel for his division’s reliance on Adrian Monk and their poor case-closure rate if the consultant’s contributions are factored out of their annual statistics.

I couldn’t read any more of the article. It was too painful.

If that was Slade’s idea of going easy on Stottlemeyer and sparing him embarrassment, I shuddered to think what his comments would have been like if he hadn’t held back.

While I was angry with Slade for what he’d done, I had to admire the way he spun the story to make Intertect appear efficient and community-minded and to cast Lucarelli as a victim.

I wondered why Slade chose not to disclose that Lucarelli had hired Intertect to prove he was innocent of the murders of the judges.

Perhaps Slade was worried that it would taint Monk’s success if people knew he was not motivated by outrage at the heinous crime but rather that he’d been paid by Lucarelli to clear him of the killings.

It was a testament to Stottlemeyer’s devotion to Monk, even at his own expense, that he didn’t challenge Slade’s version of events. Then again, perhaps that had less to do with sparing Monk than it did with protecting his case against Mrs. Carnegie from being muddied by any doubt. After all, both Slade and Stottlemeyer agreed that Monk was right and neither one of them wanted Mrs. Carnegie to walk.

After reading that article, I was glad I’d forgotten to watch the news the previous night. They’d probably lambasted Captain Stottlemeyer on all the local channels.

I ate my Pop-Tart (and told myself it was healthy because it was made of flour and cinnamon, both of which are found in nature and not created in a test tube), took a quick shower, got dressed, and headed over to Monk’s place.

I kept the file drawer in my car, took four bulging files from it, and carried them with me. My plan was to carefully dole the cases out to him in small batches.

So you can imagine my surprise and anger when I walked in the door around ten thirty and saw Monk at his dining room table, another rolling file drawer at his side, papers and crime scene photos spread out in front of him. Danielle was sitting at the table, too, facing her laptop computer and typing away.

Monk was wearing the same clothes he’d worn the day before. But that didn’t necessarily mean he hadn’t changed clothes since I’d last seen him. He bought his clothes in bulk specifically so he could wear the same thing every day if he wanted to. His clothes weren’t wrinkled either but he never allowed his clothes to wrinkle.

Even so, I was convinced that he hadn’t slept and hadn’t changed. He was going on two days without sleep and that couldn’t be good.

“Good morning, everyone,” I said with intentionally false cheer.

“Good morning, Natalie,” Danielle said, so perky and energetic that I wanted to smother her with one of Monk’s two identical square throw pillows. But that wasn’t the only motive behind my totally justifiable desire to kill her. There was the matter of that second file drawer.

“It’s about time you got here,” Monk said without looking up from his work. “I thought you’d gone on vacation.”

“You’d know if I were on vacation, Mr. Monk, because you’d be there, too, and people would be dropping dead all around us.”

Unfortunately, that wasn’t a smart-ass remark. It was the truth. I’m probably the only tourist to Hawaii, Germany, and France whose vacation scrapbook includes crime scene photos. Murder follows Monk like an obsessed fan. We could take a trip to an uninhabitable ice floe in the North Pole and we’d probably stumble on the Abominable Snowman with a dagger in his back.

“Did you hear the news?” Danielle said. “The police found a gun in Mrs. Carnegie’s house and ballistics positively identified it as the murder weapon. They also found the bicycle and the hooded jacket there. She took a big risk keeping all of that.”

“I guess it never occurred to her that the police would suspect her so soon,” I said.

“They didn’t. Mr. Monk did,” she said proudly. “He’s solved nine cases already this morning.”

“Ten,” Monk said, closing a file and sliding it over to her. “The bus driver is the kidnapper. A real bus driver would have stopped at the railroad tracks and opened the door. He didn’t.”

“Amazing,” Danielle said. “Isn’t he?”

“You should see him leap tall buildings in a single bound,” I said.

“Mrs. Carnegie was having an affair with a man twenty years younger than her,” Danielle said. “I guess she didn’t want to go through the trouble of a divorce.”

“Murder does cut down on legal fees, unless you get caught,” I said, turning to Monk. “Where did you get all these files?”

“You and Julie wouldn’t help, so I called Danielle and she brought them over.”

“At two thirty in the morning?” I said.

“It was two thirty-five by then and she’d told us that she was available any time of the day or night.”

“I meant it, too. And Mr. Slade didn’t mind me waking him up, either, or going down to the office to collect some additional open cases.”

I wasn’t surprised, considering all the success and positive publicity Monk had brought Intertect in the last twenty-four hours. “Danielle, could I talk to you privately for a moment?”

“What about?” Monk asked.

“I’m out of tampons and I thought she might-”

Monk waved his hands frantically in the air to signal me to stop talking and then covered his ears. It was just the reaction I was expecting.

“Take it outside or I might hear something that I don’t want to,” he said.

I marched for the front door and Danielle followed me out. As soon as the door was closed, I got in her face, startling her.

“If you weren’t a black belt I’d kick your butt right now,” I said. “What were you thinking when you brought him those files?”

“I was doing my job,” she said. “He asked for more cases to work on and I brought them.”

“Can’t you see that he hasn’t slept?”

“That’s because he couldn’t stop thinking about the open cases,” she said. “I thought if I brought them that he’d-”

“Sleep?” I interrupted her. “C’mon, Danielle, I thought you had a psychology degree. Did you really believe that once you brought him more open case files he’d go to bed? Or were you thinking about how happy Nick would be if Mr. Monk solved a dozen more cases before sunrise?”

She dropped her gaze to her feet, acknowledging her guilt, but I wasn’t about to let her off the hook.

“The man is exhausted,” I said. “He needs his rest. That’s why I took the other file drawer home with me.”

“But he called me and asked for cases to work on,” she said, a defensive whine in her voice. “What was I supposed to do?”

“What is in his best interest, even if he thinks that it isn’t,” I said sharply. “If you are truly working for Mr. Monk, that’s your priority. And right now what he needs more than anything is sleep.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“It’s not me that you let down. It’s him. It’s too late to take these files back now; he’s seen them. He’s probably counted them all and won’t stop thinking about them just because they aren’t in his house. But no more files after this. Is that clear?”

She nodded.

“Hopefully he’ll be so tired after plowing through these that he will finally get some sleep,” I said, and walked back into the house.

The three of us spent the rest of the day going through the files and writing up the reports on Monk’s findings. The only ones who showed any sign of fatigue were Danielle and me. Monk was on a roll, each solved case giving him momentum into the next one.

By six p.m., he’d cleared all the cases in both filing cabinets and I extracted another oath from Danielle that she wouldn’t bring him any more. But he wasted no time asking.

“Where are the rest?” he asked. “Bring it on.”

“There are no more cases, Mr. Monk,” she said.

“Not here,” he said. “You can deliver whatever case files are left at the office.”

“This is it,” she said. “You’ve cleared everything there is. You’ve put all our operatives out of work. We have to wait now for new business to come in.”

She was so convincing I almost believed it myself. He must have believed it, or his senses were so dulled by weariness that he couldn’t detect the lie, because suddenly all the fatigue he’d been outrunning with work seemed to catch up with him. His shoulders slumped and his eyes grew heavy. He dropped into his favorite easy chair.

“I’m ready for more,” he said. “Bring it on.”

“You’ll be the first person we call,” she said.

And then the damn phone rang. Monk perked up in his chair, sitting up straight, the possibility of another crime to solve giving him a jolt of energy.

I was tempted not to answer the phone but I decided the best course was to see who it was. If it was Nick Slade, or anybody else with a mystery for Monk, I intended to hang up the phone and lie to him about who’d called.

But it wasn’t anyone with a case. It was Carol Atwater with an invitation to a wake.