Mr. Monk and the Dirty Cop

CHAPTER TWENTY

The surveillance footage from the Dorchester Hotel was delivered by Lansdale to Disher’s desk on several CDs. The lobby, all the entrances and exits, the stairwells, and the elevators were covered by cameras. The various floors themselves were not.

“What kind of half-assed security system is that?” Disher said.

“I asked them the same thing,” Lansdale said. “Their reply was that they are a hotel, not a Vegas casino, and this isn’t a totalitarian state.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“They’re cheap and irresponsible,” Lansdale said. “But nobody could have gotten in or out of the hotel without being caught on camera.”

“Unless they climbed up the face of the building and entered through Braddock’s window.”

“Do you really think that’s possible?”

“Never rule out any possibility, even if it’s impossible,” Disher said. “The impossible is only impossible until it becomes possible. Why aren’t you writing that down?”

“Because it doesn’t make any sense.”

“It would if you had my years of experience on the mean streets. I’m giving you pearls of wisdom here. You’ll want to remember them.” Disher handed half of the CDs to Lansdale. “You look at these, I’ll go through the rest.”

Lansdale retreated to his desk and Disher stuck a CD into his computer.

For the next hour, Disher scanned through footage of the loading dock and the stairwell, but didn’t see any activity. There were no deliveries and nobody used the staircase.

When he was finished with those CDs, he started going through footage from the lobby. He was twenty minutes into that when he saw someone come in at ten p.m., go up the grand staircase to the conference area, and then disappear.

Disher glanced around to see if anyone was watching him. Lansdale was slouched in his seat, staring at his screen, going through elevator footage and taking notes. Disher turned back to his screen and fast-forwarded until he saw the same man come down the staircase and leave about thirty minutes later.

“Hey, Jackal, do we have any surveillance footage of the conference floors?”

Lansdale shook his head. “Nothing on the second and third floors, except the stairwells.”

“Anything unusual show up on the elevator footage?”

“Yeah, I was just about to tell you about it,” Lansdale said. “Around ten fifteen one of those guys in the beefeater costumes got on at the second floor and went up to the seventh, got off, then came down again about twenty minutes later.”

“Can you see his face?”

“Nope,” Lansdale said.

This wasn’t good, Disher thought. Not at all.

He got up and knocked on the captain’s door. Stottlemeyer waved him in from behind his desk.

Disher stepped in and closed the door behind him.

“How’s the investigation going?” Stottlemeyer asked, looking up from his work.

“Is there anything you want to tell me, Captain?”

“About what?”

“About you and Braddock?”

“It’s all in the file,” Stottlemeyer said. “Except the part about me punching him yesterday at Bill Peschel’s wake, but I assume you’ve heard all about that.”

“You also didn’t mention that you were at the Dorchester Hotel last night.”

Stottlemeyer sighed wearily. “I didn’t think it was relevant.”

“What were you doing there?”

“I got a call around nine thirty last night from a guy who said he was a cop attending the conference. He said he had evidence that Braddock was taking bribes from a gang that’s running meth labs out of mobile homes in the desert. He asked me to meet him in one of the small conference rooms at the hotel.”

“Who was the cop?”

“He wouldn’t tell me until we met face-to-face, which didn’t happen,” Stottlemeyer said. “I got there at ten, waited around for twenty minutes, and when he didn’t show, I left.”

“And you didn’t think that was relevant to the investigation?” Disher asked, failing to hide his irritation with his boss.

“I was one of hundreds of cops and tourists in the hotel last night. I was only there for a half hour and then I left. I didn’t see what it had to do with your investigation.” Stottlemeyer narrowed his eyes at Disher. “But since you think it’s relevant, I’m guessing that Braddock’s time of death was ten-ish.”

“It could have been,” Disher said. “The killer jacked up the air-conditioning in Braddock’s room to make it harder for us to pinpoint the exact time of death.”

Stottlemeyer stroked his mustache, a nervous habit he had while he was thinking. “Do you suppose that the call I got might have been a ruse to get me to the Dorchester at the same time that Braddock was being killed?”

“I don’t think so. Like you said, there were lots of other people there at the same time, including some of the best homicide detectives in the nation,” Disher said, heading for the door. “I wouldn’t worry about it, sir.”

Disher walked out of the office. But he could feel Stottlemeyer’s gaze on his back like a heat lamp.

I picked up Monk at nine on the dot and we drove over the Golden Gate Bridge to Marin County.

The lanes going into San Francisco from Marin County were clogged with the last of the rush-hour commuters, Starbucks coffee in their dashboard cup holders, Bluetooth devices in their ears, and NPR playing on their radios.

How do I know what station they were listening to on their radios? Because I know Marin County residents are well educated, own at least one Bob Dylan or Van Morrison album, and are notoriously liberal for people with so much money.

And because I like to embrace clichés that have some truth to them and I enjoy making broad generalizations that support my biases. If you haven’t learned that about me by now, you haven’t been reading very closely.

The Barnes & Noble smelled more like a coffeehouse than a bookstore. The tables of their café were full of young, well-dressed people hunched over their MacBooks, idly picking at pastries and sipping their hot drinks, trying to look busy and deep in deep thoughts.

Phil Atwater wasn’t among the self-consciously studious in the café, probably because the menu was too expensive for a man whose unemployment checks had just run out. He was getting his gourmet coffee from McDonald’s and slipping a Starbucks cardboard heat sleeve around the cup that didn’t entirely hide the Golden Arches. We found him drinking his coffee in an easy chair at the farthest corner of the store, where he was reading a book entitled The Thirty Steps to Becoming a Millionaire in Thirty Days.

“Is one of the steps murdering your father-in-law?” Monk asked.

Phil looked up at us, dropped the book, and started to get up.

“Mr. Monk, Ms. Teeger, fancy bumping into you here. I just stopped in to browse a bit before work. I’d rather spend my time here than stuck in traffic. But I’d better get going-”

“You can sit down, Phil,” I interrupted. “We know you were fired from your job months ago.”

“I wasn’t fired, I was downsized,” he said, sitting down again. “There’s a difference. It had nothing to do with my job performance.”

“Does your wife know?” Monk asked. I noticed Phil had ignored Monk’s first, provocative question.

“I can’t bring myself to tell her. It’s humiliating.”

“So you have been hiding out here,” I said.

“I’ve been using this as my base of operations, reading the want ads and applying for jobs. I’ve had a few interviews, but nothing has come of it. There’s not a big demand for guys like me.”

“What do you have to lose by telling your wife the truth now?” I asked.

“Her respect,” Phil replied. “I still have my pride.”

“Or you don’t want her to find out your darker secret,” Monk said. He drifted over to a cardboard display riser of Murder, She Wrote paperbacks that were stacked cover-out, four or five books to a pocket shelf.

“Like what?” Phil asked.

“That you murdered your father-in-law so you could get his inheritance,” Monk said, adding and subtracting paperbacks from one shelf to another so there were an equal number in each stack.

“I’m unemployed,” Phil said. “That doesn’t make me a killer.”

“You knew when your wife was leaving the house with the kids,” I said. “So you went back home, hit Peschel over the head, and tossed him in the pool, then tried to make it look like he jumped in himself in a fog of dementia.”

“Fog of dementia?” Phil chuckled ruefully. “You make it sound so mild, almost poetic. You try living with a delusional, gutter-mouthed old coot who thinks he’s still tending bar in a Tenderloin dump filled with hookers and drunks. I’d sit across from him and he wouldn’t know if I was one of his scumbag boozers, or someone shopping for a killer, or a cop he could sell them all out to.”

“So you killed him to put him out of his misery and yours,” I said.

“If I killed him, which I didn’t, what makes you think I’d admit it to you now?”

“Because if you did murder him, I’ll find out anyway,” Monk said, still shifting books around. “I was hoping you’d save me the trouble. I have a lot of cases to deal with as it is.”

“Sorry to disappoint you, but the only thing I’m guilty of is pride and cowardice.”

“And shoplifting,” Monk said.

“That’s not true,” Phil said.

“Then why did you peel the price tag off that book and remove the magnetic theft strip from the spine?”

“I didn’t,” he said.

Monk gestured to the floor with the Murder, She Wrote paperback that was in his hand. “You tried to kick them under your seat but the sticker stuck to your shoe.”

Phil looked down. Sure enough, the price sticker was stuck to the heel of his scuffed leather dress shoe.

“So what? The guy who wrote this book has already made his million bucks,” Phil said. “He doesn’t need twenty more from me.”

“That’s how a life of crime begins,” Monk said. “Today it’s a book, tomorrow it’s murdering your father-in-law.”

“Didn’t you already accuse me of doing that?”

“So now after stealing a life, you think you are free to steal anything,” Monk said. “It’s the same idea, only in reverse.”

“You’re wrong about me,” Phil said.

“If you’re not going to confess,” Monk said, “maybe you could at least answer a question for me. Where did Peschel get the tip about InTouchSpace stock?”

“It must have been from his real estate agent,” Phil said.

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“Because his tavern was bought by Dalberg Enterprises when they purchased the building it was in,” Phil said. “That’s Steve Wurzel’s real estate investment company.”

“Who is Steve Wurzel?” Monk asked.

That was like asking who Bill Gates was, though I’m not certain that Monk knew the answer to that, either. It illustrates one of the great contradictions in Monk’s character. He knows so much about so many things and yet he knows so little about so much. He could tell you the history of dental fillings but probably couldn’t name three songs performed by the Beatles.

“He was the creator of InTouchSpace,” I said.

“Why would he want to buy Bill Peschel’s tavern? Was it a prime piece of real estate?”

Phil shook his head. “The storefront was boarded up and empty for a decade until the Jamba Juice moved in last year. It’s taken that long for the neighborhood to gentrify.”

“Based on what you’ve told me about the success of InTouchSpace,” Monk said, “I suppose Wurzel had the deep pockets to wait ten years for his investment to pay off.”

“He didn’t,” I said. “His estate did. Wurzel is dead.”

“When did he die?” Monk asked.

And in the instant before I answered his question, I felt a sensation that was both mental and physical, of things seeming to snap into place. It was a feeling I’m sure Monk would have understood. Except for me the end result wasn’t startling clarity, it was greater confusion.

“Ten years ago,” I said.

Monk cocked his head and, without saying a word, headed towards the cash registers, the paperback in his hand. He was finished with Phil.

I thanked Phil for his help, told him not to make any travel plans (since that’s what cops always tell suspects), and hurried after Monk, who was standing in the checkout line.

“Do you think it’s a coincidence that Peschel’s good fortune and Wurzel’s death both happened ten years ago?”

“I don’t know,” Monk said. “A lot of things happened ten years ago.”

His wife Trudy’s unsolved murder, for one thing. I could have kicked myself for not anticipating that my question would bring up those painful memories.

“Are you hoping for a little inspiration on the case from Jessica Fletcher?” I asked, trying to distract him from his dark thoughts.

“Who is she?”

“A mystery writer who solves murders,” I said, motioning to the Murder, She Wrote novel in his hand. “The heroine of the book you want to read.”

“I’m not going to read it,” Monk said.

“Then why are you buying it?”

“To even up the display. Now there are four books cover-out in each pocket shelf.”

“You’re buying a book you don’t want just so the stacks on the shelves are even?”

“It’s a small sacrifice to make so the world will be a better place.”

There was a file from Forensics waiting on Disher’s desk when he came in that morning. Disher waved hello to Stottlemeyer, who acknowledged him with a nod from inside his office, then sat down and opened the file, which was full of crime scene photos and lab reports.

Disher started to read through it all, starting with the autopsy report.

The medical examiner confirmed that Braddock was strangled to death. As Disher predicted, there were threads from the comforter in Braddock’s mouth and nose.

The forensic report was next.

The CSI boys were able to lift a strand of polyester from Braddock’s neck and, based on the colors and composition of the fabric, they were able to trace it back to a yellow-white-and-blue-striped tie made specifically for Wal-Mart called the Continental. The bad news was that the tie was sold by the thousands at their stores worldwide.

Disher glanced at the picture of the tie and felt a chill run right up his back.

He’d seen the tie before.

But that didn’t mean anything, he told himself. Lots of people wore that same tie. He was overreacting.

Disher shifted his attention to the fingerprint report.

There were hundreds of partial prints recovered, which was typical of hotel rooms. Most of the prints were too obscured by other prints to be readable. Even so, they were able to match up the prints to about thirty people, half of whom were hotel staff. One was Braddock himself.

But it was the prints that were recovered from the shards of the broken drinking glass that were the most telling and disturbing.

Another chill crept up Disher’s spine and raised goose bumps all over his body.

This time, he couldn’t explain away the connection.

He knew what he had to do. It made him feel nauseous and it had nothing to do with the egg-and-cheese croissant he’d scarfed down for breakfast.

Disher slid the photo of the tie from the file, wrote an address on the back, then got up slowly. Trying to appear totally at ease, he sauntered self-consciously over to Lansdale ’s desk and leaned down, his back to Stottlemeyer’s office.

“I want you to go to the address on the back of this photo with the crime scene techs and wait for me to call you with a search warrant,” Disher whispered to Lansdale. “Don’t mess the place up. Be thorough but subtle. Search inside and out.”

“What am I looking for?”

Disher tapped the photo. “This tie and anything else that you think might be related to Paul Braddock’s murder.”

“Who lives there?” Lansdale asked.

“Captain Stottlemeyer,” Disher said.

Lansdale involuntarily glanced towards the captain’s office but Disher had intentionally used his body to block his view.

“Just act natural,” Disher said. “I don’t want the captain to know about this until the deed is done.”

“You think the captain murdered Braddock? Are you out of your mind?”

“God, I hope so,” Disher said.

He didn’t see the need to tell Lansdale yet about how Braddock had thoroughly humiliated Stottlemeyer in front of his peers.

Or that Stottlemeyer had beaten the crap out of Braddock at somebody’s wake.

Or that Stottlemeyer was at the hotel at the time of the murder and was wearing a tie exactly like the one that was used to strangle Paul Braddock.

Or that Stottlemeyer’s fingerprints were on the broken glass in Braddock’s room.

Instead, Disher sent Lansdale off to search Captain Stottlemeyer’s apartment and then went to the men’s room to throw up before he called the deputy chief.