Mr. Monk and the Dirty Cop

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

“You know, don’t you?” I said as we headed back to the Lexus.

“Know what?” he asked.

“Who killed Bill Peschel and Paul Braddock and framed Captain Stottlemeyer for murder.”

“You don’t need me to tell you,” Monk said. “You figured everything out this morning.”

“I haven’t figured out anything,” I said.

“You had a tickle.”

“I don’t know what the tickle meant.”

“Yes, you do,” Monk said. “That’s why you insisted that we meet Linda Wurzel. She is the key to everything.”

“She’s the killer?”

“No, but she’s pure evil.”

We reached the car. I unlocked the doors and we got inside. But we weren’t going anywhere until he explained himself.

“I really hope you’re not just saying that because she has poop facials and fish pedicures.”

“That’s a big, big, big part of it,” Monk said. “Because usually when you meet someone who cleans themselves with excrement and bathes with flesh-eating fish it means that you’re in hell and that person is Satan.”

“As convincing an argument as that is, do you have anything more to go on?”

“What more could anyone possibly need?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Evidence, maybe?”

“That’s all I have. Everything else that I know can’t be proven. She’s the only person who can clear the captain of murder. There’s only one problem.”

“What’s that?”

“She’ll never do it,” he said.

I rubbed my forehead. I could feel a Monkache coming on. “But you know Captain Stottlemeyer is innocent.”

“Yes,” he said.

“And you know who killed Bill Peschel and Paul Braddock and why.”

“Yes,” Monk said. “And I know who killed Steve Wurzel.”

“He was murdered?”

“Of course he was,” Monk said. “But you already knew that.”

“I did?”

“Peschel sold his business and retired ten years ago, right after Steve Wurzel disappeared on his way to Mendocino,” Monk said. “There was a connection.”

I felt the tickle coming back in my chest as strong as my beating heart.

“What was it?”

“You knew what it was. Linda Wurzel,” Monk said. “Satan’s concubine. But that’s not all that happened ten years ago.”

The tickle was those three words. Ten years ago.

Suddenly I experienced the same strange mental and physical sensation that I had after meeting Phil Atwater. I could almost feel the synapses in my brain firing, forging new connections, drawing together disparate facts and memories to create one cohesive understanding.

And, for a moment, I knew what it was to be Adrian Monk, to experience a world where everything is even, symmetrical, and fits perfectly into its natural place.

It was beauty and it was bliss.

In that moment of clarity, I realized why I almost figured out the mystery before he did. It was because I knew some facts that Monk didn’t until he met Linda Wurzel. Now that he had those facts, too, the answer came to him almost immediately.

“Nick Slade left the San Francisco Police Department ten years ago,” I said. “And he opened up Intertect using money he received from his InTouchSpace investment.”

Monk learned days ago that Slade left the police force ten years back but until he met Linda Wurzel, he didn’t know that the detective opened Intertect with money that he’d earned from his early InTouchSpace investment.

But I did.

On the day Slade hired us, Danielle told me that he’d used his investment revenue as the capital to start his business and later I saw the InTouchSpace Invitational putter in his office. I just never put the two facts together. Monk would have in an instant if he’d been there or if I’d only been smart enough to tell him what I knew.

But now that Monk had all the facts, he’d come to the inescapable conclusion that I’d just reached myself.

“Nick Slade killed Steve Wurzel, Bill Peschel, and Paul Braddock,” I said. “What I don’t know is why.”

“Yes, you do,” Monk said. “Bill Peschel told us and probably Braddock, too. That’s why Slade had to kill them both and frame Stottlemeyer for the crime.”

Monk didn’t have to be so damn oblique. He could have come right out and told me whodunit and why. But he never did. My theory was that he liked to savor his summation and enjoy the way everything fit together.

Only this time, I got the sense that he was doing it for an entirely different reason.

Monk was doing it for me.

Somehow he knew I was capable of solving this murder on my own and that was what he was making me do. He was guiding me the way a good, understanding teacher would with a promising student.

It may have been the kindest, most sensitive thing he had ever done for me.

I rolled down the window for some air and went through a mental checklist of what I knew about Peschel. He ran a sleazy tavern in the Tenderloin. He made a few extra bucks as a police informant, selling tips on crimes to Stottlemeyer, Slade, and Braddock. Ten years ago, he sold his place to Linda Wurzel and retired, living the high life on his InTouchSpace investment ever since.

When we met Peschel, he was living in his daughter’s house and suffering from dementia. He thought that it was ten years ago, the kitchen was his tavern, and that Stottlemeyer and Monk had come to see him for information.

Of course, all the tips he had to sell us were a decade old. There was something about a jewelry heist and something else about a woman who-

Aha!

“Linda Wurzel went to Peschel’s tavern to find someone she could hire to kill her husband,” I said. “Peschel gave the tip to Slade, who was still a cop back then. Slade pretended to be a hit man and met with her.”

“But instead of arresting her, which was his sworn duty, Slade decided the deal was too good to pass up,” Monk said. “He ran Steve Wurzel off a cliff somewhere between here and Mendocino.”

“Do you think Peschel helped him?”

Monk shrugged. “Whether he did or not, they both got paid. Linda bought Peschel’s bar and gave them both InTouchSpace stock.”

“She got stinking rich, Peschel retired, and Slade got his detective agency,” I said. “Everybody was happy.”

“Until Peschel became senile and started calling his old cop buddies with ten-year-old tips,” Monk said. “Slade couldn’t take the chance that Stottlemeyer or Braddock would start thinking about what Peschel had told them and put it all together.”

“Slade had to clean up the mess and silence all three of them,” I said, knowing that Monk would appreciate the metaphor. “Taking care of Peschel was the easy part. But what about Stottlemeyer and Braddock? How was he going to do that?”

“That must have been worrying him until saw us at the conference,” Monk said. “Watching Braddock humiliate the captain in front of everybody was a godsend for him. So he stole the captain’s glass to use later.”

“Things got even better for Slade when Stottlemeyer fired you and then took a swing at Braddock at the wake,” I said. “He probably couldn’t believe how lucky he was.”

“Then he hired me,” Monk said.

“He purposely kept you so busy that you couldn’t think straight.”

“But you could,” Monk said. “You saw all the clues.”

“I felt them more than saw them,” I said, touching my chest.

“That’s even more important. It’s instinct and a natural sense of order,” Monk said. “That’s how you solved three murders.”

“I didn’t,” I said. “You did.”

“You did before I did,” Monk said.

“But I didn’t know I did it until you did it,” I said. “You had to do it before I knew I did it so I didn’t actually do it even though you let me do it just now.”

“You still did it,” he said. “And you did it first.”

“But I couldn’t do it,” I said. “So you solved it.”

Monk shook his head. “We solved it.”

I gave him a big kiss on the cheek and my eyes filled with tears.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. Tears scared him almost as much as germs. Maybe more. He knew how to deal with germs.

“Nothing,” I said, handing him a disinfectant wipe from my purse. “These are happy tears. I know exactly who I am.”

“You’re Natalie Teeger,” Monk said.

“Adrian Monk’s assistant,” I said, wiping his cheek where I’d kissed him.

“And this was a mystery to you before?”

“In a way it was,” I said. “But not anymore.”

“I’m glad we solved one mystery today,” he said.

“Are you forgetting about the one we were just talking about?” I put the used wipe in a tiny plastic bag and stuffed it in my purse. News choppers were flying overhead.

“I’m afraid that’s all it is, just talk,” Monk said. “We can’t prove any of it.”

He was right. The only ones who knew the truth were Linda Wurzel and Nick Slade and they certainly weren’t going to confess. Even worse, now they would know that we were onto them.

“Nick is going to know that we talked to Wurzel,” I said. “If she doesn’t call and tell him, he’ll figure it out himself from tracking our car.”

“We’re under surveillance?”

I told him about the tracking device on the Intertect cars, the keystroke monitoring of their computers, and my suspicion that even the phones at the company were bugged.

“Slade is obsessed with keeping track of his operatives,” I said.

“Especially us.” Monk glanced up at the news choppers. There were three of them hovering over Chinatown now. “I just hope the car isn’t bugged, too. You need to call Julie and ask her to meet us at my apartment right away.”

“Why?”

“We’re going to switch cars with her and let her drive this one all over the Bay Area,” Monk said.

“She’s going to love that,” I said. “That’s all she’s wanted since I got the car.”

“Call Danielle on her cell phone and tell her to meet us there, too, but in her own car.”

Monk obviously didn’t want Slade to be able to track our movements anymore.

“What do you have in mind?”

“Linda Wurzel will be tied up with the authorities and the media for at least another hour and then she’ll want to go home. That gives us barely enough time to get organized.”

“For what?”

“Around-the-clock surveillance,” Monk said. “We aren’t letting Linda Wurzel out of our sight.”

“For how long?”

“Until hell freezes over,” Monk said. “And we’ll know when that happens because she’ll be covered in ice.”