Mr. Monk and the Dirty Cop

CHAPTER ONE

My name is Natalie Teeger. I’ve spent a good chunk of my life trying to figure out who I am, who I want to be, and what I want to do.

Although I don’t have the answers to those questions, I’ve pretty much reconciled myself to the fact that I’m not going to be a rock star, a U.S. senator, or an international supermodel.

I’m also probably not going to discover the cure to some horrible disease, host my own TV talk show, bring peace to the Middle East, or come up with a handy invention that completely changes the way we live.

Not that I necessarily aspired to any of those things in the past, but now I’ve officially stopped searching for a career and dreaming of lofty achievements.

I’ve set more modest goals for myself-like finding a steady boyfriend, doing the laundry before I run out of clean underwear, and paying off my credit cards in full each month.

There was a time when I was desperate to define myself through a career, but I couldn’t seem to find one that suited me (not that I was ever entirely sure who “me” was). Along the way, I tried all kinds of jobs, from blackjack dealer to yoga instructor, but nothing stuck; nothing felt right.

Who I turned out to be, and what I’ve ended up doing, found me rather than the other way around.

I certainly didn’t plan on being a widowed single mother with a teenage daughter, or working as the assistant to a brilliant, obsessive-compulsive detective.

Yet here I am.

If who we are is a reflection of what we do, how we perceive ourselves, and how others see us, then I suppose I am a loving, supportive mother to Julie and a capable, reliable, and hardworking assistant to Adrian Monk.

I’ve been fulfilling those roles comfortably, and more or less happily, for many years now, and yet I still feel as if I haven’t found myself.

I guess it’s because I’m not doing something that I always dreamed of doing or that feels like the perfect expression of who I am and my natural talents, not that I have a clue what they might be.

I envy people who don’t have those problems-and that seems to be just about everybody I know.

Take my late husband, Mitch, for example. From the time he was a kid, he always wanted to be a fighter pilot, a husband, and a father. So that was what he set out to accomplish, and he succeeded.

Mitch died being the man he wanted to be and doing what he knew he was meant to do. I’m sure that even in his last moments, he never doubted that. When I think about him and how he died in Kosovo, that certainty, along with the knowledge that he knew how much he was loved by me and Julie, gives me a measure of peace.

Adrian Monk is another good example of what I mean. He craves order, predictability, symmetry, and cleanliness. Early in his life, he longed to be an inspector for the California State department of weights and measures, but that soon changed. As early as grade school, he exhibited an amazing knack for solving little mysteries, like who stole the money from the bake sale or who was responsible for vandalizing a locker.

He wasn’t driven by nosiness, or curiosity, or a need for attention, or a quest for justice, but rather an overpowering compulsion to restore balance and order to the world around him.

To him a mystery is a form of chaos, a mess that has to be cleaned up or an imbalance that has to be corrected. It’s his uncontrollable need to literally straighten up, to put things back where they belong, that enables him to see the little details everyone else misses and solve the crimes that boggle everybody else.

Justice isn’t a philosophical, moral, or ethical ideal for him. It’s a balance that must be maintained. In a way, he became an inspector of weights and measures.

There’s absolutely no doubt that Adrian Monk was meant to be a detective. It is the natural extension of his personality, his talents, and his psychological disorder.

Everybody knows it. And he does, too. There are a thousand things he is insecure about (exactly a thousand, by the way, he has them cataloged and indexed) but being a great detective isn’t one of them.

That’s why he won’t give up trying to get back on the San Francisco Police Department, even though they fired him after he suffered a complete mental and emotional breakdown in the wake of his wife Trudy’s murder.

And that’s why his friend Captain Leland Stottlemeyer hired him as a consultant to the Homicide Department, despite Monk’s many phobias and behavioral peculiarities.

Stottlemeyer knew that being a detective was an essential part of Monk’s character and that working was the only thing that would begin to make him whole again-at least until the day he finally finds whoever put a bomb in his wife’s car.

But doing that favor for Monk came at a huge price, and I don’t mean the countless things that Stottlemeyer, and his right-hand man, Lieutenant Randy Disher, have to do to keep Monk happy. (Like making sure there are no black-and-white police cars in sight at a crime scene because it will ruin his concentration. He believes that if cars are painted two colors, it must be done symmetrically, black on one side and white on the other. Anything else would violate the laws of nature.)

Monk is called in to consult whenever there is a crime that totally stumps Stottlemeyer and his detectives. He inevitably solves the mystery so easily that the captain feels stupid for not seeing the clues himself. I know this because the captain has said so on many occasions.

That’s one thing I really like about Stottlemeyer. He always expresses his gratitude and gives Monk all the credit he deserves. But I know it takes a toll on him. Relying on Monk implies that the captain and his men weren’t good enough to solve the crime on their own… or at least not as quickly.

What’s got to make it even worse is that even on the homicide cases that Stottlemeyer and his detectives could and undoubtedly would solve on their own, Monk often figures out the solution while they are still taking out their notebooks.

The fact is that every time Monk performs brilliantly at a crime scene, he’s unintentionally demonstrating that Stottlemeyer isn’t as good at the job as he is.

Monk is oblivious to that, of course. But I’m not.

It’s been going on like that day after day, year after year, and it’s got to be hard on the captain’s self-esteem.

I know it’s hard on mine, and I don’t even want to be a detective.

Witnessing Monk’s natural ability and affinity for his work over and over again only reminds me that I’ve yet to demonstrate anything like that in my own life.

It’s got to be much worse for Stottlemeyer, who is not only in the same profession, but in a leadership position.

All those conflicts were on my mind the morning we walked into the lecture hall in one of the newer buildings at the University of California, San Francisco ’s law school.

We were supposed to meet Stottlemeyer at headquarters to pick up Monk’s paycheck and, by extension, my own, but the captain and Disher got called away to investigate a shooting at the university. Since we were desperate for the money, and Monk couldn’t resist visiting a crime scene, we went out there, too.

It was a big lecture hall with dry-erase boards and flat-screen monitors behind the lectern. Pretty soon, chalkboards and erasers will be as extinct as typewriters, vinyl records, and carbon paper.

All the seats in the room had power plugs and tables for laptop computers. I imagined that being a student here was like listening to lectures in the business-class section of a British Airways jet. The only thing missing was someone pushing a cart down the aisles serving beverages and snacks.

I did a rough head count of the students in the room. There were about a hundred of them and they were still in their seats, fidgeting nervously as a handful of detectives questioned them one by one.

The questions probably had to do with the dead guy.

The victim looked to me like one of the students, except that unlike the others he had a gunshot wound in his chest and he was dead.

His body was sprawled at the bottom of the aisle that ran down the left side of the room. There were streaks of blood on the floor that indicated he’d rolled halfway down the aisle before his foot snagged one of those fancy seats.

I could see a gun lying in the blood. A numbered yellow evidence cone marked the spot in case nobody had noticed the weapon, the blood, or the body.

Lieutenant Disher was in front of the lecture hall, pencil poised over his notebook, interviewing a jowly man who had gray hair and wore a suit and tie.

The jowly man had a short beard that I figured he grew to give his first chin more definition and distract attention from his second one.

He held his chins high, his back straight, and stared down his long nose at Disher as if regarding a misbehaving child. I wondered if he had that posture before he became a professor, if it came with the job, or if it was a vain attempt to stretch his flabby neck taut.

Lieutenant Disher was in his midthirties, eager to please, and surprisingly friendly for a homicide detective, which put most people at ease and got them to open up to him, revealing far more than they would to anybody else with a badge. But from what I could see I didn’t think the man Disher was talking to then was one of those people.

There were a couple of crime scene technicians taking pictures and gathering forensic evidence and trying very hard to look as cool as David Caruso and Marg Helgenberger while they worked. They weren’t succeeding. They were too self-conscious about striking poses, and they didn’t have the wardrobe, the stylists, or the buff bodies to pull it off.

Stottlemeyer wasn’t trying to impress anyone. In fact, he looked wearier and more haggard than usual. His jacket and slacks were wrinkled and his bushy mustache needed trimming. He was standing with his hands on his hips, staring down at the body as we approached.

He acknowledged us with a quick glance and a nod.

“You didn’t have to come all the way down here,” Stottlemeyer said.

“We came for Mr. Monk’s check,” I said.

“It’s back at the office,” he said. “Stop by later this afternoon and I’ll have it for you.”

Monk crouched down to examine the body, holding his hands out in front of him like a movie director framing a shot with his thumbs.

“Mr. Monk thought if he helped you out here, we wouldn’t have to wait until this afternoon.”

He eyed me suspiciously. “It was Monk’s idea.”

“I might have given him some advice on the matter,” I said. “The check is a week late as it is.”

“The department keeps slashing my budget and I have to prioritize my spending,” Stottlemeyer said. “I’m afraid consultants are at the bottom of the list.”

“Then you can forget about getting any help from Mr. Monk today,” I said. “He doesn’t work for free.”

“I don’t need his help right now,” Stottlemeyer said. “There’s no mystery about what happened here.”

“The guy on the floor burst into the room in the middle of class and pointed a gun at the professor,” Monk said, standing up. “The gunman was about to shoot but the professor shot him first.”

“That’s exactly what happened,” Stottlemeyer said. “It was a clear case of self-defense and we’ve got a lecture hall full of eyewitnesses to back it up.”

“What was the professor doing with a gun?” Monk asked.

“He’s a former federal prosecutor who put a lot of scary people away in his day,” Stottlemeyer said. “He’s licensed to carry a concealed weapon.”

Monk looked to the front of the room. “Is that Professor Jeremiah Cowan?”

“Yeah, you know him?” Stottlemeyer said.

“I took his Introduction to Criminal Law class when I was at Berkeley.”

“That’s the class he was teaching today,” Stottlemeyer said. “But I don’t think the lesson the students got was on the syllabus.”

Monk rolled his head as if trying to work out a kink in his neck. But I knew it wasn’t his neck that was bothering him. The kink was in his mind. There was some detail that wasn’t fitting where it should and that worried me.

“You’re not working today, Mr. Monk,” I said. “You haven’t been paid.”

“I’m not working,” he said.

“Then what was this?” I rolled my head the way he did.

“It was nothing,” he said.

“Of course it was nothing,” Stottlemeyer said. “This case was closed before you got here. There’s nothing left to do now but the paperwork.”

“Good, then there’s no reason you can’t hurry back to the office to sign Mr. Monk’s check.”

Monk headed straight for Professor Cowan, who seemed to recoil at the sight of him approaching.

Stottlemeyer and I followed Monk, neither one of us too happy that he was getting himself involved in this.

“Oh my God,” Cowan said. “It’s Adrian Monk.”

“You still remember me after all these years?” Monk said.

“Before each class, you drew lines on the chalkboard for me to write on,” Cowan said. “You insisted that I use a fresh box of chalk. And you’d never let me erase the board; you had to do it yourself. It took you hours.”

Monk looked at Stottlemeyer and me and shrugged with false modesty. “I was kind of a teacher’s pet. The entire faculty loved me.”

“You’re fortunate I wasn’t carrying a gun in those days,” Cowan said.

“Why were you carrying a gun today?” Monk asked.

“I always carry it,” Cowan said. “But I had it within easy reach today because I’ve been getting these crazy, threatening e-mails lately from a student who believes I destroyed his life by giving him bad grades. He said that I would die for it.”

Disher tipped his head towards the victim. “Was it him?”

“I presume so,” Cowan said.

Disher narrowed his eyes. “Why?”

“Because he screamed, ‘You ruined my life,’ and then aimed his gun at me.”

“Maybe there is more than one student who hates you,” Disher said.

“There could be,” Cowan said tightly.

“We don’t make assumptions,” Disher said. “We deal in facts.”

“Of course,” Cowan said. “How reckless of me.”

“The guy who sent you the e-mails could be hiding behind a bush outside right now, waiting to leap out and gar rote you as you leave the building.”

“You should go check, Randy,” Stottlemeyer said.

Disher stood there for a moment. “Really?”

Stottlemeyer glared at him.

“I’m going to go check the bushes.” Disher pocketed his notebook and hurried away.

Stottlemeyer sighed and turned to Cowan. “Did you report the threats?”

“I informed the campus police and showed them the threatening e-mails,” Cowan said. “But there wasn’t much they could do. They traced the e-mails to the public computers at the campus coffeehouse. Anybody could have sent them.”

Stottlemeyer gestured to the victim. “Do you recognize him? His name is Ford Oldman.”

“He looks vaguely familiar but I have nearly a hundred students in this class alone, not counting the others that I teach,” Cowan said. “I can’t be expected to remember them all, semester after semester, year after year. There must be thousands.”

“You remembered me,” Monk said.

“You stood out,” Cowan said. “Besides, this is only the second week of the class. I’m just getting to know the faces.”

Monk rolled his shoulders. Another kink. Not a good sign. Stottlemeyer caught it, too.

“Yes, that makes perfect sense,” Monk said in a robotic, completely unnatural way. “I couldn’t be more convinced that what you are saying is true. There are no doubts in my mind. Captain, could I please speak to you for a moment about something that has nothing whatsoever to do with the murder of this student?”

“It wasn’t murder,” Cowan said. “It was self-defense. That’s an important legal and moral distinction.”

“You’re right,” Monk said in that same stilted voice. “I should have said self-defense murder.”

“It wasn’t murder at all,” Cowan said, raising his voice an octave in exasperation.

Stottlemeyer took Monk by the arm and dragged him out of earshot of the professor. I tagged along because that’s what I do. It’s in my job description.

“What has gotten into you, Monk?” the captain asked.

“He’s the guy,” Monk said. “He’s the killer.”

“Yes, Monk, we know that,” Stottlemeyer said. “That’s not in dispute.”

“It was murder, Captain.”

“It was self-defense,” Stottlemeyer said. “We’ve got a hundred eyewitnesses and they all tell the same story.”

“That proves it,” Monk said.

“That I’m right,” Stottlemeyer said.

“That this was premeditated murder,” Monk said.

I had no idea why Monk believed this shooting wasn’t what it appeared to be but I’d long since learned he was always right when it came to murder.

“Mr. Monk doesn’t work for nothing,” I said. “If you want to hear more, you’ll have to sign his check.”

“But I don’t want to hear more,” Stottlemeyer said.

“When I took Introduction to Criminal Law, someone ran in, fired a shot at Professor Cowan, and ran out again,” Monk said. “It scared everyone and was over in about ten seconds. He then questioned the students about what they saw and got all kinds of contradictory information. The shooting was just a dramatic stunt to demonstrate the unreliability of eyewitness testimony. But I got it right, of course.”

“That was twenty years ago, Monk,” Stottlemeyer said. “It’s a coincidence.”

“The shooting happened during the second week of my class, too. I can pull my lecture notes out and show you if you want.”

“You still have them?” I asked.

“Of course I do,” he said. “I’ve kept all my schoolwork, from nursery school through college.”

“Why?”

“In case I need to refer back to it in situations like this.”

“Do lots of your former teachers shoot people?” I asked.

“It happens,” Monk said.

“I’m surprised none of them shot you,” Stottlemeyer said.

“I’m also keeping them so I can donate my papers to the university when I die.”

“I didn’t know you had papers,” I said.

“Everybody has papers,” Monk said. “Mine have the advantage of already being indexed and cataloged according to the Dewey decimal system, which is why I could find my lecture notes for this class very easily if the captain wants them.”

Stottlemeyer rubbed his temples. He was getting a Monkache.

“But this shooter wasn’t firing blanks, Monk,” Stottlemeyer said. “There were real bullets in his gun. Maybe the shooter picked this week on purpose as some kind of sick joke.”

“Here’s what happened-” Monk began, but I interrupted him.

“He doesn’t get to hear what happened, because he hasn’t paid you for last month’s consulting,” I said. “If you give him the benefit of your skills for free, he has no incentive to pay you in a timely fashion.”

“You’re right,” Monk said, bit his lip, and then gave in to temptation anyway. It wasn’t much of a battle. “Professor Cowan asked the student, Ford Oldman, to take part in his usual eyewitness stunt. But what Ford didn’t know was that his gun was loaded and that he was being set up for his own murder. It was a nearly perfect and very risky plan, because if Professor Cowan hadn’t shot first, he might have gotten himself killed.”

“What was Professor Cowan’s motive for murdering Oldman?” Stottlemeyer asked.

I spun Monk around and gave him a shove towards the door.

“That’s all you get for free, Captain,” I said. “You’re on your own.”

Before Monk could turn back, I grabbed him by the arm and practically dragged him out of the lecture hall.

“Do you want to get evicted from your apartment?” I asked. “Do you want to lose your assistant? You don’t give away your expertise for free. You’re running a business, Mr. Monk.”

“But I don’t know what the professor’s motive is yet,” Monk said.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Let the police do some detective work for a change. They could use the practice.”