Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse

Acclaim for Lee Goldberg’s previous mysteries

“A nifty creative take on the tradition of great amateur sleuths with a cast of quirky characters.”

—Stuart M. Kaminsky

“A whodunit thrill ride . . . charm, mystery, and fun.”—Janet Evanovich

“A clever, twisting tale.”—Lisa Gardner

“Sly humor, endearing characters, tricky plots.”

—Jerrilyn Farmer, bestselling author of the Madeline Bean mysteries

“Elegant writing, wry humor, a suspenseful premise, [and] a fast-paced plot.”

—Aimee and David Thurlo, authors of the Ella Clah, Sister Agatha, and Lee Nez mystery series

“A riveting mystery . . . wonderful stuff!”

—Paul Bishop, two-time LAPD Detective of the Year and head of the West Los Angeles Sex Crimes and Major Assault Crimes Units, and author of Twice Dead, Chalk, and Whispers

“A swift saga with colorful homicides, glamorous locales, and clever puzzles.”

—Walter Wager, author of Telefon, Twilight’s Last Gleaming, and 58 Minutes

“Intricate plots and engaging characters . . . page-turning entertainment.”—Barbara Seranella

“Well-plotted and beautifully rendered.”

—Margaret Maron, Edgar®, Agatha, and Macavity Award-winning author of the Deborah Knott mysteries

“A devilish plot sense, sophisticated humor, and a smooth writing style . . . he’s as good as anyone writing in the genre today.”

—Donald Bain, coauthor of the Murder, She Wrote series

“Just what the doctor ordered, a sure cure after a rash of blah mysteries . . . more plot twists than a strand of DNA.”

—Elaine Viets, author of the Dead-End Job and Josie Marcus, Mystery Shopper, series

“Fast-paced, tightly constructed mysteries. . . . You’ll read them in great big gulps!”—Gregg Hurwitz

To Tony Shalhoub, the one and only Monk.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, I want to thank Andy Breckman for creating in Adrian Monk one of the funniest and most original detectives in television history, and for letting me tell some stories about the character, first on the TV series and now in print. It has been great fun and a real pleasure for me.

I’d also like to thank William Rabkin and the writing staff of Monk—Tom Scharpling, David Breckman, Daniel Dratch, Hy Conrad, and Joe Toplyn—for all the inspiration and laughter.

I am indebted to Richard Yokley, Kelsey Lancaster, and Dr. D. P. Lyle for their technical advice; to Gina Maccoby for her wheeling and dealing; to Martha Bushko and Kerry Donovan for their enthusiasm and editorial support; to Tod Goldberg for reading all the drafts, and, finally, to my wife, Valerie, and daughter, Madison, for putting up with me while I compulsively obsessed over this book.

I was born and raised in the Bay Area, but the native San Franciscans among you might notice I’ve taken a few geographical liberties with my depiction of the city. I hope I’ll still be welcome next time I visit.

1

Mr. Monk and the Termites

My name is Natalie Teeger. You’ve never heard of me, and that’s okay, because the fact is I’m nobody special. By that I mean I’m not famous. I haven’t done anything or accomplished something that you’d recognize me for. I’m just another anonymous shopper pushing her cart down the aisle at Wal-Mart.

Of course, I had bigger things planned for myself. When I was nine I dreamed of being one of Charlie’s Angels. It wasn’t because I wanted to fight crime or run around braless—I was looking forward to the day I’d fill out enough to wear one. Sadly, I’m still waiting. I admired the Angels because they were strong, independent, and had a sassy attitude. Most of all, I liked how those women took care of themselves.

In that way, I guess my dream came true, though not quite the way I expected. I’ve made a profession out of taking care of myself, my twelve-year-old daughter, Julie, and one other person: Adrian Monk.

You haven’t heard of me, but if you live in San Francisco and you watch the news or read the paper, you’ve probably heard of Monk, because he is famous. He’s a brilliant detective who solves murders that have baffled the police, which amazes me, since he is utterly incapable of handling the simplest aspects of day-to-day life. If that’s the price of genius, them I’m glad I’m not one.

Usually taking care of Monk is just a day job, but that changed the week termites were found in his apartment building. By Monk, of course. He spotted a pinprick-sized hole in a piece of siding and knew it was fresh. He knew because he keeps track of all the irregularities in the siding.

When I asked him why he does that, he looked at me quizzically and said, “Doesn’t everybody?”

That’s Monk for you.

Since Monk’s building was going to be tented and fumigated, his landlord told him he’d have to stay with friends or go to a hotel for a couple of days. That was a problem, because the only friends Monk has are Capt. Leland Stottlemeyer and Lt. Randy Disher of the San Francisco Police Department and me. But I’m not really his friend so much as I am his employee, and, considering how little he pays me to drive him around and run his errands, I’m barely that.

I went to Stottlemeyer first, since he used to be Monk’s partner on the force, and asked if he’d take him in. But Stottlemeyer said his wife would leave him if he brought Monk home. Stottlemeyer said he’d leave, too, if Monk showed up. I went to Disher next, but he lives in a one-bedroom apartment, so there wasn’t room for another person, though I have a feeling he would have found some room if it were me who needed a place to stay. Or any other woman under the age of thirty with a pulse.

So Monk and I started to look for a hotel. That wouldn’t be a big deal for most people, but Adrian Monk isn’t like most people. Look at how he dresses.

He wears his shirts buttoned up to the neck. They have to be 100 percent cotton, off-white, with exactly eight buttons, a size-sixteen neck and a thirty-two sleeve. All even numbers. Make a note of that; it’s important.

His pants are pleated and cuffed, with eight belt loops (most pants have seven, so his have to be specially tailored), a thirty-four waist, and thirty-four length, but after the pant legs are cuffed, the inseam is thirty-two. His shoes, all twelve identical pairs, are brown and a size ten. More even numbers. It’s no accident or coincidence. This stuff really matters to him.

He’s obviously got an obsessive-compulsive disorder of some kind. I don’t know exactly what kind because I’m not a nurse, like his previous assistant, Sharona, who left him abruptly to remarry her ex-husband (who, I hear, wasn’t such a great guy, but after working with Monk for a short time, I understand why that wouldn’t really matter. If I had an ex-husband I could return to, I would).

I have no professional qualifications whatsoever. My last job before this one was bartending, but I’ve also worked as a waitress, yoga instructor, house sitter, and blackjack dealer, among other things. But I know from talking to Stottlemeyer that Monk wasn’t always so bad. Monk’s condition became a lot worse after his wife was murdered a few years ago.

I can truly sympathize with that. My husband, Mitch, a fighter pilot, was killed in Kosovo, and I went kind of nuts for a long time myself. Not Monk nuts, of course—normal nuts.

Maybe that’s why Monk and I get along better than anybody (particularly me) ever thought we would. Sure, he irritates me, but I know a lot of his peculiarities come from a deep and unrelenting heartbreak that nobody, and I mean nobody, should ever have to go through.

So I cut him a lot of slack, but even I have my limits.

Which brings me back to finding a hotel room for Monk. To begin with, we could look only at four-star hotels, because four is an even number, and a place with only two stars couldn’t possibly meet Monk’s standard of cleanliness. He wouldn’t put his dog in a two-star hotel—if he had a dog, which he doesn’t, and never would, because dogs are animals who lick themselves and drink out of toilets.

The first place we went to on that rainy Friday was the Belmont in Union Square, one of the finest hotels in San Francisco.

Monk insisted on visiting every vacant room the grand old Belmont had before deciding which one to occupy. He looked only at even-numbered rooms on even-numbered floors, of course. Although the rooms were identically furnished and laid out the same way on every floor, he found something wrong with each one. For instance, one room didn’t feel symmetrical enough. Another room was too symmetrical. One had no symmetry at all.

All the bathrooms were decorated with some expensive floral wallpaper from Italy. But if the strips of wallpaper didn’t line up just right, if the flowers and their stems didn’t match up exactly on either side of the cut, Monk declared the room uninhabitable.

By the tenth room, the hotel manager was guzzling little bottles of vodka from the minibar, and I was tempted to join him. Monk was on his knees, examining the wallpaper under the bathroom counter, wallpaper that nobody would ever see unless they were on their knees under the bathroom counter, and pointing out “a critical mismatch,” and that’s when I cracked. I couldn’t take it anymore, and I did something I never would have done if I hadn’t been under extreme emotional and mental duress.

I told Monk he could stay with us.

I said it just to end my immediate suffering, not realizing in that instant of profound weakness the full, horrific ramifications of my actions. But before I could take it back, Monk immediately accepted my invitation, and the hotel manager nearly kissed me in gratitude.

“But I don’t want to hear any complaints about how my house is arranged or how dirty you think it is or how many ‘critical mismatches’ there are,” I said to Monk as we started down the stairs to the lobby.

“I’m sure it’s perfect,” Monk said.

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about, Mr. Monk. You’re starting already.”

He looked at me blankly. “All I said was that I’m sure it’s perfect. Most people would take that as the sincere compliment it was meant to be.”

“But most people don’t mean ‘perfect’ when they say ‘perfect.’ ”

“Of course they do,” Monk said.

“No, they mean pleasant, or nice, or comfortable. They don’t actually mean perfect in the sense that everything will be, well, perfect. You do.”

“Give me some credit.” Monk shook his head.

I gaped at him in disbelief.

“You wouldn’t stay in that hotel room we just saw because the floral pattern of the wallpaper didn’t match under the sink.”

“That’s different,” he said. “That was a safety issue.”

“How could that possibly be a safety issue?” I said.

“It reveals shoddy craftsmanship. If they were that haphazard with wallpaper, imagine what the rest of the construction work was like,” Monk said. “I bet a mild earthquake is all it would take to bring this entire building down.”

“The building is going to fall because the wallpaper doesn’t match up?”

“This place should be condemned.”

We reached the lobby and Monk stopped in his tracks.

“What?” I said.

“We should warn the others,” Monk said.

“What others?” I asked.

“The hotel guests,” Monk said. “They should be informed of the situation.”

“That the wallpaper doesn’t match,” I said.

“It’s a safety issue,” he said. “I’ll call them later.” I didn’t bother arguing with him. Frankly I was just relieved to get out of the hotel without stumbling over a dead body. I know that sounds ridiculous, but when you’re with Adrian Monk, corpses have a way of turning up all over the place. But, as I would soon find out, it was only a temporary reprieve.

Monk lived in a Deco-style apartment building on Pine, a twilight zone of affordability that straddled the northernmost edge of the Western District, with its upper-middle-class families, and the southwest corner of Pacific Heights, with its old money, elaborately ornate Victorians, and lush gardens high above the city.

On this sunny Saturday morning, Monk was waiting for me on the rain-slicked sidewalk, watching the uniformed nannies from Pacific Heights and Juicy Coutured housewives from the Western District pushing babies in Peg Perego strollers up and down the hill to Alta Plaza Park and its views of the marina, the bay, and the Golden Gate.

Monk stood with two large, identical suitcases, one on either side of him, a forlorn expression on his face. He wore his brown, four-button overcoat, his hands stuffed deep into the pockets, which made him seem smaller somehow.

There was something touching about the way he looked, like a sad, lonely kid going off to camp for the first time. I wanted to hug him, but fortunately for both of us, the feeling passed quickly.

Parking is impossible on a weekend in that neighborhood, so I double-parked in front of his building, which was so streamlined that it looked more aerodynamic than my car.

I got out and gestured toward his two suitcases. “You’re only staying for a few days, Mr. Monk.”

“I know,” he said. “That’s why I packed light.”

I opened the back of my Cherokee and then reached for one of his suitcases. I nearly dislocated my shoulder. “What do you have in here, gold bricks?”

“Eight pairs of shoes,” he said.

“You brought enough shoes to wear one pair a day for over a week.”

“I’m roughing it,” Monk said.

“That can’t be all you have in here.” I wrestled his suitcase into the back of my car. “It’s too heavy.”

“I’ve also packed fourteen pairs of socks, fourteen shirts, fourteen pairs of pants, fourteen—”

“Fourteen?” I asked. “Why fourteen?”

“I know it’s playing close to the edge, but that’s who I am. A man who lives on the edge. It’s exciting,” Monk said. “Do you think I packed enough clothes?”

“You have plenty,” I said.

“Maybe I should get more.”

“You’re fine,” I said.

“Maybe just two more pairs.”

“Of what?”

“Everything,” he said.

“I thought you were a man who lives on the edge,” I said.

“What if the edge moves?”

“It won’t,” I said.

“If you say so,” Monk said. “But if it does, we’ll rue this day.”

I was ruing it already. And I wasn’t even sure what “ruing” meant.

Monk stood there, his other suitcase beside him. I motioned to it.

“Aren’t you going to stick that in the car, Mr. Monk, or were you planning to leave it here?”

“You’re saying you want me to put the suitcase in your car?”

“You thought I was going to do it for you?”

“It’s your car,” he said.

“So?”

He shrugged. “I thought you had a system.” “My system is that you put your own stuff in my car.”

“But you took one of my suitcases and loaded it in the car,” he said.

“I was being polite,” I said. “I wasn’t indicating a preference for loading the car myself.”

“That’s good to know.” Monk picked up his suitcase and slid it in beside the other one. “I was respecting your space.”

I think he was just being lazy, but you never know for sure with Monk. Even if he were, I wouldn’t call him on it, because he’s my boss and I want to keep my job. Besides, it gave me the opening I was waiting for to address a touchy subject.

“Of course you were, Mr. Monk, and that’s really great. I appreciate that, because Julie and I have our own way of doing things that’s not exactly the same as yours.”

“Like what?”

Oh, my God, I thought. Where to begin? “Well, for one thing, we don’t boil our toothbrushes each day after we use them.”

His eyes went wide. “That’s so wrong.”

“After we wash our hands, we don’t always use a fresh, sterile towel to dry them.” “Didn’t your parents teach you anything about personal hygiene?”

“The point is, Mr. Monk, I hope that while you stay with us you’ll be able to respect our differences and accept us for who we are.”

“Hippies,” he said.

There was a word I hadn’t heard in decades and that certainly never applied to me. I let it pass.

“All I want is for the three of us to get along,” I said.

“You don’t smoke pot, do you?”

“No, of course not. What kind of person do you think I am? Wait—don’t answer that. What I’m trying to say, Mr. Monk, is that in my house, I’m the boss.”

“As long as I don’t have to smoke any weed.”

“You don’t,” I said.

“Groovy.”

And with that, he got into my car and buckled his seat belt.

2

Mr. Monk Moves In

I live in Noe Valley. It’s south of the much more colorful and well-known Castro District, with its energetic gay community, and to the west of the multiethnic Mission District, which is surely next in line to be conquered by the unstoppable forces of gentrification, Williams-Sonoma catalogs gripped in their fists.

Noe Valley feels like a small town, far away from the urban hustle and chaos of San Francisco, when, in reality, the bustling Civic Center, overrun with politicians and vagrants, is only about twenty blocks away, on the north side of a very steep hill.

When Mitch and I bought our place, Noe Valley was still a working-class neighborhood. Everybody seemed to drive a Volkswagen Rabbit, and all the houses were slightly neglected, in need of a fresh coat of paint and a little loving attention.

Now everybody is driving a minivan or SUV, there’s scaffolding up in front of every other house, and Twenty-fourth Street—a shopping district that was once lined with bakeries, diners, and barbershops—is overrun with patisseries, bistros, and stylists. But the neighborhood hasn’t gone completely upscale. There remain lots of homes in need of care (like mine), and enough little gift shops, secondhand bookstores, and mom-and-pop pizza places that Noe has managed to hold on to its quirky, Bohemian character (equal parts of which are now authentic and manufactured). It’s still very much a bedroom community, filled with young, struggling families and comfortable retirees with nary a tourist in sight.

On the drive down Divisadero to my house, Monk asked me to adjust my seat so it was even with his. I explained to him that if I did that, I wouldn’t be able to reach important things like the gas pedal, the brakes, and the steering wheel. When I suggested instead that he move his seat, he ignored me and began fiddling with the passenger’s-side mirror so it was tilted at the same angle as the mirror on the driver’s side, which I’m sure he figured would compensate for the natural imbalance created by the uneven seats.

I don’t get the logic either. That’s why I keep a bottle of Advil in my glove compartment at all times. Not for him, of course. For me.

When we got to my little Victorian row house, I let Monk get his own suitcases out of the car while I rushed inside for one last look around for things that might set him off. It’s not like he hadn’t visited my place before, but this was the first time he was staying there for more than an hour or two. Little things that he might have been able to summon the willpower to overlook before might become intolerable now.

Standing there in my open doorway, looking at my small living room, I realized my house was a Monk minefield. The decor is what I like to call thrift-shop chic, the furniture and lamps an eclectic mix of styles and eras. There is some Art Deco here and a little seventies chintz there, because I bought whatever happened to catch my eye and meet my meager budget. My approach to interior design was to have no approach at all.

In other words, my entire house, and my entire life, was the antithesis of Adrian Monk. There was nothing I could do to change that now. All I could do was open the door wide, welcome him in, and brace myself for the worst.

So that’s exactly what I did. He stepped in, surveyed the house as if for the first time, and smiled contentedly.

“We made the right decision,” he said. “This is much better than a hotel.”

It was the last thing I ever expected him to say. “Really? Why?”

“It feels lived-in,” he said.

“I thought you didn’t like things that were lived-in,” I said.

“There’s a difference between a hotel room that’s been continuously occupied by thousands of different people and a home that’s . . . ” His voice trailed off for a moment. And then he looked at me a little wistfully and said, “A home.”

I smiled. In his own way, that may have been the nicest thing he’d ever said to me. “Let me show you where you’ll be staying, Mr. Monk.”

I led him down the hall, past Julie’s closed door, which had a big, hand-drawn, yellow warning sign taped to it that said: PRIVATE PROPERTY. NO TRESPASSING. STAY OUT. KNOCK BEFORE ENTERING. Since it’s usually just the two of us in the house, the sign struck me as adolescent overkill. I had a sign like that taped to my door, too, when I was her age, but I had brothers to worry about. She had only me. Below that sign, Julie had also taped up a diamond-shaped DANGER! HAZARDOUS WASTE placard that she’d found somewhere.

Monk glanced at the placard, then at me. “That’s a joke, right?”

I nodded.

“It’s very humorous.” He tried to chuckle, but it came out sounding more like he was choking. “Do you confirm it periodically?”

“Confirm what?”

“That it’s a joke,” he said. “Children can be very mischievous, you know. When I was eight, I once went a whole day without washing my hands.”

“You’re lucky you survived.”

Monk sighed and nodded his head. “When you’re young, you think you’re immortal.”

I gestured to the room beside my daughter’s. “This is our guest room.”

Actually, until the night before it had been our junk room, where we stored all the clutter we couldn’t fit into the rest of the house. Now it was all temporarily jammed into my garage.

Monk took a few steps into the room and regarded the furnishings. There was a full-size bed, the first one Mitch and I ever bought, and the walls were decorated with some cheaply framed sketches of London, Paris, and Berlin landmarks that we bought from street-corner artists when we eloped to Europe. The dresser was a garage-sale find with one missing drawer knob, a flaw I hoped Monk wouldn’t notice but knew that he would. It was his astonishing powers of observation that made him such a great detective. He could probably tell by glancing at the sketch of Notre Dame if the artist was left- or right-handed, what he ate for lunch, and whether or not he smothered his elderly grandmother with a pillow.

Monk set his suitcases down at the foot of the bed. “It’s charming.”

“Really?”

This was working out much better than I’d hoped, though I noticed he was shielding his eyes from the dresser as if it were emitting a blinding glare.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “It oozes charm.”

Before I could ask him what he meant, exactly, by “oozes,” someone rang the doorbell. I excused myself and went to see who was at the door.

There was a burly guy with a clipboard standing on my porch. Behind him I could see two men unloading a refrigerator from a moving truck in front of my house.

“Does Adrian Monk reside here?” the man asked. He smelled of Old Spice and Cutty Sark. I wasn’t sure which was more unsettling to me: the mingling of odors or the fact that I could identify them.

“No, I reside here,” I said. “Mr. Monk is just a guest.”

“Whatever,” he said, then turned and whistled to the guys on the street. “Start unloading the truck.”

“Whoa,” I said, stepping out onto the porch. “What are you unloading?”

“Your stuff,” he said, thrusting the clipboard and pen at me. “Sign here.”

I looked at the papers on the clipboard. It was a moving-company invoice listing all the furniture, dishware, bedding, and appliances they were transporting from Monk’s house to mine. This was Monk’s idea of roughing it?

“It’s about time you got here,” I heard Monk say behind me. I turned to see him holding the door open for the two guys hauling in his refrigerator. “Be careful with that.”

“Hold it,” I shouted at the movers, and then I turned to Monk. “What is all this?”

“Just a few necessities.”

“There’s a big difference between staying with someone and moving in.”

“I know that,” he said.

“Then how do you explain this?” I pointed at his refrigerator.

“I have special dietary needs.”

“So you brought your own refrigerator and all the food that’s in it?”

“I didn’t want to be a bother,” he said.

I waved the clipboard at him.

“This is everything you own, Mr. Monk,” I said. “To accommodate all of your belongings, I’d have to move everything of mine out of the house.”

Monk gestured to the movers. “I’m sure they’d be glad to help. They’re professionals.”

I took a deep breath, shoved the clipboard into the burly man’s hands, and said to him, “You’re taking all of this back where you got it.”

“They can’t,” Monk said.

“Why not?”

“The building is tented by now,” Monk said. “And filled with poison.”

“Then you’ll just have to put it in storage, Mr. Monk, or leave it on the front lawn. Because it’s not going in this house.”

I stomped back inside, slammed the door, and left Monk to work things out with the movers.

It was only when I was standing in the middle of my living room, trying hard to control my anger, that I finally realized that I’d been home for fifteen minutes and hadn’t seen or heard my daughter. I went to her door and knocked.

“Julie?” I pressed my ear to her door. “Are you in there?”

“Yes,” she said softly. “Stop putting your ear to my door.”

I stepped back guiltily, even though I knew she couldn’t have seen me. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“Mr. Monk is here,” I said.

“I know,” she replied.

“Is that why you’re hiding in your room?”

“I’m not hiding.”

“I thought you liked Mr. Monk.”

“I do,” she said.

I’m human and a single mother, and I was already pretty keyed up by Monk and the movers, so I wasn’t in the mood for petulant behavior.

“Then get your butt out here and be polite,” I said.

“I can’t,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because he’ll think I’m a baby,” she said, and then I heard what sounded like a muffled sob.

I immediately felt a pang of guilt for snapping at her instead of being the intuitive, caring, all-knowing mom I should be. I decided to ignore the warning signs on her door and heed the one I heard in her voice. I opened her door.

Julie was sitting on her bed, tears streaming down her cheeks. She’d taken out all the stuffed animals that she’d stowed deep in her closet six months ago, after declaring she was “too grown-up” for them. Now she’d gathered them all around her and was hugging them close.

I got onto the bed beside Julie and put my arm around her. “What’s wrong, sweetie?”

“You’ll think it’s stupid.” She sniffled.

I kissed her cheek. “I promise I won’t.” “Maddie called,” she said, referring to one of her friends from school. “Sparky is dead. He was killed.”

And with that she started sobbing. Completely lost, I drew her close and stroked her hair. I hated to ask, but I had to . . .

“Who is Sparky?”

Julie lifted her head, sniffled hard, and wiped the tears from her eyes. “The firehouse dalmatian. The one that Firefighter Joe brings to school every year during his talk about fire safety.”

“Oh, that Sparky.” I still had no idea what she was talking about. “What happened?”

“Someone hit him on the head last night with a pickax,” Julie said with a shiver. “Who would want to murder an adorable, trusting, innocent dog?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

She started to cry again and hugged me tight.

“I’ll find out,” Monk said softly.

Julie and I both looked up to see Monk standing in the doorway. How long had he been there?

“You will?” Julie asked.

“It’s what I do.” Monk shifted his weight. “Solving murders is kind of my thing.”

Julie reached for a Kleenex on her nightstand, blew her nose, and tossed the wadded-up tissue toward her garbage can. She missed.

“Do you really think you can catch the person who killed Sparky?” she asked.

Monk stared at the tissue on the floor as if he were expecting it to crawl away. “Yes.”

Julie turned to me. “Can we afford him?”

It was a good question. I looked back at Monk, who was watching the tissue and twisting his neck like he had a kink in it.

“Can we?” I asked him.

“I’ll bring the killer to justice if you will do me one huge favor.”

“What?” Julie asked.

I hoped it didn’t involve letting him move everything he owned into my house, because that wasn’t going to happen, no matter how many puppies, baby seals, or bunny rabbits were murdered.

“Pick up that tissue, place it in a sealed plastic bag, and remove it from this house immediately.”

“I can do that,” she said.

“Thank you.” Monk looked at me and tipped his head toward the placard on her door. “It’s no joke.”

3

Mr. Monk and the Fire Truck

Saturday is Julie’s “activity day.” Tae kwon do. Soccer practice. Hip-hop class. And, of course, the inevitable birthday party. Let’s be honest here: No parent wants to spend their weekends chauffeuring their kids around. So I organized a carpool schedule with the other neighborhood mothers (it’s always the mothers who get stuck with this drudgery). That particular Saturday happened to be one of my carpool days off, so another overworked, dead-tired mother was driving a bunch of unruly kids to their classes, practices, and birthday parties.

I always intend to spend that special “alone” time pampering myself with a good book, or a long walk, or a luxurious soak in a hot bath. But I inevitably end up running errands and catching up on all the things I’ve fallen behind on, like doing laundry, shopping for groceries, cleaning up the house, and paying bills.

So on that Saturday afternoon I was free to assist Monk, who been hired by my daughter to investigate the murder of a firehouse dalmatian.

Our first stop was the fire station, which was over in North Beach, the neighborhood between Chinatown and Fisherman’s Wharf. There’s no beach there, of course—that was buried under a landfill, and the waterfront extended farther north decades ago, so the name is kind of a cheat. It’s perhaps better known locally as Little Italy, even though now there’re as many Chinese living there as Italians, so maybe that name is a cheat, too.

North Beach is also known for beat writer Jack Kerouac, and stripper Carol Doda, whose enormous hooters used to be up in lights in front of the Condor Club. There are a few remaining vestiges of the neighborhood’s beatnik past, mostly for the sake of the tourists. A couple strip joints still cling to life on Broadway, but their seedy allure is almost comically dated, and they’re losing ground fast to coffeehouses and art galleries.

Gentrification, beautification, and renovation are everywhere, my friends. It’s not just happening with buildings and neighborhoods. Go down to L.A. and you can see they’re gentrifying, beautifying, and renovating people there now, too.

The streets were still damp from Friday’s intermittent rains, but the skies were clear and bright, with a crisp, cold wind blowing off the white-capped bay. I could smell the sea, mingled with a hint of fried food wafting up from Chinatown.

The firehouse was on top of a hill with dramatic views of the Transamerica Pyramid and Coit Tower. It was a redbrick building from the mid-1900s with a stone carving of the SFFD emblem, an eagle with its talons gripping crisscrossed axes over licking flames, mounted above the arched garage doors.

“When I was a kid,” Monk said, “I wanted to be a firefighter.”

“You did?” I said.

“I loved everything about it,” he said. “Except the firefighting part.”

“Then what was it about being a firefighter that you loved?”

“This.”

Monk turned to the firehouse and opened his arms as if to embrace the sight in front of him. Both of the garage doors were open, letting the breeze stream into the station, where half a dozen firemen scrubbed and shined the two gleaming fire trucks, the sunshine glinting off the sparkling chrome and polished red metal.

“Isn’t it great?” He sighed.

I followed his gaze as he took in the fire hoses, neatly folded atop one another on the fire trucks; the spotless cement floors of the garage scrubbed and mopped to a marblelike sheen; the neat rows of fire hats, coats, and helmets aligned in open racks of dazzling steel; the pickaxes, shovels, and other tools mounted on the wall in order of size, shape, and function. The beauty of cleanliness, efficiency, and order.

His eyes were wide in childlike awe and appreciation. He was ten years old again, though I must confess that in a lot of ways I’m not convinced he’s ever really grown up.

Monk approached the captain, who stood beside a rolling cart of neatly folded white towels and a laundry basket, watching his men at work. His short-sleeved blue uniform was perfectly pressed and starched, his badge gleaming so bright that it was nearly pure light. He was in his fifties, with the kind of hard, chiseled features that only soldiers, comic-book characters, and statues usually possess.

“May I help you?” the captain asked.

“Actually, we’d like to help you,” Monk said. “I’m Adrian Monk and this is my assistant, Natalie Teeger.”

“I’m Captain Mantooth.” He offered his hand to Monk. “You’re the detective, right?”

Monk shook his hand, then held his open palm out to me for a disinfectant wipe. I gave him one. If Mantooth was offended, he didn’t show it.

“I’ve been hired to investigate Sparky’s murder,” Monk said as he wiped his hands.

“Are you working for Joe?” Mantooth asked.

“Who is Joe?” Monk replied, and handed the wipe back to me.

“Firefighter Joe,” I supplied, stuffing the wipe into a Baggie in my purse. By the end of a day my purse was usually overflowing with little Baggies of wipes. “He and Sparky were a team.”

“They were much more than that, Miss Teeger,” Mantooth said. “Joe Cochran rescued that dog from the pound ten years ago, and they have been inseparable ever since. Sparky wasn’t my dog, but I still feel like we lost one of our men last night. We all do.”

Monk picked up one of the folded towels from the cart and gestured to the fire truck. “May I?”

Mantooth shrugged. “Sure.”

Monk went over to the truck and buffed one of the sparkling chrome headlights. When he turned back to us he had a big, boyish grin on his face.

“Wow,” he said.

The captain and I watched Monk polish a valve. The other firemen on the truck watched him, too. I could see we might be there for a while, so I decided to press on.

“Can you tell us what happened last night?”

“We responded to a residential fire four blocks from here. Must have been around ten o’clock, but I can check the logs for the exact time. A woman fell asleep on her sofa while she was smoking a cigarette. It’s the most common cause of fire death worldwide and easily the most preventable,” Mantooth said. “We knocked the fire down and got back here about two A.M. We knew something was wrong the minute we pulled into the garage. Usually Sparky runs out to greet us, tail wagging. But he didn’t this time. . . .”

Monk approached us, but it wasn’t to ask a question or actually participate in some meaningful way in his own investigation. It was to drop his used towel into a basket and get a fresh one.

“This is so cool,” he said, then grinned giddily at us both and got to work scrubbing a spotless door handle. Mantooth couldn’t stop staring at him.

“Were there any signs of a break-in?” I asked.

“No,” he replied, tearing his gaze away from Monk and back to me. “The firehouse wasn’t locked.”

“Was it unusual to leave the firehouse open and the dog by himself?”

“Not at all,” Mantooth said. “That’s one of the reasons, historically, that we have dalmatians. They guard the firehouse. Joe is full of facts like that. He can tell you all about dalmatians.”

“Has anyone ever tried to steal anything from the firehouse before?”

“Not before and not last night,” Mantooth said. “As far as I can tell, nothing is missing. It’s a safe neighborhood, or at least it used to be.”

I didn’t know what to ask next, so I turned to Monk, who was, after all, the legendary detective around here.

“Mr. Monk?” I said.

He kept polishing.

“Mr. Monk,” I repeated, more firmly this time. He turned around. “Isn’t there something you’d like to ask Captain Mantooth?”

Monk snapped his fingers. “Of course. Thank you for reminding me.”

He tossed the dirty towel in the basket and looked at the captain. “Do you have any of those honorary-fireman badges?”

“You mean the ones we give the kids?”

“No, the ones you give the honorary firemen,” Monk said.

“I think so,” Mantooth said. “Would you like one?” Monk nodded. Mantooth went back to the office. Monk looked at me.

“Wow.”

“Is that all you’re going to say?”

“Yippee.”

“Don’t you have any questions you’d like to ask about the murder? Like what happened here that night?”

“I already know.”

“You do?”

“I’ve known since we walked in,” he said.

“How?”

He drew a triangle in the air with his hands. “Simple geometry.”

There’s nothing simple about geometry. I flunked it in high school, and I’m occasionally awakened by this nightmare that Mr. Ross, my tenth-grade math teacher, hunts me down and makes me take the final exam again.

“Is there a way we could keep geometry out of this?” I said.

“The dog was over there.” Monk pointed to the far right-hand side of the station house. “Point one of the triangle. That was his favorite spot to lie down when the trucks were away.”

“How do you know?”

“You can see where he’s scratched the wall with his paws,” Monk said.

I followed his gaze and squinted. Sure enough, there were some light scratches the dog must have made when he was stretching or rolling over or lying against the wall.

“When the fire trucks are gone, that spot gave Sparky a clear view of the garage doors,” Monk said. “When the fire trucks were here, they blocked the view from there, so he slept in his basket in the kitchen, where he could get table scraps and also enjoy more foot traffic.”

He tipped his head toward the kitchen, and I saw the edge of the dog’s basket inside the open doorway. I could see a rubber hot-dog chew toy in the basket.

I couldn’t figure out how, or when, Monk noticed the scratches and the dog bed. It seemed to me that from the moment we got there all his attention had been on the fire trucks. But I was wrong.

Monk cocked his head, looked around the station, then took a few steps forward, as if he were placing his feet in a set of footprints in the sand.

“The murderer crept in through the open garage and reached this point, the second point in our triangle, when the dog saw him and charged,” Monk said. “He looked around for something to defend himself with and spotted those.”

Monk whirled around to face the axes, shovels, and rakes neatly arranged along the wall to the left of us, every tool in its proper place. At least I knew why that had attracted Monk’s attention.

“He ran over there, the dog closing in on him. He grabbed the pickax off the wall and swung it at the dog at the last possible second.” Monk took a few steps forward and stopped near the open racks of coats, helmets, and boots. He tapped the floor with his foot. “Sparky died right here. The third point in our triangle.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Simple geometry,” Monk said again.

“He’s right, Miss Teeger,” the captain said, coming up behind me. “That’s exactly where we found the poor dog when we got back, right here in front of the turnouts.”

“The what?” I said.

“It’s what we call our firefighting gear,” he said. “All the stuff we wear into a fire.”

Monk looked past me. “Uh-oh.”

“Uh-oh, what?” I asked.

He went over to the rack of heavy fire coats, which were all aligned front-to-back in a neat row. One of the coats was hanging from a hanger that was facing a different direction from the others.

Naturally, Monk took the coat off the hanger, turned the hanger around, and hung the coat up again, careful to make sure the shoulders lined up with the ones behind and the ones in front.

Mantooth shook his head in amazement. “He’s more of a stickler for order than I am.”

“Than anybody,” I said.

“I wish all my guys were like him.”

“Be careful what you wish for,” I said.

Monk came back and wagged his hands in front of me for some wipes. I reached into my purse and gave him two.

“Are you absolutely sure nothing has been stolen from the firehouse?” Monk said while cleaning his hands.

“All of the equipment is accounted for, and none of the guys have reported anything missing from their lockers,” Mantooth said.

“How about something that you wouldn’t think of as important?” Monk said. “Something so insignificant, obscure, and unremarkable that nobody would necessarily miss it?”

“Then how would we know if it was gone?”

“I once solved a murder where it turned out all the killer was after was a piece of paper jammed in a copying machine.”

“We don’t have a copying machine.”

“I once solved a murder where it turned out all the killer was after was a rock in a goldfish aquarium.”

“We don’t have any goldfish.”

Monk glanced at me. “This is going to be a tough one.”

“Come to think of it,” Mantooth said, “we’re missing two towels.”

“What kind of towels?” Monk asked.

“The ones we use to clean and polish the fire truck,” Mantooth replied. “We had thirty-four the day before the fire and thirty-two afterward. I know this sounds silly, but I’m kind of compulsive about keeping track of the towels.”

“It sounds perfectly natural to me,” Monk said. He’d found a kindred spirit.

“Do you really think someone would come in here to steal two towels?” the captain said.

Monk shrugged. “Where do you keep them?”

“In the basement, by the washer and dryer.”

This was getting ridiculous. There was no way someone killed a dog over a couple of towels. So to stop the insanity, I piped up with a question of my own.

“Captain Mantooth,” I said, “can you think of any reason someone would want to harm Sparky?”

“You’d have to ask Joe,” Mantooth said. “He was closer to that dog than he was to any of us. When he went off duty, he’d take Sparky home with him.”

“Where can we find Joe now?”

“He’s still on duty, but he didn’t want to be here, not today, not without Sparky,” Mantooth said. “So I sent him back to the scene of the house fire to oversee the cleanup and assist the arson investigators. He should still be there.”

“Thank you, Captain,” Monk said. “This has been wonderful.”

“You’re welcome back anytime, Mr. Monk.”

Monk started to go when Mantooth called out to him: “Wait, you don’t want to leave without this.”

The captain pinned a badge on Monk’s lapel. The badge was a red helmet atop an emblem of a fire truck encircled by a golden fire hose and the words JUNIOR FIREFIGHTER in block letters. Across the bottom it read: SAN FRANCISCO FIRE DEPARTMENT.

Monk looked down at it and smiled. “Wow.”

4

Mr. Monk and the Ruined Weekend

Since the scene of the previous night’s fire was only four blocks away, and it was such a beautiful day, I thought it would be nice if we walked, even though it meant a steep climb uphill back to the car. I didn’t even mind that Monk counted and tapped each parking meter we passed along the way. I was too preoccupied trying to make sense of what we’d just learned at the firehouse.

If the guy’s plan was to kill Sparky, why didn’t he bring a weapon with him? If he came to steal something, and killed Sparky in self-defense, how come nothing was missing?

I asked Monk the same questions. Between his parking meter count, which I will spare you, he answered them. Sort of.

“He could have been staking out the station house for days, waiting for them to leave to fight a fire so he could murder the dog,” Monk said.

“Why would he want to do that?”

“Maybe the dog urinated on his roses.”

I could see how that could strike Monk as a compelling motive for murder.

“So assuming this insane gardener was that intent on killing Sparky,” I said, “why did he wait for the dog to go after him? Why didn’t he just walk up to the dog and clobber him with a baseball bat or something?”

“He would have had to bring the baseball bat with him,” Monk said. “And then he’d have to dispose of it later. Then there’s the risk that it might be found and could somehow be traced back to him.”

“And if he keeps it, it might link him to the crime later,” I said.

Monk nodded.

It made sense. The case wasn’t so confusing after all.

“On the other hand,” Monk said, “maybe he didn’t expect Sparky to be there.”

“But Sparky was always there,” I said.

“Only when Joe was on duty,” Monk said. “Otherwise Joe took the dog home with him.”

It had been only a few minutes since Captain Mantooth had told us that, and already I’d forgotten it. I obviously wasn’t cut out for detective work.

“So you think Sparky’s murder was an accident,” I said. “You think the killer was after something else and got caught by the dog.”

“Not necessarily,” Monk said. “He could still have been going there to murder Sparky.”

I was getting confused all over again.

“How can you kill a dog that isn’t there?”

“You could poison his food.”

I thought about it. The killer staked out the station on a day he knew that Joe wouldn’t be working, waited for everyone to leave to fight a fire, then sneaked inside to poison the food. But instead the killer was attacked by the dog he’d come to kill, a dog that wasn’t supposed to be there, and had to protect himself with the pickax.

It could have happened that way.

Or the other way.

Either way, it wasn’t too complicated. I could deal with it.

“Or the dog was killed by accident,” Monk said, confusing things for me all over again. “And the guy was in the firehouse for an entirely different reason.”

“Like what?” I said. With that question, I gave up trying to make sense of the case. That was Monk’s job, not mine.

“I don’t know,” Monk said. “But I once solved a murder that was all about a penny. . . .”

The house that had caught fire was still standing, but the first floor was charred and gutted, the windows broken and rimmed by black where flames had licked out. The property was cordoned off with yellow caution tape, and several firefighters picked through the rubble while others hosed things down.

The smell of smoke was heavy in the air, the streets and gutters inundated with soot-blackened water, the storm drains clogged with burned debris. There was a fire truck, a black-and-white, an SFFD sedan, and an unmarked police car parked in front of the house.

The people in the neighborhood were out on their porches and milling on the sidewalks, looking at the house and talking animatedly among themselves. There’s nothing like a fire to bring a community together.

The burned house was one of a half dozen identically bland, blockish town houses built side by side in the 1950s. They must have been designed by somebody who was really into the “international modern style” popularized by Le Corbusier, Richard Neutra, and Mies Van Der Rohe, only done artlessly and on the cheap (as you can probably tell, I took a few architecture courses and have been waiting for an opportunity to show off what little I remember). The town houses were unadorned by moldings, eschewing style for function, and the doors and windows were flush with the flat walls around them, making the places stand out in sharp (and, if you ask me, offensive) contrast to the gables, cornices, and bay windows of the utterly charming Victorian homes across the street.

I wondered how many of the neighbors were thinking the same thing I was: Architecturally speaking, it was a shame the fire didn’t burn down all six of the ugly town houses on that side of the street. The neighbors’ homes, by contrast, were wood-frame Eastlake Victorians standing shoulder-to-shoulder, narrow and tall. Each house had the requisite bay windows to increase the available light, decorative gables to add some individual flair, and tiny garages that were barely able to fit a single car.

The uniformed officer guarding the fire scene recognized Monk, lifted up the yellow caution tape, and nodded us past.

The interior of the living room was a gutted, scorched skeleton of what it once was, with the charred furniture and melted TV still eerily in place. An African-American woman in a bright blue SFFD windbreaker with the words ARSON INVESTIGATOR written in big yellow letters on the back examined the rubble in the far corner of what was left of the room. Her hair was braided with colorful white and pink beads. Julie had been nagging me to let her do that to her hair, which would have been okay with me if it didn’t cost $120.

Monk stepped in gingerly, trying not to get a speck of soot on himself, which was impossible. We’d barely come through the door when we were greeted by a familiar face.

Captain Leland Stottlemeyer stood off to one side, smoking a fat cigar, his wide tie loosened at his open collar. He was a perpetually weary man, with a mustache that seemed to grow bushier as his hairline receded. He didn’t look pleased to see us.

“What are you doing here, Monk?” he said.

“We came to talk to one of the firefighters,” Monk said. “The firehouse dog was killed last night.”

“You’re investigating pet deaths now?” Stottlemeyer said.

“It’s for a very special client,” Monk said.

I couldn’t help smiling, and Stottlemeyer noticed. In that instant he knew the client was me, or someone close to me. Stottlemeyer is a detective too, after all.

“We were told that this fire was an accident,” I said.

“It probably was,” Stottlemeyer said. “But since a lady died, we have to treat this like a crime scene until the arson investigator makes her determination. So we send someone down to stand around until then. It’s routine.”

“So why didn’t you send Lieutenant Disher?”

Stottlemeyer shrugged. “It’s been raining all week and it’s a sunny day. I wanted to get out. Gives me a chance to smoke my cigar.”

Monk sneezed. And then sneezed again.

“Whoever lived here had cats,” Monk said.

“How do you know?” Stottlemeyer said.

“I’m allergic to cats.”

“You’re allergic to plastic fruit, dandelions, and brown rice, and that’s just for starters,” Stottlemeyer said. “How can you tell it’s cat dander that’s making you sneeze?”

Monk sneezed. “That was definitely a cat sneeze.”

“You can tell the difference between your sneezes?” I asked.

“Sure,” Monk said. “Can’t everybody?” Stottlemeyer took a deep drag on his cigar, then flicked his ashes on the floor.

Monk stared at him.

“What?” Stottlemeyer said.

“Aren’t you going to pick those up?”

“They’re ashes, Monk. Take a look around. The entire place is in ashes.”

“Those are cigar ashes,” Monk said.

“Oh.” Stottlemeyer nodded his head knowingly. “They don’t belong with the other ashes.”

Monk smiled. “I knew you’d see reason.”

“Not really.” Stottlemeyer flicked his cigar again. Monk lunged forward, catching the ashes in his cupped hands before they could hit the ground.

Monk looked up, relieved. And then he sneezed, but managed not to blow the ashes out of his hands. “Anyone have a Baggie?”

Stottlemeyer glared at him, mashed out his cigar against the blackened wall, and dropped the stub in Monk’s open hands.

“You can take the pleasure out of anything, Monk. You know that? Talk to Gayle, the arson investigator.” Stottlemeyer tipped his head toward the African-American woman in the SFFD windbreaker. “I’m sure she can help you.”

Monk made his way to the woman, walking like a man carrying a vial of nitroglycerine through a minefield. He moved cautiously and deliberately, careful not to get soot on his clothes or spill a single fleck of cigar ash from his hands.

Stottlemeyer and I observed his slow progress. It was strangely fascinating.

“How are you holding up with Monk as a houseguest?” Stottlemeyer asked me.

“It’s only been a few hours.”

“A few hours with Monk can seem like decades,” he said. He took a pen from his pocket, scrawled something on the back of a business card, and handed it to me. “This is my home number. If you need a break, give me a call. I can take him out to the car wash.”

“Thank you, Captain,” I said. “That’s very nice of you.”

“You and I are the only ones who take care of him. We have to back each other up.”

“We’re sort of like partners.”

“Sort of,” Stottlemeyer said.

“He likes the car wash?”

“Loves it,” Stottlemeyer said.

Monk finally reached the arson investigator, who was bent over with her back to him, examining something on the floor. I heard him clear his throat to get her attention. Gayle straightened up and turned around.

“Hello, Gayle. I’m Adrian Monk. I’m a consultant to the police.” Monk shrugged a shoulder to draw her attention to the Junior Firefighter badge on his lapel. “And I’m one of your brothers.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Is that so?”

“Could I have a Baggie?”

She took a clear plastic evidence bag out of the pocket of her windbreaker.

“Could you hold it open for me?”

She did. He emptied his ashes and the cigar stub into the bag and clapped his hands together, brushing off whatever microscopic traces might have been left. And then he brushed them a couple dozen more times for good measure.

“Thank you,” Monk said, and left her holding the bag, his attention drawn to the coffee table. Its thick glass top and metal legs had survived the fire virtually unscathed. The table was in front of a pile of springs and ashes that I guessed was once the couch. More springs and ashes, the remains of two armchairs, were on the other side of the table.

Gayle sealed the bag and, with nowhere else to put it, reluctantly shoved it into her pocket to throw out later. I knew exactly how she felt.

“Where was the body found?” Monk asked, squatting beside the coffee table and squinting at an ashtray, a mug, and a glob of plastic that resembled a TV remote.

Gayle glanced at Stottlemeyer for approval, and he nodded.

“On the couch,” she said.

“Where on the couch?”

The investigator pointed to the end of the couch farthest from Monk. “She was sitting in that corner, her hand on the armrest. The cigarette fell from her fingers and landed on a stack of newspapers on the floor, setting them aflame. The fire spread from there, engulfing the couch, the drapes, and eventually the entire room. She had piles of old newspapers. Matches and cigarettes everywhere. It was like kindling, a fire waiting to happen.”

Monk made his way over to the TV, looking from it to the couch, then to the remains of the chairs.

“Have you found any traces of an accelerant?” Stottlemeyer asked the arson investigator.

“Nope,” Gayle said. “The cigarette definitely caused this fire. It looks like an accident.”

Monk nodded in agreement. “That’s what it looks like.”

“Great,” Stottlemeyer said. “I can make it home early tonight and enjoy my Sunday off.”

“But it’s not,” Monk said.

“Excuse me?” Gayle said with attitude, hands on her hips.

“It’s not an accident,” Monk said. “It’s murder.”

“Oh, hell,” Stottlemeyer said.

“He’s wrong,” Gayle said.

“No, he’s not,” Stottlemeyer said miserably.

“When it comes to murder, he’s never wrong.”

“I’ve been doing this job for ten years.” Gayle opened her coat to show Monk the badge pinned on her uniform. “This is a real fire department badge, Mr. Monk. And I can tell you there is absolutely no evidence of arson.”

Monk made his way to what had been the edge of the couch. “You said she died right here.”

“Yes,” Gayle said. “Her name was Esther Stoval, sixty-four years old, and a widow. The neighbors say she was a chain-smoker. Always had a cigarette in her mouth or in her hand.”

“Did she live here alone?” Monk asked.

“With about a dozen cats,” Gayle said. “They fled in the fire and have been coming back all day. We’ve got them out back waiting for Animal Control.”

“Damn,” Stottlemeyer muttered, then looked at me. “Can you tell the difference between one of your sneezes and another?”

“No,” I said.

“Me neither,” he said with relief. “So it’s not just me.”

“It’s not just you,” I said.

“If she was by herself, why was she sitting here?” Monk asked. “At this edge of the couch?”

“Because it was comfortable?” Gayle said. “What difference does it make?”

“Her coffee mug, her TV remote, and her ashtray are on the coffee table at the other end of the couch,” Monk said.

I followed his gaze. The remote was a melted lump of plastic on the glass, but the mug and the ashtray were intact.

“If she sat there, she could see the TV,” Monk said, gesturing to the other side of the couch. “But sitting here, where her body was found, the TV is blocked by that chair. Why would she want to look at an empty chair?”

Stottlemeyer looked back and forth between the couch and the TV and the remains of the chair.

“She wouldn’t, not unless someone was sitting in it,” Stottlemeyer said. “Someone else was here.”

Gayle looked at Monk. “Damn.”

She was impressed.

I was pretty impressed, too. That was twice in one day I’d seen Monk extrapolate a whole chain of events based on where a person—or a dog—happened to be sitting.

Who knew sitting could be so important?

Stottlemeyer took out his cell phone, flipped it open, and made a call. “Randy? It’s me. Go down to the morgue. Tell the ME to move Esther Stoval’s autopsy to the front of the line. It’s a homicide. If you have any Sunday plans, cancel them.”

He snapped his cell phone shut and glanced at Monk. “I’m glad you stopped by, Monk. This one might have slipped past us.”

And that’s when I remembered why we’d stopped by in the first place.

5

Mr. Monk Learns to Share

We found Firefighter Joe Cochran sitting on an overturned bucket in the backyard, pouring milk into bowls and letting the cats crawl languorously all over him. He was a big man in his early thirties, who radiated strength and stoicism, qualities that seemed at odds with the tenderness he was showing to the cats. He stroked them gently, nuzzled them against his stubble-covered cheeks, and purred to them. For a moment I found myself wishing I could trade places with one of those cats.

The thought startled me. I’ve been involved with a few men since Mitch died, but none of them seriously, and none lately. I’d managed not to think about men for a long time, and was a little unnerved by how close to the surface those feelings really were. All it took was one glance at a rugged and tough, but sweet and tender, fireman to bring them all back.

My God, who was I kidding? Any woman would have felt the same way. He was the cover of a romance novel come to life. I just hoped when he spoke he didn’t have a high, squeaky voice or a horrible lisp.

Repulsed, Monk stopped in his tracks. “How can he do that?”

“He’s obviously a man who loves animals,” I said.

“I’m not,” Monk said.

“Really?” I said in mock surprise.

“You go talk to him,” Monk said. “I’ll stay here.”

“Don’t you want to ask him some questions?”

“I can read lips.”

“You can?” I asked.

“This is as good a time as any to learn,” Monk said.

I was hardly a natural at this detecting business, as I’d proved already. On the other hand, wouldn’t it be nice to talk to Joe without Monk there?

“I can ask him to come over,” I offered weakly.

“No,” Monk said. “The cats might follow him. I could sneeze to death. It’s a horrible way to die.”

“Fine,” I said, glancing back at Joe. My heart fluttered. It felt like high school all over again. “Any advice for me?”

“Remember to enunciate.”

I took a deep breath and headed over to the hunky fireman. Hunky. Those were the terms in which I was thinking. How was I going to ask probing, sleuthful questions of Firefighter Joe when I’d mentally devolved into an adolescent girl?

“Joe Cochran?”

He looked up at me. “Yes, ma’am?”

Ma’am. He was brawny and polite. And God, what a smile.

“I’m Natalie Teeger,” I said. “I work for Adrian Monk, the detective.”

I motioned to Monk, who waved.

Joe rose to his feet and waved at Monk. The cats leaped off of him. “Why won’t he come over here?”

“It’s a long story,” I said. “The reason we’re here is because my daughter, Julie, is a student in one of the middle-school classes you visit each year. She heard about what happened to Sparky.”

At the mention of his dog’s name, Joe’s eyes grew moist. It endeared him to me even more.

“The kids care that much?” he said.

“So much that she hired Mr. Monk to find whoever killed him.”

“Excuse me.” He turned his back to me and took a few steps away before wiping the tears from his eyes. I can’t tell you how much I wanted to hold him, and comfort him, and wipe those tears away myself.

I swallowed hard and waited. After a moment he faced me again. “Forgive me, Miss Teeger.”

“It’s okay. Call me Natalie, please.”

“As long as you call me Joe.” He overturned another bucket, set it down beside his own, and offered me a seat. I took it.

Monk whistled and stirred the air with his finger. I got the message.

“Do you mind if we turn around?” I said, turning so I faced Monk.

“Why?” Joe asked.

“Mr. Monk needs to see our faces,” I said. “He reads lips.”

“Is he deaf?”

“No,” I said.

“Okay,” he said. “Is he a good detective?”

“The best,” I said. “But eccentric.”

“If he can find the son of a bitch who killed Sparky, I don’t care if he likes to run naked through Golden Gate Park singing show tunes.” He immediately caught himself, his cheeks reddening in embarrassment. “Oh, my God. I forgot. Can he really read lips?”

“I doubt it,” I said, and waved at Monk. He gave me a thumbs-up.

Joe exhaled, relieved, and picked up one of the cats. “What do you need to know, Natalie?”

I liked hearing him say my name. Did I mention his voice wasn’t the least bit squeaky?

“Do you know of anyone who’d want to hurt Sparky?”

His face tightened, but he continued to gently stroke the cat. “Only one person. Gregorio Dumas. He lives a few doors down from the station house.”

That would certainly make it easy for him to know when the company responded to a fire and if the station was empty.

“What does he have against Sparky?”

“Love,” Joe said. “Sparky was smitten with Letitia, Gregorio’s French poodle.”

“And Mr. Dumas didn’t approve of the relationship?”

“Letitia is a show dog,” Joe said. “Gregorio was afraid Sparky would ruin her career. He warned me that if he caught Sparky in his yard again, he’d kill him.”

“Anybody else have a problem with your dog?”

Joe shook his head no. “Sparky was a smart, sweet, trusting animal. I’d take him to the cancer ward at the children’s hospital, and he was so good with those kids, even the tiniest, frailest child. Everybody loved him.”

“Somebody didn’t,” I said, and immediately regretted it.

His eyes started to tear up again, but this time he didn’t try to hide it from me. “He wasn’t just a dog to me, Natalie. He was my best friend. I know how corny that sounds, ‘a boy and his dog.’ But this job, and the hours I keep, aren’t conducive to relationships, if you know what I mean.”

Unfortunately, I did. Being a single mother who works for an obsessive-compulsive detective doesn’t make for a great social life, either.

“I spend a lot of time alone. But I wasn’t really alone, not with Sparky,” he said. “Now I am. He was all I had. I feel gutted and totally adrift. Do you know what that’s like?”

I took his hand, gave it a squeeze, and nodded. “Yeah, I do.”

I suddenly felt self-conscious. I withdrew my hand and stood up.

“Mr. Monk will find whoever did this, Joe.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because he’s Monk.”

“I’m told he’s got a long story,” Joe said. “I’d like to hear it sometime.”

“Here are my numbers,” I said, writing them down on a piece of paper. “Please give me a call if you think of anything later that might help Mr. Monk’s investigation.” I took a deep breath. “Or if you want to hear that story.”

“I will,” he said with a smile.

I didn’t know what else to say, so I just smiled back at him and headed back to Monk, who hadn’t so much as taken a step from where he had been standing.

“How much of that did you get?” I asked.

“Just the part about enemas, Astroturf, and Wayne Newton’s hair.”

“None of those things came up.”

“I see,” Monk said. “I must have been reading the subtext.”

There was subtext all right, but that sure as hell wasn’t it.

For dinner I made Julie, Monk, and myself Dijon chicken breasts, petite peas, and mashed potatoes. Monk helped by counting out the peas onto our plates (we each had exactly twenty-four peas per serving) and laying them out in rows. He also served our mashed potatoes with an ice-cream scoop so they formed neat balls, which he carefully smoothed out with a butter knife.

Julie watched all this with rapt attention. It took her mind off her sadness, that’s for sure.

While we ate, I filled her in on what we’d learned so far, which didn’t sound very substantive to me but seemed to impress her. She gave Monk a hug and went back to her room to IM her friends.

I told her once that when I was her age we didn’t have instant messaging to communicate with our friends. We used something called a telephone. You know what she said to me?

“I’m glad I live in the modern age.”

I felt like a dinosaur.

Monk insisted on doing the dishes after dinner, and I didn’t argue with him. While he worked I sat at the table and relaxed with a glass of wine. I decided there were some definite benefits to having a clean freak as a houseguest. I wondered what it would take to get him to do the laundry, but then I imagined him trying to sort our bras and panties without touching them, or even looking at them, and knew it would never work. On the other hand, it might be amusing to watch.

The phone rang. What would some anonymous cold caller in Bangladesh try to sell me tonight? I was tempted to let Monk answer the phone and put Rajid through the living hell he deserved, but I was merciful and snatched up the receiver myself.

“Hello,” I said.

“Natalie Teeger? This is Joe Cochran. I hope I’m not bothering you.”

He was, but in a good way. I reached for my glass of wine and took a preemptive gulp to slow down my heart. It didn’t work.

“Not at all,” I lied.

“I was wondering if you might be interested in having dinner with me sometime,” he said.

“That would be nice,” I said, trying to sound casual about it when, in fact, I wanted to scream with glee.

“Is tomorrow too soon? My next night off duty isn’t for a couple of days.”

“Tomorrow works for me.” Ten minutes from now would have worked for me, too, but I didn’t want to seem too eager. We set a time and I gave him my address.

When I hung up the phone, Monk was drying the dishes and giving me a look.

“What?” I said.

“You’re going on a date with Firefighter Joe?”

“It appears that way,” I said, smiling giddily.

“Who is going to take care of Julie?”

I wasn’t as concerned about that as I was about who would take care of him. I’d have to sit Julie down for a detailed briefing.

“I was hoping you’d keep an eye on her for me,” I said. Then I lied, “A sitter is going to be hard to get on such short notice. Do you mind?”

“Will there be any shenanigans?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Will I have to organize any activities?”

“She’ll probably just stay in her room,” I said. “She’s at that age.”

“Me too,” Monk said.

On Sunday mornings, Julie and I like to get into our grungiest old sweats, grab the Sunday Chronicle off the porch, and go to the Valley Bakery, where we order blueberry muffins, coffee for me, hot chocolate for her, and forage through the paper.

Julie likes to read the comics, of course, and the capsule movie reviews in the Datebook, also known as the pink section for its colored pages. Each review is accompanied by a drawing of a little man in a bowler hat sitting in a movie theater chair. For a great movie he leaps out of his chair, hands clapping, eyes bugging out, hat flying off his head. If the movie stinks, he slumps in his seat, sound asleep.

Sometimes, as I go through the week, I picture that guy sitting in his chair, reviewing my life as it plays out in front of him. Most of the time he’s sitting ramrod straight in his seat, mildly interested, which is a mediocre review. Rarely do I imagine him leaping out of his chair in ecstatic glee on my account.

After breakfast we take a long walk up a very steep hill to Delores Park, where the view of the Castro, the Civic Center, and the Financial District is spectacular. But that’s not the view we go to see. We like to sit under a palm tree on the grassy knoll and people-watch. We see all kinds of people of every race in every possible combination.

Take the couples, for instance. We see men and women, men and men, women and women, and people who fall somewhere in between. We see mimes performing, kids playing, families picnicking, bands playing, groups protesting—all of it against the panoramic downtown backdrop. It’s the best show in town.

We usually stay in the park for an hour or so, talking about the week that was and the week that’s coming, and then, once we’ve caught our breath and had our fill of the show, we make the easy walk downhill. Once we get home, around noonish, we take our showers, change into fresh clothes, and do whatever chores and errands need doing.

But our routine was shaken up on that Sunday by a couple of things. First there was the weather. The city was socked in by thick fog and soaked by drizzle. And then there was Monk.

He woke me up at six A.M. with his incessant scrubbing. I dragged myself out of bed in my T-shirt and sweats to find him in the hall bathroom.

Monk, his hands in dish gloves, was on his knees in the bathtub polishing the drain. He was wearing a matched set of pajamas, and sheepskin slippers, which would have been adorable if he weren’t an adult.

Obviously I’d cleaned the bathroom before he arrived, but not to the point that you needed sunglasses to tolerate the glare off the linoleum, which was what he’d done to it. On the sink there was a bar of soap still in its wrapper, a brand-new toothbrush enclosed in plastic, and a fresh tube of toothpaste. His electric razor was plugged into the outlet.

“It’s six o’clock in the morning, Mr. Monk,” I whispered so as not to wake Julie.

“I didn’t know you’re such an early riser.”

“I’m not,” I said. “What are you doing?”

“Getting ready to take a shower,” he said.

“You do this before every shower?”

“And after,” he said.

I shook my head and trudged to the kitchen. He was still in there two hours later. Julie was up by then and she was sitting at the table in her bathrobe, eating a bowl of cereal and shaking her leg.

“I really have to go to the bathroom, Mom.”

“I’m sure Mr. Monk will be out in a minute,” I said.

“You said that an hour ago,” she said. “I’ve had two glasses of orange juice since then.”

“That wasn’t very smart, was it?”

“I didn’t think he’d be in there forever,” she said. “Couldn’t you knock?”

“Is it that bad?”

“It’s that bad,” she said.

So we both got up and went to the bathroom door. I knocked.

“Mr. Monk?” I said. “We really need to use the bathroom.”

“Does it have to be this one?” he asked from behind the door.

“It’s the only one in the house,” I said.

He opened the door, still holding his toothbrush. The bathroom gleamed the way it had at six. There was no sign at all that he’d used it. Julie bounced and shifted her weight from foot to foot.

“How well do you know the neighbors?” he asked.

“Not that well,” I said. “We’re going to have to share this bathroom.”

“I don’t see how that is going to work,” he said.

Julie groaned in frustration, pushed past Monk, and went straight for the toilet. He scrambled out of the bathroom in terror and slammed the door closed behind him before she could even lift up the lid of the toilet seat.

Monk stood there looking at me. I looked at him.

“There’s only one bathroom and three of us,” I said.

“It’s barbaric,” he said. “Does the health department know about this?”

“You’ll just have to get used to it.”

“How can you live this way?” he said.

“If you paid me more,” I said, “I wouldn’t have to.”

That shut him up. I knew it would.

The only thing stronger than Monk’s compulsion for cleanliness and order is his stinginess with money.

6

Mr. Monk Meets the Queen

I spent an hour acting as Julie’s social secretary, arranging a playdate for her at the home of one of her friends so she would be under a parent’s supervision for the day while I assisted Monk on his investigation.

Since, technically, Monk was working for Julie, she didn’t mind that I was dumping her at her friend’s house. It didn’t hurt that her friend had an Xbox, a PlayStation, a Game Boy, and every other computer game gizmo ever devised by man. The downside for me was that Julie would come home demanding, for the hundredth time, that I buy her all that stuff, too.

Monk and I were out the door at 10 A.M. The first stop Monk wanted to make was at the home of Gregorio Dumas, the man who lived across the street from the firehouse and was, according to Firefighter Joe, Sparky’s only enemy and therefore our number one suspect.

We knocked on Gregorio Dumas’s front door a half hour later. He look as if he patronized the same groomer as his dog. His fluffy mane of golden hair was styled into an enormous, flowing pompadour. His silhouette reminded me of a French poodle, which, by the way, was the animal he happened to own.

Coincidence? I don’t think so.

The guy was short and fat, with gold rings on every finger and necklaces and medallions draped around his neck. All his bling had a tacky canine theme, like the enormous, diamond-encrusted dog bone on the gold chain around his neck. He stood at his front door in a silk kimono, smirking with haughty superiority and evident distaste at his guests on the stoop, who happened to be Mr. Monk and me. Behind the two of us was the fire station where Sparky was killed.

“You obviously like dogs,” Monk said after introducing us and explaining why were there.

“You are a detective,” Gregorio said in a voice that was equal parts Ricardo Montalban and Fran Drescher. “Are all your deductions as brilliant as that?”

He stepped aside to let us in. It looked like he’d inherited his home furnishings from an elderly relative who did a lot of shopping at Levitz in 1978. The upholstery reminded me of the Impala station wagon my parents used to have.

An entire wall of shelves overflowed with dog show trophies, award ribbons, and framed photos of Letitia and her proud owner. Seeing the pictures, I was convinced I was right about their sharing the same groomer.

“If you like dogs so much,” Monk said, “you must be heartbroken about what happened to Sparky.”

“He was a rapist,” Gregorio said. “A canine sex offender.”

“C’mon,” I said. “We’re talking about dogs here.”

“Letitia is not a dog; she’s a symbol of perfection and beauty, the reigning queen of the canine world,” Gregorio said. “Or she was until Sparky ruined her life.”

He swept his arm in front of the wall of honors. “She’s won hundreds of American Kennel Club competitions, including Best in Show at the Tournament of Champions. Letitia earned over sixty thousand dollars in prize money and endorsements last year alone.”

“So you’re living off your dog,” Monk said.

“She enjoys the fruits of her success,” Gregorio said. “She lives better than I do.”

“She couldn’t live worse,” Monk muttered.

Gregorio led us through the kitchen. The laundry room was a modified pantry, and Monk paused to look in at a fresh load of clothes, underwear, and towels folded on the dryer.

“Mr. Monk,” I said, drawing his attention away before he started to refold everything or, worse, began giving his lecture on the importance of separating clothes by type of garment into their own stacks.

Gregorio opened the door to the backyard, which was dominated by a miniature Victorian cottage with a cedar-shingled roof, gables, cupola, bay windows, and a wraparound porch with flower boxes. There were a bunch of rubber chew toys on the porch, including a bone, a squeaky ball, a hot dog, and a cat. There was a high fence ringed with razor wire surrounding the yard.

“You’ve got to treat royalty like royalty,” Gregorio said.

“All that,” I said, “for a dog? I could live in there.”

“How many bathrooms does it have?” Monk asked.

“Show dogs are judged by teeth, muscle tone, bone structure, coat texture, and, most important, how they carry themselves. Their gait, their balance, how all the elements fit together. A dog who lives in a castle walks like a queen. That’s what she was, a queen.”

“You keep talking about Letitia in the past tense,” Monk said. “What happened to her?”

“Sparky’s lust,” Gregorio said. He whistled for the dog.

Letitia bounded out of her mansion. The French poodle still had her astonishingly white, fluffy hair and her regal bearing, but she was almost as rotund as her owner.

“Sparky knocked her up,” Gregorio said.

She went straight for Monk and shoved her nose toward his crotch. Monk blocked her with his hands and squealed when her wet nose made contact with his skin.

“I’ve been hit,” he said, backing into the living room while the dog pushed him along, trying to get her nose past his hands.

“Now she’s just a pregnant bitch,” Gregorio said as he returned to the living room. I followed him. “Soon she’ll be fat and swollen with big, bloated udders. But that’s nothing compared to what she’s going to look like after she squeezes out a litter of puppies.”

Monk grabbed a pillow from the couch and placed it protectively in front of his groin. So the enthusiastic dog angled around for a sniff at his butt instead. He dropped into a chair, covered his lap with the pillow, and pinched his knees together.

I could have helped Monk, of course. But after the morning ordeal with the bathroom, I was enjoying some payback.

“Surely she can get back into shape,” I said. After all, I thought, I bounced back to my old form after my pregnancy, didn’t I?

“Sagging teats, wrinkly skin, bloodshot eyes; that’s her future,” he said. “A shriveled-up shell of her old self. I warned those firemen something bad would happen if they let their spotted monster run wild through the neighborhood whenever they left the station.”

There was a mirror on the wall. I looked at my reflection, wondering if that was what Joe was going to see at dinner tonight: sagging teats, wrinkly skin, bloodshot eyes.

“It’s not like she bred with a show dog. Sparky was common street trash,” Gregorio said. “Can you imagine what those mixed-breed mongrel monsters are gonna look like? I won’t shed any tears over Sparky.”

Letitia jumped up on the couch beside Monk and started licking his cheek.

“Help,” Monk squeaked.

“Sounds like you hated Sparky enough to kill him,” I said.

“Except I didn’t,” Gregorio said.

“Is that the best you can do?” I said.

“Help,” Monk squeaked again.

I grabbed Letitia by the collar and pulled her away from Monk, who bolted out the front door and closed it behind him.

“If I was gonna kill him, I would have done it before he knocked up Letitia,” Gregorio said, taking Letitia from me. “What good would it do me now?”

“How about revenge?” Monk said from outside, his voice muffled by the door.

“I won’t say it didn’t cross my mind,” Gregorio said.

“What?” Monk said.

“It crossed my mind,” Gregorio yelled. “But I’m suing the San Francisco Fire Department for Letitia’s lost earning potential instead.”

“Where were you last night between ten P.M. and two A.M.?” I asked Gregorio.

“Here,” Gregorio said. “Alone.”

“That’s not much of an alibi,” I said.

“I don’t need one,” Gregorio said. “Because I didn’t do it.”

“Could you speak up?” Monk called out.

“I didn’t do it,” Gregorio yelled back. “Ask the fireman.”

Monk opened the door a crack, just enough to stick his face in. “What fireman?”

“The one I saw coming out of the station about ten thirty,” Gregorio said.

“But they all left at ten to fight a fire,” I said.

“I know that. Don’t you think I’ve got ears? It’s a real joy to live across the street from a fire station, let me tell you. Anyway, the blaring sirens at ten; then a half hour later that damn hell-dog of theirs starts barking. I looked out my window to see if he was trotting over here to defile Letitia some more, but the barking stopped and I didn’t see anything. Five minutes later, Letitia starts barking, so I look out the window again, thinking Sparky’s on his way over for some action, and I see a fireman walking out.”

“How do you know it was a fireman?” Monk asked.

“I could see his helmet and heavy coat,” Gregorio said.

“But not his face,” I said.

“He had his back to me,” Gregorio said. “And it was nighttime, and he was across the street. Now if you will excuse me, I’ve got things to do.”

He ushered me to the door. The instant I stepped outside, Monk waved his hands frantically in front of me, as if ants were swarming all over them.

“Wipe, wipe, wipe,” he said.

I gave him about thirty of them as we walked to the car, which was parked in front of the fire station.

“I need to shower,” Monk said. “For a year.”

“Who does he think he’s kidding?” I said. “He expects us to believe that a fireman killed Sparky? How lame is that? He’s just trying to deflect attention from himself.”

“He’s not the guy,” Monk said.

“How can you say that? Sparky knocked up his cash cow—or cash poodle—whatever. The point is, Gregorio lost sixty thousand dollars per year. That’s plenty of motive for murder, and he lives right across from the fire station, so he knows exactly when the firemen come and go.”

“He’s not the guy,” Monk said.

“He admitted he loathed Sparky and that he knew the firemen left at ten,” I said. “It probably happened just like you said. He went over there to poison the dog food or something and Sparky surprised him.”

“He’s not the guy,” Monk said.

“Will you please stop saying that?” I asked. “Did you see his hair? He’s got to be the guy. How do you know he’s not the guy?”

“He’s too fat,” Monk said. “He never could have made it to the pickax before Sparky took him down. But he’s lying.”

“About what?”

“He was in the fire station the night Sparky was killed.”

“How do you know?”

“His laundry,” Monk said. “I saw the two missing firehouse towels folded with his socks. Can you believe that? With his socks.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I was busy defending myself from that vicious dog and its slavering jaws of death.”

I suspected the slavering part was what concerned him the most. Then again, if I lick my lips, he accuses me of slavering.

“Gregorio Dumas is still in possession of stolen property,” I said. “Though you’ve got to wonder why he took the towels in the first place.”

“I do,” Monk said. “I also wonder how Sparky got Letitia pregnant.”

“I could explain that to you,” I said. “But do I really have to?”

“I don’t mean how he did it, but how he was able to do it.”

“He’s a dog, she’s a dog, I think that’s all that really matters to dogs,” I said. “That’s why they call them dogs.”

“What I mean is, the backyard is protected by a fence topped with flesh-cutting razor wire. How did Sparky get into the yard?”

“Maybe the fence was installed after the deed was done?”

We didn’t get a chance to ponder the question because my cell phone rang. It was Stottlemeyer. He wanted to see Monk in his office right away.

Stottlemeyer’s office was more than just an office. It was his refuge. Here he could do all the things his wife wouldn’t let him do at home. He could smoke cigars. Eat junk food. Pick his nose. He could take off his shoes, put his stockinged feet up on the desk, and browse Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue. The office was also filled with all the stuff she wouldn’t let him display around their house, like his baseball memorabilia, his Serpico movie poster, his collection of cigar labels, and the bullet that was dug out of his shoulder a few years back.

So as much, and as often, as Stottlemeyer complained about having to work late and on weekends, I knew he took more comfort and solace in being in his office than he was willing to admit.

“I hate coming in here on my day off,” Stottlemeyer said as we gathered in his office. The bullpen outside was sparsely occupied by three or four detectives.

Stottlemeyer was wearing a sweatshirt, jeans, and tennis shoes to remind himself, and anyone who saw him, that he was supposed to be home relaxing.

Lieutenant Randall Disher, by comparison, was in his usual ill-fitting, off-the-rack suit and tie, as if it were any other day of the week. He idolized Stottlemeyer, so he was never entirely comfortable around him. A tremor of eager-to-please anxiety underscored his every word and action.

“We could use your help on this one, Monk,” Stottlemeyer said. “And since you’re the one who brought this unsolvable homicide to our attention, I think you’ve got a duty to solve it for us.”

“Unsolvable?” Monk asked. “There’s no such thing.”

“That’s the spirit,” Stottlemeyer said. “Tell him what we have, Randy.”

Disher referred to his notebook. “Ordinarily in these kinds of accidents, where someone falls asleep while smoking, it’s not the fire that kills them but the smoke.”

“Did the medical examiner find smoke or soot particles in the victim’s lungs or nasal passages?” Monk asked.

“No,” Stottlemeyer said. “Meaning Esther Stoval was dead before the fire started.”

“There you go,” Monk said. “It’s murder. You solved it. What’s the unsolvable part?”

“We’re getting to that,” Stottlemeyer said. “Go on, Randy. Tell him the rest.”

“The ME found bits of fabric in her windpipe and petechial hemorrhages in the conjuntivae of her eyes that come from increased pressure in the veins when—”

“Yadda, yadda, yadda,” Stottlemeyer interrupted him. “In other words, she was smothered with a pillow.”

“But we’ll never get anything off the murder weapon because it was incinerated in the fire,” Disher said. “Along with any fingerprints or other trace evidence that the killer might have left in the room.”

“We’ve got no witnesses, either,” Stottlemeyer said. “We canvassed the neighborhood. Nobody saw or heard anything.”

“So you’re saying you can prove it was murder but not who did it,” Monk said. “And you’ll never be able to prove who did it because all the evidence went up in flames.”

“You got it,” Stottlemeyer said. “We’re looking at the perfect murder.”

Monk tilted his head from one side to the other. I’ve seen him do that before. It’s like he’s trying to loosen up a stiff neck, but I think what really goes on is that his mind refuses to accept some fact he’s seen or heard.

“I don’t think so,” Monk said.

“You already see the mistake the killer made?” Stottlemeyer said.

Monk nodded. “He shouldn’t have killed Esther Stoval.”

“You got anything more substantial than that for us to run with?” Stottlemeyer asked.

“Not yet,” Monk said. “But I’m working on it.”

“That’s good to hear,” Stottlemeyer said. “It’s a start.”

“What do you know about the victim?” I asked.

“From talking to the neighbors, we know that Esther was a miserable, chain-smoking harridan whom nobody liked,” Stottlemeyer said. “Worse than that, she stood in the way of everybody on her block getting stinking rich.”

He explained that Lucas Breen, a developer known for rejuvenating tired neighborhoods with innovative mixed-use developments, wanted to demolish those six ugly town houses and build a Victorian-style condominium and retail project. Esther Stoval was the only homeowner on the block who wouldn’t sell, enraging her neighbors, who’d already sold their places to Breen and whose deals were contingent on her selling as well.

“Looks like there’s no shortage of suspects,” I said.

“They all could have done it,” Stottlemeyer said. “They could have stood in a line and taken turns holding the pillow to her face. But we have no way of proving any of them were in that house the night it burned down.”

“Maybe because none of them did it,” Disher said.

“Where are you going with this, Randy?” Stottlemeyer asked.

“I have a theory,” Disher said. “It’s a little out-of-the-box.”

“That’s okay,” Stottlemeyer said.

“What if it’s the cats?” Disher said.

“The cats,” Stottlemeyer said. “How could it be the cats?”

“There was this great Robert Culp movie. There are these scientists doing research in a remote lab in the Arctic on the effects of isolation on monkeys. The scientists are getting killed one by one, and no one knows who the killer is. The surviving scientists are afraid to turn their backs on one another,” Disher said. “Pretty soon, it’s down to just Robert Culp and one other guy and—”

“It’s the monkeys,” Monk said. “They turned the tables on the scientists and manipulated them into killing one another.”

“How did you know?” Disher said.

Stottlemeyer sighed. “Because you started telling us that endless story to support your inane theory that the cats killed Esther Stoval.”

“What if the cats purposely tipped the pillow onto her face and, while one of them sat on it, another one knocked the cigarette onto the newspapers?” Disher said. “What if it was an act of feline rebellion against their cruel master?”

“That isn’t out-of-the-box thinking, Randy,” Stottlemeyer said. “It’s out-of-your-mind thinking.”

“Cats are very clever, Captain,” Disher said.

“Stop,” Stottlemeyer said.

Disher started to speak again, but Stottlemeyer held up his hand to halt him.

“One more word and I’ll shoot you,” Stottlemeyer said, then looked imploringly at Monk. “Now do you see how badly we need you on this?”

7

Mr. Monk and the Buttons

The fog lifted Sunday afternoon, but dark clouds gathered over the city, pushed by a cold wind that made the torn, yellow caution tape outside Esther Stoval’s scorched house dance in the air like party streamers.

Although there wasn’t actually a party going on, the young couple living next door, Neal and Kate Finney, definitely had a skip to their step as they loaded up a U-Haul truck with moving boxes. They lived in one of the five town houses slated for demolition to make way for Lucas Breen’s proposed condominium and retail complex.

“We only had minor smoke and water damage, but now that Mrs. Stoval is dead, there’s really no reason to stick around another day.” Kate wheeled a hand truck stacked high with boxes down to the U-Haul. “The house belongs to Lucas Breen’s company now, which means we’ll finally get our check.”

“Honolulu, here we come,” Neal said from inside the truck. He wore a loud Hawaiian shirt and cargo shorts despite the chilly weather. That’s how enthusiastic he was.

“You aren’t even trying to hide how happy you are that she’s dead,” Monk said.

“Nope,” Neal said.

“You were her next-door neighbors. She stood between the building of the new condo complex and your big payday. Now she’s dead and you’re on the next plane to Hawaii,” Monk said. “Aren’t you concerned about how this makes you look?”

“We’ll be sure to leave the police our forwarding address.” Kate wheeled the boxes up to her husband, slid the hand truck out from under the stack, and headed back to the house for another load.

“You have the best possible motive for killing her, and you aren’t even bothering to hide it,” Monk said.

“It’s our best defense,” Neal said as he organized the boxes in the truck. “With all we had to gain, we’d have to be complete morons to torch her place.”

“That could be your cunning plan,” Monk said. “It’s so obvious that you did it that nobody would think you did it, even though you did do it.”

“We were out to dinner at Ruggerios with two other couples when the fire happened,” Neal said. “Had I known what was going on, I would have ordered two more bottles of wine and picked up the check for everybody.”

“A lonely old woman was killed in that fire,” I said. “Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“You don’t know anything about Esther Stoval or what it was like living next door to her. So don’t judge me, lady.”

I didn’t like these people or their selfishness and unadulterated greed. Did they sell their souls to Lucas Breen along with their home?

I thought about my own house and what it meant to me. Mitch and I found it, fell in love with it, and bought it together. Our daughter was born under its roof. I can still feel his presence in the walls, in the air, in the light streaming through the windows. Next to Julie, it’s the last true attachment to him I have left. I couldn’t sell it, no matter how much my neighbors pressured me.

“Did it occur to you for even one second that she might have refused to sell not just to be obstinate or for the evil pleasure of denying you wealth?” I said. “Maybe her house had deep, sentimental value to her. Maybe she loved living here and didn’t want to move.”

“She could have stayed,” Kate said, wheeling some more boxes out of the house. “The developer offered to give her one of the condos in the new complex rent-free for the rest of her life, in addition to the good money he was paying her for her house. You can’t get much more generous than that. And she still said no.”

“It’s not the same thing.” Disgusted, I walked away until I was out of earshot but still within sight of Monk if he needed me. I couldn’t stand to be near these people for another minute.

Monk stuck around and asked a few more questions. I don’t know what they were. Maybe he asked them what it was like living without a soul. Maybe he asked them what it was like to value money more than another person’s right to happiness. But knowing Monk, he probably asked them to rearrange the boxes in the truck into even stacks of eight with the same sides facing out.

Aubrey Brudnick was a professional intellectual in his forties who worked at a San Francisco think tank and lived next door to the late Esther Stoval.

“I’m paid for my thoughts,” he said, talking through his nose and chewing on his pipe. “If I can’t think, I starve, and that is why I loathed Esther Stoval.”

Judging by his double chins and potbelly, it wouldn’t have hurt him to starve a little. He wore a blue cable-knit sweater over a white T-shirt, brown corduroy slacks, and black leather Ecco running shoes. His feet were up on his book-cluttered desk, which faced a window that looked out on the charred rubble of Esther’s house.

“You couldn’t think with her around?” Monk asked.

“It wasn’t so much her,” Brudnick said. “It was her cats.”

“We heard she took in a lot of strays,” I said.

“There were dozens of them. And they weren’t simply strays,” Brudnick said. “They were exotics. She trolled the shelters looking for rare breeds. Just a few days ago she brought home a Turkish Van, a fluffy breed also known as the White Ring-tail and the Russian Longhair.”

He reached for a large book on his desk, found the page he was looking for, and passed it to me. It was a book on cat breeds, and he’d turned to the listing for the Turkish Van, a white cat with a cashmere-like coat.

“You kept track of her cats?” Monk said.

“It’s a failing of mine. If a bird flies by, I need to know what it is. If a car is parked out front, I need to know its history. If I hear someone whistling a tune, I need to know the name and the complete biography of its composer,” Brudnick said. “My intellectual curiosity is my great failing as well as my gift.”

“I know the feeling,” Monk said.

“That’s one of the reasons I found her cats so distracting. Every time I saw one, I had to research the damn animal,” Brudnick said. “The other thing, of course, was the smell. Her house was like an enormous litter box, and on breezy days the smell carried, along with all that dander.”

“Did you do anything about it?” Monk said.

“I spoke to her,” Brudnick said. “But she told me to mind my own business, which, coming from her, I found rather ironic.”

“Why is that?”

“Because the old crone was always peeking in my windows, sorting through the mail in my box, and reading my magazines,” Brudnick said. “I started walking through my house naked just so I could get a little privacy.”

Monk shuddered at the thought, and so did I.

“You never thought about taking more direct action?” Monk said.

“You mean like burning her house down?”

Monk nodded. Brudnick smiled.

“I thought about it every day,” Brudnick said.

“Instead I sold out to Lucas Breen and looked forward to a new home in the near future, far away from Esther and her feline menagerie.”

“So Esther wasn’t just making your life a living hell,” I said. “She was also standing between you and a fortune.”

“She wasn’t my favorite neighbor on the block; that’s true. But I didn’t wish any violence upon her.”

“Where were you between nine and ten P.M. on Friday night?” Monk asked.

“Enjoying a hot bath and the latest issue of American Spectator,” Brudnick said.

That was an image that would haunt me.

“Were you alone?” Monk asked.

“Sadly, yes,” Brudnick said. “It’s been some time since I’ve found a lady who’ll share a bath and American Spectator with me.”

He looked at me and smiled. I think it’s a credit to me and my astonishing powers of self-control that I didn’t vomit or run screaming out of his house at that moment.

“Did you see or hear anything unusual that night?” Monk said.

“Not until her house went up in flames,” Brudnick said. “That was certainly unusual.”

It was depressing. Esther’s other neighbors on her side of the street had the same attitude about her as the Finneys and Brudnick did. Nobody saw anything, nobody heard anything, and nobody cared. They were all eagerly awaiting their checks and the wrecking ball.

We went across the street to see what the other neighbors had to say, the ones without the sales of their homes on the line, who didn’t profit quite so directly from Esther’s death.

We found Burton Joyner, a scrawny, unemployed software engineer, in his garage, working under the hood of an old AMC Pacer, a car that looked like a pregnant Ford Pinto—which was, by the way, the first car I ever owned, until my dad heard they could explode if a bug hit the windshield and bought me a Plymouth Duster instead. Joyner also had an AMC Gremlin and an AMC Ambassador parked at the curb.

“I’ll be honest with you, Mr. Monk. I’m glad she’s gone,” Joyner said, tightening something with his wrench.

“She’s not gone,” I said. “You make it sound like she moved to Palm Springs. She was murdered.”

“Esther was a victim of the bad karma she created,” Joyner said. “She was a mean, vindictive person who made life unpleasant for everybody in the neighborhood. You can feel the difference on the street already. The stress level has gone way down.”

“And the property values will go way up,” Monk said. “Once the new development is built.”

“The development isn’t really important to me. It won’t change my circumstances much, so I’ve stayed out of it. I’m the kind of guy who likes to get along with people.” Joyner leaned back and wiped his hands on his jeans, smearing them with grease. “Live and let live is what I say.”

“Me too,” Monk said. “You wiped your hands on your pants.”

“Esther wasn’t like you and me. She’d sit at her window with binoculars, taking notes and pictures, intruding on things that were none of her business. She saw me watching a ball game on ESPN, so she called the cable company and ratted me out for hijacking their signal with an illegal converter box.”

“Were you?” I asked.

“That’s not the point,” Joyner said. “How was sitting in my recliner in my living room, watching a ball game on TV, hurting her?”

“You stained your pants,” Monk said.

“It’s okay; they’re my work pants,” Joyner said.

“I’ll give you another example. My hobby is collecting and restoring old AMC cars. I’ve had to sell a couple of them to create some cash flow until I can find another job. Esther took pictures of people buying cars from me and filed a complaint with the city clerk, who fined me two thousand dollars for operating a business out of my home without a license.”

“What did she have against you?” Monk said.

“Absolutely nothing. I never did a thing to her. She treated everybody that way. She had a certain view of life and expected everyone to conform to it. How crazy is that?”

“Super crazy,” Monk said. “You can go change your pants. We’ll wait here.”

“I don’t want to change my pants.”

“You really should,” Monk said.

“I’m fine in these.”

“You’ll thank me later.”

“No, I won’t,” Joyner said. “Do you have any more questions? I’d like to get back to my work.”

“Where were you Friday night between nine and ten P.M.?” Monk asked.

“I was here at home, doing my laundry.”

“I see,” Monk said. “So you don’t deny you have a pair of clean pants you could change into?”

“What’s the matter with you?” Joyner said.

“Think about the karma your pants are creating,” Monk said. “Did you see anybody visit Esther Friday night?”

Joyner shook his head. “I don’t spy on my neighbors; I don’t keep track of who comes and goes or what they’re watching on TV.”

He wiped his hands on his shirt—deliberately, I think—picked up his wrench, and got back to work.

“Why did you do that?” Monk said to him. “Now you have to change your shirt, too.”

“Let’s go, Mr. Monk,” I said. “We have other neighbors to talk to.”

“But we can’t just leave him like that,” Monk said.

“Let’s go.” I tugged on his overcoat and led him away.

Monk came along, but he wasn’t happy about it. He kept looking back at the house we’d just left. “I don’t know how you can turn a blind eye to other people’s suffering.”

“He’s not suffering,” I said.

“I am,” Monk said.

After hearing Joyner’s story, and those of his neighbors, I was beginning to wonder if I was being too hard on Neal and Kate Finney. It appeared that Esther Stoval didn’t do much to encourage warmth and understanding from the people around her. I wondered how I’d feel about Esther if I had to live on the same street with her year after year. Maybe I’d be dancing with glee over her death, too.

There was one last neighbor whom Monk wanted to question, if only because there were six houses on each side of the block and he couldn’t bear to leave on an odd number.

Lizzie Draper lived in the Victorian on the corner—her house also doubled as her art studio. It was a bright, open, and airy space, filled with colorful bouquets of flowers, one of which she was using as model for the still life she was painting. I could see why. The bouquet was a stunning mix of green orchids, blue hydrangeas, red and yellow lilies, orange roses, coral peonies, purple trachelium, yellow celosia, and red amaryllis.

The sad thing was she didn’t have the talent to capture the vibrant colors or the natural beauty of the bouquet. Samples of her other paintings, sketches, and sculptures were everywhere, and, I have to say, I’ve seen better artwork at Julie’s middle school open house.

The only sculptures worth studying were her breasts, enormous implants like two basketballs tucked into her loose-fitting denim shirt. She had three buttons opened to reveal a provocative glimpse of her deep cleavage.

“I’m Adrian Monk, and this is Natalie Teeger,” he said. “We’re assisting the police in their investigation of Esther Stoval’s murder.”

Monk stared at her chest. She was clearly flattered, but I knew it wasn’t her bosom that enthralled him. It was the three buttons. If she didn’t open one more button, or button one up, he might have a stroke.

“I’d like to ask you three some questions,” he said.

“Three?” she said.

“I think he means three questions,” I said. “Don’t you, Mr. Monk?”

“Did you see or hear anything unusual Friday night?” Monk said to her buttons.

“I wasn’t home,” she said. “I was at work. I’m a bartender at Flaxx.”

I knew the place. It’s a hot club on Market Street. It’s where the beautiful, young, rich people go to admire how beautiful, young, and rich they are. I tried to get a job there once, but I didn’t have the right qualifications. Monk was staring at hers.

“You’re not an artist?” I said.

“It’s who I am, but it’s not what I do. It’s what sustains me, but not what I live on. It’s—”

“I think I get it,” I said, interrupting her.

She looked back at Monk, who was still fixated on her buttons.

“When did you get back from work?” It was getting increasingly difficult for him to concentrate. Or breathe.

“After midnight,” Lizzie said. “The whole street was closed off. There were firemen everywhere. I couldn’t believe what had happened.”

His unwavering attention to her chest finally became too much even for her. She bent her knees to look him in the eye, but he matched her move, crouching to stay focused on her buttons.

“Mr. Monk, you haven’t looked me in the eye once since you came into my house.”

“I’m sorry; it’s your buttons,” Monk said. “They are very distracting.”

“My buttons, how sweet.” Lizzie straightened up and smiled with false modesty. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. They’re new, and I guess I like showing them off.”

“You should have two,” Monk said.

“That’s what God intended.”

“Or four,” Monk said.

“Four?”

“But this isn’t natural,” Monk said, pointing at her cleavage. “You should really fix those.”

“What did you just say to me?” Her smile morphed into an angry sneer. It wasn’t pretty.

“I think there’s been a misunderstanding,” I said, which was like trying to stop a runaway train after it had already jumped the tracks and plowed into an orphanage. “He doesn’t mean what you think he means.”

“There’s no reason to get upset; it’s very easy to correct,” Monk said. “You can do it yourself.”

She marched to the door and held it open. “Get out. Now.”

Monk held up his hands in surrender, gave me a look, and left. I tried to apologize, but she hustled me out and slammed the door behind me.

“Can you believe some people?” He shook his head in disbelief. “They get so worked up over nothing.”

8

Mr. Monk Straightens Up

Julie sat on the rim of the bathtub watching me while I stood at the mirror, fixing my hair and putting on a little makeup for my date with Firefighter Joe. The bathroom door was closed, so I knew there was no chance of Monk invading our privacy. Julie knew it, too.

“You’re not really going to leave me alone with him, are you?” Julie said.

“Mr. Monk is a very sweet man,” I said.

“He’s strange.”

“Stranger than Mrs. Throphamner?” I said, referring to her usual babysitter. “At least Mr. Monk won’t take his teeth out and put them in a glass while he watches television.”

“Mom, he wouldn’t let me tie my shoes this morning because the two ends of my shoelaces weren’t even. And then after I relaced the shoes, he measured the laces to be sure they were right.”

“That’s his way of showing how much he cares about you.”

“That’s not all. He insisted on tying my shoes because the bows I make aren’t ‘symmetrical.’ ”

“Things will be just fine tonight if you follow a couple of simple rules. Don’t ask him to make choices. Don’t create disorganization of any kind. And whatever you do, don’t make popcorn.”

“Why not?”

“No two kernels are the same. It makes him crazy.”

“Gee, how can you tell?” she said. She’d recently discovered sarcasm, the perfect tool to express her growing frustration, common among all kids her age, with having to tolerate parental authority.

“He likes Wheat Thins. They’re squares. There’s an unopened box in the pantry.”

“Why can’t I come with you?”

“It’s a date,” I said.

“Who says you can’t bring your daughter on a date?”

“You don’t see me inviting myself to your sleepovers with your friends, do you?”

“You’re going to sleep with him tonight?”

“No, of course not,” I said. “That wasn’t what I meant. I’m just saying that sometimes I need a little time to myself. Would you like me to come along on your dates?”

“I don’t date,” she said. “You won’t let me yet.”

“Well, if you did, would you want me there?”

“Fine.” She sighed, and it came out more like an anguished groan. “What are we supposed to do while you’re out having fun?”

I started to clean up the mess I’d made at the sink. “Do what you always do. Watch a movie. Read a book. IM your friends.”

“What about Mr. Monk?”

I looked at the wet towels draped over the shower curtain rod, at the razor I had used to shave my legs, and at all the cotton balls on the floor that had missed the garbage can . . . and I hatched an evil, insidious plot: I decided to leave them.

“Don’t worry about Mr. Monk,” I said, giving her a kiss on the cheek. “He’ll be busy getting an early start on tomorrow’s shower.”

I gave myself one last critical appraisal in the mirror, decided there was nothing left I could do without expensive cosmetic surgery, and left the bathroom. It was perfect timing because Firefighter Joe was already knocking at the door.

Monk opened it with a handkerchief, perhaps in case someone infected with bubonic plague had touched the doorknob while we weren’t looking.

Firefighter Joe looked just as good in a leather bomber jacket, polo shirt, and brown corduroy pants as he did in uniform. I had a hunch he looked good in everything. He held a nice bouquet of roses, carnations, and morning glories in one hand and a tiny gift box in the other.

“You’re right on time.” Monk tapped his watch. “To the second. That’s very impressive.”

“Mr. Monk?” Joe said, brow furrowed with confusion. “I didn’t realize that you and Natalie were—”

“We’re not,” I interrupted. “Mr. Monk is staying with us while his apartment building is being fumigated. You look great, by the way. Not that it’s an afterthought. I mean, I noticed it right away, which isn’t to say—”

“Mom,” Julie said. She knows I tend to babble when I’m nervous and does her best to stop me, mostly to save herself, rather than me, from embarrassment.

“These are for you,” Joe said as he offered me the flowers and Julie the gift box.

“What is this for?” Julie asked.

“Open it and see,” he said.

Julie let out a little gasp when she saw what was in the box. She took out a tiny red badge, similar to the one that Captain Mantooth gave Monk, only this one had a dog-bone emblem.

“It’s Sparky’s fire dog badge,” Julie said. “I can’t take this.”

“I want you to have it,” Joe said. “For caring about Sparky so much that you hired the best detective in San Francisco to find his killer.”

It didn’t matter what Joe might say or do on the date; he’d won me over already. Julie, too. She gave Joe a hug.

“Mom said I could come with you.”

“No, I didn’t,” I said quickly, before Joe could reply. “You’re staying here with Mr. Monk.”

“It’s going to be fun,” Monk said. “We can play with LEGOs.”

“I’m twelve,” Julie said indignantly. “I don’t have any LEGOs.”

“Then it’s a good thing I brought mine,” Monk said.

“You play with LEGOs?” Julie said, astonished.

“Are you joking? I’m a red-hot LEGO demon. I’ve got the building-block fever.”

Julie gave me a pleading look, as if I were abandoning her to wolves. “Mom, please. The man has LEGOs.”

“It can get pretty intense,” Monk said. “But we’ll start with some simple structures before we increase the excitement.”

“Don’t get her too excited,” I said to Monk. “She’s got school tomorrow.”

I gave her a kiss and got Joe out of there as fast as I could.

This isn’t a story about me or my love life; it’s a story about Adrian Monk and how he solved two puzzling murders, so I won’t bore you with a lot of details about my date with Firefighter Joe. Oh, who am I kidding? It’s my book and I’m going to talk about whatever I feel like. If you don’t like it, flip ahead a couple of pages.

Some guys try to impress you on a first date by taking you to either a fancy restaurant or a trendy one or on some creative excursion. But I think a date is all about introducing a person to who you are, what matters to you, and what your approach to life is. I guess, in some ways, you’re getting that when a guy tries to wow you with extravagance or cleverness. He’s telling me he’s not the guy for me.

Joe took me to his favorite restaurant in Chinatown, a ten-table, family-owned place with dead ducks hanging in the window as an enticement to come in and sample the menu. Monk would have run away screaming.

Everyone knew Joe there, so it was almost like going to dinner with his family. The food was good, and it was cheap. Another woman might have walked away with the impression that Joe was a cheapskate. Not me. It showed me that Joe was a confident, easygoing guy who was well liked by others and comfortable with his life. Besides, as a single mother on a limited income, I’m always looking for affordable places to eat. It also told me that he was stable and reliable—a guy who runs from relationships and commitments doesn’t go to the same restaurant for years and make friends with the staff.

We talked about the usual first-date stuff. We told each other abbreviated versions of our life stories. I tried to tell mine without dwelling too much on Mitch’s death so as not to depress myself or Joe. I learned that he was raised in Berkeley, that his father was a poet and his mother was a park ranger, and that he’d never been married.

The conversation then turned to firefighting. He told some exciting stories about fires and the colorful history of his firehouse, which was built after the 1906 quake on the site of a rooming house that was the final hideout of desperado Roderick Turlock, the notorious train robber who bedeviled the Pinkertons with his daring gold thefts.

Talking about the firehouse, of course, brought up the investigation into Sparky’s death. I filled Joe in on what we’d learned, that on the night of Sparky’s murder Gregorio Dumas claimed he saw a fireman leave the station a half hour after the rest of the company went to put out the fire at Esther Stoval’s house.

Joe said Gregorio had to be lying, since all the firemen on duty were at the fire. Nobody was left behind at the station or sent back for any reason later.

I could see that talking about Sparky was bringing him down, so I told him some stories about Monk, who amazes me because he can untangle the most perplexing, complicated murder mysteries but is afraid to step into a telephone booth.

We left the restaurant and walked aimlessly around Chinatown for a while, then stopped in at City Lights Bookstore at Broadway and Columbus to browse. I liked that we could enjoy each other’s company even when we weren’t saying anything, but were just standing near each other looking at books.

The clock was inching toward midnight by the time he drove me home. We were only a few blocks away when he pulled over at Dolores Park, at the corner of Church and Twentieth. The park was a scary place at night, full of vagrants and drug dealers.

“Why are we stopping?” I asked.

“I’d like to pay my respects,” he said.

Joe pulled over, got out of the car, and went over to a fire hydrant, which was painted gold. I got out and joined him, looking around to make sure no killers, rapists, or junkies were heading our way.

“What are we doing here?” I asked.

“This was the little fire hydrant that saved San Francisco after the 1906 quake,” he said, gazing at it thoughtfully.

I glanced at the hydrant. It never struck me as special, though I’d certainly noticed it over the years, usually when some dog was peeing on it.

“This one?” I said. “It seems so far away from downtown.”

“The quake knocked out all the other hydrants. But it was water from this one that finally tamed the firestorm. Every year after that, at five A.M. on April eighteenth, survivors of the quake would show up here and give it another coat of gold paint. Some still do, but mostly it’s up to members of the St. Francis Hook and Ladder Society to carry on the tradition. I’ve missed the last couple of anniversaries.”

I thought he might salute the hydrant or something, but he just gave it a nod and we got back in the car. I wondered if every fireman was as into the lore and legend of San Francisco firefighters as Joe was.

He got me from the park to my doorstep in about two minutes and walked me to my door. I wanted to avoid any awkward moments, so I took the initiative and gave him a friendly kiss on the lips.

“I had a great time,” I said. “A really, really great night.”

“So did I,” Joe replied. “I hope we can do this again sometime soon.”

I wasn’t going to leave him hanging. Or myself. “When are you off duty again?”

He gave me a big smile. “Wednesday.”

“It’s a date,” I said. “Same time?”

“Same time.” He gave me a kiss, a little friendlier than the one I had given him.

I unlocked the door and went inside. I immediately froze. Something wasn’t right. I mean, I was definitely in my house—these were my things—but there was something wrong. Off-kilter. Weird. Like I’d stepped through the door into an alternate universe. It was as if I weren’t standing in my house, but in a brilliant re-creation, like a movie set.

I blinked hard and looked around again. What was it that was giving me that feeling of being in another dimension?

Monk came out of the kitchen with a glass of milk. “Did you enjoy your date?”

“He’s a very sweet man,” I said.

I told Monk the story about the firehouse and the train robber and the reasons Joe thought Gregorio Dumas was lying about seeing a fireman at the station. Monk mulled all of that for a moment, working out that nonexistent kink in his neck.

“How did things go tonight with you and Julie?” I asked.

“We worked the LEGOs for a while.”

Monk gestured to the kitchen. I looked past him and saw a massive and elaborate LEGO castle, complete with drawbridge, turrets, and a moat, erected on our table. It would have taken me a year to build that.

“She’s got the touch,” he said proudly.

“Really?”

“With the right training and lots of practice, I think she could become a LEGO master.”

“Like yourself.”

“I don’t like to brag.”

“So what did you do with the rest of your evening?” I asked, still feeling unsettled and off balance.

Monk shrugged. “I straightened up a little bit.”

So that was it.

I looked around the room again and saw what I’d only registered unconsciously before. Monk had done exactly what he said: He’d literally straightened the place. He must have taken a T square and a level to everything in the house. All my stuff was still there, only it had been adjusted. Aligned. The furniture was centered and each piece was repositioned at uniform, measured distances from the others. All the pictures on the wall had been rehung, so that the spaces between them were consistent. The knickknacks and framed photos on the tables and shelves were grouped by height and shape and spaced evenly apart. The magazines were arranged by name and stacked chronologically. He’d reorganized my books alphabetically, by size, and, for all I knew, by copyright date as well.

The living room—and I assumed the entire house—was clean, organized, and utterly sterile. It looked like a model home. I hated it.

“Mr. Monk, everything in here is level and centered and perfectly organized.”

“Thank you.” He beamed with pride, which only frustrated and infuriated me more.

“No, it’s wrong. Don’t you see? You’ve taken all the personality and charm out of my house.”

“Everything is still here,” Monk said. “Except the dirt, the dust, and half a grilled cheese sandwich I found under the couch.”

“But there’s no more clutter,” I said. “It looks like robots live here.”

“And that’s a bad thing?”

“People live here, Mr. Monk. Eight years of marriage, twelve years of parenting, a mother and daughter living together; that all leaves a trail. I like that trail. It comforts me. It’s the muddled arrangement of photos on the shelf, the half-read book left open on the arm of a chair, and yes, even the forgotten grilled cheese sandwich. Clutter and disorganization, those are signs of life. It is life.”

“Not mine,” he said.

Those two words carried an infinite sadness that made me ache and, for a moment, forget my own frustration and think about his.

Monk’s life was a constant pursuit of order. I’m sure that’s why he became a detective and why he’s so good at solving murders. He notices all the things that don’t fit as they should and puts them into their proper places, creating a solution. Restoring order.

The only mystery he hasn’t been able to solve is the one at the heart of his own personal disorder.

The murder of his wife.

Everything else he did, like organizing my house or making sure my daughter’s shoelaces were even, was a poor substitute for the perfect order he lost with Trudy. That could never be restored.

But I couldn’t say all that to him. Instead I took his hand in mine.

“Your life is a lot messier than you think. I’m a big mess and I’m part of it, aren’t I?”

“You and Julie,” Monk said. “And I’m glad you are.”

“Me, too, Mr. Monk.”

“Actually, I’ve loosened up quite a bit.”

“You have?”

“I haven’t always been the easygoing guy you know today,” Monk said. “There was a time when I was very uptight.”

“I can’t imagine that.” I gave his hand a squeeze and let go. “Please don’t straighten up my house anymore.”

He nodded.

“Good night, Mr. Monk.”

“Good night, Natalie.”

I went to my room. It wasn’t until I was in bed, and nearly asleep, that I realized that I’d held his hand and he didn’t ask for a wipe. Even if he sanitized his hands later, at least he didn’t do it in front of me. That had to mean something, and whatever it was, I think it was something good.

9

Mr. Monk and the Thirtieth Floor

Straightening up the house must have exhausted Monk because on Monday morning Julie woke up before he did and managed to beat him to the bathroom by a few seconds. They nearly collided at the door at six o’clock.

“I need to use the bathroom first,” Monk said.

“Is it number one or number two?”

“I think I have a constitutional right not to have to answer that question.”

“I need to know how long you’re going to be,” Julie said, holding the door possessively with one hand, her school clothes draped over her arm.

“No longer than usual.”

“I can’t wait that long,” Julie said. “School starts at eight fifteen, not noon.”

She closed the door on him. He stared at the door for a moment, then looked at me. I was standing outside my bedroom, not bothering to hide my amusement.

“Does she have to use the bathroom so often?” Monk said.

“Would you prefer she didn’t bathe at all?”

“But it was ready for me. I cleaned it last night.”

“You cleaned everything last night,” I said, and padded past him into the kitchen.

The LEGO castle was gone. Monk must have dismantled it and put all the pieces back in their proper boxes before he went to bed. No wonder he’d overslept. I opened the pantry to get myself a bagel and noticed that Monk had rearranged all the boxed and canned goods by food group and expiration date.

Monk came in and reached past me for his box of Chex. The cereal was made up of almost perfect squares of shredded wheat. The imperfect squares would be sorted out of his bowl before he poured in the milk.

I opened the cupboard to get him a bowl and was shocked to find it empty. There wasn’t a single bowl, plate, or dish inside, just barren shelves.

I turned to look at Monk, who was sitting at the table carefully selecting Chex one at a time from the box and eating them.

“What happened to all my dishes?”

He wouldn’t look up at me, pretending instead to concentrate on the difficult task of selecting Chex. “It’s a little complicated.”

“I don’t see the complication, Mr. Monk. I had dishes last night and now I don’t. Where are they?”

“You had seven bowls, which isn’t right. You should have six or eight, but not seven. So one bowl obviously needed to go. But you had eight plates. You can see the problem.”

“I can see that I don’t have any dishes; that’s the problem.”

“Everyone knows you can’t have six bowls and eight plates, so two plates had to go. But then I noticed that some of the bowls and plates were chipped, and not all of them in the same places. You had a matching set of dishes that didn’t match at all. I was faced with a situation that was spiraling out of control into total chaos. The only reasonable thing to do was to get rid of them all.”

Monk looked up at me then, clearly expecting sympathy and understanding. He sure as hell wasn’t going to get it from me.

“Reasonable? You call throwing out all of my dishes reasonable?”

“ ‘Thoughtful,’ ‘conscientious,’ and ‘responsible’ also came to mind,” Monk said. “But I thought ‘reasonable’ said it best.”

“Here’s what we’re going to do today before you solve any murders or catch any bad guys,” I said. “As soon as you are showered and dressed, we’re going to Pottery Barn and you’re going to buy me a new set of dishes, or you can eat your next meal in this house off the floor.”

I reached for the silverware drawer for a knife to cut my bagel, but I stopped before opening it.

“Do I want to open this drawer?” I asked.

“It depends what you’re looking for.”

“A knife would be nice,” I said. “Actually, how about any silverware at all?”

Monk shifted in his chair. “You don’t want to open the drawer.”

“You can add silverware to the list of things you’re buying me today,” I said, and went to the refrigerator. I picked up the carton of orange juice and took a drink from it.

Monk cringed, as I knew he would. “You really shouldn’t drink from the carton.”

“Fine.” I turned and pinned him with the coldest, cruelest, most accusatory glare I could muster. “Do I still own a glass I can drink from instead?”

He shifted in his seat.

“I didn’t think so.” I took the carton with me and slammed the refrigerator door shut. “I hope your credit card is paid up, Mr. Monk, because it’s going to get a real workout today.”

I stomped back to my bedroom with my bagel and orange juice and left Monk alone in my dish-less, knifeless, cupless kitchen.

The streets were damp, and fog completely obscured the skyline on that Monday morning, but the city was bustling. The downtown sidewalks were jammed with young professionals wearing the latest fashion accessory—something electronic in the ear.

There wasn’t a naked ear in sight.

Everyone except us seemed to be wearing either a pair of white iPod earphones or one of those Bluetooth cell phone units that looked like the radio Q-tip that stuck out of Lieutenant Uhura’s ear on the original Star Trek.

It was after twelve by the time we finished shopping for dishes, silverware, and glasses at Pottery Barn.

I’ll never admit this to Monk, but once I got past my initial anger, I was glad he threw my stuff out. I’d been ashamed to have people over to eat because we had chipped dishes and silverware that had been mangled in the disposal. But I couldn’t afford to replace any of it. Now Monk was buying me new kitchenware, and I was thrilled. (It wasn’t until he suggested we browse the cookware that I discovered he’d thrown out my pots and pans, too.) Here’s how awful I am: I actually began to toy with the idea of “accidentally” letting him see the mess in my closet so he’d buy me a new wardrobe, too.

To make shopping as painless as possible for both of us, I picked solid colors for the dishes and let him open all the boxes in the store to inspect each piece for imperfections. Every so often while this was going on, I’d feel a pang of guilt, like I was taking advantage of him or something. But then I’d remind myself that he was the one who went into my kitchen and threw out all of my dishes. And then my anger would come back and beat the crap out of my guilt and I was fine with myself all over again.

We’d just finished loading up the back of my Cherokee with all my goodies when Stottlemeyer called. The captain was on his way to interview Lucas Breen, the developer who planned to demolish Esther Stoval’s block, and asked if we wanted to join him. We did.

Breen Development Corporation was in a thirty-five-story Rubik’s Cube that had shouldered its way between two other buildings in the Financial District for a view of the bay. The lobby was a glass atrium that had its own florist, chocolatier, and a small outpost of the Boudin Bakery, which makes the best sourdough bread in the city, maybe even the world.

Stottlemeyer, sipping a cup of coffee from Boudin, was waiting for us in front of Flo’s Floral Designs. The smell of fresh sourdough was making me swoon.

“Morning, Natalie. Monk. I heard you talked to everybody in Esther’s neighborhood. You come up with any clues we missed?”

“No,” Monk said.

“That’s depressing,” Stottlemeyer said. “What about your other case, the one with the dog; how’s that going?”

“I think I’m on to something,” Monk asked.

That was news to me. But Monk doesn’t always share with me what’s going on in his mind, and, I have to say, most of time I’m deeply thankful for that.

“Want to trade cases?” Stottlemeyer said.

“I don’t think so,” Monk said. “Though you could do me a favor. Could you ask Lieutenant Disher to find out everything he can about a notorious robber named Roderick Turlock?”

“It’s the least I can do. What’s Turlock notorious for?”

“Robbing trains,” I said.

“Do people still do that?”

I didn’t think it would help our cause to mention that Turlock was captured in 1906. Apparently Monk agreed with me, since we both treated Stottlemeyer’s question as a rhetorical one. We must have been right, because Stottlemeyer didn’t wait for an answer.

“So, Monk, you ready for this?” Stottlemeyer tipped his head up.

Monk looked up, searching for whatever it was the captain was talking about. “For what?”

“To see Breen,” Stottlemeyer said. “He’s a rich, powerful man. He’s not going to appreciate either one of us suggesting he might have been involved in Esther Stoval’s murder.”

“He’s up there?”

“Thirtieth floor,” he said. “Rich guys love to look down on everybody.”

Stottlemeyer approached the security guard, a beefy guy with a boxer’s nose who manned a marble-topped counter in front of the elevators. Stottlemeyer flashed his badge, introduced us, and said we were there to see Lucas Breen. The guard called up to Breen’s office, then nodded to the captain.

“Mr. Breen will see you now,” the guard said.

“Great,” Monk said. “When’s he coming down?”

“He’s not,” Stottlemeyer said. “We’re going up.”

“It would be better if he came down.”

Stottlemeyer groaned and turned to the guard. “Could you ask Mr. Breen if he’d mind meeting us for a cup of coffee in the lobby? My treat.”

The guard made the call, spoke for a moment, then hung up. “Mr. Breen is very busy and can’t leave the office at this time. If you want to see him, you need to go to his office.”

“I tried, Monk,” Stottlemeyer said. “So let’s go.”

We headed for the elevators, but Monk dragged behind. “I have an idea. Let’s take the stairs.”

“Thirty floors?” I said.

“It’ll be fun.”

“It’ll be fatal,” Stottlemeyer said. “I can talk to Breen without you. You really don’t need to be there.”

“I want to be there,” Monk said.

“I’m taking the elevator,” Stottlemeyer said. “Are you coming or not?”

I looked at Monk. He looked at the elevator, took a deep breath, and nodded.

“Okay,” he said.

The three of us got into the elevator. Stottlemeyer hit the button for the thirtieth floor. The doors closed. Monk covered his finger with his sleeve and hit the button for the second floor. And then the fourth. And then the sixth. He hit the button for every other floor all the way up to the thirtieth.

Stottlemeyer rolled his eyes and sighed.

The instant the doors opened on the second floor, Monk stepped out, took several deep breaths, then came back in.

“I think this is going very well,” he said.

On the fourth floor he burst out with a cry, startling the people in the waiting room at the Crocker Advertising Agency.

“It’s a living hell,” he told them.

Monk took several hungry breaths of air and then leaped back into the elevator as if he were plunging into deep water.

The instant the elevator reached the sixth floor, he threw himself out into the lobby of Ernst, Throck, and Fillburton, Attorneys at Law, and screamed something about the “injustice and inhumanity” of it all.

By the eighth, Stottlemeyer and I were resigned to our fate, leaning against the handrails and doing our best to relax. We played Tetris on Stottlemeyer’s cell phone screen while Monk paced, and groaned, and cried, and pulled at the imaginary leeches in his hair.

Stopping at every other floor, it took us forty minutes to reach Breen’s office on the thirtieth. I won six games and Stottlemeyer won eight, but he’s had a lot more practice, working on his technique during stakeouts. When the elevator doors opened, Monk staggered out, gasping for air, his face drenched with sweat, and collapsed onto the black leather couch in the waiting room.

“Sweet Mother of God,” he whined. “It’s finally over.”

I gave him a bottle of Sierra Springs water from my purse—which, by the way, is about the size of the baby bag I lugged around when Julie was an infant. It’s full of water, Wet Ones, Baggies, even some Wheat Thins in case he gets hungry. The only thing I’m not carrying with me that I carried then are diapers.

Stottlemeyer went up to the receptionist, a disarmingly attractive Asian woman who sat behind a sweeping desk that made her look like the anchorwoman on the eleven-o’clock news. Except that the breathtaking view of the city behind her wasn’t a backdrop; it was the real thing.

“Captain Stottlemeyer, Adrian Monk, and Natalie Teeger to see Mr. Breen,” he said.

“We were expecting you to be here almost an hour ago,” she said.

“So were we,” he said.

Monk guzzled the water and tossed the empty bottle over his shoulder. The color was beginning to return to his cheeks. He mopped his forehead with his handkerchief and then tossed that, too.

“Going down will be much easier,” I said reassuringly.

“Yeah, because I’ll be taking the stairs.”

The receptionist spoke up. “Mr. Breen will see you now.”

She gestured toward a massive set of double doors that reminded me of the gates to the Emerald City of Oz, only without the munchkin guard. Breen had an Asian supermodel instead, which I’m pretty sure the wizard also would have preferred.

The doors slid open on their own as we approached, which was intimidating. Sure, the doors at Wal-Mart do the same thing, but somehow it’s different when you aren’t pushing a shopping cart.

And there, in a cavernous office of glass and mahogany and stainless steel, stood real-estate developer Lucas Breen, his arms outstretched, a welcoming smile on his face, his capped teeth gleaming like polished ivory.

10

Mr. Monk Buys Some Flowers

Everything about Lucas Breen’s office screamed money and power. His floor-to-ceiling windows offered a commanding view of the city and the bay. The intricately detailed models of his most architecturally daring office towers were dramatically lit and displayed on marble stands. The designer furniture was arranged like sculptures. There were pictures on the wall of him and his gorgeous, bejeweled wife shaking hands with presidents, kings, movie stars, and local politicians.

And even if Breen’s office didn’t scream money and power, his handmade jacket, monogrammed shirt, elegant watch, and expensive shoes certainly did. I’d wow you with the brand names, but my fashion and jewelry expertise doesn’t extend beyond what you can find at Mervyn’s, JCPenney, and Target.

Breen was in his forties, remarkably fit, and naturally tanned—the kind of body and rich tan that comes from playing tennis on your Marin County estate, lazing around on yachts in the Caribbean, and having tantric sex.

Okay, I don’t know about the tantric sex part, but he looked like the type who would brag that he was having it even if he weren’t.

“Thank you for making the time to see us, Mr. Breen,” Stottlemeyer said, shaking the developer’s hand.

“My pleasure, Captain. I’m pleased to do anything I can to assist the San Francisco Police Department,” Breen said. “That’s why I’m so honored to be a member of the Police Commission.”

You’ve got to admire how Breen got that in there so quickly, as if Stottlemeyer didn’t already know that the chief of police and the department answer to Breen’s oversight committee.

“You must be Adrian Monk. I’ve been an admirer of yours for some time.” Breen offered his hand to Monk, who shook it, then immediately turned to me for a wipe. “Please, Mr. Monk, allow me.”

Breen took a disinfectant wipe from his pocket and gave it to Monk, who scrutinized the package. It was a Magic Fresh.

“No, thank you,” Monk said.

“It’s a moist towelette,” Breen said.

“It’s a Magic Fresh.”

“They’re all the same.”

“That’s like saying all corn flakes are the same,” Monk said.

“They are.”

“I prefer Wet Ones,” Monk said, and held his hand out to me. I gave him a package. “I don’t trust anything with magic in it.”

Breen forced a smile and tossed the package on his desk. Somebody was going to be fired for not providing Breen with the correct wipe for Monk.

“We’re investigating the murder of Esther Stoval,” Stottlemeyer said. “And, for obvious reasons, your name came up.”

“You realize, of course, that I never actually met Esther Stoval or set foot in her home. Other members of my company interacted with her and tried to address her concerns,” Breen said. “But from what I heard, she was a very difficult individual.”

“Is this the project?” Stottlemeyer asked, tipping his head toward a model.

“Yes, that’s it,” Breen said, leading us over to a scale model of Esther’s block.

The three-story building was a clever amalgamation of styles—Victorian, Spanish Renaissance, French chateau, and a dozen others—that made it seem at once both vintage and new. But there was something calculated, commercial, and Disneyesque about the building’s charm. I knew I was being manipulated with subliminal design cues meant to evoke cable cars and foggy streets, Fisherman’s Wharf, and the Golden Gate, and I hated that it was working. Maybe Esther Stoval hated it, too.

While Stottlemeyer and I admired the model, Monk looked at all the pictures on the wall of Breen and his wife with celebrities and politicians.

“What’s the selling price of the condos?” I asked, not that I was in the market or anything like that.

“Six hundred thousand and up, which, without getting into specific numbers, is what we paid the homeowners for their properties. But they weren’t the only ones who benefited. Once you revitalize one corner of a neighborhood, it creates a domino effect of beautification that enhances the whole community. Everyone wins. Unfortunately, there’s an Esther Stoval in every neighborhood.”

“Do they all end up dead?” Monk asked.

Stottlemeyer shot him a look. “What Mr. Monk means to say is that—”

Breen interrupted him. “I know what he means. No matter how beneficial my projects are to a community, Mr. Monk, there is always opposition. Environmental groups, historical societies, homeowners associations, and an occasional recalcitrant individual. Most of my day is spent working on compromises that unify people and invigorate neighborhoods.”

“You didn’t reach one with Esther,” Monk said.

“We offered her a premium for her property, as well as a lifetime lease on the condominium of her choice in the project,” Breen said. “You can’t get more amenable than that. She refused to even negotiate. But in the end, her opposition became irrelevant.”

“Because she’s dead,” Monk said.

“Because we were planning to move ahead without her.”

“How could you?” I asked. “Her house was right in the middle of the block.”

“I didn’t get this far in the real-estate business, Ms. Teeger, without being creative.” Breen went to his desk and unfurled an architect’s rendering of a building that was very similar to the model. “We were going to build around her.”

The revised plans showed the building encircling Esther’s house on three sides, shrouding it in almost complete darkness and robbing her of any privacy at all. With the way the building was designed, however, Esther’s house didn’t look out of place at all, but instead like a quirky, intentionally amusing design element. It was a nasty way of dealing with Esther, though I suppose it was a lot nicer than murder.

“She never would have gone for this,” I said.

“She wouldn’t have had a choice,” Breen said. “The planning commission was scheduled to vote on the project next week, and she was the lone voice of opposition. I have it on good authority that we were likely to win unanimous approval from the commission. The project would have been built with or without her.”

“You were going to drive her out by making her life absolutely miserable,” Monk said.

“On the contrary, we would have been friendly neighbors, I assure you,” Breen said. “She and her cats could have stayed there as long as they liked. That said, we designed the building so that when she eventually passed away, we would have the choice of either letting her home stand or tearing it down for a plaza.”

“So you’re saying that Esther Stoval’s murder didn’t change a thing for you,” Stottlemeyer said.

“Not as far as the project is concerned,” Breen said. “However, as a San Franciscan, and a human being, I’m truly horrified about what happened to that poor old woman. I don’t think her murder had anything to do with our building. She was probably killed by some crazed junkie looking to steal something to finance his next fix.”

I couldn’t recall seeing any junkies, crazed or otherwise, on the street when Monk interviewed the neighbors, but at least that theory made more sense than Disher’s theory of crazed cats smothering the old lady and setting the house on fire.

“Well,” Stottlemeyer said. “I think that covers everything, don’t you, Monk?”

“Where were you Friday night between nine and ten P.M.?” Monk said.

“I thought we just established that I had nothing to gain, either directly or indirectly, from her death,” Breen said. “What difference does it make where I was when she was killed?”

“Actually, Monk is right; it’s one of those procedural questions we’re always supposed to ask,” Stottlemeyer said. “I’d hate for someone like you, on the Police Commission and all, to think I wasn’t doing my job.”

“Very well,” Breen said. “I was at the ‘Save the Bay’ fund-raiser at the Excelsior Tower Hotel from eight P.M. until midnight.”

“With your wife?” Monk pointed to the pictures on the wall. “This is your wife, isn’t it?”

“Yes, I was there with my wife, and the mayor, and the governor, and about five hundred other concerned citizens,” Breen said. “Now, if there are no other questions, I have a very busy day.”

He took a key-fob-size remote out of his pocket, aimed it at his office doors, and they slid open again—a real subtle hint that our meeting was over.

“Thanks for your help,” Stottlemeyer said as we left the office. Monk trailed behind, taking one last glance back at Breen.

“There’s a big difference between Raisin Brans,” Monk said. “Trust me on that.”

It wasn’t until we were at the elevators, out of earshot of the receptionist or anyone else, that Stottlemeyer turned to Monk, who was heading for the stairwell door.

“You want to tell me why you were needling Breen?” Stottlemeyer punched the call button for the elevator as if it were someone’s face. “And it’d better not be because he uses the wrong brand of disinfectant wipe or wouldn’t come down to the lobby to meet you.”

“He’s the guy.” Monk covered his hand with his sleeve and opened the door to the stairs.

“What guy?”

“The guy who killed Esther Stoval,” he said. “It was him.”

And with that, our elevator arrived and Monk disappeared into the stairwell. Stottlemeyer started to go after him, but I gently tugged his sleeve to stop him.

“Do you really want to chase him down thirty floors?” I said. “It can wait.”

He looked at me, sighed with resignation, and stepped into the elevator.

“Sometimes I could kill him,” he said. “And it would be justifiable homicide.”

After Stottlemeyer called the office to get Disher started on confirming Breen’s alibi and exhuming the background on train robber Roderick Turlock, the two of us enjoyed a leisurely lunch at the Boudin Bakery in the lobby.

We both ordered Boston clam chowder in fresh sourdough bread bowls and took a table by the window, where we could watch all the accountants, stockbrokers, bankers, and homeless people go by.

We talked about our children and the schools they were going to, and how kids don’t go outside and play anymore; they schedule playdates instead. I know; it sounds like awfully mundane, boring stuff to talk about, which is why I’m sparing you the actual conversation.

But here’s why I even mention it at all: It was the first time the two of us had ever really talked, and while it wasn’t what you’d call a particularly scintillating or intimate conversation, at least it wasn’t about Monk or murders or law enforcement. It was about life.

I believe that it was sitting there, eating our soup and picking at our bread bowls, that I saw Leland Stottlemeyer as a person instead of a homicide cop for the first time.

We sat at a table where Monk would be sure to see us when he finally got to the lobby, which ended up being about a half hour after we’d left him on the thirtieth floor.

Monk staggered out of the stairwell looking as if he’d just trekked on foot across the Mojave Desert. He undid the top two buttons at his collar and, without even acknowledging us, shuffled into Flo’s Floral Designs.

“You think he saw us?” Stottlemeyer said.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Neither one of us got up to check. We weren’t finished with our soup and we both knew Monk had to pass us if he wanted to leave the building. But the incident was a conversation killer. We were both silent, watching the florist shop, waiting to see what would happen next.

After a few minutes he came out holding a beautiful bouquet of flowers and collapsed into a seat at our table.

“Water,” he croaked.

I took a Sierra Springs bottle out of my bag and passed it to him. He guzzled it down and sagged into his seat.

“How was your walk?” I asked.

“Invigorating,” Monk replied.

“Who are the flowers for?” Stottlemeyer said.

“You.”

Monk handed them to the captain, who took them, a befuddled look on his face. I doubt he appreciated the beautiful mix of lilies, roses, orchids, and hydrangeas. It was a stunning bouquet.

“Is this some kind of apology?”

“It’s evidence that Lucas Breen is guilty of murder.”

Stottlemeyer looked at the flowers, then back at Monk. “I don’t get it. What do the flowers have to do with anything?”

That’s when I recognized them. I’d seen them before and I remembered where.

“I talked to Flo.” Monk gestured to the florist shop. “This bouquet is one of her original designs. She’s very proud of it.”

“Good for Flo,” Stottlemeyer said.

“Lucas Breen bought one just like it from Flo on Thursday,” Monk said.

“So?”

“They were for his mistress, Lizzie Draper,” Monk said. “I saw the same bouquet in her house yesterday.”

I don’t know how Monk noticed the bouquet, since his gaze was locked on Lizzie Draper’s cleavage the whole time we were there. Monk must have astonishing peripheral vision. It was the same extraordinary bouquet Lizzie was using as a model for the painting she was working on.

“Even if that’s true,” Stottlemeyer said, “what does that have to do with Esther Stoval’s murder?”

“Esther Stoval spied on her neighbors. She used binoculars to look into her neighbors’ homes and took pictures,” Monk said. “She once turned a neighbor in to the cable company for watching ESPN with an illegal converter box.”

“I’m surprised she lived as long as she did,” Stottlemeyer said. “You don’t come between a man and his sports.”

“I think Esther had incriminating photos of Lucas Breen and Lizzie Draper and threatened to show them to his wife if he didn’t halt the condominium project. A divorce could have cost him tens of millions of dollars. That’s why Breen killed Esther.”

Stottlemeyer shook his head. “That’s a mighty big leap, even for you, Monk.”

“That’s what happened,” Monk said.

I was sure he was right. Stottlemeyer was sure, too. Because if there is one thing Monk is always right about, it’s murder. And Monk knew that we knew. Which made the situation all the more frustrating for the captain.

Stottlemeyer held up the bouquet. “And this is all you’ve got?”

“We also have her buttons,” Monk said.

“Her buttons?”

“I couldn’t help noticing them,” he said.

That was probably the biggest understatement of the day.

“The letters ‘LB’ were written on them,” Monk said. “At the time I thought it was a brand name, but it wasn’t. It was a monogram. The shirt she was wearing was handmade for Lucas Breen.”

11

Mr. Monk and the Suspect Smell

We reconvened in Stottlemeyer’s office, where he put the bouquet in an empty Big Gulp cup and filled it with water. Vases aren’t easy to come by in the homicide department of the SFPD.

Disher came in and stared at Monk with dismay. “What’s wrong? Are you feeling all right?”

“I feel fine,” Monk said.

“Are you sure?”

“Positive,” Monk said. “Why do you ask?”

“It’s just that I’ve never seen you so, so . . .” Disher searched for the right word. “Unbuttoned.”

“Unbuttoned?” Monk said.

Disher motioned to his collar. “Your top two buttons are unbuttoned.”

“Oh, my God.” Monk immediately flushed with embarrassment and buttoned his collar up. “How long have I been naked? Why didn’t you say something?”

“It was two buttons, Mr. Monk,” I said.

“Word is probably spreading all over the department right now!” Monk said.

“I’m sure nobody noticed,” Stottlemeyer said.

“I strolled in here half-naked. They aren’t blind.” He buried his face in his hands. “I’m so ashamed.”

“You’re among friends, Monk.” Stottlemeyer came around his desk and squeezed Monk’s shoulder reassuringly. “Nobody is going to say anything. You have my word.”

Monk looked up, stricken. “Could you talk to them for me?”

“Sure,” Stottlemeyer said. “Who?”

“Everyone,” Monk said. “Every officer in the building.”

“Okay, I can do that,” Stottlemeyer said. “But could I wait until after we discuss how we’re going to prove that Lucas Breen killed Esther Stoval?”

“That’s not going to be easy,” Disher said. “There’s no physical evidence that puts him in that house when Esther was killed.”

“Or anybody else,” Stottlemeyer said.

“He did it,” Monk said. “If we work backward from there, we’ll find something.”

“He’s got a rock-solid alibi.” Disher went to Stottlemeyer’s computer and clicked a few keys. “I’ve pulled dozens of press photos off the net of Breen and his wife arriving at eight P.M. and departing at midnight. I talked to the photographers and got the approximate times the photos were taken from them.”

“Good work,” Stottlemeyer said.

Disher angled Stottlemeyer’s monitor so we could see the pictures on the screen. Sure enough, there were photos from various angles from different photographers of Breen and his wife in their raincoats, huddled under an umbrella and rushing into the lobby from the rain. There were also photos of the Breens leaving at midnight with the governor and his wife.

“There were five hundred guests at that event. I doubt anybody can account for his movements the whole night,” Monk said. “The Excelsior has dozens of exits. He could have left the hotel and come back and no one would have noticed.”

“Pull the security-camera footage from the hotel,” Stottlemeyer told Disher. “Maybe there’s something. And talk to some of the guests and hotel staff, see if anybody noticed he was gone.”

“Breen built the Excelsior. I’m sure he knows how to get in and out without being seen,” Disher said. “Besides, leaving the hotel doesn’t put him in Esther’s house, holding a pillow to her face.”

“One step at a time,” Stottlemeyer said.

“Okay,” Disher said. “So what does a train robber who died in 1906 have to do with all this?”

“Nothing,” Monk said. “That has to do with the murder of a firehouse dog.”

“You’re trying to solve a one-hundred-year-old murder of a dog?”

“Sparky was murdered Friday night,” I said.

“By a ghost?” Disher said.

“Whoa.” Stottlemeyer raised a hand. “Could somebody please tell me what’s going on?”

“In the late eighteen hundreds, Roderick Turlock and his gang robbed trains that were carrying bank cars filled with gold coins,” Disher said. “The Pinkertons finally tracked him down to a boardinghouse in San Francisco, where he was killed in a shoot-out, taking his secret with him.”

“What secret?” Monk asked.

“What he did with the stolen gold,” Disher said. “Most of it was never found. Legend has it that he buried it somewhere.”

“That’s real interesting, but can we discuss San Francisco’s rich and colorful history another time?” Stottlemeyer said. “We’ve got a murder to solve here and no evidence whatsoever.”

“You’re forgetting about the buttons,” Monk said. “And the flowers.”

“Right, of course. The flowers.” Stottlemeyer snatched the bouquet out of the Big Gulp cup. “Tell you what, Randy, I’ll take these over to the DA right now while you and Monk go arrest Breen.”

Stottlemeyer marched to his door. Disher stood in place, not sure what to do.

“You want me to . . . I mean, should I . . . ?” Disher looked at Monk. “Is he serious?”

“No, I’m not serious.” Stottlemeyer pivoted on his heels and waved the bouquet as he spoke, shaking off some of the petals. “Lucas Breen is on the Police Commission, for God’s sake. What we need is his DNA all over the crime scene, twenty-two eyewitnesses who saw him there, and a video of him smothering the old hag. And then maybe, maybe, we’ve got something to go on.”

Stottlemeyer shoved Disher out of the way, slammed the bouquet back into the Big Gulp cup, and took a seat behind his desk. He took a deep breath, then glanced at Monk.

“Tell me how you think he did it.”

“I think he left the hotel, killed Esther, set fire to her house, then went back to the party.”

“That’s not a very cunning plan,” Disher said.

“It worked, didn’t it?” Stottlemeyer said. “Did you check out Lizzie Draper’s alibi?”

Disher nodded. “They have some kind of Coyote Ugly thing going at Flaxx. There are a hundred guys who saw her dancing in a wet T-shirt on the bar, pouring drinks and juggling bottles until midnight.”

That, by the way, was the other reason I didn’t get the job at Flaxx. I don’t jiggle or juggle.

“Assuming you’re right, Mr. Monk,” I began, then paused when I saw the chastising look he was giving me. “Excuse me, knowing you’re right, Breen couldn’t have taken his car, not without the valet and the press seeing him go. And he wouldn’t have hailed a taxi and taken the risk that a cabbie might remember him. So how did Breen get to Esther’s house and back again?”

Stottlemeyer nodded at me. “You’re getting the hang of this, Natalie.”

“He must have walked,” Monk said.

“Is that possible?” I wondered. “I mean, could he do all that in an hour on foot?”

Monk shrugged. “There’s only one way to find out.”

As we left the police station, Monk apologized to every officer we passed for his “earlier nakedness,” which he blamed on disorientation caused by his sinus medication, not that anyone asked or cared.

“Allergies,” he said to them. “It’s the monkey on my back.”

We drove to the Excelsior, which was on Montgomery Street, a few blocks northeast of Union Square. Although it was a relatively new building, constructed in the last decade, it was crafted in the Beaux Arts style favored by San Francisco’s elite in the early 1900s. The big-ticket touches that advertised wealth were all there: the grand arched doorways, the monumental stone columns, the sculpted balustrades, and the arched windows adorned with carved-leaf crowns and ornamented keystones.

I reluctantly left my Cherokee in the Excelsior’s underground garage, where it costs more to park a car per day than it does to rent one. As Disher predicted, even a casual inspection revealed dozens of ways out of the building, including doors on each floor of the parking structure and a service exit that opened into a dark alley.

The service exit into the alley was also conveniently blocked from view from the street by several large Dumpsters. If Breen used this door to slip out of the building, he could have taken the alley a full block before having to emerge onto the street, putting him at a safe distance from the hotel and any press gathered out front. Monk assumed that was the likeliest route for Breen to have taken, so we followed it, too. But from that point, there were any number of routes he might have taken. Monk chose the most direct one, going straight up Montgomery, to start with.

It was nearly dark as we began our walk, and it began to drizzle. Our trek took us past the towers of the Financial District, where business-people and clerical workers were already streaming out, eager to get a head start on the rush-hour traffic. And the night shift of homeless people was beginning to move in, seeking shelter in the alcoves and doorways, scrounging in the trash bins, and hitting up passersby for money.

Monk wouldn’t give them money, but he handed out individual packages of Wet Ones from my purse to every indigent we passed. They didn’t seem to appreciate the gesture, particularly one guy, who slept on a piece of cardboard and wore an ill-fitting, tattered overcoat over several layers of filthy shirts.

When Monk tossed him a Wet One packet, the homeless man rose up from his mat.

“What the hell am I supposed to do with this?” he said indignantly, holding the Wet One in disgust. His hair and beard were matted, his skin deeply tanned and caked with dirt. He smelled of body odor and rot, like he’d been sleeping in a Dumpster. The stench was an invisible force field that kept Monk a good three feet away from him.

“You’re right,” Monk said to the man. “It wasn’t very thoughtful of me.”

Monk reached into my bag, took out two handfuls of wipes, and dumped them at the man’s feet.

“One isn’t nearly enough,” Monk said, and hurried away, sneezing, the homeless man shouting profanities in our wake.

I handed Monk a Kleenex. Monk blew his nose, then put the used tissue into a Ziploc bag, which he sealed and stowed in his pocket.

“That man sleeps with cats,” Monk said.

“I think that’s the least of his problems.”

I looked over my shoulder and saw the homeless man gathering up the wipes and putting them into the pocket of his overcoat. He saw me looking at him and flipped me off. Have a nice day to you, too, I thought.

We walked north, following Montgomery as it crossed Columbus Avenue and rose up toward Telegraph Hill. The office buildings and restaurants soon gave way to upscale galleries and residences. We zigzagged along side streets into the residential triangle of Victorian homes and garden apartments roughly bordered by Columbus Avenue, Montgomery Street, and Filbert Street. It was a steep climb—not nearly as steep as the one I took to Delores Park each Sunday, but we were still breathing pretty hard when we reached the crest of the hill and found ourselves, much to my surprise, facing Firefighter Joe’s station house.

“Do you mind if we stop in and say hello to Joe?” I asked. Breen would have needed a rest about now, I thought, even if he had been in a hurry. We were eight or ten serious blocks from the Excelsior, and we’d been walking for about twenty minutes.

“That’s a good idea,” Monk said. He looked like he could use the rest, too.

It was also a chance to dry off a bit. Drizzle isn’t so bad until it accumulates and you suddenly realize you’re soaked, which we both were.

Besides, we’d more or less proven that Breen could have walked from the Excelsior to Esther’s place, which was only a few blocks from the fire station, in a half hour.

Everything in the station was gleaming, of course. Even the turnouts, the firefighting rigs hanging in the open racks, were all clean, the latches and zippers shining.

The firemen were all in the kitchen eating pizza. I couldn’t help noticing that Sparky’s bed basket and rubber hot-dog squeak toy were still there. Monk also noticed it. I guess Joe wasn’t willing to accept that Sparky was gone quite yet. I knew the feeling. I kept Mitch’s clothes hanging in the closet for almost a year after he died. And I know Monk still has the pillow his wife slept on. It’s in a plastic bag in his closet.

Joe broke into a big smile the minute he saw me, jumped out of his seat, and rushed over to greet us. But once he got to me, he wasn’t quite sure what he should do. Kiss me? Hug me? Shake my hand? We settled on a friendly hug.

“Natalie, Mr. Monk, what a nice surprise. You’re just in time to join us for some pizza.” Joe glanced back to Captain Mantooth, who held out a slice to Monk on a napkin.

“No, thank you,” Monk said. “We just stopped by to ask you some questions.”

Once again I was out of the loop. I thought it was a happy coincidence that we ended up in front of the firehouse.

“Captain Mantooth, did you notice any towels missing before Friday night?”

“Sure, they’re always disappearing,” Mantooth said. “They’re like socks. You know how that is, Mr. Monk.”

“No, I don’t.” Monk looked genuinely perplexed.

“Everybody loses socks,” Mantooth said. All the men around him nodded in agreement. So did I. “You’ve never lost a sock?”

“How could I? They’re either on my feet or they’re being carried in the basket back and forth between the hamper, the laundry room, and the sock drawer,” Monk said. “I don’t see how it’s humanly possible to lose a sock.”

“It’s one of the great mysteries of life,” Joe said. “Where do all those socks go?”

“The same place as our towels.” Mantooth laughed.

“And my panties,” I added. Mantooth’s smiled faded. I looked around. Everybody was staring at me. “C’mon, guys, everybody loses underwear.”

The men shared glances, shook their heads, and looked at me with bewilderment, especially Monk and Joe.

“I know this for a fact,” I said.

“I want you to think about something, Captain,” Monk said, saving me from further embarrassment, though I’m sure that wasn’t the reason he spoke up. “In general, were you more likely to notice a towel or two missing after you returned from responding to a fire?”

Mantooth mulled that over for a moment. “Now that you mention it, yeah, maybe you’re right. But to be sure I’d have to check my records.”

“You keep a record of missing towels?” I asked, incredulous.

“I keep track to justify the expense of buying new ones,” Mantooth said. “I have to account for every penny that I spend.”

I had a feeling he would whether he had to or not. No wonder Monk wanted to be a fireman. Mantooth was almost as anal as he was, which gave me reason to wonder what Joe’s dark side might be like. Joe had been amazingly punctual when he came to pick me up for our date. Was punctuality a thing with him? What would happen the first time I was late to meet him somewhere?

Monk turned to Joe. “Did Sparky run around the neighborhood only when the company was on call to a fire?”

“Yeah,” Joe said.

“How come you didn’t tie him up?”

“Sparky always came back,” Joe said. “I didn’t want to restrict his freedom.”

“When he came back,” Monk asked, “what did he smell like?”

Joe seemed bewildered by the question. I certainly was. “Like crap. I don’t know what he got himself into.”

“How bad was the smell?”

“I usually had to give him a bath as soon as he got back or Cap would give me hell.”

“I like a clean station,” Mantooth said. “Cleanliness is the outward expression of order.”

“Amen, brother,” Monk said, and then he smiled at me. I’ve seen that smile before, usually just before somebody gets arrested and sent to prison for a very long time. “Let’s go have a talk with Mr. Dumas.”

I followed Monk across the street to Gregorio Dumas’s house and knocked on the door. Monk stood directly behind me, using me as a shield, his hands poised to protect his groin from canine attack. How gallant.

Gregorio opened the door wearing a red smoking jacket, pajama pants, and so much bling that he made Mr. T, Sammy Davis Jr., and Liberace look under-accessorized by comparison. I know those celebrity references are dated, but somewhere between the time I graduated college and the day I became a mother, my cultural needle got stuck. I don’t want to think about how out of touch I am with American popular culture. It makes me feel like I’ve become my mother, and that’s scary.

Anyway, back to Gregorio. Monk asked if the dog was out back and, if she was, if we could come in and talk to him for a moment.

Gregorio reluctantly invited us in. We took a seat on the couch and he sat in a chair across from us. He didn’t look too happy about our being there.

“Can we make this quick? Jeopardy is on,” Gregorio said.

“That’s the game where they give you the answers and you have to come up with the questions,” Monk said.

“Yes, it is.”

“Oh, great,” Monk said, “let’s play.”

“What do you mean?” Gregorio said. “You want to watch TV with me?”

“Let’s have our own game. I’ll give you the answers and you can give me the questions. Ready? Here’s the answer: Roderick Turlock’s gold.”

Gregorio flinched as if he’d been slapped.

“C’mon, Mr. Dumas,” Monk said, “take a guess.”

Gregorio didn’t say anything, but he began to sweat under his pompadour. Monk mimed the sound of a buzzer.

“Time’s up. The question is: Why have you been tunneling from your house to the sewer and from the sewer to the fire station? That was fun, wasn’t it? Here’s another answer: To wipe your footprints off the firehouse floor. Can you tell me the question?”

Gregorio licked his lips and wiped his brow.

“You aren’t even trying, Mr. Dumas,” Monk said.

“I am,” he said. “I just don’t know the question. The answer makes no sense.”

“I know, I know,” I said, raising my hand and waving it enthusiastically.

Monk smiled and pointed to me. “Yes, Natalie, what’s your guess?”

“Why did Mr. Dumas steal the towels?” I said.

“Correct!” Monk said. “He tunneled under the firehouse searching for the gold whenever the firemen left the station. But he didn’t want Sparky barking and attracting attention to his digging, so he’d lure him out of the station with a rubber hot-dog squeak toy. It’s Sparky’s favorite. There’s one on Mr. Dumas’s porch that’s identical to the toy in Sparky’s basket.”

All the disparate facts, all the things we’d seen and heard, suddenly fell into place for me. It was an exhilarating feeling, and for a moment I understood why detectives want to be detectives.

“Sparky got to this house by way of the tunnel and the sewer,” I said. “That’s how Sparky got past the razor-wire fence and impregnated Letitia. And that’s why Sparky always came back to the station smelling like he was covered with crap. It was crap.”

Gregorio broke into a deep sweat.

“Natalie is winning this round, Mr. Dumas,” Monk said. “You’re going to have to guess the right question to this answer to stay in the game. Here it is: Fifteen years in prison.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Gregorio screeched.

Monk shook his head. “No, I’m sorry, the correct question is: What’s the combined jail term for filing a fraudulent lawsuit and committing an extreme act of animal cruelty?”

“I treat Letitia like royalty!” Gregorio said.

“But you murdered Sparky,” I said.

“You’ve got it all wrong,” Gregorio said. “Yeah, I’ve been digging for Turlock’s gold, and I was in the firehouse Friday night, but I didn’t kill Sparky.”

“Convince us,” I said.

“The truth is, Letitia is over-the-hill, past her prime. The only reason she won her last show two years ago was because I spent twenty-two thousand dollars on an extreme makeover.”

“She had plastic surgery?” Monk said.

“It bought us another year on the dog show circuit, but that was it,” Gregorio said. “The judges have sharp eyes, and no amount of cosmetic surgery can prevent the inevitable decline of beauty. We’ve been living on the gold coins I’ve been able to dig up under the firehouse. My plan was that once the coins ran out, we’d live off a settlement from the fire department on our lawsuit.”

“Your fraudulent lawsuit,” I said. “You were using Letitia to keep Sparky occupied while you hunted for gold.”

“Tell us what really happened on Friday night, Mr. Dumas,” Monk asked.

Gregoria sighed heavily. “It started out like usual. As soon as the fire trucks left, I took the tunnel to the firehouse basement. I could hear Sparky barking. But when I came out in the basement I didn’t hear anything. So I took two towels, wiped off my feet, and went upstairs to look around. That’s when I saw Sparky lying there and the fireman leaving.”

I snorted in disgust. “You’re sticking to your story that a fireman did it? It’s laughable. Why don’t you just go all the way and admit what you did?”

“Because I’m telling the truth,” Gregorio said, his eyes welling with tears. “I couldn’t have killed Sparky.”

“Why not?” I asked with as much sarcasm and disgust as I could put behind the two words.

“It would have broken Letitia’s heart.” He wiped a tear from his cheek. “And mine, too. I loved that damn dog.”

Monk tilted his head from side to side and shrugged his shoulders. “Yes, that makes perfect sense.”

And with that, Monk abruptly got up and walked out the door without so much as a good-bye. I had to hurry to catch up with him outside.

“You’re not going to nail him?” I said.

“I just did,” Monk said, setting off in the direction of the Excelsior.

“For stealing towels and filing a fraudulent lawsuit, but what about killing Sparky?”

“He didn’t kill Sparky,” Monk said.

“Then who did?”

“It’s obvious,” Monk said. “Lucas Breen did.”

12

Mr. Monk Makes His Move

It was dark now, and we were retracing our steps back downhill to the Excelsior, where I’d have to skip a car payment to pay the attendant for parking. That was a compelling motive for murder right there. I was surprised the parking lot attendants weren’t wearing Kevlar and sitting in bulletproof cages.

“Why would Lucas Breen want to murder a firehouse dog?” I asked.

“He didn’t want to,” Monk said. “He had to. Breen didn’t know the dog was there when he sneaked into the firehouse.”

“What was Breen doing there?” I asked. As we got closer to the Financial District, the number of people around us thinned out and the streets seemed to get darker and colder.

“He came to steal a firefighter’s coat and helmet,” Monk said. “Breen was the fireman whom Mr. Dumas saw leaving the firehouse.”

“I don’t understand this at all,” I said. “What makes you think that was Breen?”

“Means, motive, and opportunity,” Monk said, then explained to me his theory of what happened on Friday night.

Lucas Breen slipped out of the Excelsior around nine fifteen, walked to Esther’s house, and smothered the woman with a pillow. He made it look like she fell asleep smoking, and then he hid outside until he was sure the living room was consumed with flames. Breen was rushing back to the hotel when he discovered he’d left something incriminating behind.

But it was too late to run back inside the house; it was already ablaze and the firefighters were on their way. And he couldn’t take the chance that whatever belonged to him would burn in the fire. As luck would have it, the firehouse was nearby. He decided to steal a firefighter’s gear, go back to Esther’s house, retrieve whatever he’d left behind from the inferno, then return the outfit to the station on his way to the hotel.

“But he didn’t know about Sparky,” Monk concluded. “The dog charged him, so Breen grabbed the pickax to defend himself.”

That would mean it happened just as Monk described the first time we visited the firehouse.

We were so busy talking, I hadn’t paid much attention to our surroundings, but that changed as we passed between two buildings and a blast of icy wind slapped me awake.

The forest of skyscrapers blocked out what little moonlight there was. The wind whistled between the building, tossing fast-food wrappers and other loose trash, the tumbleweeds of a modern city.

I clutched my jacket tightly around myself. The chill wasn’t the only thing making me shiver. Monk and I seemed to be the only people on the street. It was amazing how fast the Financial District buildings had emptied out. With the exception of the occasional passing car or bus, it felt like we were the last two people on earth.

“What was it that made you realize Breen came to steal firefighting gear?” I asked.

“When we visited the firehouse the first time, I saw a firefighter’s coat on a hanger that was facing the wrong direction,” Monk said. “I fixed it, but it’s bothered me ever since.”

Only Monk would be bothered by something like that. I once made the mistake of accepting a baker’s dozen at Winchell’s, and Monk has been haunted by that thirteenth doughnut ever since.

“Captain Mantooth likes order,” Monk said. “The firefighters know better than to hang a coat on a hanger that’s facing the wrong way. But Breen didn’t. The coat I rehung was the one he stole the night he murdered Esther Stoval.”

“Then his fingerprints will be all over it,” I said.

Monk shook his head. “The coats and helmets are cleaned shortly after every fire to remove the toxins from the smoke.”

If the firemen weren’t so anxious to clean and shine everything, we might have had the evidence we needed to nail Lucas Breen. But now we had nothing, unless Monk had figured out something he wasn’t telling me yet.

“So how are you going to prove that Lucas Breen was in the firehouse?”

Before Monk could answer, someone grabbed me from behind, yanked me into an alley, and put the edge of a very sharp knife to my throat.

“Drop your purse,” a raspy voice hissed into my ear.

Monk turned and his eyes widened in shock. “Let her go.”

“Shut up and get over here or I’ll slit her throat right now.”

Monk did as he was told. We backed deeper into the dark alley. I was afraid to breathe, or even to tremble, for fear the movement would make the blade slice me.

“You,” the attacker said to Monk. “Give me your wallet and your watch.”

Monk took out his wallet, opened it, and began to carefully examine the contents.

“What the hell are you doing?” the mugger said. I was thinking the same thing. Didn’t Monk see the knife to my throat?

“Sorting through my wallet for you,” Monk said.

“I can do that myself,” the mugger said. I could smell the alcohol on his breath and the desperation in his sweat. Or maybe that was my desperation I was smelling.

“But if I do it,” Monk said to the mugger, “I can keep what you’d otherwise throw away.”

“Give me the damn wallet!”

“Obviously you want the money and the credit cards, but I’d like to keep the photo of my wife.” Monk showed him the tiny photo of Trudy.

“Fine, keep it. Give me the rest. Now. Or I’ll slit her throat. I will.”

I felt him shaking with nervous frustration right through the sharp edge of the knife pressed against my skin. All it would take was the slightest increase in pressure and I’d be bleeding.

“Please do as he says, Mr. Monk.”

Monk ignored me and took out a green-and-gold card, holding it up for the mugger to see. “What good is my Barnes and Noble Reader’s Advantage Card to you? You don’t strike me as a big reader. Do you really need a ten percent discount on books? I think not.”

“I’m going to cut her, Goddamn it!” the mugger said. I believed him. He was getting edgier by the second.

“And what about my Ralphs Club Card? What good is it to you? You probably get your discount on groceries by stealing them.”

All of the mugger’s attention was focused on Monk now. I felt the pressure on my neck slacken and his hold on my waist loosen. Without thinking, I grabbed his wrist with one hand, smacked him in the face with the back of my other hand, and stomped on his foot as hard as I could. I felt the bones crack under my heel.

The mugger yelped and released me, dropping his knife. I kicked the knife away, spun around, and drove my knee deep into his crotch. He doubled over and I shoved him headfirst into the wall. The mugger bounced off the wall and dropped flat on his back to the ground. I planted my knee in his crotch, pinned down his arms with my hands, and looked up at Monk.

He was still standing there, absorbed with putting everything back in the right place in his wallet. My heart was pounding and I was breathing hard as the adrenaline surged through me.

“Thanks,” I said. “You were a big help.”

“I was distracting him until you could make your move.”

“My move? What about your move?”

“That was my move.” Monk put his wallet back in his pocket. “Where did you learn to do that?”

“I’d like to know, too.” The mugger groaned.

“Watching my daughter in her tae kwon do class.” I glanced at Monk and jerked my head toward my purse. “You can use my cell phone to call the police.”

“Not yet.” Monk came over and crouched beside me. “Excuse me, Mr. Mugger. Do you work this street a lot? Is this your mugging turf?”

The mugger didn’t answer. I ground my knee into his testicles until he whimpered. I am woman; hear me roar.

“Answer the question,” I said.

The mugger nodded. “Yeah, it’s my patch.”

“Were you working on Friday night?” Monk asked.

“I don’t get a lot of vacation days in my profession,” the mugger said.

“Did one of your victims Friday night include a man named Lucas Breen?”

“Screw you.”

I increased the pressure on his privates. “You’ll have a hard time screwing anything ever again if you aren’t more forthcoming.”

I knew I sounded like a character in a bad cop movie, but I was still riding on adrenaline and pissed off about having a knife to my throat. The tougher I talked, the better I felt and the more the fear began to fade away.

“Yeah, I robbed Breen,” he croaked. His eyes were bulging so much I was afraid they might pop out and bounce away. I eased the pressure I was exerting on him.

“What time did you mug him?” Monk asked.

“I don’t have a watch.”

“You must have stolen hundreds of watches in your career. You never considered keeping one?”

“I don’t have lots of appointments.”

“Was Breen missing anything?”

“He was after I met him,” the mugger said.

“But not before,” Monk said.

“I took his wallet and his watch. I let him keep his wedding ring.”