Mr. Monk and the Blue Flu (12 page)

Monk walked to the back of the store and stopped in front of the door that led to the storeroom. There was a handwritten sign on the door that said,
No Public Restrooms.

He stared at the sign for a long moment, turned around to face the front counter, and nodded to himself.

“What?” I said.

“Now I get it,” Monk said.

“Get what?”

“What happened here,” he said, and walked out.

I didn’t know there was anything mysterious about the robbery, except the identity of the two robbers. Was it possible that somehow Monk had already figured that out?

He walked over to Officer Riglin and Lorna Karsch, who flicked her cigarette stub onto the sidewalk and ground it under her heel. Monk winced but didn’t do anything about it.

“Ms. Karsch? I’m Captain Monk. Could you tell me what you were doing right before you heard the gunshots?”

“I was in the back room, like I told him,” she said, gesturing to Officer Riglin. “I was unpacking a box of Doritos. The nacho-cheese ones.”

“What were you doing before that?” Monk asked, sniffing the air.

“Unpacking Big Slurp cups and stacking them by the drink machines,” she said.

“I see.” Monk leaned forward and sniffed her. She would have taken a step back if there weren’t a wall behind her. “What did you do after you heard the shots?”

“I opened the door and saw these two big black guys running out of the store. They were both in those puffy jackets, you know, like the rappers wear. And one of the guys was carrying a gun in his hand.”

“Then what did you do?”

“I went up to the counter to check on Mr. Touzie and saw all that blood,” she said. “I called nine-one-one and sat beside him, holding his hand until the police got here.”

“You didn’t go anywhere else?”

“I was comforting him,” she said. “The man was dying right there in front of me. I wasn’t going to leave him alone.”

“That’s very touching,” Monk said. “Did you know you smell like a toilet bowl?”

“What did you just say to me?” Lorna said.

“What did you just say to her?” Riglin said.

“You smell like a toilet bowl,” Monk said. “A very clean one, of course, with water the same deep blue as that stain on the damp end of your sleeve.”

She looked at her sleeve. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“My favorite toilet bowl cleaner,” Monk said. “2000 Flushes with Spring Meadow fragrance. I’d recognize the wonderful scent and beautiful shade of blue anywhere, though judging by the tint, you’ve got only one hundred fifty-three flushes to go before it needs to be replaced.”

Officer Riglin took a step forward and jabbed his finger at Monk’s face. “You may outrank me, but if you call her a toilet one more time, I’m going to knock you on your ass. This lady just watched her boss die in front of her.”

“Because she shot him,” Monk said.

“You’re a lunatic,” Lorna said.

“You said you were in the storeroom unloading boxes when the robbery happened and that you stayed by your boss’s side until the police got here. So when did you stain your sleeve?”

“It was earlier,” she said, “when I was cleaning up.”

“Which was when?” Monk pressed.

“Before I was unpacking the Doritos,” she said.

“You said you were putting out the Big Slurp cups before that,” Monk said.

“I was,” Lorna said. “And before that I was cleaning the bathroom. What difference does it make?”

“The difference between guilt and innocence,” Monk said. “Here’s what really happened. There weren’t any robbers. You shot your boss, emptied the cash register, and called nine-one-one. You quickly wrapped the gun and the money in aluminum foil, sealed them in Ziploc bags, and hid them in the toilet tank, staining the end of your sleeve in the colored water. If you hadn’t left a perfectly good box of Ziploc bags and a full roll of foil in the trash, you might have gotten away with it.”

“You don’t believe that crazy story,” Lorna said to Officer Riglin.

“It’s easy enough to check,” Officer Riglin said. “I’ve had to go to the bathroom for the last half hour anyway.”

Officer Riglin started toward the store.

“I want a lawyer,” she said. “I’m not saying another word.”

Officer Riglin turned around, handcuffed Lorna Karsch, and read her her rights.

“I’m sorry about what I said to you, Captain,” Officer Riglin said. “I was out of line.”

“It’s okay,” Monk said. “I have that effect on some people.”

Officer Riglin led Lorna away.

“That was pretty amazing, Mr. Monk,” I said. “You can stop worrying about your mojo. You’ve still got it.”

“God, I hope so,” Monk said. “Go back in the store and get some Lysol, a roll of paper towels, and a box of trash bags. I’ll stay here and secure the scene.”

“What scene?”

Monk pointed to Lorna Karsch’s crushed cigarette stub. “It could leave a permanent stain.”

Ever since Monk discovered a while back that the kindly old woman I used as a babysitter murdered her husband and buried him in her backyard, day care has been a problem for me.

It took me a while, but I finally found Chelsea, a nineteen-year-old junior college student who took classes in the morning and was free to watch over Julie in the afternoon. She and Julie even did their individual homework together, which was a wonderful motivator for my daughter. If something important came up on weekends, I’d usually be able to draft Chelsea into service then, too.

On Sunday I arranged for Chelsea to take Julie and Katie bike riding in Golden Gate Park, not only freeing me up to work with Monk, but also burning off the “free day” debt I’d incurred only yesterday with Katie’s mother.

I picked Monk up at ten a.m. and drove him down to police headquarters, where Cindy Chow and her psychiatric nurse and Frank Porter and his granddaughter and Jack Wyatt and his anger-management counselor were waiting for us.

Chow was busy dismantling her phone (Why? I don’t know), while Jasper Perry took notes on his PDA. She wasn’t wearing the aluminum foil or the radio on her head. I figured there was something about the police station that prevented alien beings, secret government agencies, or even Oprah Winfrey from reading her mind.

Porter was wearing the same clothes he had on the day before, and so was Sparrow. So either they’d spent the night on one of the cots in the back room or they were trying to cut down on their loads of laundry.

Wyatt leaned back in his chair with his feet up on his desk, trying his best to ignore his anger-management counselor, whom I recognized from the scene of the hit-and-run. The counselor’s arm was in a sling, and his eyes were kind of glazed over, probably from the painkillers.

As I looked at the assembled detectives, it suddenly occurred to me that every one of them had their own personal assistant (or enabler, counselor, or watchdog, depending on your point of view). All of us sidekicks should get together and talk shop, I thought. We could share war stories about our long hours, lack of benefits, and miserable salaries. We could even form our own union, the International Association of Detectives’ Sidekicks, to address our concerns.

What would all the brilliant, eccentric detectives out there do if their beleaguered costars decide to stage our own Blue Flu?

Monk faced his squad of detectives, Officer Curtis, and all of us underpaid, underappreciated, and, in at least one case, bullet-ridden sidekicks. Monk cleared his throat and shifted his weight between his feet.

“Good morning,” he said. “Since there has been a lull in the killings, I think we should take this opportunity to clean up the squad room, straighten the pictures on the walls, align the furniture in rows, organize our desks, sort our paper clips by size, and equalize our pencils.”

“Equalize our pencils?” Wyatt said.

“He wants you to make sure they’re all sharpened and the same length,” I said.

Monk smiled approvingly at me, presumably pleased by my appreciation of his worldview.

“Oh.” Wyatt took all his pencils in his hand, broke them in half, and dumped them in the trash. “Done.”

“Try to control your anger,” his counselor mumbled.

“I did, Arnie,” Wyatt said to him. “If I was angry, I would have shot the pencils.”

Arnie swallowed hard. I was wondered if Arnie had been shot by accident. I was sure Arnie wondered the same thing.

“What day is it?” Porter asked.

“Sunday,” Sparrow said.

“That’s good to know,” Porter said. “What year?”

“Two thousand seven,” Sparrow said.

“No, really,” Porter said. “What year?”

“Two thousand seven,” Sparrow said.

“That’s not possible,” Porter said. “I’ll be dead by then, and there will be Holiday Inns on the moon.”

“Have you swept the room for bugs?” Chow asked.

“No,” Monk said.

“Then it’s a good thing I did,” she said, taking a device that looked like Mr. Spock’s tricorder out of her purse and setting it on her desk. “We’re clear. But you never know when a drone might pass overhead.”

“What’s that?” Sparrow said.

“Robotic surveillance craft employed by the government to pick up transmissions of all kinds, including brain waves,” Chow said. “It operates with sophisticated software designed to search for specific words or thoughts and then lock onto the sender, logging everything for later examination.”

Jasper nearly dislocated his thumbs trying to type all that on his tiny PDA keypad.

“Any new developments in your homicide investigations?” Monk asked the detectives.

“John Yamada, the roadkill from yesterday, was going through an ugly divorce,” Wyatt said. “His estranged wife, who still happens to be the beneficiary of his one-million-dollar life insurance policy, reported her car stolen two days ago. When we locate her car, I’m betting we’ll find some of her husband in the tire treads.”

“I’d like to talk to her,” Monk said.

“I found out Allegra Doucet had a rich client, a guy named Max Collins, who made all his investments based on her astrological advice,” Chow said. “He isn’t so rich anymore. He’s lost millions, thanks to her.”

“Sounds like a strong motive for murder,” Monk said. “I’ll follow up on that.”

“I’m still checking her other clients and digging into her past,” Chow said. “It wouldn’t surprise me if she was somehow involved with Project Subzero.”

“What’s that?” Monk said.

“The government’s secret mind-control program,” Jasper said. “They track psychics from birth and enlist them for thought surveillance activities.”

“If it’s such a secret,” I said, “how do you know about it?”

“He’s part of it,” Chow said. “He’s strip-mining your brain right now.”

“I think that’s what happened to me,” Frank Porter said. “I have these little memory lapses, like part of my mind has been wiped.”

“It has,” Chow said. “It’s common knowledge now that Alzheimer’s is a side effect of thought surveillance. They were probably digging into your head the whole time you were investigating the county supervisor’s murder in 1998.”

“I don’t remember that,” Porter said.

“I’m not surprised,” Chow said.

“But I remember that Diane Truby, the gal hit by the bus, had a customer at her restaurant who was stalking her,” Porter said. “She even got a restraining order against him after he sent her a bouquet of roses and a vial of his blood. He showed up at her restaurant yesterday morning and screamed in front of witnesses that if he couldn’t have her, nobody could.”

“He could be the guy,” Monk said. “I’ll talk to him.”

“We’ve got a list of about twenty-five itinerant sellers of running shoes,” Officer Curtis said. “Should we start showing them photos of the Strangler’s victims?”

“No,” Monk said. “I want to be there.”

“Could I talk to you for a moment, Mr. Monk?” I asked. “In private?”

He nodded and we went into Stottlemeyer’s office. I closed the door behind us.

“You just said you wanted to interview Max Collins yourself and John Yamada’s wife and Diane Truby’s stalker.”

Monk nodded. “They’re all strong suspects.”

“And you want to go around the city yourself and show all those shoe salesmen the pictures of the Strangler’s victims,” I said.

“One of the salespeople could be the Strangler.”

I motioned to the detectives in the squad room. “What are they going to be doing while you’re investigating all those cases?”

“Cleaning up the office, organizing their desks, sorting their paper clips,” Monk said. “Preventing the San Francisco Police Department from slipping into anarchy.”

“And what about any new homicides that come in?” I said. “Are you going to handle those yourself, too?”

“Of course,” Monk said.

“While you’re continuing to work on the Strangler killings and the Doucet, Yamada, and Truby murders.”

“How else am I supposed to solve them?”

“Who said that you, personally, have to solve each murder that’s committed in San Francisco?”

“That’s why I’m here,” Monk said. “Isn’t it?”

“Mr. Monk, you can’t do it all. You’re just one man. There aren’t enough hours in the day.”

“I’ll just have to solve them faster.”

“Remember how you felt yesterday? It’s only going to get worse,” I said. “You’re going to exhaust yourself, and then these cases will never get solved.”

“But I don’t know how to do it any other way,” Monk said.

“You’d better find one,” I said.

Monk frowned and paced and frowned some more. Finally he stopped and looked at me.

“We need a consultant,” Monk said.

 

On TV cop shows, people are always having secret meetings in empty warehouses, in deserted parking garages, or in abandoned amusement parks.