Mr. Monk is Cleaned Out (15 page)

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Mr. Monk Works for Free

I
forgot to mention to you that after I left Phoef Sutton’s place, and before I broke into Monk’s apartment, I spent the day at my kitchen table polishing my résumé and Monk’s.

I’d had so many jobs before becoming Monk’s assistant that I could pretty much slant my résumé to fit whatever open position I applied for. But Monk’s résumé took some creative writing talent. I stressed his skills, his attention to detail, his dependability, and his dedication to cleanliness, rather than his experience as a police officer and Homicide consultant.

If you’re applying for sales, clerical, secretarial, and service positions, the people doing the hiring don’t really care about how many homicides you’ve solved. But they do value cleanliness, education, reliability, and intelligence, and Monk had all those attributes.

After I left Stottlemeyer’s condo, I went back home and logged on to every job- hunting site on the Web and submitted myself and Monk for every opening in San Francisco that didn’t require degrees, certifications, licenses, or extensive experience in a particular field or profession.

That didn’t leave a lot of great opportunities. For instance, there was an opening for a dishwasher at a Fisherman’s Wharf restaurant. I thought Monk had a pretty good shot at that one if he could just get in for an interview and demonstrate his talents.

I also knew it would have been a tragedy if Monk got the job. Sure, he would be ridiculously content washing dishes, but the pay would be crap and it would be a waste of his talent and abilities.

It just wasn’t right.

I found myself hoping some brilliant serial killer would strike, murdering a ton of people and terrifying the public, so that the police would have to hire Monk again out of sheer desperation.

That was how bad I was feeling. I was actually wishing for a massacre just so I could have my job back and not have to worry about losing my house.

Maybe Monk’s worldview wasn’t so wrong after all.

I gave up on applying for lousy jobs around midnight, turned off the laptop, and dragged myself to bed, depressed and scared. I was sure that I was so anxious that I’d never get to sleep, but I was unconscious in about sixty seconds.

My phone rang at 3:33 in the morning. If Monk saw those numbers flashing on his clock radio, he’d assume he was having a waking nightmare, hide his head under his pillow, and wait until 4:44 to peek at the clock again.

I foolishly answered the phone instead. It was Captain Stottlemeyer.

“There’s been a murder in San Mateo,” Stottlemeyer said. “You need to meet us there.”

“Us?”

“Me and Monk,” the captain said. “He says he can’t do his thing without you.”

“Have you rehired him as a consultant?”

“No,” he replied.

“Too bad. Tell Mr. Monk that if he wants to tag along with you to look at some putrid corpse in the middle of a cold, dark night, that’s his stupid, self-destructive decision, not mine. I don’t work for him anymore. And you can remind him that I don’t work for him because he can’t pay me, and he can’t pay me because you—the man he is now consulting with for free—fired him. Have fun.”

I hung up the phone and put my face back into the warm spot on my pillow. I was beginning to slip back into sleep when the phone rang again. I grabbed the receiver.

“San Mateo is out of your jurisdiction,” I said, turning my head but keeping my face in the warm sunken spot in my pillow.

“Yes, it is,” Stottlemeyer said.

“So what makes this murder so special that you’re schlepping all the way out there and you’re letting Monk come with you?”

“The victim is Lincoln Clovis,” the captain said. “He was Bob Sebes’ accountant and was responsible for auditing the Reinier Investment Fund.”

I’d read about him. He’d been charged with a ton of stuff, including securities fraud, and was facing a hundred years in prison if convicted on all the counts against him.

Bob Sebes had victimized both the wealthy and the poor, individual investors as well as pension funds and charities. It was a crime that outraged the public, not just in San Francisco but across the country. There was enormous pressure on law enforcement agencies to win a conviction. But that wouldn’t be easy to do with coconspirators and potential prosecution witnesses getting killed left and right.

Whoever murdered Haxby and Clovis—and I assumed it was one guy—wasn’t a serial killer, at least not the kind that terrifies the general public. Even so, I realized that this could be the case I was hoping for.

The pressure on the police to solve these murders, and to do it quickly, had to be intense.

The police department wasn’t paying Monk yet, but they soon could become desperate enough to cave in, especially if he started to make headway in the case and then abruptly stopped working for free (even if it meant I had to tie him up and lock him in my attic to do it).

We’d have a gun to their head. They’d have to hire him again.

So I didn’t hang up the phone this time. Instead, I asked for the address and told Stottlemeyer that I would be right there.

San Mateo is a southern suburb of San Francisco and was once part of a massive Spanish land grant known as Rancho de las Pulgas, which in English means “Ranch of Fleas.” I could have torpedoed Monk’s presence at the crime scene and his involvement in the investigation just by letting him know that little historical fact.

But I am not that spiteful.

Lincoln Clovis lived in a two-story Cape Cod-style house with blue-shingle siding and a wraparound deck overlooking the lagoon that snaked through the Mariner’s Island and Seal Slough neighborhoods of San Mateo. The street was clogged with the usual official vehicles. The house was cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape and was illuminated with portable floodlights like a movie set.

I identified myself to the uniformed police officer stationed on the street and he led me to the back of the house, where the lawn sloped down to the water and a small boat dock.

Monk and Stottlemeyer were standing beside a woman who looked to be about my age and had the slender toned body of a runner or a ballet dancer. She wore casual clothes, a T-shirt and jeans, but there was nothing casual about the gun and badge clipped to her belt.

The three of them were looking up at the back of the house. I followed their gaze and saw a man hanging from a noose tied to a thick wooden railing post on the second-story deck. His face was bloated and dark red, his eyes bulging, and his tongue was sticking out of his gaping mouth.

Aside from the fact that he was dead, Clovis seemed physically fit and well off. He was dressed in slacks, a shirt with a buttoned-down collar, and a V-neck cashmere sweater. The Rolex on his wrist glimmered in the glow from portable floodlights.

“You must be Natalie Teeger,” the female cop said, offering her hand to me. “I’m Captain Erin Cahill, San Mateo Homicide. Thanks for coming out.”

She made the comment without a trace of sarcasm, as if my presence was an honor and I actually had some professional expertise to offer the investigation.

“I’m afraid I’m not going to be of much help to you,” I said, shaking her hand.

Cahill tipped her head toward Monk. “He seems to think you will be. He wouldn’t let us tell him anything about the case until you got here.”

“I like Natalie to know what I know,” Monk said. “Sometimes I miss things.”

“You never miss anything,” Stottlemeyer said. “You just like having someone to run interference for you.”

“What sort of interference are you concerned about?” Cahill asked Monk, but Stottlemeyer answered for him.

“There’s a list,” Stottlemeyer said. “It’s in several volumes and comes with an index. He gave me a copy one year for Christmas.”

“That reminds me,” Monk said. “I didn’t see it in your apartment.”

“My wife got it in the divorce,” Stottlemeyer said. “She cherishes it. Can we focus on the murder now?”

The mention of divorce seemed to catch Cahill’s interest. She gave Stottlemeyer a long, appraising look that he missed entirely. Men are so stupid.

“How do you know it’s a murder and not a suicide?” I asked. “He’s got plenty of motivation for killing himself.”

“Like what?” Monk asked.

Cahill turned to him. “Don’t you know who Lincoln Clovis is?”

“I know he was Bob Sebes’ accountant,” Monk said. “But that’s all I let Captain Stottlemeyer tell me until Natalie got here.”

“I know who he is,” I said.

“How?” Monk asked.

“Because I’m an engaged member of our society. I keep up on the news so that I am well informed on matters that might impact my life or enrich my understanding of myself and others.”

“It sounds exhausting,” Monk said.

Cahill cleared her throat and spoke up. “Clovis ran a one-man accounting business in a strip mall here in San Mateo. Before Sebes found him, Clovis made his living doing simple income tax returns for walk-in customers.”

“I don’t know how Sebes found him,” Stottlemeyer said. “But he bought Clovis some fancy stationery and paid him two hundred thousand dollars a year to falsely certify that he’d audited the books and reviewed the securities.”

“Did Clovis know it was a Ponzi scheme?” Monk asked.

“I don’t think Clovis ever opened the books,” Stottlemeyer said. “But if he did, he obviously didn’t understand what he was looking at.”

Monk cocked his head. “Why do you say that?”

“Because Clovis invested most of the money Sebes paid him into the fund and even convinced his family and friends to invest in it, too.”

“He was supposed to be an independent auditor,” Cahill said. “So the investment and his soliciting other investments in the fund were also violations of the law.”

“The guy was an imbecile,” Stottlemeyer said.

“So Clovis not only lost everything,” I said, “but he was looking at a hundred years behind bars for aiding and abetting the scheme that swindled him. Is it any surprise that the dope hung himself?”

“He didn’t,” Monk said.

“How can you tell?” Cahill asked. “The medical examiner hasn’t arrived yet and the crime scene unit hasn’t finished collecting their forensic evidence.”

“If he killed himself, he would have stood on the rail and jumped,” Monk said. “But there are splinters in his cheek and on his sweater, indicating that he was rolled facedown over the railing.”

She took a step closer to the body and squinted up at it. “I’ll be damned. You’re right. Maybe the rope will give us some leads.”

“It won’t,” Monk said. “It came from his boat.”

“How do you know that?” she asked.

“It’s exactly the length you’d need to tie a boat to those cleats on the dock,” Monk said, gesturing to the water. “And his boat is gone.”

“I’ve been with you since you got here. You haven’t measured the rope or the distance between the cleats. How can you possibly know it’s the right size?”

“I’m not blind,” Monk said.

“I can guarantee you that his eyeball measurements will be correct,” Stottlemeyer said. “Within an eighth of an inch.”

“I wouldn’t be that far off,” Monk said. “Have a little faith in me.”

Cahill waved over an officer. “Send a patrol boat down the lagoon. I want his boat found, secured, and examined by a forensics unit.”

The officer nodded and went off. Cahill stared at Monk as if he was some kind of extraterrestrial. I turned to Stottlemeyer.

“When you called me, you said that Clovis was murdered. But Mr. Monk didn’t prove it until just now. So why did you jump to that conclusion before you had any evidence?”

“Clovis agreed yesterday to a reduced sentence in exchange for his testimony against Sebes. He would have done ten years in a minimum-security prison. And he’s the second indicted conspirator to the Sebes scheme to die this week. I don’t think it’s a coincidence.”

“Neither do I,” said Cahill. “I’d love to take this homicide off my desk and put it on yours.”

“Gee, thanks,” Stottlemeyer said.

“It’s not that I don’t care about the death of one of our citizens, but our budget has been slashed to the bone and our limited resources are already stretched to the max.”

“I know the feeling,” he said.

“Maybe we could commiserate,” she said.

Stottlemeyer seemed startled by the suggestion. He stuck his hands in his pockets and found something to look at on the water.

“I haven’t commiserated in a while,” he said. “There hasn’t been much opportunity.”

“We could commiserate about that, too.”

He was smiling when he turned back to her. “I’d like that, Captain.”

“Call me Erin,” she said.

Standing in front of a bloated corpse at a quarter to five in the morning, and surrounded by crime scene techs and police officers, seemed like an odd and inappropriate time and place to be arranging a hookup. But perhaps it was precisely that circumstance, and the many like it, that filled their days and nights, that made it hard for them to find somebody to commiserate with. They practiced a lonely profession. Come to think of it, it had become mine and it had been a long time since I’d commiserated with someone, too.

But all of this was lost on Monk. He walked around the yard, framing the scene between his hands, looking for incongruities, yet missing the congruence that Stottlemeyer and Cahill were attempting to establish with each other.

“Did Clovis live here alone?” Monk asked.

“Yes,” Cahill said.

“I’d like to see inside the house.”

Cahill led us up the path to the front yard. A question occurred to me as we approached the front door.

“If he lives alone, how was the body discovered?”

“By patrol officers,” she said. “His neighbors called to complain about a barking dog that was keeping them up.”

We went inside the house, which was decorated like an upscale seafood restaurant with lots of nautical and fishing-related paraphernalia on the walls. Monk stopped to examine the alarm console on the wall beside the front door.

“Was this activated?”

“Nope,” Cahill said. “And the door was unlocked when the officers arrived.”