Mr. Monk Gets Even (21 page)

“From the blood spatter and stains, it looks like Dobbs was initially attacked in front of the desk, and then fell on the floor, where he was stabbed again,” Monk said. “He scrambled to his feet, was stabbed twice more, then backed up against that wall, where he took some brutal hits before sliding to the floor, then staggering to the deck.”

“Why did he come out here?” I asked, joining Monk.

Devlin spoke up. “Perhaps the killer was blocking his path to the door. Or maybe he was disoriented, or maybe he was hoping to call for help. But it looks like his last stand was in front of this pot, and then he went over the side.”

“Or was pushed,” Monk said.

“Doesn’t really matter,” Devlin said. “Murder is murder.”

Monk peered over the railing at the body below. Dobbs’ dead eyes stared back up at him.

“Where’s Jenna Dobbs?” he asked.

“In her bedroom,” Devlin said, “being treated by paramedics for shock.”

“I’d like to talk with her,” Monk said.

“I don’t think it’s a good time,” she said.

“But I have questions for her.”

“Like what she was planning to do for dinner?”

“Like why she lied for her husband and gave him an alibi for the murders,” Monk said.

“It hardly matters now,” Devlin said.

“Everything matters,” Monk said.

“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” Devlin said. “She was being a good wife, protecting her husband.”

“So why not let the truth speak for itself?”

“The truth can be twisted and people don’t always think things through when they hear their spouse being falsely accused of murder. Her natural reflex, right or wrong, was to defend him.”

The “falsely accused” bit she stuck in there had to sting. I wondered if she’d done it on purpose to needle Monk just a little for his “everything matters” rebuke. If so, I couldn’t blame her. He deserved it.

“Did you check out her alibi?” Monk asked.

“Of course I did,” Devlin said.

“And she lied,” Monk said.

“Badly. On the morning Grossman was killed, her credit card activity shows she parked her car with the valet at the Belmont Hotel in Union Square, probably to go shopping. We don’t know where she was when Zuzelo was thrown off his balcony, but her Golden Gate Bridge FasTrak pass indicates that she was in Marin County somewhere when Carin Branham was killed.”

“Didn’t she think we’d check up on her?” Monk asked.

“I don’t think she thought at all,” Devlin said. “Like I said before, defending her husband was a reflex. But that’s all moot now that he’s been murdered, probably by whoever killed Grossman, Zuzelo, and Branham.”

“I wonder why he didn’t try to run,” Monk said, “and why he never turned his back on his killer.”

“Would you turn your back on a man with a knife?” Devlin asked.

“I might look over my shoulder at him as I ran,” Monk said. “But yes, I would. But Dobbs didn’t.”

“Maybe he was facing his killer and pleading for his life,” I said. “Maybe that first wound injured him too badly to run.”

Monk frowned. “So the killer was someone Dobbs knew and trusted. He invited the killer in. The killer snatched a knife from the kitchen at some point, came upstairs with Dobbs to the office, then attacked him.”

“Looks like it,” Devlin said.

“Why didn’t he bring a weapon of his own?” Monk asked.

“To make it less likely we could track the weapon back to him if it’s ever found,” Devlin said.

“Why didn’t he attack Dobbs in the kitchen rather than hide the knife and wait to make his move until they came up here?”

“Maybe the office had some meaning to him,” I said. “Maybe the killings all spring from something that occurred between the two men in this room.”

“There are things about this murder that just don’t fit,” Monk said.

“Fit what?” Devlin said.

“Fit together in a way that’s coherent and clear,” Monk said.

“To you,” she said.

“Which is the same as everybody.”

“Not really,” she said. “But I’m sure it will all fit for you after we find the killer and discover his motive.”

“Usually it’s what doesn’t fit that leads me to the killer,” Monk said.

“It didn’t this time. It led you to Dobbs,” Devlin said. “So let’s try it my way and see what happens.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

Mr. Monk Has Changed

“T
his is why I hate change,” Monk said as I drove him back to his place from Dobbs’ house. It was nice to be driving in the city again, so I took the long way.

“What does the murder of Cleve Dobbs have to do with change?”

“The fact that I didn’t see it coming,” Monk said.

“You were never psychic,” I said. “Though I hear there’s a PI down in Santa Barbara who is supposed to be a pretty good one. I met his assistant here once at a gathering for assistants of detectives.”

“You had gatherings?”

“It was more like a support group,” I said. “Me, Jasper, Arnie, Sparrow, and a few others.”

“They had nothing in common with you.”

“They assist detectives.”

“Chow is certifiably insane, Wyatt has severe anger-management issues, and Porter is senile,” Monk said. “They aren’t assisting detectives—they are caring for people with debilitating psychological issues who can’t function in normal society. They weren’t like you at all.”

“Yes, I see your point,” I said. “I was definitely the odd man out.”

“You were their voice of reason,” Monk said.

“Probably so,” I said. “But let’s get back to what you were saying about change. There was no way you could have foreseen the murder of Cleve Dobbs.”

“The old Monk would have known how and when Dale was going to escape,” Monk said. “The old Monk would have known there was another killer out there besides Dobbs.”

“Besides Dobbs?”

“I still think Dobbs murdered those three people,” Monk said. “But now I won’t ever be able to prove it, thanks to whoever killed him.”

I couldn’t decide whether he was simply unwilling to accept that he was wrong about Dobbs, or if there was justifiable grounds for him to suspect there were two murderers at work. But I wouldn’t know until I had more facts and, at the moment, it was actually the least interesting aspect of the discussion to me.

“What do you mean when you say the old Monk?”

“The Monk I was before all of this change made me the Monk I am now.”

“You mean the Monk you’ve become after you solved your wife’s murder, after Disher moved to New Jersey to be with Sharona, and after you began to feel your life had become balanced in a way it hadn’t in a very long time?”

“Not quite then,” he said.

“You mean the Monk you became after you took your brother on a cross-country road trip in a motor home so he’d experience the balance you had in your own life?” I said. “And he fell in love with a woman who was a tattooed ex-con?”

“Not quite then, either.”

“You mean after I solved a case on my own, and after Ambrose got engaged to Yuki, and after you got into a relationship with a woman who sells poop, and after I left you to become a cop in Summit?”

“Sometime after all of that.”

“You mean after all of us went through big changes in our lives that you had to adapt to, and after you discovered not only that you could adapt, but that you were actually happy after you did?”

“Yes, that’s it,” Monk said. “Now you see my crushing problem.”

“You think happiness has thrown you off your game.”

“Denying my misery has distracted me from reality,” Monk said. “I am not seeing the world as it really is or the details that really matter.”

“Or maybe you’re just seeing some things now that you never saw or appreciated before.”

“I see what’s important,” he said.

“We see what’s important to us,” I said and pulled the car to the curb in front of his apartment. “Maybe what is important to you has changed.”

“That’s what I am getting at,” he said. “Change is bad.”

“Really?” I gestured to the light in his window. “Ellen Morse stuck around for you. Isn’t it nice for a change to come home to a house that isn’t empty, to someone who cares about you?”

He glanced at his window and rolled his shoulders. “I don’t know if it’s a good thing having her in my life.”

“You like her, don’t you?”

“But maybe that’s where my problems started,” Monk said.

“I’m not following you,” I said.

“She sells poop products. It’s repulsive. I pretend that part of her life doesn’t exist so I can be in the same room with her. But when I put those blinders on, what else do I blind myself to? Is that why Dale was able to escape, Leland lost his job, and Cleve Dobbs is dead?”

“No, it absolutely isn’t.”

“How can you know that?”

“Because you’re allowed to be happy.”

“Am I?” Monk said. “Look what happened the last time I was. Look what has happened now.”

He opened the car door and got out.

• • •

It was so nice to sleep in my own bed in my own house. Granted, a lot of my stuff was packed up, and Julie had pretty much made the place her own, but my room was more or less as I’d left it. And the house itself, which I’d bought with my late husband, Mitch, would always be filled with wonderful memories, even if someone else lived there someday. But for now, being in the house was like being wrapped in a big warm blanket.

I used to feel like that every day, before things changed.

It was also great to stroll into the kitchen in my nightgown early the next morning to find my daughter, in her T-shirt, sweats, and slippers, sitting at our scuffed-up table and drinking from a big mug of coffee and browsing on her iPad.

It was almost like it used to be, before she grew up and went off to college. Before things changed.

“How did it go last night?” she asked.

“This is going to sound terrible,” I said, “but it was like the good old days.”

Before things changed.

Good God, I was as bad as Monk.

“You didn’t think things were so good at the time,” Julie said. “You were constantly complaining about Monk’s quirks, about the long hours, and the lousy pay.”

“I have some perspective now that I didn’t have before.”

“Or everything looks better from your rearview mirror when you’re leaving,” Julie said.

“When did you get so cynical?”

“When I became an assistant to a guy who investigates murders,” she said. “I thought you enjoy being a cop, that it validates you in a way no other job ever has. That you feel you’ve finally found yourself outside of being a mother to yours truly.”

I put a bagel in the toaster, poured myself a cup of coffee, and sat down next to her at the table.

“Yes, I like being a cop, and I feel all those things that you mentioned,” I said. “But it’s not as exciting as I thought it would be and it’s in Summit. I miss you, Mr. Monk, and this house.”

“You’ll get over it,” she said. “The murder of Cleve Dobbs is all over the newspapers, the television, the Internet. You’d think he was president of the United States.”

“His products had a big impact on popular culture,” I said. “It’s no surprise that his death has one, too.”

“They don’t mention anything about how his murder might be connected to the deaths of Grossman, Zuzelo, and Branham.”

“That’s because the only people who could leak it to the media are Devlin, Stottlemeyer, and Jenna Dobbs, and they’re certainly not going to do that.”

“Amy has her work cut out for her,” Julie said.

“So does Monk,” I said.

“Don’t forget we’ve got the wedding rehearsal tonight.”

“There’re only eight of us,” I said. “What’s to rehearse?”

“Fire drills, earthquake drills, tsunami warnings, possible alien invasion, and who knows what other emergencies,” Julie said.

“Knowing the Monk brothers, that might actually be the ceremony,” I said.

“I bet when the judge gets to the part about ‘in sickness and in health,’ Ambrose will have a list that he will want read into the official record.”

“There aren’t stenographers at weddings,” I said.

“There will be at this one,” she said.

We both laughed and probably could have continued riffing on the subject of a Monk wedding for a couple more hours, but my cell phone rang. It was in a charger on the kitchen counter. I snatched the phone and answered it.

It was Amy Devlin.

“You might want to pick up Monk and come down to the station right away,” she said. “Unless you want to stay at home, in which case, you can hear all about it in the news.”

“Has there been a break in the search for Dale Biederback?”

“Nope, not a thing,” she said. “It’s like the bastard just evaporated.”

“So you’ve developed some new leads in the Dobbs homicide?”

“Nope,” she said. “We’ve made an arrest.”

“Who?”

“Come to the station and you’ll see.”

• • •

I picked up Monk at his apartment and told him that Devlin arrested someone for the murder of Cleve Dobbs.

“But I haven’t told her who the killer is yet,” Monk said.

“She figured it out herself.”

“How did she do it?”

“She’s a trained homicide detective,” I said, and I noticed an odd expression on his face, like he was laughing at a private joke. “Do you know who did it?”