Mr. Monk in Trouble (3 page)

CHAPTER THREE

Mr. Monk Arrives in Trouble

M
onk had no problem examining a dead body without flinching, but he couldn’t live with the thought that there might be a speck of blood on his door or in his apartment. It was one of the many bewildering contradictions in his character.

He spent the next two days scrubbing and disinfecting his entry hall before he gave up and decided that the only reasonable course of action was to replace his front door, refinish his floors, and repaint his walls.

That was actually the compromise that I got him to accept instead of gutting the apartment entirely or moving out and finding a new place to live.

Monk was trying to figure out where to go while the workers remodeled his place, and I was telling him all the reasons why he should stay with his brother, Ambrose, when Stottlemeyer called and said that he wanted to see us at headquarters right away.

On the drive over, I continued to make my case for him to stay with Ambrose.

“It’s the home where you both grew up and you can sleep in the familiar, safe, clean surroundings of your old bedroom,” I said. “You could even pass the time with your rock shining kit.”

“There’s only one problem,” Monk said.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“My brother is crazy,” Monk said. “I can’t take the stress.”

“Now you know how I feel,” I said. I regretted the words the instant they were out of my mouth and quickly covered for my gaff. “Living with a teenager is hell. They are so moody and unpredictable. Sometimes it’s like Julie has a split-personality disorder.”

Monk nodded. Not only had he bought it, but I think it might even have made him reconsider what I knew was coming next. He wanted me to offer to let him stay at my house.

I’d let him spend a few days with me when his building was being fumigated and it was not an experience I wanted to repeat.

“And she makes such a mess,” I said, trying to underscore my earlier point. “There’s hair all over the bathroom, bras hanging from the curtain rod, and she leaves half-eaten food on the living room couch.”

Monk shuddered. I smiled to myself. Mission accomplished.

As we came into the squad room, Disher was walking back to his desk with a cup of coffee. He kept bumping into desks and chairs on his way, fumbling around like a blind man. It wasn’t until he sat down at his desk outside of Stottlemeyer’s office that I saw why.

He was wearing sunglasses that were so darkly tinted they were practically a blindfold.

“Why are you wearing sunglasses?” I asked him.

“The glare,” Disher said.

“There’s no glare in here,” I said.

“There is on the street,” he said. “You’d understand that if you’d ever been out there.”

“We just came in from the street,” I said.

“I’m not talking about that street.”

“What street are you talking about?”

“The mean street, lady, the grimy, bloodstained stretch of asphalt where I enforce the law,” Disher said. “Disher’s Law.”

“Oh,” I said. “
That
street.”

“At least there wasn’t any gum on it,” Monk said. “You can wash dirt and blood off the street pretty easily. But gum is a living hell. People who spit out their gum should be put in prison for life.”

Disher snarled. “Out there, a cop has to squint straight into the harsh glare of corruption, filth, and despair, and without shades, it’ll roast your eyeballs out and incinerate your soul.”

Monk looked at me. “I need sunglasses.”

I smiled at Disher, though he probably couldn’t see it with those sunglasses on. He reminded me of Julie when she was a little girl. It took her a week to stop wearing her Halloween costume everywhere. She hated to give up the fantasy of being the Little Mermaid or a Teletubby.

Stottlemeyer opened the door to his office. “If you two are done chatting with Dirty Randy, I’d like to have a word with you.”

“We’re done.” Disher reached for his coffee cup and grabbed his pencil holder instead. He lifted it up for a drink and spilled pencils on his face as we followed Stottlemeyer into his office.

“Did you find out why Lenihan murdered my neighbor?” Monk asked.

“Yeah. They’d been dating for a couple of months. He killed her because he was tired of her always overcooking his meat.”

“You’re kidding,” I said.

“It was also too salty,” Stottlemeyer said. “He likes his steaks a certain way.”

“I don’t understand how anybody could make a life-or-death issue out of something so insignificant,” Monk said.

Stottlemeyer and I both stared at him.

“It’s not like she was serving him food on a chipped plate,” I said.

“Or letting his vegetables touch his meat,” Stottlemeyer said.

“Exactly,” Monk said. “His priorities are all out of whack.”

Stottlemeyer rubbed his temples and took a seat behind his desk. “Forget about Lenihan. He’s not the reason I wanted to see you.”

“I know why you asked us to come down here,” Monk said.

“You do?” Stottlemeyer said.

“You wanted to apologize to us,” Monk said.

“For what?”

“Desecrating Christmas,” Monk said.

“How did I do that?”

“You said that Santa only does three ‘ho’s.”

“That’s not why I asked you down here,” Stottlemeyer said. “I need you to do me a favor.”

Monk shook his head. “I won’t even consider it until you apologize.”

The captain looked at me. I shrugged. We both knew Monk would never let this go. Stottlemeyer sighed.

“Okay, Monk, I’m sorry I said that Santa Claus goes ho-ho-ho and not ho-ho-ho-ho. Satisfied?”

Monk shook his head again. “What does a pirate say when he greets someone?”

“Yo-yo-ho-ho,” Stottlemeyer answered with a pained look on his face.

Monk smiled. “You’re forgiven. You may proceed.”

“Thank you. This is about a friend of mine, Manny Feikema. You may remember him.”

“Wasn’t he a beat cop in the Tenderloin for decades?”

Stottlemeyer nodded. “That’s the guy.”

“The last time I saw him was May 17, 1997. He had a stain on his tie,” Monk said. “It was spaghetti sauce.”

“He retired about five years ago and moved to Trouble, a tiny old mining town in the California gold country. Manny got bored after only a couple of months, so he signed up as a security guard at the history museum they have there. He was glad just to get out of the house and wear a uniform again.”

“I hope he isn’t still wearing that tie,” Monk said.

“He was killed two nights ago while doing his rounds.”

“And the tie?”

“Forget about the tie,” Stottlemeyer said. “The man was murdered.”

“I suppose if he’s cremated with the tie on, that will solve the problem.”

“I don’t know what he was wearing, Monk. I just know that Manny is dead and that whoever killed him is still out there,” Stottlemeyer said. “That’s the issue that concerns me.”

“Manny was doomed from the start,” Monk said.

“Because of his tie?” I said.

“Because of where he lived,” Monk said. “The place is called Trouble. It’s a warning sign that he blithely ignored at his own peril.”

“It was common for Old West towns to have colorful names,” I said. “Like Tombstone, Hangtown, Cadaver Gap, Gnaw Bone, Purgatory, or Deadwood. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Would you retire to a place called Misery?” Monk asked.

“If it was nice,” I said.

“How about a place called Filth?”

“I don’t think there’s a place called Filth,” I said.

“That’s because nobody would live there,” Monk said, then turned to Stottlemeyer. “How did you hear about Manny’s murder?”

“The chief of police out there contacted us about Manny’s cases on the off chance someone with a grudge might have come after him to settle a score,” the captain said. “I’ve got Dirty Randy checking to see if anyone Manny put away has been released from prison lately. But what the request tells me is that the local yokels don’t have anything to go on.”

“What did the thieves take?” Monk asked.

“Nothing. Manny must have spooked them before they got what they were after.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Catch the son of a bitch who did this.”

“Can’t the local police do that?”

“Trouble only has a three-man police force, not counting the chief. They don’t have the experience or the resources to solve a murder,” Stottlemeyer said. “Manny may have retired, but he was still a San Francisco cop as far as I’m concerned. We owe him our best. And that’s you, Monk. I’d go up there myself but I’m all out of vacation days. So I’d appreciate it if you’d look into it for me.”

“It’s perfect timing, Captain,” I said. “Mr. Monk needs to be out of the house for a few days anyway.”

“I can’t do it,” Monk said.

“Why not?” I said.

“Tumbleweeds,” Monk said. He was terrified of them.

“What do tumbleweeds have to do with anything?” Stottlemeyer said.

“It’s an Old West town,” Monk said. “The Old West is where tumbleweeds like to tumble.”

“I’ll protect you,” I said.

“How?”

“If any tumbleweeds come along, I’ll throw myself in front of them.”

“You’d do that for me?” he asked.

“Just like I did when you were nearly hit by that runaway dandelion a few weeks ago.”

“It’s not the same thing,” Monk said. “Tumbleweeds are like dandelions on steroids.”

“I’m willing to take that chance if it means catching a cop killer,” I said. “Don’t you think that’s worth the risk?”

Monk sighed and looked at the captain. “All right, I’ll do it.”

The little I know about the California Gold Rush I learned back in grade school, so you’ll have to forgive me if I’m a bit sketchy on the details.

The gist of it is this: In 1849, workers at Sutter’s sawmill on the south fork of the American River stumbled on some flakes of gold. The accidental discovery sparked a stampede of hundreds of thousands of people into Central California from every corner of the world to seek their fortune. They became known as the forty-niners.

Whenever someone found a flake of gold in his pan, people would swarm to the same spot like ants. Overnight a mining camp would go up. And so it went, all along the rivers of California’s Central Valley and the western slopes of the Sierra Nevadas until there were camps everywhere. If the pickings were good and steady, the camps became boomtowns.

Most of the wealth, though, eventually found its way to San Francisco, where the major mine owners, railroad barons, and titans of industry lived in their Nob Hill mansions.

Ten years later, when the gold became harder to find and more expensive to dig up, most of the mining camps and towns dried up and were abandoned.

The majority of the towns that survived have become sprawling bedroom communities of housing tracts and shopping centers that retain only a few traces of their frontier pasts.

But there are still a handful of old mining camps, a hundred miles southeast of Sacramento along Highway 49, that have hardly changed over the last one hundred and fifty years.

Driving with Monk on the highway, right down the center of the California gold country, was like passing through one Western movie set after another.

Some of the towns were nothing more than tourist traps, selling T-shirts and Western memorabilia from within the aging, wooden storefronts. Others were meticulously restored and upscaled into pricey antique shops, French cafés, and elegantly quaint B and Bs so the towns looked more like Western-themed shopping malls than the authentic nineteenth-century mining camps that they once were.

We took a turn off the highway and drove for miles up a badly maintained, two-lane road that snaked past farms and abandoned mines, covering the car in a thick layer of dust.

All of a sudden we started getting pelted with what sounded like hail but covered the windshield with what looked like raw eggs without the shells. Yellow goop dripped down the glass.

Monk shrieked. “What is going on?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Is it the end of the world?”

“I doubt it.”

I pulled the car over to the side of the road and came to a stop. And that’s when I saw what was hitting us.

Butterflies. Tens of thousands of them fluttering across the highway. And they were still hitting the car, only not as many as when I was driving.

“It’s only butterflies,” I said.

“Is there any way around them?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “This is the only way in and out of Trouble.”

“Then we’ll have to turn around and go home until they are gone.”

“We can’t do that, Mr. Monk,” I said. “You’ll just have grit your teeth and get through it.”

I looked over my shoulder and drove back onto the highway. Almost immediately butterflies started splatting against the glass.

I tried spraying the windshield with washer fluid and running the wipers, but it only smeared the insect goo and dirt together into a disgusting muck.

“I hope you’ve got some money saved up,” Monk said.

“Not on what you pay me,” I said.

“Then I don’t know what you’re going to do.”

“About what?”

“Buying a new car,” he said.

“What do I need a new car for?”

“You’ve totaled this one.”

“It’s running just fine,” I said.

“It’s unsafe to drive,” Monk said. “It’s pestilence on wheels.”

“I’ll take it to a car wash,” I said. “It will be good as new.”

“A car wash isn’t going to be enough,” Monk said.

We might have kept arguing about that, but we made it through the butterflies, rounded a curve in the road, and there was Trouble laid out below us, capturing our attention.

The small town was tucked into a bend of the Stanislaus River and set against a sparse forest and disfigured hills that still bore the ravages of the hydraulic mining that had dissolved them like sugar cubes. It was a striking image. It was as if we’d just driven through a time warp and arrived in the 1850s.

The heart of Trouble was comprised of four intersecting streets that were laid out in a perfect tic-tac-toe pattern, which struck me as curiously well planned for what must have been a wild and unruly mining camp in its day.