Mr. Monk Is Open for Business (19 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Mr. Monk on the Next Rebound

D
aniela Grace and I celebrated the next morning by attending an AA meeting at the Mission Fellowship Center on Twenty-fourth Street. We toasted each other with cups of black coffee from her thermos and listened to our fellow alcoholics stand up and share. Once again it was an open meeting and I was not required to join in.

Afterward, we strolled over to Boogaloo’s, a funky diner built into an old Cut-Rate drugstore. On the front of their menus they have printed the foot-by-foot instructions to doing the boogaloo, a dance I vaguely remember from old episodes of
Soul Train
. I can’t tell you exactly what we ordered, but they were both dishes with eggs and cream gravy, which are the two main reasons for having brunch in any diner anywhere in the world.

The night before, I had e-mailed Daniela the final bill for the Pickler case, and this morning she slid an envelope across the table, right after the dregs of our cream gravy had been cleared. I thanked her and stashed it straight into my PBS tote.

“So do you consider this case a win or a loss?” I asked. “I
mean, because of us, Henry’s back in jail, probably for a long time.”

“A win, definitely,” said Daniela. “In spite of all the lawyer jokes, we are officers of the court. Plus, Becky was a friend of sorts. You don’t want someone to get away with killing your friends, even if he is a client. It sets a bad tone.” She took a linen handkerchief from her Gucci purse and wiped egg from the corners of her mouth.

“This was our first time working for a lawyer.” Maybe I shouldn’t have said that, but it was true. It’s always been the police or the FBI or private clients. “I’m glad it worked out.”

“Don’t fish for a compliment, dear. It’s unbecoming. It worked out very nicely, yes, and I certainly plan to use you again—even if you’ve been lying to me all this time about being an alcoholic.” She waited for a response, looking me square in the eyes. “You’re not, are you? An alcoholic.”

“I’m not,” I confessed. I felt ashamed but also relieved. “In my defense, that’s what I’ve been telling you from the day we met, but you wouldn’t listen.”

“We met at an AA meeting, Natalie.”

“That was totally my fault,” I admitted. “But every time I tried to straighten it out, you assumed I was in denial.”

“Well, you were very strident about it. What was I to think?”

“What finally convinced you?”

“The fact that you would never share in a meeting. You’re a very forthright person, dear. You’re certainly not ashamed to go to meetings.”

“I find them very comforting and supportive.”

“So the only reason I could conceive of is that you don’t want to tell an outright lie in front of a group of people who trust you.”

“Thank you,” I said with feeling. “For being so perceptive and getting me off the hook.”

“You’re welcome,” said Daniela, who was just taking a bottle of hand sanitizer out of her Gucci. “And if I weren’t so perceptive? Were you planning to spend the rest of your life going to meetings?”

“Don’t they tell us to take life one day at a time? That’s what I was going to do.”

She chuckled. “You should consider starting your own support group for single mother detectives.”

“Not a bad idea.”

“By the way, do you know that woman? She’s trying to get your attention.”

I turned around in my chair and spotted Amy Devlin waiting alone in line by the cash register. I waved back, excused myself, and went over to say hello. “What are you doing here? Is there a break in the case? You should have called.”

“I’m not on the case—you know that.”

A small table by the window had just opened up, and Devlin rushed to take it, barely beating out an older woman and a man with a cane. “Are you by yourself?” I asked.

She seemed a little tired and depressed. “I’m working a burglary in the area and I got hungry. I thought some comfort brunch might cheer me up.”

“A burglary. That’s nice.” I couldn’t help feeling sorry, a hardwired homicide investigator being reduced to mundane burglaries. Even her spiky hair was looking limp.

“It’s the City Smart Furniture store on Guerrero.”

“Right.” I vaguely recalled. “You were working that a couple of days ago.”

“No, that was a different City Smart, over in Richmond. But this case is nearly identical. They broke in, set off the alarm system, and left without taking a thing.”

“You mean just like the first one? That’s pretty weird.”

“I know,” she said, feigning a note of enthusiasm. “Maybe it’s all part of some big clever scheme run by interior decorators. I can solve it and get my reputation back. Wouldn’t that be something?”

“You never know,” I said. “Look, Amy, it’s great to see you, but I need to get back to my client. We’re wrapping up some business.”

“The vacant-lot case, right? Leland called last night and told me. Congratulations. Very clever work.”

“Thanks. We’ll talk soon, okay? I mean it.”

“Oh, Natalie.” Devlin avoided eye contact and stared at the cover of her menu, as if studying how to do the boogaloo. “Tell Monk I haven’t lost faith. I know he can solve this. I really need him to.”

“He will,” I promised.

* * *

When I got back from brunch, I was all set to do a lap around the office, waving the check and perhaps subtly mentioning just how well our new company was doing. Not only had we just made twice what we usually do, but the money had come from the bad guy’s account. A total win-win.

But I was stopped in my tracks, before I could even raise the check, by the sight of Monk sitting at my computer,
wearing headphones. He raised a finger to keep me from saying anything, then pushed about twenty keys to get whatever he was listening to to pause. I slipped the check back into my tote.

“I couldn’t figure out how to plug mine in,” he shouted as he took off the headphones. “There are so many places for plugs. Even with yours it took hours.”

“Adrian, you can’t play on my machine. God only knows what might be screwed up now.”

“Hey, I’m not a child.”

“No, a child would have been able to connect up a computer. Please tell me you didn’t hit any button that says ‘Erase.’”

The last time Monk had been on my computer, the keyboard got accidentally stuck on caps and italics and bold. I couldn’t figure how to turn it off for weeks. Every e-mail looked like it had been written by an angry twelve-year-old.
CAPTAIN, I NEED THE AUTOPSY REPORT.

Just stay calm,
I thought.
What’s done is done.
These were all good lessons learned in my many AA meetings. “So, you were actually listening to a file,” I said. “That’s great.”

“Natalie, a file is something you read. This is an audio recording.”

“My mistake,” I said. “What is it?” I moved behind him and checked the screen. “The 911 calls during the shooting spree. Devlin sent them to me last week.”

“The call from Sarabeth definitely sounds fake. Like she’s pretending to be scared and out of breath. Katrina’s call, on the other hand . . . Computer, play out loud.” He spoke slowly and clearly to the screen. “Play out loud.”

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“It did before. I said, ‘Play through headphones,’ and it switched right over as soon as I plugged in the headphones.”

“Brilliant. Let me in there.” I mime-pushed him out of my chair and settled in. No caps or italics. Good. Within a few seconds I had the first file cued up and playing through my desktop speakers.

Sarabeth’s call was about a minute long and it sounded pretty desperate. On my second time through, I listened for other things—the things Monk always hears. Ambient noise, echoes, faint voices, and footsteps from other rooms. “You know the sound experts in the department have been over this a dozen times.”

“I haven’t come up with anything, either,” he admitted. “Except that Sarabeth is definitely faking it. Now listen to the second audio.”

I scrolled down to Katrina’s call and double-clicked. I have to admit she sounded a lot more panicked than her coworker. “Everyone’s being shot. I don’t know what’s going on. Get the police, please.” The 911 dispatcher tried his best to get more information, but you could hear Katrina running now, her voice fading and out. Her last audible words were, “Run. Save yourself, Sarabeth. No!” A second later came a deafening gunshot. A few seconds after that, someone, probably not Katrina, ended the call.

“She said, ‘Save yourself, Sarabeth,’” I pointed out. “That must be when Sarabeth ran down the stairs.”

“Or she could have been shouting to someone else. ‘Save yourself. Sarabeth, no!’”

“Wow. You’re taking this rejection hard. Are you saying she’s the shooter now?”

“No. Wyatt Noone escaped with the shotgun. That seems clear. But she might have been an active participant. I know that she lied.”

“Lied about having a husband?”

“About what happened that day. When I looked out the third-floor window . . .”

I’d almost forgotten. “Yes, Adrian. What did you see? You never told me.”

“It’s what I didn’t see. I didn’t see a southern exposure with light streaming through the window.”

“Okay . . .” There had been a time when Monk would have had to explain the whole thing, from Sarabeth’s testimony in the ICU to when he looked out the reception-area window. But I was getting a little better. “Sarabeth said that when Wyatt walked in that day, she couldn’t see the shotgun in his hands because of the sun. He was backlit.”

“An obvious lie,” said Monk. “The sun doesn’t hit those windows until late afternoon.”

“You knew this when you looked out the window. And yet you continued to protest her innocence.”

“I thought there might be some innocent explanation,” he said. “Like the sun reflecting off the windows across the street.”

“The windows across the street don’t reflect,” I pointed out. “They’re tinted. You know that.”

“I know that,” said Monk, cricking his neck and shrugging his shoulders. “Don’t make this harder on me. It’s hard enough.”

I heard the captain’s clunker of a Buick before I saw it pulling into a parking space right out front. Stottlemeyer took his time wandering in. “Just happened to be in the neighborhood?” I asked. “This is becoming a very popular neighborhood.”

“Good day to you, too, Natalie. Actually I have a detective sergeant checking out something at the pawnshop, so I thought I’d string along. He’s over there now.”

“Pawnshop?” I said, trying not to look in Monk’s direction. “What’s up with the pawnshop?”

The captain grinned. “We got an anonymous tip this morning about stolen property.”

“Really, Adrian?” I sighed. “You’re going to get us kicked out of our mini-mall.”

“It was right in the window, taunting me,” Monk said. “A Mickey Mantle rookie baseball card. I knew from the slight wear on the left corner and the old mark of a rubber band. . . .”

“I don’t want to hear it,” I said. “Sorry, Captain.”

“No,” said Stottlemeyer. “It’s always good to recover stolen property, although your neighbor can’t be too happy.” He brushed both sides of his mustache and looked around. “I see you’re still sharing an office and haven’t resorted to killing each other. Good job, Natalie.”

“What about me?” asked Monk.

“Good job on staying alive.”

Stottlemeyer checked out the window. The SFPD cruiser was still in front of 24-Hour Holiday Pawn. “As long as we have a minute, we might as well share notes. I’ll start.” The
fact that he didn’t take out a notebook seemed to me a bad sign. “No credible leads on Noone,” he reported from memory. “But he took a few million dollars with him, so we’re trying to follow the money. None of the victims’ spouses—Todd Avery, Helena Lubarsky, even Caleb Smith’s roommate—have had any unusual transactions. The one possible exception, and I hate to say this . . .”

“Sarabeth Willow,” Monk stated categorically.

The captain raised his eyebrows and lower lip in unison. “I thought you were in her corner.”

“Corners change,” said Monk. “Is she suddenly spending money? I knew it. You should subpoena her bank.”

“Slow down, buddy. I don’t know what happened between you and her. Obviously something.”

“She dumped me on the rebound for her ex-husband.”

“I see.” Stottlemeyer reached out a hand to mime-touch Monk’s shoulder. “That’s tough luck, Monk. I’m sorry. But this woman was shot twice. Her only offense so far is that she’s the sole survivor and the bad guy got away.”

“You said she’s spending money. On what?”

“She’s not spending money per se. But her hubby’s doctor, Dr. Rothstein, is a fan of yours. He knows you’re interested in her husband’s health and he gave us a heads-up to pass along. Next week Paul Willow is flying off to Berne, Switzerland, for some experimental treatments. This has been in the works for some time. I checked, and it’s an expensive program. The drugs alone run over a hundred thousand. And it’s not covered by any insurance program. I also checked.”

“So where’s the money coming from?” I asked.

“Sarabeth sent a money order to cover the down payment. That’s all we know so far.”

“Maybe it was savings,” I said, playing devil’s advocate. “Or an inheritance. Or maybe they hocked everything they own to pay for it.”