Mr. Monk Is Open for Business (8 page)

“But she’s alive and Mel is dead,” said Stottlemeyer again.

“Ha,” said Monk, and made his version of a raspberry sound, with no spit and very little sound. “It wouldn’t be the first time a killer betrayed his partner. It kind of goes with the territory.”

“We’ll check Mel out,” Devlin promised. “We’ll check everything.”

“Did you really arrest Ellen Morse’s brother?” asked Stottlemeyer. “Yes, of course you did. Why am I even asking?”

I had my PBS tote under my arm and felt my phone vibrate. I always keep it on vibrate in the police station. To me it’s like being in a theater or a church.

I saw who it was and took a deep breath before answering. “Daniela, hi. We’re actually with Captain Stottlemeyer of homicide right now, discussing your case.”

“Good. The captain might be able to help us out. I’m with your intern. She’s been arrested.”

To my credit, I did not say, what the hell do you mean, my intern? Although I almost did. Instead, I said in my calmest voice, “Ah, yes. Julie. I’m sure it was just a misunderstanding. May I please speak with her?”

I stepped aside, leaving Monk and Devlin to fight over the symmetry of the corkboard. “Mom?” came a soft, hesitant voice. “I’m so sorry.”

“Julie, where are you?”

“I’m in Henry Pickler’s house, like we discussed.”

“We discussed no such thing, young lady. You stay right there. I’m coming.”

“The police want to take me to the station and book me. I’m kind of guilty.”

“Don’t say that.” Life was tough enough. My daughter was not about to add a criminal arrest to her résumé. “We’ll get you out of this.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

Mr. Monk and His Dream House

D
aniela had been right. Captain Stottlemeyer was able to help. As soon as I pulled him away from the corkboard and explained the situation, he made a call to the sheriff’s office in Millbrae, which is just south of South San Francisco—which is not a part of San Francisco at all but a totally separate town, despite its name.

It was surprisingly easy to get Monk away from the board. All I had to say was Julie was in trouble and he forgot all about symmetry. Monk is like an uncle to her. He and Julie had even worked on a case or two, with Julie filling in for me as his assistant. Devlin also asked if there was anything she could do. Everyone at the station loved Julie. Except for me. Right now, I wasn’t too fond of her.

Most of Millbrae is dominated by the San Francisco airport and the kind of developments that often get built around airports. But there’s a section farther south, not far from the tony environs of Hillsborough, where the lots are larger and you might be able to squint and fool yourself into thinking there’s some nature around that’s not part of a backyard or a state park.

The Pickler residence was in just such an area. It was a large
split-level ranch, straight out of the seventies, complete with a sunken living room, shag carpeting, and harvest gold appliances. I know the place sounds overwhelmingly depressing, but it wasn’t. When you walked in, you found yourself entering a spotless, perfectly maintained tribute to that era. It was like a museum to a gentler, more innocent era of terrible taste. And you instantly knew two things. One, this had been Henry’s childhood home. It had to be. And two, a lot of money and attention had been spent to keep it looking this way.

Daniela Grace met us at the door. Julie Teeger waited nervously by the modular sofa under the bay window. I recognized the wallpaper color from my own childhood, a soft Moon Landing blue. The captain’s call had succeeded in getting rid of the police presence, so it was just Daniela, Monk, and the two Teegers.

“Mom, I am so sorry.”

“Don’t say anything. We’ll talk about this later,” I advised. It was my own version of the Miranda warning. Anything you say now can and will be used against you, sweetie.

“Hey, Adrian.” Julie and Monk hadn’t seen each other in a month or more. They greeted each other with their usual air hug. “How’s it going?”

“Can’t complain,” said Monk.

“You can’t? Really?”

“That’s a figure of speech. Don’t hold me to it.”

Daniela seemed a lot more forgiving than I would be, given the circumstances. “I remember when my son was an intern at my law firm years back,” she reminisced. “He once tried to help by rewriting an entire tort in street English without telling anyone. We had six lawyers show up at the meeting
and no one could make heads or tails of it.” Daniela smiled. “He wanted to help. That’s how it is with the children of alcoholics. They have this need to take care of their parents.”

Great, I thought. On top of being an alcoholic, I’m a bad mother.

“I didn’t do much illegal,” Julie insisted. “I found an unlocked side window, so there was no breaking, just entering. And I wasn’t taking anything. I just wanted to look around, the way Adrian does.”

“The house has motion sensors and a silent alarm,” explained the lawyer. “Since Henry’s in jail, I’m listed as the alarm company contact. The police called me as they were on their way. Luckily, I live in Hillsborough. I arrived shortly after they did.”

“So there won’t be any charges?” I asked. That was a relief.

“No charges,” said Daniela. “Between my presence here and the call from your captain . . .” Her smile was mischievous. “Julie had your permission to be here; you had my permission; and I had Mr. Pickler’s.”

“Good,” I said, ignoring the lie about Julie having my permission. “So, long story short, we’re free to look around.”

Monk was already a step ahead of us. This time he didn’t have his hands up. He was walking slowly through the rooms as if under a trance. “Beautiful,” he said again and again. “This man has excellent taste.”

I knew exactly where Monk was coming from. He hated change. His earliest memories centered on the sixties and seventies, which fit in perfectly with Henry Pickler’s décor. Monk wouldn’t call it nostalgia, but I would. The problem
with living in the past, of course, is maintenance. But the Pickler house had been eerily and spotlessly maintained.

“We’re acting under attorney-client privilege,” Daniela warned us. “The upside is that we have his permission to go through the house. The downside is that nothing we find pertaining to the death of Mr. Rivera can be turned over to the police. Nothing at all relating to motive or means or opportunity.”

“That’s ridiculous,” said Julie. “What are we even doing here?”

“Acting in the interests of our client,” said Daniela. “That’s what happens when you work for a lawyer.”

“Not to worry,” said Monk. “Henry Pickler couldn’t be involved with that drug runner. Just look at this place.”

Monk restarted in the living room, hands raised this time. He made a slow, clockwise circle through the split-level, interrupting his inspecting every now and then for an appreciative little grunt or nod. “It goes much faster when everything’s perfect,” he murmured.

“I know,” I said. “But when everything’s perfect, you don’t get clues.”

“It’s a trade-off,” he acknowledged. Then he stepped into the kitchen and came to a halt, his eyes almost bugging out. To me it looked like a normal kitchen—if you took into account Pickler’s affinity for harvest gold and yellow Formica and linoleum floor tiles. But to Monk, it was like he’d been slapped in the face. “This must be where it happened.”

“The murder?” Julie asked. “Cool.”

“Not murder. But whatever made him go outside and do whatever he did. It happened here.”

“How do you know?” asked Daniela.

“Because it’s a disaster. Look.” And he circled the room clockwise. “Smudge on the microwave handle; one whole-wheat crumb under the toaster; plate in the sink, sponge not properly wrung out; dinette stool number two out of alignment. The Henry Pickler I know would never leave it like this unless there’d been an emergency.”

“You can tell that the crumb is whole wheat?” Daniela asked. That was such a newbie question. Of course he could.

“What type of emergency?” I asked Monk, and began to list the possibilities. “Phone call? Someone at the door? An alarm going off? Hearing something outside?”

Monk crossed to the window above the sink. The floral chintz curtains were open to a view of the backyard.

The backyard was nothing but a rectangular lawn running the length of the ranch-style house and going back perhaps fifty feet. There was no patio or garden to interrupt the perfection, just a flat, weed-free lawn with every blade of grass in place, cut to exactly the same height. At the end was a white picket fence and beyond it a large, unruly field, also a piece of Pickler property, purchased decades earlier when prices were cheap and Henry’s parents were concerned about protecting their privacy.

“This was at night,” Monk thought out loud, “when a decent person like Henry would have his curtains closed—unless he happened to hear some commotion outside. Then he would open them.” Monk pointed toward the vacant lot. “Out there. That’s the crime scene, isn’t it?”

Two minutes later, we were outside, walking along the edge of the brush of the large lot. The crime scene tape had
been taken down but parts of it still dangled from a few trees. Monk led the way and we followed in his footsteps.

As we walked, Julie took it upon herself to recite facts from the report she’d stolen from my coffee table. “Esteban Rivera was shot with a nine millimeter, probably with a silencer on the barrel. The body wasn’t moved, except for a few yards by Henry Pickler. The San Mateo County coroner estimates the time of death at less than half an hour before the patrol car passed by and caught Mr. Pickler. The gun and silencer were never found.”

“The police combed this field thoroughly,” Daniela told us. “They haven’t dug it up because there were no signs of recent digging. And because Henry’s shovel showed no signs of use.”

“I’ll bet it was a perfectly clean shovel,” said Monk. “Polished and shiny.”

“It was,” said Daniela. “Is that a clue?”

“No. Just a sure bet.”

“I have a theory,” said Julie.

Julie was allowed to have theories, of course. But it was always intimidating to voice one around Monk, especially for an intern who hadn’t been hired yet. I was kind of proud of her. “Go ahead, sweetie.”

“Thanks, Mom.” Julie stood up straight and spoke clearly. “What if Pickler was looking out his window and saw the murder go down in his field? After the killer leaves, taking the gun, Pickler goes out with a shovel to bury the body.” Her posture began to deflate almost as soon as the last words were out of her. “That doesn’t make sense, does it?”

“Why would he bury someone else’s victim?” asked Daniela. “On his own property? Why not just call the police?”

Julie was still thinking. “Maybe the killer already buried the body and Pickler just dug it up?”

“With a clean shovel? And a clean corpse? Not to mention a field with no holes in it?” Monk shrugged his shoulders. “Even your mother comes up with better theories. No offense.”

“None taken,” Julie said.

“None taken,” I said. We said it pretty much in unison and it made us smile, the first smile we’d shared since I got here.

Monk had not moved from the field’s edge. There were probably bristles in there and dead leaves and insects and soil, better known to my partner as dirt. He turned slowly in a tight little circle, three hundred sixty degrees. “That’s an apple tree,” he said, indicating a gnarled, unpruned tree not far from the picket fence.

“I believe it is,” said I. “Do you want me to pick you an apple?”

“Just commenting on nature,” he said, then made another tight three sixty, this time looking farther into the distance.

Surrounding the overgrown lot were a dozen or so houses, all with a comfortable amount of privacy and on decent-sized lots. In the middle of his second three sixty, Monk stopped and focused on one house in particular. It was a modern white construction, modern in the old-fashioned sense with square angles and big square windows. From the eighties, I would have guessed. It was set on a mound slightly higher
than the others and, despite the white stucco wall, had an unobstructed view from the second-story windows.

“That one,” said Monk, and began to lead the way up the street. The rest of us followed.

“What’s he doing?” Daniela asked. She was huffing along at the back of the pack, with Julie keeping her company.

Julie explained. “Adrian noticed the position of the house and the lights around it and the security cameras. He thinks they might have seen something.”

“The police already spoke to the neighbors,” said Daniela.

“Well, we’re not the police,” said Julie. I did not like the way she said
we
.

A woman answered the door after two evenly timed rings of the bell. Monk took a reflexive step back, bowled over by the stench of her perfume. Or maybe it was from the shine of her lipstick and makeup and silver lamé tank top. She might have been in her twenties, although her fashion choices gave her the look of an underage cougar.

“Are you the lady of the house?” Monk asked. He wrinkled his nose to fight the smell.

“That depends what you’re selling,” she said, smiling and brushing back her long blond hair. Then she took in all four of us. “What’s this about?”

“We’re investigating what happened over there,” said Monk, pointing back toward the field. “Were you here on the night of the drug dealer’s murder?”

“Why, yes,” she said dramatically. “Yes, I was.” Her eyes turned misty. “Horrible. Although I didn’t hear a thing or
even know about the poor man until the police showed up. I was watching a rerun of
Sons of Anarchy
with the sound turned up, so that might explain it.”

Her name was Cyndi Locklear, with a reversed
i
and
y
as she put it when she spelled it out. She wasn’t shy about standing in her doorway and telling us every detail of her life. She never even asked why three women and a man with a wrinkling nose were asking her questions.

Cyndi was originally from Las Vegas—yes, actually a native, born and raised there in a Mormon family, although she herself stopped going to church ages ago. A Jack Mormon her parents called her, even though she had no idea who Jack was. Oh, and did she mention? Her boyfriend rented this house for her. Carlos was this crazy-busy businessman and didn’t spend as much time with her as he should. She was really getting fed up. I mean, why did he make her move to this boring suburban wasteland if he was just going to be gone all the time? You know?

I felt sorry for Cyndi, all dressed up all the time with no place to go. Her talkativeness was probably a result of loneliness, I guessed. But she didn’t make it easy to get a word in.

“Your sexual paramour is concerned about security,” Monk said, pointing to a white camera positioned at the right side of the house above a window.