Mr. Monk on Patrol (8 page)

“Having fun, ladies?” one of the officers asked. He was so muscular that I wasn’t sure whether it was a Kevlar vest under his starched uniform or his beefy body. Even his cheeks looked ripped.

Only then, when I saw his leering, frat-boy grin, did I realize I was wearing only a T-shirt and panties. It wasn’t my nakedness that bothered me as much as how flabby I was.

I really had to start going to the gym if I was going to run around hotels half-naked, tackling ghosts in front of muscle-bound cops.

“You’re welcome to wrestle all you want,” the other cop said. His neck was so thick that it appeared to have absorbed his chin. But it wasn’t muscle in his case. He looked like a cop balloon that had been overinflated. “But could you please keep it quiet and behind closed doors?”

That’s when Monk, lightly covered in dust and bits of insulation, staggered out of a closet down the hall.

“Someone call a paramedic,” Monk said. “We have a deadly emergency.”

“Who’s hurt?” the chinless cop asked.

“I am,” Monk said. “I’m caked in hantavirus.”

An hour later, as morning was dawning, a sleepy-eyed Chief Disher, wearing an untucked, wrinkled shirt and jeans, his hair askew, sat across from us on a couch in the lobby.

Standing behind Disher were the two officers, who’d since been introduced to us as Raymond Lindero, the muscular one, and Walter Woodlake, the chubby one.

I’d put on a bathrobe and a pair of sweats and sat yawning next to Monk. He’d been given a clean bill of health by the two irritated paramedics, who assured him that despite his desperate protests to the contrary, no treatment was needed for hantavirus, which is carried by rat droppings, simply because he’d encountered a lot of dust in a crawl space.

“What do you think crawls in crawl spaces?” Monk said. “Rats.”

“So see your doctor if you begin to show symptoms,” said one of the paramedics as he packed up his stuff.

“You’re suggesting that I wait to seek medical attention until I am already in my death throes? What kind of lazy, incompetent paramedics are you?”

“The kind who are leaving,” the paramedic said and walked away with his partner.

Now, as eager as Monk was to go back to his room and shower the plague off his clothes, his desire to regale Disher and his police force with his brilliance was even stronger than his phobia.

That’s because when Monk solves a mystery, it’s one of the rare times when he feels utterly in control of the world around him, when everything seems to fit and balance is restored.

It’s also the only time when he seems totally confident in himself, able to assert authority over his own phobias and insecurities.

So he indulges himself and we allow him to do so,
no matter how long and frustrating the experience might be.

He started his story at the moment a few hours earlier when we’d left him in his hotel room.

Monk told us that the first thing he did was inspect his surroundings. He opened the drawers, looked under the furniture, and examined the closet.

He spotted an access door in the ceiling of the closet that he presumed led to some sort of crawl space. But it wasn’t secured in any way, which he thought was odd. So he pulled over a desk chair, stood on it, and pushed against the door. It was locked from the other side.

“What’s so strange about that?” Disher asked. “They obviously don’t want guests crawling around in the ceiling.”

“Then why have the access panels at all?” Monk asked.

“So they can get up into the crawl space for maintenance purposes,” said Lindero, his impatience underscoring every word. I was mesmerized by the muscles coursing under his cheeks and decided that he could probably chew walnuts without shelling them first.

“Then it would be locked from the outside, not the inside,” Monk said. “Therefore, I surmised that the panels aren’t intended to allow access to the crawl space from the room, but rather the other way around.”

At the time, it was an oddity that Monk filed away for later consideration. He had more pressing tasks to perform, things he believed everyone should do the moment they arrive at a hotel, like locate the emergency exits and the nearest cache of cleaning supplies.

“Why would you want to know where the cleaning supplies are?” Woodlake asked.

“In case you run out of the cleansers that you brought with you and a mess occurs.”

“You leave it for the maid,” Woodlake said.

“What if the maids are off duty?”

“You wait,” Woodlake said.

“And I suppose if the building was burning, you’d wait for the firemen before fleeing from the nearest exit.”

Woodlake started to reply, but was cut off by Disher. “Forget it, Woodlake. Let Monk continue.”

Monk explained that he went down the hall, found a utility closet, opened it, and discovered two things that puzzled him—a padlocked access panel on the ceiling and, amid the cleaning supplies, a large, unmarked bottle of blue liquid that he determined from the smell and viscosity was a mixture of water and glycol.

“Then it all made sense to me,” Monk said.

“What did?” Disher asked.

“The legend about the ghost, of course,” Monk said. “So I went to see the woman at the front desk. Her name is Rhonda Dumetz and she’s the daughter of the couple who own the hotel and who built the 1983 addition to the building that we are staying in.”

“Yes, we know that,” Lindero said. “We live here.”

“I informed her that Natalie always takes a sleeping pill after a late-night plane flight,” Monk said, “and that she would likely need multiple wake-up calls in the morning in order to awaken from her deep, almost comatose slumber.”

“I don’t take sleeping pills,” I said.

“I also asked if they had a safe,” Monk said, ignoring my objection. “I told her that I was worried about Natalie’s diamond ring, an old family heirloom that she keeps on her nightstand. I thought it might not be wise for her to wear it around town and draw the attention of local ruffians.”

“I don’t have a ring like that,” I said.

“We don’t have ruffians,” Disher said.

Monk ignored us both. He explained that he went back to his room, but kept watch. An hour later, Rhonda Dumetz passed by in the hall. He opened his door a crack and saw her go into the utility closet.

“I immediately called the police, reported a violent altercation at the hotel, and went to the closet to investigate.”

“There wasn’t a violent altercation,” Lindero said.

“But I knew one would occur because, as I expected, the access panel to the crawl space was unlocked, a ladder was deployed underneath it, and the bottle of glycol was missing.”

Monk stopped, pleased with himself, a smile on his face. Disher and the cops stared at him.

“That’s it?” Disher said.

“The rest is obvious,” Monk said. “I’d solved the mystery.”

“What mystery?” Woodlake asked.

“The ghost mystery,” Monk said.

Disher rubbed his forehead, and for a moment it was as if I were looking at a younger version of Stottlemeyer. “I’d forgotten what this felt like.”

“Solving a crime?” Monk asked.

“Following your reasoning,” Disher said.

“The bottle of glycol mixture was the dead giveaway,” Monk said. We all stared at him blankly. “None of you know what it’s used for?”

The cops shrugged. I was too tired to shrug.

Monk shook his head in disappointment, disapproval, and intellectual superiority. It pissed me off, not that I needed much of an excuse to be irritable. I’d had only a couple of hours’ sleep.

“You can’t tell the difference between a Nacho Cheese Dorito and a Funyun,” I said, “but you can
identify glycol from smell and texture and you know what it is used for?”

“Of course,” Monk said.

“Why would you possibly know that?” I asked.

“It’s the formula used in haze machines to create the smoky atmosphere in buildings to safely train firemen and police officers on fire rescues,” Monk said. “It’s perfect for that purpose because it’s water based, nonhazardous, dissipates quickly, and doesn’t trip hydrocarbon sensors in fire detectors.”

Now Disher nodded. “They use it at concerts and discos, too. You can get one for thirty dollars and creep out your house at Halloween.”

“Or a hotel room to create the impression that a woman in white is a ghost,” Monk said. “I followed Rhonda up into the crawl space. I discovered that there’s a remote-controlled haze machine up there that she positioned next to the air vent in Natalie’s room.”

Now it all made sense to me, too, as did the colorful detail of the legend, the part about how looking at the ghost’s face would lead to your own demise. That was meant to scare people away from taking too close a look at the ghost. There would be less of a chance, even with the mist and darkness, that anybody would recognize the ghost’s face. It also explained the yellow eyes and fangs, two terrifying distractions to help you forget her actual facial features.

Monk continued his story. “Ordinarily, if Rhonda accidentally awakened a guest, she would escape through the closet, creating the illusion that she’d just disappeared. But I held the access door closed, so this time she had to flee out the door.”

“Wait a minute,” Woodlake said. “How did you know the ghost was Rhonda and that she’d make a play for the ring tonight?”

“Because she works nights and is thin enough to move easily through the crawl space and be convincing as a ghost,” Monk said. “I knew she’d strike now because it was the only time that she could be certain that Natalie would take a sleeping pill and be deep enough asleep not to realize someone else was in the room.”

Disher broke into a broad smile and turned to his officers. “See? Isn’t Monk just like I said he’d be?”

The cops nodded in agreement.

“Mentally unstable,” Woodlake said.

“Frustrating as hell,” Lindero said.

“A damn good detective,” Disher said, “who honed his skills working closely with me for years in Frisco.”

“So how come you didn’t solve the ghost mystery yourself?” Lindero asked.

“Because I was too busy rooting out corruption in city government to focus my attention on it. I’m only one man.” Disher pinned his gaze on Lindero. “And until now there was nobody else in this department who even approached my level of expertise. But with Monk here, that’s changed. Nothing is going to get past the eyes of justice.”

“You can count on me,” Monk said.

“Thank you, Monk,” Disher said.

“If I don’t die a miserable, drooling death from the hantavirus first.” Monk stood up and gestured to the couch, where he’d left some dust and insulation behind. “That piece of furniture will need to be incinerated, of course.”

“Of course,” Disher said.

“If this is the best hotel in town, I wouldn’t want to see the worst,” Monk said and headed off to his room.

Disher looked at me and smiled. “It feels like old times.”

The downside of drugging Monk for the flight to Newark was that he was almost fully rested but I was walloped with fatigue. I’d foolishly stayed up on the flight chatting with Sharona. And thanks to Monk sending a ghost to my room, the only sleep I’d had in twenty-four hours was a short nap.

While Monk showered, changed, and served himself a breakfast of Wheat Chex (which he’d packed for the trip, along with the spoon and bowl to eat them with), I waited for Lindero to remove the haze machine from the crawl space, and once I was sure nobody would be peeking at me through my air vents, I showered and went down to the lobby for some breakfast in the hotel’s restaurant.

But the restaurant was closed and Officer Woodlake was busy trying to explain to a dozen outraged guests why cops were in the crawl space and why the owners of the hotel were too busy at the police station to run the kitchen.

So I had no one to blame but myself for having to scrounge up breakfast somewhere else.

I went outside and looked around. Down the street to my right, past some apartment buildings, was the police station, housed in a redbrick colonial building with imposing white columns supporting a portico.

To my left, at the corner of the next block, was a gas station mini-mart.

I headed over to the mini-mart, which had a fine selection of microwavable goodies in its freezer section. I zapped myself a sausage and cheese Hot Pocket, grabbed a shrink-wrapped cinnamon bun with an expiration date well into the next decade, and poured myself a large cup of highly caffeinated coffee.

I managed to eat most of my breakfast on the walk back to the hotel, and I did it without spilling anything on myself. It was a feat of physical prowess that ought to be an Olympic event and for which I certainly deserved a gold medal.

The cinnamon bun was so tasty that I was tempted to go back for another one. But then I thought about how strong and unnatural the chemicals must be that could keep it fresh for years and all the irreparable harm they might be doing to my own DNA.

On the plus side, I figured that maybe they’d keep me fresh into the next decade, too, but I was willing to settle for keeping me awake for the day.

When I got to the lobby, Monk was waiting for me. He looked upbeat and energized. Solving a crime and eating a bowlful of perfect squares of wheat often had that effect on him.