Mr. Monk on the Couch (5 page)

Devlin’s face tightened, but she did as she was told. “We arrested the newspaper delivery guy yesterday at an Arby’s downtown. He still had the bloody newspaper in his car. He started sobbing the moment he saw my badge and confessed to killing Dach.”

Monk nodded. “Will the paperboy be tried as a juvenile or an adult?”

“He’s forty-seven,” Devlin said.

“Isn’t that a little old to be a paperboy?” Monk asked.

“This isn’t Mayberry,” Devlin said. “Kids don’t ride around on bikes delivering papers anymore.”

“This paperboy used to market subprime home loans at Big Country Mortgage before they went under,” Stottlemeyer said. “Now he’s working two jobs, delivering newspapers in the morning and manning the fry station at Arby’s the rest of the day.”

“I almost feel sorry for the guy,” I said.

Stottlemeyer waved Monk and me into his office and closed the door behind us after we’d stepped inside. “What did I tell you, Monk, about giving Amy dental floss?”

“She didn’t try to strangle me,” Monk said.

“What she wanted to do to you was worse,” I said.

“I can’t say that I blame her,” Stottlemeyer said. “Monk has that affect on people.”

“I was trying to help her,” Monk said. “You can, too, by ordering her to clean her desk.”

“It’s her personal space. I don’t care how she keeps it. Whatever works for her works for me.”

“Aren’t you concerned about the spread of disease?”

“Nope,” Stottlemeyer said.

“You will be when the office is overrun with flesh-eating bacteria,” Monk said.

“That’s true,” Stottlemeyer said.

“But by then it will be too late,” Monk said. “You’ll be on your hands and knees, looking for your nose or a finger, and I’ll be there to say ‘I told you so.’ ”

“I’m sure you will,” Stottlemeyer said. “Speaking of diseases, you were right. It was skin cancer that killed the guy in the hotel. And there were trace amounts of cyanide in his system from his laetrile treatments, but it wasn’t enough to poison him.”

“Have you had any luck locating his next of kin?” I asked.

“No, we haven’t,” Stottlemeyer said. “His IDs were all fakes and we didn’t get any hits on his fingerprints.”

“What about DNA?”

“We got a sample, but it will be months, maybe years, before we get any results.”

“Why is it going to take so long?” I asked.

“Because we’ve got a huge backlog of DNA samples that need to be tested for open rape and homicide investigations and cold cases that have been reopened,” Stottlemeyer said. “And he died of natural causes, so it’s not just low priority, it’s no priority. But if he hasn’t been arrested, or associated with a crime, we’ll hit a wall with the DNA, too.”

“Have you contacted the authorities in Mexico?”

“Yeah,” Stottlemeyer said. “They’ve got nothing.”

“They could pass around his picture at cancer centers that offer laetrile treatments and see if any of the doctors or staff recognizes him.”

“I suppose the authorities could do that, if they cared enough to make the effort and if the clinics would even give them that information. But since law enforcement agencies down there are rife with corruption, strapped for resources, and in the midst of fighting an all-out drug war, they’d need some strong motivation to canvass every cancer clinic in the country asking about this guy. You know, like a major crime of some kind.”

“A man is dead,” I said.

“Of natural causes,” Stottlemeyer said.

“Why did he have or need fake ID, and how did he get across the border with it?” I asked. “I suppose he could have found a way to sneak over, but that just raises even more questions. Why did he want to get back here so badly?”

“None of those questions matter to me,” Stottlemeyer said.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because he’s dead,” Stottlemeyer said. “Of natural causes.”

I turned to Monk, who hadn’t said a word. “Tell him, Mr. Monk.”

Monk took a step forward. Stottlemeyer sat on the edge of his desk, crossed his arms under his chest, and faced him, braced for the tirade.

“Have you lost your humanity?” Monk said. “Are you so cold inside that you have forgotten what it feels like to care about somebody?”

I nodded in agreement. I appreciated his support and was encouraged by the surprising passion of Monk’s argument.

“He’s right, Captain,” I said.

“If you still have a heart, if you have any feelings left at all for your fellow man, I implore you, I beseech you, to do the right thing,” Monk said. “Command Lieutenant Devlin to clean her desk.”

“Mr. Monk!” I said.

“What?” he said, turning to me.

“I’m talking about Jack Griffin.”

“Who?” Monk said.

“The man with the fake identity who came all the way here from Mexico to die in some squalid hotel room,” I said. “Don’t you want to know why?”

Monk frowned and shook his head. “Nope, not really.” He glanced at Stottlemeyer. “Do you?”

“Nope,” the captain said and shifted his gaze to me. “Are we done here?”

“I’m not,” I said.

CHAPTER FIVE

I
don’t know when I actually decided I was going to solve the mystery of Jack Griffin’s identity and why he’d come to San Francisco to die. But at that moment in Captain Stottlemeyer’s office, I’d committed myself to it and there was no going back. So I asked the captain if I could have Jack Griffin’s personal effects. He had no problem with that and sent Amy Devlin down to the property room with me to take care of it.

The captain didn’t ask me why I wanted Griffin’s things. Nobody did. I hadn’t even asked myself, perhaps because I was busy thinking about what I intended to say to Amy Devlin once we were alone.

As soon as the two of us entered the stairwell to go down to the basement, I confronted her, blocking her path.

“What the hell is your problem?” I said.

“Wrong question,” Devlin said. “What you should be asking is
who
, not
what
.”

“I know better than anybody how difficult and infuriating Mr. Monk can be, but when it comes to homicide investigation, he’s the best there is. And you know it, too. So the least you can do is to show him some courtesy and respect.”

“Like he shows me?”

“He does, in his own way,” I said, feeling the moral high ground disintegrating beneath my feet. “He gave you a toothbrush.”

“Because he thinks I’m disgusting.”

“That’s one way to look at it. But the gift takes on an entirely different meaning if you look at it from his perspective.”

“What about
my
perspective? Have you or Monk ever considered that?” she said. “No, of course you haven’t. Because you think the whole world revolves around him, just like he does.”

“Okay, so what is your perspective? Tell me.”

“I’m a cop. This is who I am and what I do. I don’t appreciate some mentally ill guy and his enabler showing up at my crime scenes before I’ve even had a chance to start working them myself.”

“What pisses you off is that Mr. Monk can solve the case before you even get your notebook out.”

“Damn right,” she said. “I’d like the opportunity to actually do my job. It might take me a little longer than thirty seconds to close a case, but I will do it.”

“So you’re jealous,” I said.

“No, I’m not. There are a lot of cops who are better at this than I am. I have no problem with that. The difference is that they don’t stick their noses in my cases unless I ask them to.”

She pushed past me and went down the stairs. I followed her.

“So what do you want from him?” I said, my loud voice reverberating up and down the empty stairwell. “Do you want him to act stupid? To hold on to his deductions until you catch up? Or maybe you’d just like him to quit consulting for the police? I can tell you that none of those things are going to happen.”

Devlin stopped at the landing and looked up at me. “Here’s what else is not going to happen: I won’t change who I am, the way I work, or how I look at the world just so Monk can feel comfortable and believe that he isn’t a total nut job, which, in case you haven’t noticed, he is.”

“He’s eccentric,” I said. “And sometimes his words and deeds can be unintentionally offensive. Part of my job is to minimize that, but I can do only so much. I have to count on the fact that most people are decent and kind and will give him the benefit of the doubt. I don’t think it’s asking too much for you to do the same.” I walked down a few steps so that we were eye to eye and only inches apart. “In other words, do us all a favor and stop being a total bitch.”

She gave me a death stare that I’m sure had caused others to lose control of their sphincters and crumble. There was no question that, in terms of hand-to-hand combat, she could take me. But when it came to strength of conviction, determination, and sheer stubbornness, we were evenly matched. So my stare didn’t waver.

We might have stood there glaring at each other all day if the door behind her hadn’t opened up and two cops hadn’t rushed in, barreling past us on their way to homicide upstairs. They broke our childish staring contest without either one of us having to back down.

Devlin grabbed the door before it closed, turned her back on me, and headed for the property room. I caught up to her at the clerk’s cage, which was essentially a counter and screen set into a double-wide doorway. Behind the obese clerk was row after row of iron shelving. The upper shelves were lined with identical file boxes, while tagged, oversize items, like bicycles and suitcases, occupied the lower ones.

She told the clerk what I wanted and signed the necessary papers while he went off and got the stuff. He came back with the suitcase and file box. I took the box and Devlin carried the suitcase.

We walked back upstairs in silence. When we pushed open the doors to the homicide department, the first thing we both noticed was that the stacks of file folders were no longer on her desk. Her trash was gone, her computer monitor gleamed, and her pencils had been sharpened so that they were all exactly the same length.

Monk stood beside her desk, his hands in rubber gloves, presenting the scene as if it were the showcase on
The Price Is Right
.

Devlin dropped the suitcase and gave Monk a death stare that made the one she gave me seem warm and affectionate by comparison.

“I told you not to touch my desk,” she said, advancing on him.

“A sensible warning, given the amount of filth,” Monk said. “Which is why I wore gloves.”

“You know what I meant,” she said, almost nose to nose with him.

Monk held his ground, though he did tip his head way back. “Of course I did. Someone less savvy than me might have misinterpreted your comment about breaking my arms as a threat, but I knew you were saying that you wouldn’t let me risk infection.”

Devlin turned around and looked at me. “Is he for real or is he dissing me?”

“That’s the real Adrian Monk,” I said.

“You’ll thank me later,” he said.

“Or I’ll shoot you,” she said.

That’s when Stottlemeyer came into the room behind me, a newspaper under his arm, and spotted the clean desk.

“Uh-oh,” he said.

“You know better than to leave Mr. Monk alone with a mess,” I said. “Where were you?”

“Answering the call of nature,” he said. “Though in this case, it was more like a scream.”

That was more than I needed to know. “We were just leaving, weren’t we, Mr. Monk?”

“Yes,” he said, as he sidestepped Devlin and made a beeline to me.

I handed him the box, I picked up the suitcase, and we walked out.

“Do you think she’d really shoot me?” Monk asked.

“Definitely,” I said. “She’s very irritated.”

“That’s what happens when you don’t floss,” Monk said. “If I had those gums, I’d shoot myself rather than waste the bullet on somebody else.”

 

I drove back to the Excelsior Hotel with Monk. I wanted another look at the room where Jack Griffin died. I was hoping that maybe I’d see something that I’d missed the first time around or intuitively glean some new understanding just by being in the room again.

Detectives on TV do that all the time. They go back to the crime scene, stare intensely at this and that, and then have incredibly stylized and revealing visions of what the victim was doing before he died.

I figured there was no reason that couldn’t work for me, too.

On the way there, I expected Monk to start complaining, to remind me that I worked for him, not the other way around, and that I was wasting valuable time that he could be spending on something important, like vacuuming his ceiling.

But he remained silent.

I found his silence more aggravating than his complaining. I wanted him to ask me questions, to make me justify my actions, because I wanted to hear the answers myself. Maybe then I’d understand what I was doing and why I was doing it, beyond hoping I’d be blessed with some cool, TV-detective flashbacks of my own.

The same group of vagrants that was hanging out in the Excelsior lobby on Sunday was still there, making me wonder if they’d ever left. The same clerk was on duty, too, eating a Hot Pocket and surfing the Internet on a laptop that was covered with stickers from various bands.

We approached the cage. “I’d like the key to room 214.”

The clerk looked over at Monk, then back at me. “You want it for an hour or for the day?”

“I’m working with the police and I want it for the week,” I said. “The week that Jack Griffin paid for and still has left.”

“He’s dead,” the clerk said.

“He paid for it,” I said. “He gets it. Or would you prefer to refund us what he paid for the remaining week and I’ll pass it on to his next of kin?”

The clerk scowled. “Fine. You can have the room. But I don’t have the key. I gave it to the cleaning crew.”

That got Monk’s attention. “Is it being cleaned right now?”

“Yeah,” the clerk said.

Monk tugged on my sleeve. “Let’s go see.”

The only thing Monk liked more than cleaning something himself was telling others how to do it. I wanted to go up, too, but for a different reason—I was afraid that the maid might dispose of any potential evidence.

Evidence of what, though, I wasn’t sure.

So we hurried up the stairs to the second floor, where there was an enormous red drum marked “biohazardous waste” on a cart equipped with a wet vacuum, humidifiers, and assorted cleaning equipment and supplies parked outside of the open doorway to room 214.

Two men wearing white, hooded Tyvek coveralls, filtered respirator masks, goggles, and matching yellow rubber gloves and boots emerged from the room carrying a soiled mattress that was wrapped tightly in transparent plastic sheeting and sealed with duct tape.

The two men leaned the mattress against a wall and paused to take a break.

Monk broke into an enormous smile. “This is the finest hotel in San Francisco.”