Mr. Monk Gets Even (8 page)

“Remain very still,” Monk said, then drew a green
X
on the man’s broken arm. “You’re going to be fine now.”

Monk tossed the green pen in the hazardous materials bin and headed for the next patient. Julie hurried after him.

“You’re not a doctor,” she said.

“I know that,” Monk said.

“Then what are you doing?”

“What the captain asked me to do,” Monk said. “Making sure everything is in order.”

“I’m pretty sure that he was referring to hospital security,” Julie said.

“That’s exactly what I am doing.”

Monk whipped back the curtain around the next bed, revealing a woman with a badly broken leg—a big shard of jagged bone jutting from her bloody flesh—and startling the nurse, who was injecting something into the IV.

“What are you doing?” the nurse asked.

“This won’t take a moment,” Monk said. He carefully applied a yellow
X
to the patient’s other arm, then gave the nurse a nod. “Carry on.”

Monk slipped out again, drawing the curtain behind him, and tossed the pen in the hazardous materials bin. He was about to go to the next curtained area when Dr. Stubble appeared and cut him off.

“I’m Dr. Frank Jessup, and this is my ER. Who the hell are you?”

“Adrian Monk. I’m a consultant to the San Francisco Police and this is Julie Teeger, my assistant. We’re here as part of the security detail assigned to Dale the Whale, the morbidly obese homicidal maniac from San Quentin who is being operated on down the hall.”

“That doesn’t explain what you are doing here meddling with my patients.”

“We were just leaving,” Julie said and turned to go, tugging on Monk’s sleeve. But Monk yanked his arm from her and held his ground.

“I admire your triage system, Doctor, but in your effort to quickly treat patients, you forgot to mark them on both arms.”

“I didn’t forget,” Dr. Jessup said. “I only mark them on one.”

“You need to mark them on both and dispose of the pen afterward,” Monk said. “In fact, you should throw out the pens that you have in your pocket in the nearest hazardous waste receptacle right now and get new ones.”

He stared at Monk. “Why should I?”

“Because it’s unsanitary.”

“No, it’s not,” Dr. Jessup said.

“You wouldn’t use the same tongue depressor on two different patients, would you? So how can you use the same pen?”

“Because I am not sticking the pen in their mouths,” Dr. Jessup said.

“I don’t see the difference,” Monk said.

“I don’t care,” Dr. Jessup said. “Get out of my ER right now or I will call security and have you dragged out.”

“But I am a consultant to the San Francisco Police,” Monk said. “And I’m right and you’re wrong.”

“We apologize and will stay out of your way,” Julie said to the doctor. She grabbed Monk firmly by the arm and led him away.

“We need to notify the Department of Public Health and the American Medical Association,” Monk said.

“We need to focus on our job,” Julie said.

“To protect and to serve—that’s our job. Every time that doctor touches someone’s flesh with his germ-soaked pen, he’s spreading pestilence and death. I can’t just turn a blind eye to that.”

“And what if Dale the Whale knows that?”

“What are you talking about?”

“What if Dale knew that you’d become so distracted by Dr. Jessup’s triage system that you’d forget all about keeping your eye on his security?”

“Oh my God, you’re right,” Monk said, and immediately looked down the hall, where the two officers still stood in front of the operating room doors.

Julie forced back a smile, pleased that Monk bought her argument, which she’d improvised on the spot.

I couldn’t have done it better myself.

That’s when the operating room doors opened and Dr. Wiss and Captain Stottlemeyer emerged.

Monk and Julie hurried down the hall to join them. Dr. Wiss removed his mask. His face was damp with sweat. Stottlemeyer looked pale.

“How did it go?” Julie asked.

“The operation went smoothly,” Dr. Wiss said. “It’s remarkable how much fat and skin we were able to remove.”

“Horrific is more like it,” Stottlemeyer said. “I may never eat again.”

The orderlies wheeled the gurney out the door toward the elevator across the hall. As the gurney passed, Monk and Julie got a good look at Dale. All they could really see were his eyes. He was unconscious and wrapped up like a mummy, but what astonished them both was that his whole body fit well within the edges of the gurney, which would not have been possible before.

“My God,” Julie said. “It’s like you cut him in half.”

“I freed the man that was trapped under all the flesh,” Dr. Wiss said.

“I certainly hope not,” Monk said. “The last thing anyone wants is Dale Biederback going free.”

“I’m sorry, that was a poor choice of words,” Dr. Wiss said, following the gurney into the elevator. “We’re taking him to the ICU now.”

“He’ll be under armed guard 24/7,” Stottlemeyer said, joining the doctor in the elevator. “I’m taking the first shift myself.”

“We’ll take the next one,” Monk said.

“We will?” Julie said.

“No, you won’t,” Stottlemeyer said. “Now that the operation is over, I want you out there on the street, helping Lieutenant Devlin if any bodies drop. I’ve told her to call you in on everything.”

“She must have been thrilled about that,” Julie said.

“Go home, Monk. I’ve got it from here,” Stottlemeyer said, and the elevator doors closed.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Mr. Monk Goes to the Police Station

M
onk and Julie went from the hospital to police headquarters. Although Devlin hadn’t called them in, Monk was too keyed up to go home and there were two unsolved murders that he needed to investigate.

I know what you’re thinking.
Two
murders? You probably remember only one, the murder of David Zuzelo, the high school math teacher who was thrown from the balcony of his seventeenth-floor apartment the previous night by someone he knew.

That’s because I told you about Zuzelo in detail and only mentioned the other murder in passing. But I did say that Zuzelo’s death was actually the second case that week that had appeared to be an accident at first but that Monk quickly proved to be a homicide.

The victim in the first case was Bruce Grossman, a big name in local business circles, a CEO-for-hire who took over troubled companies and got them back on their feet. In fact, to show you what a small world it is, Grossman ran the Burgerville restaurant chain after their CEO was murdered, a crime that Monk solved years ago.

He’d been jogging in shorts and a T-shirt through Land’s End, a rocky and heavily wooded park on the northeastern edge of San Francisco, a spot known for its spectacular views of the Golden Gate Bridge. But he’d decided to go off-trail into the fenced-off area, lost his footing, and fell over the edge of a cliff to the rocky shore far below. If Grossman had fallen a few yards farther out, the waves would have pounded him to pieces and carried what was left of him out to sea. Instead, Grossman’s broken body was hauled up more or less intact, and Monk was able to see his muscular, tanned legs.

And that’s how Monk knew that Devlin, who’d met him at the scene, was wrong about Grossman’s death being an accident.

If Grossman had scaled the fence and run along the cliff’s edge, he would have had to go through the same junipers and prickly brush that Monk had navigated, a terrifying experience that took him an hour and a half and that he likened to crossing a minefield.

And yet, Grossman’s legs were unscratched.

This proved that Grossman didn’t fall off the cliff. He was thrown, contrary to Devlin’s initial conclusion.

That was why she’d been so irritated at Zuzelo’s place when Monk proved that she’d been fooled again by a murder disguised as an accident.

So Devlin wasn’t very happy when Monk and Julie walked into police headquarters on that Sunday and she had to tell him that the forensics report from the crime lab had confirmed his observations in Zuzelo’s apartment.

“Zuzelo was, in fact, murdered,” Devlin said, sitting at her cluttered desk outside of Stottlemeyer’s office.

“You say that as if it’s a surprise,” Monk said. “I’m never wrong about homicide.”

“One of these days, you will be. You quickly jump to some pretty big conclusions based on some very tiny details, so you’ll have to forgive me if I’d like independent confirmation of your findings.”

“It’s your time to waste, though I think it would be better spent cleaning your desk.”

“I like my desk the way it is,” she said. “Are you here for a reason?”

“We have two open homicide investigations.”

“I do,” she said. “I’ll be sure to call you if I need a consultation.”

“You never call me,” Monk said.

“And what can you deduce from that?”

“Whoever killed David Zuzelo had to be buzzed in to the lobby,” Monk said, ignoring her question. “Do you have any security camera footage of him?”

“Gee, I would never have thought of that,” Devlin said, hitting a few keys on her computer. An image came up on her screen of a man wearing a hoodie who was standing at an angle that blocked his face entirely from view. “But it’s useless.”

“The killer knew exactly where to stand to avoid being photographed,” Monk said. “He’d cased the place.”

“We have an even worse angle of him leaving,” Devlin said and showed it to him.

Julie, you may have noticed, didn’t contribute anything to the discussion. While Monk and Devlin were talking, Julie plopped herself down on the couch in Stottlemeyer’s office and got busy playing Words with Friends, a Scrabble-type game app, on her iPhone with her boyfriend. He beat her about nine times out of ten. She won only when she had Monk play on her behalf.

“So where does that leave us?” Monk asked.

“Us?” Devlin said. “I don’t know what you’re doing, but I’m searching for any enemies Zuzelo might have had.”

“Who opens his door and invites his enemy into his apartment?”

“You know what they say—keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”

“That’s idiotic,” Monk said. “Who says that?”

“Sun Tzu in
The Art of War
.”

“He should retitle it
The Art of Losing a War
.”

“He’s been dead for thousands of years.”

“Killed, no doubt, by an enemy that he let get up close to him. Everybody knows you keep your enemies as far away as you possibly can. If you can’t do that, the very least you should do is close your door. That’s what doors were designed for—to keep your enemies out. And wild animals, of course.”

“Of course,” Devlin said. “In any case, I can’t find anybody with a grudge against Zuzelo. He was a retired high school math teacher, for God’s sake. He led a pretty quiet life.”

“He’s a lot quieter now,” Monk said. “Have you had better luck on the Bruce Grossman case?”

“Now there’s a guy with lots of enemies. One of the ways that he saved the companies that he took over was by closing stores or factories and slashing jobs. The challenge will be narrowing the list of people who wanted him dead down to just a few names.”

“What company was he running at the time of his murder?”

“None. He hasn’t been in a corporate suite in three years. He’d lost his mojo. On his last few gigs, he performed worse than the guys he replaced. He’s the genius who pushed out Cleve Dobbs at Peach and then released the Pit.”

Of course, Monk didn’t know anything about the Personal Internet Telephone, derisively known as the Pit, the lame and disastrous follow-up to Dobbs’ revolutionary and adorable Peach multimedia recording device. That’s because Monk didn’t participate in, or follow, American popular culture or the devices that shape it. He was unaware that the pocket-size Peach, and the company that Dobbs founded of the same name, had changed the way we record and share home movies and all but rendered the camcorder extinct overnight.

Monk was still only slightly familiar with a mouse, mostly because he refused to use any device named after a rodent.

“You don’t know who Cleve Dobbs is, do you?” she asked.

“No idea,” Monk said.

“His memoir is the number-one bestselling book in the country and he created Peach, a company rivaled only by Apple for technological innovation.”

“I am familiar with peaches and apples,” Monk said. “But not the electronic versions.”

“How can you possibly expect to be an effective investigator if you don’t keep up on modern technology?”

“Murder is as old as man. Look no further than Sun Tzu. It is also disorder. All I’ve got to do is look for the things that don’t belong, are out of place, unbalanced, uneven, or missing, and if I try to restore the order, and clean up the mess, the truth will reveal itself.”

“And what if that thing that is not where it’s supposed to be has something to do with a Peach, or an iPad, or some other piece of technology that everybody, including toddlers who can’t even talk yet, and perhaps even some domesticated animals, are familiar with and you are not?”

Devlin’s phone rang before Monk could reply, which is a shame, because I would have been curious about his answer to that question.