Mr. Monk Gets on Board (7 page)

Back in my cabin, I brushed my teeth and hair and changed for my evening of dining and forced smiles. Then I put in a ship-to-shore call to Ellen Morse. It would be expensive but worth every cent.

“He’s where?” Ellen said, sounding more upset than surprised.

“On a cruise ship with me,” I said. “I’d love to explain every charming detail, but I’m being charged by the second, and I’ve had only two small glasses of wine.”

“I was just about to go over to his place and cook him dinner,” she said. “Meat loaf and peas and pound cake. He knew I was coming. He insisted on the menu.”

“Sorry. That was all part of his hush-hush operation.”

“Unbelievable.”

By the end of the one-minute-fifty-two-second call, Ellen had agreed to grab the first flight down to Catalina Island tomorrow and take full custody. The woman was a saint.

   C
HAPTER EIGHT

Mr. Monk’s Cure for Snoring

M
y first evening aboard the
Golden Sun
could not have gone better. Three criminal defense attorneys from three of the biggest firms in San Francisco had taken my card and expressed a real interest in using us on their most difficult cases, even after I’d explained that Monk wouldn’t work for a client who was guilty and that he almost always knew when a client was guilty.

“Glad to hear it,” said Gregor Melzer in an accent that was certainly Slavic and probably Russian. He had been the man across the lounge in the gray, expensive haircut and the Tommy Bahama shirt. He had changed into a gray suit that almost matched his hair. “We can use him as a Geiger counter,” he joked. “Not that we won’t wind up representing them. But it’s always nice to know.” On second thought, it probably wasn’t a joke—or a bad idea.

“As long as you pay us,” I said. I handed Gregor a business card and watched as he slid it into his wallet.

After our very successful dinner, Malcolm and I took a leisurely stroll around the Valencia deck, then up one flight and around the Granada deck. I don’t know what it is, but there are some people with whom you have to struggle to make any kind of conversation, and others who just make it so easy. Malcolm was one of the easy ones. And his Louisiana lilt didn’t hurt. Every time we spoke, about anything, the words just flowed, as if we’d been talking like this for years.

I do have to admit to a little distraction that evening. As we passed by the rows of lifeboats on each deck, I couldn’t help checking them for any signs of entry. Nothing. Good. I had not seen Monk at dinner, but to my knowledge he was no longer hiding in lifeboats.

The next morning, I woke up in a good mood. In a few hours, the ship would be docking in Catalina. Monk would be stepping onto dry land and into the arms of his girlfriend—although, now that I think of it, I’ve never actually seen them in each other’s arms.

My mood lasted until after I finished my morning routine, got myself dressed and brushed, and started fantasizing about sizzling bacon and fresh-brewed coffee. That’s when I swung open my door and found Monk asleep, nestled in a fetal position right in my doorway like a homeless man on a frigid night. He literally fell into the room just as a family of four scuttled by in the hallway, trying not to look.

“What the hell?” I screamed.

Monk was jolted awake. “Natalie, Natalie, Natalie.”

I scrambled to get him off the floor and onto my bed. He was in no shape to stand. “Adrian. How long have you been here?”

“Most of the night. Did you know your room number is 555? Not as symmetrical as room 000, but still a very nice room number.”

“You are not getting my room,” I said. Then I asked the obvious, although I really didn’t want to. “How did last night go with Darby?”

“Darby kind of fell out of sight,” Monk said. Turns out he meant that literally.

As Monk had promised
, after the lifeboat incident, he’d gone back to cabin 457 to try to make peace with his alcohol-loving roommate. While Monk had been away, Darby had sobered up and ceased to be his easygoing self. He had managed to reclaim his half of the space and made the measurements exact by drawing a line down the middle of the room with a black Sharpie.

Monk’s impulse, of course, was to erase the offending line and vacuum the rug. But Darby stopped him. “Keep all your crap on your side,” he warned. “And your creepy little noises.”

The sink, Darby explained, would be on his side and the bathroom on Monk’s, although each would have visitation rights. According to Monk, Darby’s side was admirably roomy, except for the scattered clothes and littered beer cans. Monk’s side now resembled a child’s bedroom fort, with walls and passageways made of neatly stacked accessories, hanging clothes, and dozens of bottles of Fiji Water.

“Where are the backup batteries to my backup alarm clock?” Monk asked as he frantically searched and restacked his fortress.

“You, my friend, are a lunatic,” Darby explained. “But you are not going to ruin this week for me. Understand?”

In just a few more minutes, they succeeded in annoying each other enough that they both stalked out of cabin 457. I’m not sure what Monk wound up doing for food that night. As I said, I hadn’t seen him in the dining room.

At some point—he didn’t recall when—Monk came back and found the cabin empty. He borrowed the bathroom for two hours, then squeezed into bed, pinning himself under the covers, blankets pulled up to his chin. He didn’t say so, but I imagine there was some whimpering involved.

Later that night, Darby stumbled his way into his side of the cabin, coming home from one of the many shipboard bars, no doubt. The man collapsed into his own bed and promptly began snoring.

Now Monk doesn’t appreciate snoring. Even his own snoring sometimes keeps him awake. Maybe if his roommate’s had been soft and perfectly timed like a metronome, Monk could have made an effort to endure it. But Darby’s snores were erratic and explosive, and Monk dealt with them as long as was humanly possible—approximately eleven seconds, according to his backup clock.

His first try at a solution was to cross the black Sharpie line and gently shake Darby’s shoulder. This did nothing. The man barely moved, and his snorts were uninterrupted. Monk tried a harder shake. Then a harder one and another, until he felt like he was going to dislocate the fellow’s shoulder. His final push was enough to send Darby tumbling to the floor.

Monk scuttled into the safety of the bathroom and slammed the door. But he could still hear. Darby’s tumble had had no effect on the sounds escaping his lips. Monk emerged in a quandary. Here was a man seemingly impossible to revive. And yet Monk had to wake him. Maybe a good slap to the head. But if the slap woke him up, wouldn’t he attack Monk? Most men would.

Darby McGinnis lay faceup on the carpet. The vibration from the snores alone would have kept Monk agitated, so he couldn’t let this go on. No way. And then the idea of breath came to him. If this man couldn’t breathe, Monk reasoned, he couldn’t snore. He would have to wake up.

It took Monk several excruciating minutes to wad up the tissues in just the right shape and size, and long enough so he would never have to touch Darby’s face. The first tissue slid effortlessly into the snoring man’s left nostril. This had no effect except to redirect the airflow. So it was time for the second tissue into the second nostril.

The result of tissue number two was that Darby’s open mouth fell even further open and his volume intensified.

Monk was left with no choice, at least in his mind. He found a washcloth in the bathroom, wadded it into a ball, slipped it into Darby’s mouth, then hurried back into his bathroom fortress. Just in case.

It turns out that completely cutting off someone’s air supply can have quite an immediate effect. Monk was barely out of the way when Darby, the balding, aging frat boy, began jerking his head and sputtering for breath. He groggily gasped into his washcloth and, when that didn’t work, pawed at his nose, and when that didn’t work, became fully, desperately awake. But still drunk.

In a matter of seconds Darby was on his feet, his mind not quite aware of his predicament. He grasped at the washcloth and pulled it out. But he was still oxygen deprived and still in a panic and suddenly aware of these foreign objects in his nostrils.

All he seemed to know at that moment was that he needed air. And that led him to stumble toward the balcony and push open the glass slider.

“He just banged up against the railing,” Monk confessed to me, his hands flailing. “It wasn’t my fault. Those railings are meant to handle a lot more weight than that.”

“What? You’re saying the balcony railing broke?” I slapped him on the arm. “Adrian.”

“Ow.” He massaged the arm. “Now you have to hit me on the other one.”

“Gladly.” And I did. “What the hell were you thinking?”

“Ow. It wasn’t my fault. The man was snoring.”

“Did he fall?” My mind was reeling. “Did he fall into the ocean?”

“He fell onto the balcony below. Eight and a half feet, by my calculations.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. The third-level balconies, as I knew from the ship’s map, jut out farther than the ones above them, almost like terraces. “Was he hurt? Did he break anything?”

“I don’t know,” Monk said. “I ran before I could find out. I’ve been here in your doorway for hours and hours. Honestly, I expected you to be up before now. You’re being a bit of a slugabed.”

“Slugabed?” I let that one go, having more important things to worry about. “Okay. Did Darby see you last night when he came in? Did you speak to each other?”

Monk thought for a second. “No. He was skunk drunk, and I was behind a wall of Fiji Water, pretending to be asleep.”

“Good,” I said. “Adrian, you stay here. If anyone comes and asks, tell them you were here in my room all night.”

“You mean I can stay here? Where are you going to stay?”

“No, you cannot stay here. Just say you did.”

“Can I rearrange your room? It really needs it. You’ll thank me later.”

“No.” I said it firmly, then grabbed my little ship’s map from the end table before scooting out the door. Infirmary, infirmary . . . Ah, there it was.

The
Golden Sun
’s infirmary was on level two, a small windowless room outfitted with an examining table, a few locked cabinets for supplies and drugs, and an alcove with a cot-like bed. The door was open when I got there. I didn’t know quite what I was going to say, so I went with the first thing that came to mind.

“Excuse me,” I said, knocking on the edge of the open door. “I was wondering if you had anything for sea sickness . . . Oh, Mariah. Good morning.”

Mariah Linkletter and the ship’s doctor, Dr. Aaglan—according to the tag on his white coat—stood by the examining table and seemed to be in the middle of a serious discussion. Mariah’s face lit up when she saw me. “Natalie? Do you know where your friend is? Mr. Monk?”

“Yes,” I said. “He stayed in my cabin last night. On the other bed.”

“So, he wasn’t in his cabin.”

“No. He and Mr. McGinnis don’t get along. Why? What happened?”

Mariah looked to Dr. Aaglan, who nodded and took over the story. “The couple in cabin 357 found Mr. McGinnis on their balcony at around three last night. He had apparently fallen through his balcony railing in a heightened state of inebriation.”

“Oh my God,” I said with convincing shock. “Is he all right?”

“No bones broken,” the doctor continued. He was a relatively young man, not much more than a boy, with the hint of some European accent. “Mr. McGinnis was mumbling something about being gagged, but I think that was a reaction to the vomiting.”

“Mr. McGinnis vomited quite a bit after his fall,” Mariah said. “Probably gave him the sensation of being gagged.”

Well, that was one piece of good news. But I wasn’t going to tell Monk about the vomiting. Even the mention of the word
vomit
has been known to make him vomit.

“I kept Mr. McGinnis here for an hour or so, for observation.” The doctor smiled sheepishly. “Truth is, he was snoring so loudly, I walked him up to his room and put him back in bed.”

“We were hoping to learn more from Mr. Monk about the fall,” said Mariah. “But I guess he wasn’t there.”

“No,” I assured them. “He wasn’t.”

I was so relieved that I completely forgot my seasickness. Dr. Aaglan had to remind me and give me a small packet of Bonine from his drawer of pharmaceutical samples.

Mariah and I left the infirmary together, and she walked me back up to level five.

“It’s hard to believe the railing actually broke,” I said. I was anxious to try to shift the blame away from the human factor.

I was reassured to see Mariah nodding in agreement. “We had a technician check out the balcony. Four of the six bolts that held the railing in place were gone, no sign of them on the upper balcony or lower. He couldn’t tell if they’d just been stripped away by the fall from wear and neglect, or whether they’d been removed.”

“Removed?” I was shocked. “What do you mean,
removed
? By a person?”

“We sent technicians to check all the balconies on the four hundred level. We called it a standard maintenance check. Four other balconies had the same problem, railings held in place by just a bolt or two. Accidents waiting to happen. Think of it: a young couple posing against a loose railing or a kid swinging on one? We were lucky Mr. McGinnis didn’t clear the lower balcony and hit the ocean.”

“So it’s almost a good thing,” I said. “McGinnis wasn’t killed, and you can repair the other balconies.” I was trying to put a positive spin on Monk’s ridiculous stunt.

“A good thing?” Mariah smiled. “I admire your optimism, Natalie.” And this coming from one of the most optimistic people I’d ever met.

“Maintenance failures can turn out a lot worse—you have to admit.”

“If it was a failure.”

“Are you saying this might have been deliberate?” I asked. “Someone sabotaging the ship?”

“Well, we’re checking the other levels, and we’ve found no problem. Not so far. Everything is tightly bolted and shipshape, so to speak. It was just on level four.”