Mr. Monk in Trouble (19 page)

The doctor left and a few moments later Monk came in wearing blue surgical scrubs and disposable white slippers. My purse was over his shoulder and he was carrying another folded set of scrubs in his hands.

“Where are your clothes and your shoes?” I asked him.

“The same place yours are, in the hazardous waste bin.” He handed me the scrubs. “The nurse will come in and help you put these on. While you do that, I’ll get your prescriptions filled and then a police officer will drive us back to the motel.”

He walked out before I could protest, not that I had any intention to. The nurse helped me dress, eased me into a wheelchair, and wheeled me out to the waiting squad car, which drove us the two blocks to our motel.

Monk led me into his room, insisting that it was more sanitary than mine, and got me into bed. He handed me a bottle of Summit Creek water and pulled up a chair beside me.

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

“Not right now,” I said.

“You’re supposed to take those pills with some food,” he said.

“I’ve got a few more hours until then,” I said. “We can order a pizza. Uncut, of course.”

“I’ve got my tape measure, but I forgot to bring string, a compass, a T square, and a level.”

“You’ll manage to cut the pizza without all of that,” I said.

“It’s going to be dicey,” he said.

“We’ve been in dicier situations,” I said.

“Speaking of which,” he said, “you’ll be glad to know that I don’t have a pants infection.”

“That’s a big relief,” I said. “You have no idea how much that was weighing on my mind.”

I knew that the sarcasm was completely wasted on him, of course, and that he was taking my words straight, but there’s no harm in amusing yourself when you feel like crap.

“But I insisted on getting a tetanus shot just in case,” he said.

“Good thinking,” I said.

We were quiet for a long moment.

“Thank you for saving my life,” Monk said. “You do it every day, but today you did it especially well.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. I just nodded.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “You can read me a story.”

The Extraordinary Mr. Monk

The Case of the Golden Rail Express

(From the journal of Abigail Guthrie)

TROUBLE, CALIFORNIA, 1856

M
rs. Cromartie, who ran a boardinghouse in Trouble, showed up at the door of Artemis Monk’s assay office one morning asking for help, but it wasn’t for his expert opinion on some rocks.

She came to him because Sheriff Wheeler, his deputy, and Dr. Sloan were all several long miles away, dealing with the aftermath of the robbery of the Golden Rail Express, which had occurred the previous night.

Although Monk was the town assayer, he’d developed a reputation in Trouble as a man capable of solving vexing mysteries, yet another reason people tolerated his many eccentricities.

Mrs. Cromartie was pretty eccentric herself. The widow was a large woman with a mustache nearly as full as those of the miners she rented rooms to. She wore a gun belt to ward off unwanted male attention, though from what I’d heard, for a pinch of gold and a bottle of whiskey, she’d gladly drop her gun belt and lift her skirt.

She’d come to Monk because there were two dead men in one of her rooms. She couldn’t tell whether they’d died of natural causes, murder, or some horrible plague.

Monk was eager to help, which surprised me. We almost had to run to keep up with him as he bolted out the door into the street.

“What if it’s plague?” I asked.

“We’ll have to burn the boardinghouse down,” he said with a smile. “Perhaps the entire block.”

Mrs. Cromartie gasped. “God, no. The boardinghouse is all I’ve got.”

“You’re hoping it’s plague,” I said to Monk. “Aren’t you?”

“All the buildings on that street are different heights, some aren’t even symmetrical,” Monk said. “It’s already a serious health hazard.”

“So they aren’t identical,” I said. “How is that unhealthy?”

“It strains the eyes and the sensibility,” Monk said. “It could drive a person with a weak constitution into total madness.”

I was tempted to ask if that was what happened to him, but I bit my tongue.

“Maybe that’s what happened to them,” she said.

I turned to her, startled that she’d practically read my mind, though she referred to her tenants and not Monk.

“You’re not serious,” I said.

“Last night Mr. Durphy, one of the two dead miners, was drooling and dancing naked outside of my room doing birdcalls,” she said. “I nearly shot him.”

“What do you know about the men?” Monk asked as we hurried along.

“They worked in the mill room of the Big Rock mine,” she said.

The Big Rock was one of the biggest mine operations in Trouble. Their tunnels went deep underground to dig up the gold-laced ore, which was pulverized into dust, then mixed with mercury in the mill room. The mercury drew out the gold from the ore into a malleable amalgam. The amalgam could be heated, or simply squeezed with a cheese cloth, to separate out the gold.

The mining company made every employee change their clothes before their shifts, then shower and change clothes again at the end.

Monk admired the Big Rock mine owners for that practice alone, but it wasn’t done in the interests of cleanliness. The owners wanted to make sure none of the valuable amalgam was being snuck out.

The owners even made the miners leap naked over a stack of logs before showering to make sure no amalgam was secreted away in body cavities. They also searched the miner’s lunchboxes, tobacco pouches, and any other containers they brought to the mine.

“Besides the naked birdcalls, have the men been acting strangely?” Monk asked.

“The other guy stayed in his room all the time. He only came out at night because the light hurt his eyes,” Mrs. Cromartie said. “I guess that’s what happens when you spend all day in a hole in the ground.”

“But he wasn’t in the mine,” I said. “He was in the mill.”

Mrs. Cromartie shrugged. “Then maybe it was the buildings on the street that made them mad as a hatter, like Monk was saying.”

Monk rolled his shoulders and tipped his head from side to side like he was trying to loosen a stiff neck. But I’d seen him do that before, right before he solved a murder.

We reached her boardinghouse, a long, simple structure that was, essentially, several one-room shacks lined up in a row and sharing thin walls.

“Which one are they in?” Monk asked.

“Number seven,” she said, pointing to the very last room.

“No wonder they were ill,” he said. “You should be ashamed of yourself, Mrs. Cromartie.”

“What did I do?” she asked.

“You put an odd number on the door,” Monk said.

“It’s the seventh room,” she said. “There’s nothing I can do about that.”

“You could build another room so you have eight of them,” Monk said.

“There would still be odd-numbered rooms, Mr. Monk,” I said in her defense.

“She could give them all even numbers,” Monk said. “Instead of rooms one through seven, you should have rooms two, four, six, eight, ten, twelve, and fourteen.”

“Don’t you think people would find that confusing?” Mrs. Cromartie said.

“You wouldn’t have as many dead tenants,” Monk said.

“You think
that’s
what killed them?” she asked.

“I’m sure it was a contributing factor, no matter what happened.” Monk stepped up to the door of room seven and, using a handkerchief, pushed open the door.

There was one bunk, a table, a bench, and two shelves. On the table was a large prospecting pan full of cigarette butts.

The two men were lying on their backs on the floor. One of them was, indeed, buck naked. I noticed their pink cheeks and fingertips.

“They’re miners,” I said. “But they’ve got shopkeeper’s fingernails.”

Their nails were long, the better to snag an extra few granules of gold dust with each pinch from a customer’s poke.

Monk turned to me and smiled. “Very observant, Abby.”

Abby.

It was the first time he hadn’t called me Mrs. Guthrie. I felt my face flushing and I didn’t know why.

Monk crouched beside the dead miner who was dressed, reached into the pocket of his pants, and pulled out a tiny shingle nail, which he held up to his eyes. He nodded to himself, then turned to Mrs. Cromartie.

“These men were gold thieves,” he said. “And so are you. If you pay for their proper burials and build an eighth room with the gold you stole from these two, your transgression will be our secret.”

Her face became as red as a tomato. I was afraid she might pull her gun and shoot him.

“They hadn’t paid me rent this week,” she said between gritted teeth. “I only took what I was owed.”

“You took far more than that,” Monk said.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “How did you know they were thieves?”

“It’s stealing the gold that killed them,” Monk said. “It was Mrs. Cromartie who solved the mystery before I even got here.”

“I did?” she said, totally perplexed.

“You said they were ‘mad as hatters,’ ” Monk said. “Indeed they were. These two miners died of mercury poisoning, just like the Huguenot craftsmen who went slowly insane making hats. Intolerance of sunlight, excessive drooling, pink extremities, and profuse sweating are just a few of the many other symptoms as the poisoning progresses.”

Monk explained that the two men probably dragged their long nails over the mercury tables at the mine every time they passed them, scooping up valuable flakes of amalgam. They stuck their hands in their pockets and worked the amalgam out from under their fingers with the shingle nails.

“Wouldn’t they have been caught with the amalgam in their pockets when they changed clothes?” I asked.

“They put the little balls of amalgam into their tobacco and rolled them into the butts of their cigarettes,” Monk said. “During their breaks, they smoked their cigarettes and tossed the butts in the trash. They collected the butts later, outside the mine, when the trash was hauled away and dumped.”

He reached into the bowl of butts and unpeeled one of them. Sure enough, there was a tiny bead of gold inside.

“What happened to the mercury?” I asked.

“They smoked the cigarettes too short,” Monk said. “The heat vaporized the mercury and they inhaled it with the cigarette smoke.”

“So them dying had nothing to do with the odd-numbered room,” Mrs. Cromartie said, sighing with relief.

“Their scheme was insane,” Monk said. “What do you think drove them to it?”

“An odd number on the door?” she replied incredulously.

“Undoubtedly. I hope you can sleep at night,” Monk said and, oddly contented, walked away.

It seemed to me that nothing made him happier than solving these little mysteries. Perhaps that was his true calling.

Unfortunately, he had no luck helping the sheriff figure out who’d robbed the Golden Rail Express. We learned later that day from the sheriff that the train robbers had killed three men, shot two others, and made off with thousands of dollars in gold coins from the wealthy mine owners from San Francisco who traveled on the private railroad.

Wheeler tracked the robbers back into town, where he lost their trail.

Since hardly anybody ever used gold coins in Trouble, Wheeler figured the robbers probably hightailed it to San Francisco with their loot. Nobody there would look twice at someone spending gold coins. That’s where the mint was and where most of the gold that was mined in Trouble and everywhere else in California was eventually sent.

After a week or two, nobody gave the robbery much more thought and everything went back to the way it was.

Except that Monk was still calling me Abby.

Of course, that was his prerogative as my employer, but it meant much more to me. I wondered what would happen if I started to address him as Artemis.

We were living under the same roof, after all. I washed and mended his clothes, I made his meals, and kept his records, but he never treated me like his servant.

I’d been saving my pay for a ticket back home to Kansas. But as my time with Monk went on, I felt less desire to leave. His home was beginning to feel more and more like mine, too.

One morning I was helping Monk with his elaborate sketches for an underground sewer system in Trouble—modeled after the one in Paris, France—when a man in a fancy suit and hat came in. Two men in decidedly less grand, and far dustier, attire stood behind him carrying some large rocks in their arms.

“Mr. Monk?” the dapper man asked, but he didn’t wait for a reply. “My name is Jonas Dehner from San Francisco. I have a sample I’d like you to assay swiftly and at your earliest convenience.”

“Now is fine,” Monk said.

I pulled out our ledger, dipped a quill into the inkwell, and started to ask Dehner the usual questions.

“Where is your claim, Mr. Dehner?”

“It doesn’t belong to me. It’s the Jump Off Joe mine, which is presently owned by Mr. Ed Barkley and his associates.”

We knew Ed. He came to Trouble about the same time as Hank and I. He didn’t have any money, so Zeb Graves, the owner of the general store, grub-staked him as he had so many others, in return for a share of any profits from the claim.

So far, Ed and his partners had done modestly well. But it was common knowledge that he didn’t have the means to fully exploit the mine’s possible potential.

It was a unique problem.

Because Ed and his partners were itinerant prospectors with no business background and no local roots, there was no bank willing to loan them the money to finance the digging of deep tunnels, the purchase of a stamping mill to crush the ore, and the hiring of additional labor.

So they either had to do it all themselves, slowly and laboriously over years, or sell out to someone with deeper pockets and move on.

It seemed prospectors got the short end even when they got lucky and found a solid claim.

“I know the mine,” Monk said. “Are they looking to sell?”

“Indeed they are,” Dehner said. “But don’t worry, Mr. Monk. I’m not some rube. I brought my own powder to the mine, drilled my own holes in front of my eyes, and blasted my own drift to expose virgin stone, which I have with me here now.”