Mr. Monk in Trouble (7 page)

“I certainly don’t,” I said. “I’m driving up to the motel, but you’re welcome to walk. It’s only a block or two.”

Monk looked warily down the dark, dimly lit street towards the motel. “I could be mauled by a burro on the way.”

I opened the driver’s side door. “I’m going now.”

“Maybe an armed police officer could escort me,” he said.

“Couldn’t hurt to ask,” I said and got in. I was starting the ignition when Monk knocked on my window. I rolled it down. “Yes?”

“Could you go inside the police station and ask for me?”

“No,” I said.

“Isn’t that what I pay you for?”

“It might be, but my shift just ended. I’m on my own time now. Unless you’re paying for overtime.”

Monk grimaced, walked around the front of the car and got inside, put on his seat belt, and covered his nose and mouth with his hands as I drove to our motel.

The Trouble Motor Inn was shaped like a staple around a fenced-in pool. It was a flat-roofed, low-slung cinder-block building that looked more like a collection of storage units than a motel. We were booked into rooms two and four. I parked the car in front of room two.

Monk took one look at his simple room, with carpet about as plush as plywood, and asked me if I could get him the maid’s cleaning cart. I talked to the unshaven, sallow-faced manager, who insisted that the room was already clean. But I explained that Monk liked his rooms clean enough to perform open-heart surgery in them.

“You aren’t planning on drugging someone and removing one of their kidneys to sell on the black market, are you?” he asked.

From the yellow tinge of his skin, I wondered if that had happened to him.

“Not on this trip,” I said. “Maybe next time.”

He gave me a maid’s cart, which was stocked with a big laundry sack, a garbage bag, and plenty of assorted cleaning supplies, as well as a mop, broom, and vacuum. I wheeled it to Monk’s room, where he’d already stripped the bed and dumped the sheets on the floor.

“I knew I should have brought my own mattress,” he said.

“I would have had to tie it to the roof of my car,” I said. “It would have been covered with dead bugs and dirt when we got here.”

“It still would be cleaner than this one,” Monk said, scowling at the stained mattress. “It’s a good thing I brought plastic sheeting with me. You should never leave home without it.”

“That’s what all the professional assassins and serial killers always say.”

Murderers like to spread plastic sheeting over surfaces before they do their killing so they won’t leave blood or other trace evidence behind. Monk liked to do it to protect himself from whatever germs might be lurking around, waiting to pounce on him.

We covered the mattress in plastic, tucked it in, then we made the bed with the sheets and blankets that he’d packed for the trip. We removed all the towels, toilet paper, and tissues in the room and replaced them with supplies he’d brought from home.

I stuffed the hotel linens in the laundry bag and Monk began to clean.

There are professional crime-scene cleaners and hazardous material teams who don’t do as thorough a job as Monk does. The only way Monk could be more thorough was if he stripped the room to the studs and remodeled it entirely, which wasn’t something I’d put past him.

At the very least, I knew he’d be at it for hours and I wasn’t going to help, since I was officially off duty and, therefore, could pick and choose what tasks I was willing to do or what I would put up with.

After a long day with Monk, I admit I could get a bit surly and disagreeable. But I figured after all of our years together, he ought to be used to it and make the necessary adjustments in his behavior to lessen the risks for him, which he didn’t, either out of ignorance, stubbornness, or spite.

So I settled into one of the chairs and read aloud to Monk, my captive audience, from Abigail Guthrie’s book. It was the one way I could be sure that he’d at least give some attention to the story of Artemis Monk.

The Extraordinary Mr. Monk

The Case of Piss-Poor Gold

(From the journal of Abigail Guthrie)

TROUBLE, CALIFORNIA, 1855

T
he commerce in Trouble relied almost exclusively on gold dust, which people carried around in leather pokes tied to their belts. A pinch was worth about a dollar and just about everybody, from the clerk at the general store to the sporting women, had a set of scales.

It was usually the seller who did the pinching and it was common for them to engage in some trickery to gain a few extra grains of gold in the transaction.

Most of the bartenders, shopkeepers, barbers, and sporting women in town kept their nails long, the better to capture dust in a pinch, and in their spare time, rolled rough pebbles between their thumbs and index fingers to create indentations in their skin to trap more dust.

The shopkeeper at the general store went a step further. He was known for his abundant, and slickly greased, head of hair, which he smoothed before every transaction and then raked his fingers through afterwards as the customer was leaving. According to Monk, that was because the gold stuck to his greased fingers during the pinch and was wiped off in his hair afterwards. Each night the shopkeeper washed his hair into a gold pan and made more than most prospectors did squatting beside a river.

But I suppose it all evened out in the end, since many prospectors and miners were known to salt their gold with pyrite and brass filings to give their poke a little more volume.

Monk didn’t bother himself with those petty crimes but he did catch plenty of more ingenious thieves.

I remember one situation in particular, because it happened in the first few weeks that I was working for him and because it also happened to be the first murder I’d seen him solve.

It was a warm morning in September and I was indexing samples and updating his assay ledgers in the front office of his large, perfectly square cabin.

Monk kept a representative sample of the rocks that were brought in for him to test. He placed the sample in a jar and labeled it with the date it was tested and index numbers that corresponded to entries in a ledger that he kept of the various claims, their locations, and the owners. The ledger also contained the results of his assays. It was part of my job to maintain those records.

The shelves in the front office were neatly organized with sample jars, reference books, maps, and various rock specimens. His prospecting tools were carefully organized according to size, shape, and function. The tools rested on pegs in the wall specifically fitted for the individual implements.

The cabin was divided into four equal sections—the front office, which doubled as our kitchen and communal living area, the laboratory, Monk’s room, and my room.

Monk spent most of his time in the laboratory, where he worked at an enormous desk that he somehow managed to keep dust free, even though he regularly worked with rocks and dirt. The shelves were filled with the specialized tools, chemicals, crucibles, microscopes, and balances required for his trade.

The rear of his laboratory was reserved for the crushing of rock samples into dust, which he would then fire in the two-deck, clay furnace in the back as part of some complicated process I don’t pretend to understand. All I know is that when it was done, and the pulverized rocks had been melted, poured into cupels, cooled and cleaned and chemicals added, he could separate the gold from everything else and tell you how rich or poor your claim was likely to be.

Monk was in his lab when a young prospector walked into the front office. I immediately stopped him at the door and led him back outside to the porch.

“I need to see Mr. Monk,” he said.

“You can’t come in here like that,” I said.

“Like what?”

I could tell he was a greenhorn, fresh off the boat, train, or trail and eager to make it rich in the gold country. He had the same feverish look in his eye that my Hank, and hundreds of other men, had. But it was more than that.

His wool shirt was still a recognizable shade of red, his trousers weren’t patched, but both were covered with dirt. He had the blistered hands and stumbling gait of someone unaccustomed to working with a shovel and pick, or the long hours squatting in the cold river, swishing gravel around in a pan. He was thin from lack of good food and possibly a touch of land scurvy. His whiskers were mangy but not yet obscuring his youthful features and his hair was long but not yet wild and matted.

“You’re too dirty,” I said. “Mr. Monk only allows people inside who are freshly washed and dressed in their clean Sunday best.”

“This ain’t no church and I don’t want to marry him. I just want him to look at my rocks.”

“What is your name, sir?”

“Nate Klebbin,” he said.

“You can give me your samples, Mr. Klebbin, and I will take them in to Mr. Monk. You may wait here on the porch if you like,” I said, motioning to the guest bench. “Or I can fetch you in the saloon when Mr. Monk is finished.”

“I’ll wait here.” He handed me his sack of rocks and took a seat on the bench.

I went inside and carried the sack to Monk, who greeted me at the doorway of his laboratory.

“You have a new client,” I said.

“I know,” Monk said. “I could smell him from a hundred yards away.”

“You say that about everybody except me.”

“Because nobody except you in this town bathes and wears fresh clothes each day,” Monk said. “And many of them regularly sit astride filthy beasts.”

“You mean horses.”

“That’s what I said.” Monk took the bag from me and retreated to his laboratory, closing the door behind him.

“I’d ride a horse if I could afford one,” I said.

Monk never rode horses and believed they should be prohibited from the streets. If he had his way, everybody would have to hitch up their horses in a corral outside of town and clean up after them.

He emerged again a few hours later, a bewildered look on his face.

“Is there an animal being slaughtered on our front porch?”

Monk was referring to Nate Klebbin, who’d fallen asleep the instant after he sat down on the bench and had been snoring loudly ever since.

“That’s the fellow who brought in the sample for you,” I said. “He’s sleeping on the porch.”

“It sounds like he’s being murdered and yet it smells like he died two weeks ago.”

“I’m sure he’ll be flattered to hear that,” I said.

Monk opened the door and stepped out onto the porch, where Klebbin was snoring away. “Mr. Klebbin?”

The man was too deep asleep to be stirred by the mere mention of his name. So Monk reached back into the cabin, grabbed the broom, and poked Klebbin in the side with the handle.

Klebbin jerked awake. “What are you poking me for?”

“I’m Artemis Monk, the assayer. I’ve finished studying your sample.”

Klebbin sat up straight, his eyes flashing with excitement. “Did you find color?”

“I did,” Monk said.

“A lot of it?”

“Enough to indicate the possibility of much more to be had with hard labor,” Monk said.

“Yee-haw!” Klebbin said.

“I wouldn’t yee or haw just yet,” Monk said. “Where is your claim?”

Klebbin reached into his shirt for a folded sheet of sweat-stained paper, which he held out to Monk. “It’s right here.”

Monk took a step back as if he were being offered a dead rat. “I mean, where is your parcel located?”

“In a gulch west of Juniper Creek,” Klebbin said. “I bought it from Clem Janklow. You know him?”

Monk knew Clem and so did everybody else in town. Clem was a prospector who scraped by but never struck it rich, and what gold he did find he quickly spent at the saloon. He was always broke and perpetually drunk and relieved his prodigious bladder wherever, and whenever, the urge struck him.

This, of course, disgusted and infuriated Monk, who demanded that Sheriff Wheeler lock Clem up or throw him out of town. But Wheeler was reluctant to do either.

“If I lock him up, then he’ll just piss all over my jail,” Wheeler said. “And if I drive out everybody who pisses in the street, the town would be deserted. Besides, Clem can’t help it. He’s got a kidney ailment.”

“The ailment is whiskey,” Monk said.

Clem claimed it was more than that but that he couldn’t afford the medicine that would lessen his need for alcohol and relieve his kidney problem. Monk talked to Dr. Sloan, who confirmed Clem’s account and recommended an elixir known as Greeley’s Cure, which was used to treat syphilis, alcoholism, opium addiction, and digestive troubles.

So Monk had made a deal with Clem. He’d pay for the medicine himself if Clem agreed to stay out of the saloon and not to relieve himself on the streets.

Since then, Clem hadn’t relieved himself once in public and stayed away from the saloon. The bottles of Greeley’s Cure cost Monk several dollars a day, but he figured it was a small price to pay to save a man’s life and keep the community clean.

Now Monk’s face was turning beet red with anger.

“Why did Clem sell you his claim if it was still producing gold, Mr. Klebbin?”

“Clem told me he’s too sick and feeble to work it anymore, but it ain’t played out yet,” Klebbin said. “He’s got some kind of kidney problem from too much rotgut whiskey. It’s got so bad, he’s pissing day and night all over the place out there. You wouldn’t believe the stink, but I don’t mind if there’s gold.”

Monk shivered. “You’ve been swindled, Mr. Klebbin, and so have I.”

“But you found gold in them rocks, didn’t you?” Klebbin said.

“Indeed I did,” Monk said. “Stay here while I get the sheriff.”

Monk marched away and I hurried after him to Main Street. He kept his head down, watching the planks as he stepped on them.

“I don’t understand the trouble, Mr. Monk. Everything Clem told Mr. Klebbin is true.”

“That’s what makes it so infuriating,” Monk said. “The audacity of the crime.”

Monk stopped and pointed to a warped plank. I bent down and marked a big “X” on it with a piece of chalk so the wood could be replaced later. I carried the chalk with me at all times for exactly that purpose.