She was a sweet young lady and gladly welcomed Monk into her life. It gave them both something they were desperate for: a lasting connection with Trudy.
Those weren’t the only changes that happened in Monk’s world. The people around him also saw their lives change in significant ways.
Captain Stottlemeyer had a whirlwind romance with a magazine reporter and married her, all in the space of a few weeks.
Her name was Trudy. Honestly. I’m not kidding.
And if you think
that’s
strange, get this: Lieutenant Randy Disher, Stottlemeyer’s right-hand man, abruptly quit the force to become the chief of police in Summit, New Jersey. He didn’t take the job just because it was a wonderful opportunity to be the boss and run his own department.
He did it to be close to his girlfriend, a recently divorced woman.
Her name?
Sharona Fleming.
That’s right, Randy fell for Monk’s former nurse and the woman who preceded me as his assistant.
As for me, some big changes were going on in my life at the same time, too. My daughter, Julie, left home to live in the dorms at UC Berkeley, and I got into a pretty serious relationship with navy lieutenant Steve Albright, who’d been a friend of my late husband, Mitch, a navy pilot who was shot down over Kosovo.
I knew that Steve spent a lot of time at sea in a submarine. But what I
didn’t
know was that he had a girl in every port and that he wasn’t going to drop them just because he had a girl in this one. So I gave him the heave-ho and was back to being single, and I was feeling it more than ever before now that Julie was gone and I had the house to myself for the first time.
After that flurry of change, though, things settled down and Monk and I went back, more or less, to our old lives. And yet I detected a difference. Monk seemed content in a way that I’d never seen before.
One day in his apartment, as he was cleaning his cans of disinfectant spray with disinfectant wipes, he actually admitted it.
“Have you noticed that things seem a lot more even lately?”
“You’re saying that you’re happy.”
“I’m saying that I don’t see as many things that don’t match, or that are out of place, or that are oddly numbered.”
“Maybe that’s because you aren’t looking for them as much,” I said. “You’re easing up.”
Monk shook his head. “No, that can’t be it. The world is just more even.”
“And why do you suppose that is?”
“Because my years of hard work are finally paying off,” Monk said.
“With your shrink,” I said.
“With humanity,” Monk said. “People around here are finally seeing reason.”
“And that makes you happy?” I said.
He rolled his shoulders. “It makes me slightly less miserable.”
An essential part of Monk’s even life was routine. And for us, it was routine to start a day looking at a corpse. A few minutes after that conversation, we got invited to see one.
It’s going to sound odd to say this, and I mean no disrespect to the dead, but it felt like all was right with the world.
CHAPTER TWO
Mr. Monk and the Seventeen Steps
W
e weren’t going to a murder. We were going to a suicide.
That didn’t mean there was anything suspicious about the case. It was standard procedure for the police to investigate unattended deaths, especially those involving a gun.
But Monk wasn’t usually called for suicides unless there was a connection to another case he was investigating, or the victim was really high profile, or the situation was just plain weird, like someone killing himself by gorging on Ding Dongs.
None of those scenarios applied this time. In fact, it was so routine that it wasn’t even Captain Stottlemeyer who called us. We got the call from an officer at the scene who didn’t know any of the details except the victim’s name and address in Dogpatch, the industrial flatlands between Potrero Hill and the decaying shipyards of the city’s eastern waterfront.
Nelson Derrick, the dead man, lived on Tennessee Street in one of a handful of surviving Victorian-style single-family cottages built on narrow strips of land in the 1880s for the workers who toiled in the factories and shipyards.
Derrick’s cottage was built over a garage that would be a tight fit even for a Corolla. The front of the house was covered in gray scalloped shingles, with a heavy, protruding cornice arched like a raised eyebrow over the single front window, as if the cottage disapproved of having to look at the weedy asphalt parking lot across the street. A long, steep staircase spilled from the front door to the ground next to an inconveniently placed electrical pole that bore the scars of numerous violent encounters with car bumpers.
There was a warehouse on one side of the house and a once-identical cottage on the other that some moron had contemporized into blandness by removing the cornices, adding a huge picture window, and smearing every surface with stucco. There was a “For Sale” sign stuck in the neighbor’s flower box.
We climbed up the front steps, Monk counting each one as we went, until we reached the young police officer who was manning Derrick’s door. He looked barely older than my daughter.
“Seventeen,” Monk said.
“I’m twenty-three,” the officer said, clearly self-conscious about his boyish appearance.
“I was talking about the number of steps.”
“Oh,” he said, his cheeks reddening slightly. “Is that significant?”
“Very,” Monk said, stopping to examine the door, which had obviously been broken open.
“What does the number of front steps have to do with the man committing suicide?” the officer asked.
“That’s like asking me if going completely broke, being diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer, or being dumped by his wife for his best friend might have contributed to a suicidal depression.”
Monk studied the doorknob, the dead bolt, and then the splintered doorframe and the chain-bolt assembly that had been torn, screws and all, from its mounting by the force of someone’s well-placed boot.
The officer looked totally baffled. “But we’re only talking about steps.”
“Odd numbered and treacherous, a glaring flaw indicating not only shoddy construction but profound moral decay,” Monk said. “Ask yourself this: What kind of man would live in a home like that? Only someone totally beaten down by life, unable to escape from his own bottomless financial and spiritual squalor, would trudge up and down those stairs of despair each day, continually reminding himself of his pitiful, worthless, doomed existence. Putting a gun to his head must have been sweet release.”
The officer stared at him. “Because he had seventeen steps?”
“It’s a cruel world. And that’s on a good day.” Monk lowered his head and stepped inside, examining the hardwood floor and colliding with a man in the narrow entry hall who was doing the same thing.
“Oh, pardon me,” the man said, flustered and backing out of Monk’s way.
The man appeared to be in his forties, with a frosting of gray hair at his temples and the first etching of age around his eyes. He was tall, square jawed, and wearing an impeccably tailored navy blue suit, a white shirt, and a red and white striped tie that made him appear positively presidential, if not for the three bandaged fingertips on his right hand.
That’s when Captain Stottlemeyer stepped out of the book-lined study to our left, which was crowded with half a dozen crime scene technicians who blocked our view of the body. Since his marriage, the captain had started to pay attention to his personal appearance. His bushy mustache was neatly trimmed, his hair was combed, and his clothes didn’t look as if he’d slept in them.
“Thanks for coming down, Monk,” the captain said. “I see you’ve already met David Hale.”
“Actually, we haven’t met,” Monk said. “We bumped into each other.”
It would have been hard not to, even if they weren’t both looking at the floor. The entry was very cramped. The three of us were standing so close together that we were practically having a group hug.
“I’m sorry,” Hale said. “I guess I’m still dazed from the shock. I can’t believe that Nelson did this to himself.”
“Didn’t you see the steps?” Monk asked.
“Steps?” Hale said. “Are you saying I could have prevented this?”
“No one is blaming you, Mr. Hale,” the captain said, then turned to Monk. “Nelson Derrick was a writer, Monk. Mr. Hale was his agent. He’s the one who discovered the body.”
“Nelson was my client for over ten years. He was a deeply troubled man, frequently depressed, occasionally suicidal, but I really thought he’d gotten past that.”
“You just didn’t want to see it,” Monk said. “Nobody wants to look at seventeen steps. It’s probably what drove his neighbor away.”
“I just don’t get it,” Hale said. “Everything was going so well for Nelson lately. In fact, we were supposed to meet this morning for a very important breakfast with an editor to discuss a new book contract. But Nelson didn’t show. I called him repeatedly, but there was no answer, so I came right over. I banged on the door for a while, then tried to peek in the window. The curtains were closed, but there was a tiny gap, and I saw him slumped over in his desk chair. I immediately called the paramedics.”
Hale gestured down the short hall to the kitchen, where two paramedics sat at the table, sipping coffee out of white disposable foam cups. One of them picked at the rim of his cup and wiggled his leg impatiently.
“They broke down the door,” Hale continued. “But it was too late. There was nothing they could do for him.”
Monk started toward the kitchen, but Stottlemeyer grabbed him by the arm.
“Let it go, Monk.”
“We have to stop him,” Monk said, almost pleading.
“There’s no law against picking at a cup,” Stottlemeyer said.
“There’s something called basic human decency,” Monk said. “Look, the entire rim is ragged.”
“It’s only a cup, Monk. No one is getting hurt.”
“Would you be saying the same thing if he was clubbing a baby seal?”
“No, I wouldn’t, because clubbing baby seals is actually illegal.”
“Oh God, now he’s poking a hole in the side,” Monk said. “He’s putting his finger right through.”
“He’s just impatient and eager to leave,” I said. “Look at the way he’s wiggling his foot. The faster we’re out of here, the sooner he’ll get going and stop picking at his cup.”
I turned Monk back toward the study.
Stottlemeyer glanced at Hale. “Would you mind sticking around in case we have some more questions?”
“Of course not,” Hale said, and shifted his gaze back to the floor.
“You can go outside if you like,” Stottlemeyer said. “Just don’t stray too far.”
Monk looked once more over his shoulder at the paramedic, cocked his head with curiosity, then faced the study. He tugged at his sleeves.
“Okay, let’s do this,” he said.
Stottlemeyer addressed the forensic techs who crowded the study. “Okay, everybody out, the detectives need the room.”
The forensic techs filed past us out the front door, leaving only a female detective and the body.
Nelson Derrick sat with his back to us in a leather desk chair that had been patched with duct tape. He wore a bathrobe, sweatpants, and untied running shoes. His body was draped over an armrest, and the top of his head was blown off. The gun was on the floor, just out of reach of his dangling arm.
There was an old IBM Selectric typewriter with a sheet in the carriage, a neat stack of manuscript pages splattered with blood, an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts, two cans of Coke, and an open bag of Cheetos.
Monk cocked his head from side to side, held his hands up in front of him, and framed the scene like a movie director as he ventured slowly and deliberately into the room, weaving and dipping and swaying as if he were doing some kind of tai chi.
He went from the body to the bookcases, stopping briefly to examine a few framed photos. The pictures showed a younger Derrick, sitting at his typewriter, his index fingers poised over the keys, a cigarette dangling from his lips, and a bottle of scotch within close reach. There was something self-conscious about him, as if he knew everything about the staging and his pose was a cliché.
The female detective watched Monk warily as he circled the desk. She wore faded jeans, a V-neck sweater with a white T-shirt underneath, and a leather jacket that looked as if she’d owned it, and abused it, for years. A badge and a holstered gun were clipped to her belt, and she wore them comfortably, like a construction worker carries his tools.
I figured her to be in her mid-thirties. She was pretty, but I could see every one of those years in the hard look in her eyes. She was tall and thin, with short black hair and a lean runner’s body. She was probably drop-dead gorgeous when she wanted to be, but I had a feeling that wasn’t often. I was willing to bet that she owned one dress, a dozen pairs of jeans, and no skirts at all.
She caught me studying her and met my gaze with a cold stare as Monk worked his way back to the desk.
“This is Lieutenant Amy Devlin,” Stottlemeyer said. “She’s transferred into homicide from vice, where she spent years doing undercover work, mostly infiltrating the drug trade.”
“I’d still be doing it if the judge in my last case had let me testify without showing my face,” she said, “but he didn’t. That bad decision burned me for good as an undercover agent.”
“Vice’s loss is our gain. Not many homicide detectives have her experience on the street.” Stottlemeyer gestured to Monk, who squatted beside Derrick’s body. “This is Adrian Monk, our special consultant, and his assistant, Natalie Teeger.”
We shook hands. She had a very firm grip.
“Nice to meet you,” I said.
She gave me a cursory nod and directed her attention to Monk, who was under the desk. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”