Mr. Monk on the Road (3 page)

“I need a pair of gloves,” Monk said.

Stottlemeyer reached into his pocket and handed him a pair. We all gathered around Monk as he slipped the gloves on and waited to see what evidence he’d found.

He began tying Derrick’s shoelaces.

“Why are you doing that?” Devlin asked.

“Because they are untied.”

“But he’s not going anywhere.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” he replied, tying one set of laces into a perfect bow.

“He’s dead,” she said, “so there’s no point.”

“They’re untied,” Monk said.

“So what?” she said.

“I thought that you said that you spent years working in vice.”

“I did.”

“Don’t you recognize a vice when you see one?”

“The untied laces or you getting freaky with a corpse’s feet?”

Monk finished tying the other shoe and looked up at Stottlemeyer. “She has a lot to learn about police work.”

The captain stifled a smile. He actually seemed to be enjoying this, even though this was usually the kind of Monkish behavior that gave him a headache. It was certainly giving me one. Marriage obviously had a calming influence on him. I debated whether I should get hitched just so I could be as easygoing as Stottlemeyer appeared to be.

Devlin turned to the captain. “I thought you only called Monk in on the tough cases.”

“We haven’t had any lately, so I figured this might be a good opportunity for you two to meet and get a feel for how each of you works.”

She shrugged. “Seems like a waste of his time to me. It’s an obvious suicide.”

Monk stood up and tugged at his sleeves again. “What makes it obvious?”

“Well, there’s the suicide note in his typewriter, for starters,” she said in a patronizing tone of voice as she tipped her head toward the paper in the carriage. “And there’s the gun on the floor, just beneath his hand. And there’s the fact that the doors and windows were all locked from the inside.”

“You left out the front steps,” Monk said.

“What about the front steps?” she asked.

“There are seventeen of them. It says a lot about his state of mind.”

“It does?”

“Ask the rookie officer out front later and he’ll explain it to you,” Monk said. “You’re going to need to be more observant if you’re going to last in this job.”

He leaned in to read the suicide note and missed the cold look that she gave him. I peered over his shoulder. The note said:

“What was the time of death?” Monk asked.

“The ME figures it was around three or four in the morning.”

“Nobody heard the gunshot?” I asked.

She looked at me as if I’d belched loudly in the middle of a wedding ceremony.

“There’s a parking lot across the street. It’s empty at night. The warehouse next door was unoccupied at that hour, and the neighbor’s house is vacant and on the market. There was nobody around to hear it.”

“How do you know Derrick wrote the suicide note?” Monk asked.

Devlin sighed with weariness. “Forensics positively matched his fingers to the prints they lifted from the typewriter keys.”

“Which fingers?”

“All of them,” she said. “We’re very thorough. There were no other fingerprints on the typewriter or anywhere else in the room. The victim lived alone.”

Monk looked at the note and at the typed manuscript pages, and then turned to Hale, who was circling the entry hall, staring at the floor. And then Monk tilted his head from side to side, as if trying to work out a kink in his neck.

I knew what that meant and so did Stottlemeyer, but when I tried to catch his eye, he pretended not to notice me. I think he was really enjoying himself, which made me wonder what he had against Lieutenant Devlin.

“Satisfied?” Devlin asked Monk.

“Totally.”

“I told you it was a simple case.”

“It certainly is,” Monk said. “A simple case of murder.”

CHAPTER THREE

I
noticed that David Hale, out in the entry hall, looked up from the floor at the mention of murder. I didn’t blame him. The word is always an attention getter.

Devlin glared at Monk. Apparently, she was not someone who liked being challenged on her conclusions. “Didn’t you listen to anything that I just said?”

Monk nodded. “You said the doors and windows were locked from the inside, there was a suicide note, and Derrick’s fingerprints were all over the typewriter keys.”

“So how can you say it’s murder?”

“Because the doors and windows were locked from the inside, there was a suicide note, and Derrick’s fingerprints were all over the keys.”

Devlin looked like she might pull out her gun and shoot him.

Once again, I noticed Stottlemeyer fighting a grin. I finally realized now the point of the whole exercise. He was exposing her to Monk’s unconventional methods on a relatively small case so she’d be prepared when an unusually perplexing murder came along.

Monk dealt with her like he did with everyone. In other words, he was doing things his way without caring about the impact of his actions on others. That was never going to change. So if they were going to have any kind of working relationship together, it would be up to her to learn how to adapt to him. But it wasn’t going to be easy. I knew that from long, and painful, personal experience.

She turned to the captain. “He’s not making any sense.”

“He’s saying that everything that points to suicide actually points to murder,” Stottlemeyer said, but this time he didn’t quite succeed in hiding his amusement, which only irritated her more.

“Yes, I know that, Captain,” she said, her voice and face tight. “But I don’t see how that’s possible.”

“Neither do I, Lieutenant. But Monk is going to tell us, and then you and I can feel stupid together.”

I didn’t think that feeling stupid was something Devlin was going to appreciate.

“Let’s take it from the bottom,” Monk said. “You told me that Derrick’s fingerprints were all over the keyboard. But Derrick was a two-fingered typist.”

“How do you know that?” she asked.

“You can see it in the photo on the wall, but, more important, you can tell from the calluses on the tips of his index fingers. Those are the only prints you should have found. Someone wiped the keyboard, typed the note, then put Derrick’s fingers on the keys.”

“Or maybe Derrick learned over the years how to type with more than just his two fingers,” Devlin said.

“Perhaps, but then there’s the suicide note itself.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“The paragraph indent in the note is two spaces, but if you look at his manuscript, all of the indents are five.” Monk pressed the indent key, and it jumped forward five spaces. “Whoever wrote the note used the space bar instead of the indent key.”

“That proves nothing,” she said. “It still could have been Derrick who wrote it.”

“It’s obvious that he didn’t. There’s no mention whatsoever of the seventeen steps.”

“What steps?”

“The ones out front,” Monk said. “He wouldn’t have overlooked mentioning them if he killed himself.”

“If that’s your reasoning, and I use that term very lightly,” she said, “then I’m confident in declaring this case a suicide.”

“You forgot about the doors and windows that were locked from the inside,” Monk said.

“No, I haven’t, but I’m glad you brought it up. It proves that it couldn’t have been murder.”

“It conclusively proves that it is,” Monk said. “If, as you believe, Derrick shot himself in the head at three a.m. and nobody was around to hear the shot, why bother locking all the doors and windows? Who was going to come running inside to save him?”

“He didn’t want to take any chances,” she said.

“Let me show you something,” Monk said and marched out to the entry hall, where David Hale was waiting.

We huddled around Monk as he pointed to the door.

“The doorknob and the sliding chain bolt were locked, you can tell because when the door was kicked open they splintered the doorframe or were torn off completely.”

“That’s not news,” Devlin said.

“But the dead bolt wasn’t locked. There’s no damage to the socket in the doorframe.”

We all squinted at the doorframe. He was right.

“I don’t see the significance,” Devlin said.

“The reason the dead bolt wasn’t used was because it was the one lock that the killer couldn’t set and still walk out the door,” Monk said.

“Neither is the sliding chain bolt,” Devlin said.

“He used a hook and a fishing line to lift the chain bolt and slide it into place before closing the door,” Monk said. “The only problem was that the line broke when he was dragging the hook back out again.”

“If that’s true,” she said, “where’s the hook?”

Monk turned and gestured to Hale. “That’s the same question he’s been asking himself.”

Hale shook as if someone had just thrown a big bucket of ice water on him. “It isn’t true. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Nelson Derrick’s head was blown off,” Monk said. “It’s an incredibly gruesome sight, particularly if the victim is a friend or loved one. Most people wouldn’t want to be anywhere near the corpse, but you haven’t left the entry hall since the paramedics arrived.”

“I was asked to stay,” he stammered.

“Nobody told you to remain in the entry hall,” Monk said. “You could have stood outside, or waited in the kitchen. But no, you didn’t, you remained here, your head down.”

“So I didn’t have to look at Derrick,” Hale said. “Surely you understand. You said yourself that it’s extremely difficult for the people who knew him to see him like that. I can see his brain, for God’s sake.”

“That’s not why you’ve been staring at the floor. You’ve been desperately looking for the hook.”

“That’s not true,” Hale said. “This whole theory of yours is absurd. There is no hook.”

“We’ll find it,” I said.

“I already have,” Monk said, and then abruptly pointed down the hall at the paramedic, who, by this time, had picked his cup into pieces that he’d gathered into a pile on the table. “I expect you to clean up that mess and seek professional help for your problem.”

The paramedic looked up, startled. “Are you talking to me?”

“Do you see anyone else in this house desecrating cups?”

“This?” The paramedic gestured to the pile. “It’s a disposable cup, not the freakin’ Holy Grail.”

“Monk,” Stottlemeyer said. “Forget the cup. Where’s the hook?”

Monk pointed to the paramedic again. “It’s right there, dangling from the bottom of the defiler’s left shoe. He snagged it as he came through the door.”

“You can see that from here?” Devlin asked.

“I saw it earlier when he was wiggling his foot.”

Devlin marched down the hall to the kitchen and stood in front of the paramedic. “Let me see your shoes.”

The paramedic lifted his feet and she examined the soles.

“I’ll be damned,” she said and came back toward us.

Stottlemeyer smiled at her. “I think this would be a good time to read Mr. Hale his rights.”

“And the paramedic, too,” Monk said.

“So there was a hook,” Hale said. “That doesn’t prove I had anything to do with Nelson’s murder.”

“The cuts on your fingertips do,” Monk said, motioning to his three bandaged fingers. “You sliced yourself with the fishing line trying to free the hook.”

Devlin pulled out a pair of handcuffs from behind her back and approached Hale. “Assume the position.”

Hale did. And while Devlin read him his rights, Monk went to the kitchen to lecture the paramedic about his responsibility to respect the sanctity of disposable cups, especially while in uniform. I won’t inflict the rant on you.

Stottlemeyer glanced at me. “Have you noticed that whenever Monk solves a murder on the spot, half of the time the killer is whoever discovered the body?”

I thought about it for a moment. “Maybe from now on you should arrest that person the moment you arrive at the scene. Half the time you’ll be right, your workload will plummet, and your case closure rate will skyrocket.”

“And the other half of the time the department and I will be sued for millions of dollars for false arrest,” he said.

Devlin led Hale out of the house and down to a squad car. We watched her go.

“I miss Randy,” I said.

“So do I,” he said.

 

There was one person in Monk’s tiny social circle whose life hadn’t changed over the last few months or even in the last few decades. I’m talking about Ambrose Monk, his older brother.

Ambrose still lived in their childhood home in Marin County and had been outside only twice in thirty years, once because his place was set on fire by a neighbor and later because he’d been poisoned by tainted Halloween candy (Monk was somewhat responsible for both of those incidents, but that’s another story).

The brothers weren’t close, but I had made it my mission to change that. I dragged Monk over the Golden Gate Bridge to Tewksbury to see Ambrose every couple of months, on major holidays, and on their birthdays, whether Monk liked it or not.

Mostly it was not.

I don’t know why. Maybe going back to the house where he grew up brought back memories of all his childhood torments, although they were pretty much the same as his adult torments. Or perhaps Monk was frustrated by his inability to talk Ambrose out of his agoraphobia. Or maybe Monk felt guilty for leaving Ambrose behind to pursue his own life.

It could have been anything. But if Ambrose resented Monk for keeping his distance, he rarely showed it. Ambrose had, after all, intentionally distanced himself from people, so he could hardly blame others for not rushing to see him.