Mr. Monk and the Two Assistants (13 page)

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Authors: Lee Goldberg

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“That’s why we’re here,” Dozier said.
 
 
“He’s referring to the grass,” Sharona said.
 
 
“Why hasn’t anyone done something about this?” Monk said. “It’s an affront to human decency.”
 
 
“The ownership of the house is in dispute,” Dozier said. “Ellen Cole willed it to her lover, but her parents are contesting it, since the couple had an acrimonious split and were fighting over this house and custody of their two-year-old kid at the time of her murder.”
 
 
Monk, Sharona and I stared at Dozier. He looked back at us.
 
 
“What?” Dozier said.
 
 
“You never said anything before about Ellen Cole being in the middle of an ugly breakup,” Sharona said.
 
 
“Why should I?” he said.
 
 
“Because her lover had a much better motive to kill her than Trevor did,” Sharona said.
 
 
“But she didn’t kill her,” Dozier said.
 
 
“She?” Monk said.
 
 
“Ellen Cole was a lesbian,” Dozier said. “She and her lover, Sally Jenkins, lived together in this house with their kid before the breakup.”
 
 
“So Sally would have known the alarm code,” I said.
 
 
“Unless Ellen changed it,” Dozier said.
 
 
“Did you check?” Sharona asked.
 
 
He didn’t reply, which meant the answer was no.
 
 
“Maybe Ellen came home early and caught Sally in the house,” Sharona said. “They fought and Sally hit her with the lamp during the struggle.”
 
 
“There’s just one problem with that theory,” Dozier said.
 
 
“It would mean you screwed up,” Sharona said.
 
 
Dozier let that remark go. “Sally Jenkins couldn’t have done it. At the time of Ellen Cole’s murder, Sally was in Sacramento testifying in front of a state senate committee that’s considering a bill to legalize gay marriage. That’s what we in the detective trade call ‘an airtight alibi.’ ”
 
 
“Mr. Monk has broken better alibis than that,” I said, and turned to Monk, only to find him on his knees, measuringblades of grass with his finger and cutting them individually with a pair of nail clippers.
 
 
“Adrian,” Sharona said, “what are you doing?”
 
 
“Mowing the lawn,” he said, though it was hard to hear him mumbling from inside that mask.
 
 
“At the rate you’re going, it’s going to take you a month,” I said. “And by the time you’re done, everything that you’ve already cut will need to be trimmed again. You could be cutting this lawn for the rest of your life.”
 
 
“I can live with that,” he said, clipping another blade.
 
 
Sharona groaned, grabbed Monk by the strap of the gas mask and forced him to his feet. “We’re investigating a murder here, Adrian. Pay attention.”
 
 
She snatched the nail clippers from him and dropped them in her purse. “You’ll get these back when we’re done here,” she said and gave me a hard look. “You’re way too soft on him.”
 
 
“I try to be sensitive and understanding,” I said. “I think it’s more effective in the long run.”
 
 
“Where did you get that idea? If I treated him the way you do, he’d still be wearing a gas mask every time he left the house.”
 
 
It took Sharona a moment to realize the absurdity of what she’d just said. “As opposed to just occasionally,” she added.
 
 
“Big improvement,” Dozier said.
 
 
Monk walked up the path to the front door of the house with his hands on either side of his face to make sure that he wouldn’t see the overgrown lawn.
 
 
We joined Monk at the front porch, where he was scrutinizing the door.
 
 
“There’s no sign of forced entry,” Monk said.
 
 
“He came in through an unlocked window,” Dozier said.
 
 
“Didn’t she have an alarm system?” I asked.
 
 
“Yes, so he must have known the code,” Dozier said.
 
 
“How?” Sharona said.
 
 
“It’s easy,” Monk said.
 
 
“It is?” she said.
 
 
“Is the alarm activated now?” Monk asked.
 
 
Dozier nodded.
 
 
“Open the door but don’t type in the code,” Monk said. “Let me do it.”
 
 
“Sure.” Dozier unlocked the door and opened it, immediately triggering the alarm.
 
 
The loud, electronic wail sounded like a red alert on the Starship
Enterprise.
 
 
Yeah, I know that’s my second comparison to
Star Trek
, but so much of what was on that show is now part of our daily lives. Take a look at your flip phone or all the people walking around with those Bluetooth things in their ears like Lieutenant Uhura and tell me I’m wrong.
 
 
Monk stepped in and scrutinized the keypad. “The code is 1212333.”
 
 
I was stunned. “How did you know?”
 
 
“The one, two and three on the keypad are dirtier than the rest,” Monk said, stepping into the living room, holding his hands out in front of him like a director framing a shot.
 
 
The house was only about fourteen hundred square feet and very cozy, with lots of fluffy pillows on the furniture and plenty of paintings, mostly landscapes, on the walls.
 
 
“But how did you know the order of the numbers?” I said. “There must be thousands of possible combinations.”
 
 
“Monk figured it out the same way Trevor did,” Dozier said and punched in the code. The tones formed a familiar tune, “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” The alarm went off. “Trevor must have heard her deactivate the alarm one of the times when he was here gardening.”
 
 
“Over the sound of the mowers, the blowers and the ringing alarm?” Sharona said.
 
 
Monk seemed to be swaying to a rhythm only he was hearing as he moved through the living room. It was his observational dance, his method of picking up the details in the room and feeling the karmic traces of what had occurred.
 
 
“Maybe he wasn’t mowing or blowing,” Dozier said. “Maybe he was standing here, talking to her at the time.”
 
 
“That would make her awfully stupid,” Sharona said.
 
 
“That’s why she’s dead,” Dozier said.
 
 
I was still impressed that Monk figured out the security code thing and was surprised that nobody else was, especially Dozier.
 
 
“Aren’t you amazed that Monk guessed the security code?” I asked him.
 
 
“Not really,” Dozier said. “Ian Ludlow figured it out, too.”
 
 
“Ian Ludlow the author?” Sharona said, clearly surprised. “He was here?”
 
 
“Ludlow has helped me out on some tricky cases. He’s like our Adrian Monk,” Dozier said, then lowered his voice to a whisper. “Only sane.”
 
 
I knew who Ludlow was. It was impossible not to. You couldn’t step on an airplane without seeing one of his Detective Marshak novels in just about everybody’s hands. It made me wonder if there was some FAA regulation requiring airline passengers to read Ludlow’s books.
 
 
Ludlow must have had elves cranking out his books for him because there seemed to be a new title every month in the grocery store checkout line, in the place of honor and prestige, right next to the
National Enquirer
and the
Star.
 
 
Lieutenant Disher, who took a UC Berkeley extension class from Ludlow, once referred to the author as the “Tolstoy of the Mean Streets.”
 
 
I glanced at Monk, who was still examining everything, pausing to align pillows by size, straighten crooked pictures or alphabetize a bookshelf. It was his process and I didn’t dare intrude.
 
 
“I’ve been Ludlow’s technical adviser on his last couple of books, which were inspired by some of my cases,” Dozier said. “He creates the excitement. I provide the gripping realism.”
 
 
“So I guess in Ludlow’s next book Detective Marshak’s fly will be open the whole time,” Sharona said. “And he’ll send the killer’s murder weapon to Wisconsin.”
 
 
“What was Ludlow doing here?” I asked quickly, hoping to distract Dozier from gunning Sharona down for that remark.
 
 
“He was intrigued by the case,” Dozier said. “All we had at the time was a UCLA professor of gender studies found dead in her home. We looked at her lover and her students but we didn’t have any suspects. Ludlow helped us develop the leads that led us to
her husband
.”
 
 
Although Dozier was answering my question, he deliveredthose last two words directly at Sharona as if they were physical blows.
 
 
And that was exactly how she took them, but she probably deserved it for her crack about his technical advice.
 
 
“Was this where you found the body?” Monk asked from afar.
 
 
I’d been so caught up in my conversation with Dozier that I’d completely lost track of Monk. He’d wandered down the hall into the master bedroom.
 
 
There was a big four-poster bed in the center of the room that was covered with pillows and a fluffy, frilly comforter. I wanted to climb into that bed with a good book and never get out.
 
 
There were matching nightstands on either side of the bed. One had a lamp on it; the other didn’t. Now I knew where the murder weapon came from.
 
 
Before I met Monk, I never noticed details like that. Then again, before I met Monk, I never imagined anybody ran their doorknobs through the dishwasher every week.
 
 
The bed faced a flat-screen TV mounted on the wall above a waist-high entertainment center.
 
 
On one side of the room was a set of French doors that opened out onto a backyard patio. On the other was a wall lined with a dresser and vanity.
 
 
Monk stood by Ellen Cole’s dresser, studying the blood-stained carpet at his feet.
 
 
“We found her laying right there,” Dozier said. “The back of her head was a bloody mess.”
 
 
“Could you show me exactly what her position was on the floor?” Monk said.
 
 
Dozier hiked up his pants and curled up on the floor, facing the dresser, careful not to actually lay his head on the bloodstain.
 
 
Monk crouched beside Dozier and studied the detective’s position. Then he got up. He held his hands out in front of him, palms up, as if warming himself by a fire, and did a little pirouette, coming to a stop facing the closet.
 
 
He went over to the closet and opened the double doors.
 
 
The clothes that were hanging on the wooden bar had been pushed aside. Behind the clothes, there were several file boxes stacked against the back wall. On the floor, there were shoes, which had been cleared away to make room for one of the boxes.
 
 
Monk shook his head and groaned.
 

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