Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse (16 page)

“By having them spread diseases themselves?” Monk said. “What’s next? Having the kids drink cyanide-laced fruit juice to see how poison works? I can’t imagine how they teach sex education.”

“I have an idea.” Julie took the book from Monk and closed it. “How about if you quiz me for the test instead? Here are some of the questions.”

She handed Monk a piece of paper.

“I hope you plan on bringing extra gloves and disinfectant wipes to school tomorrow,” Monk said.

“Extra?” she said.

“You
do
take gloves and disinfectant wipes to school, don’t you?”

Behind Monk’s back, I nodded vigorously to Julie, and she got the message.

“Yes, of course, who doesn’t?” she said. “I just thought what I usually bring would be more than enough. So are you going to quiz me?”

Monk sighed with relief, nodded, and glanced at the paper. “Okay, here goes. What are pathogens?”

“Organisms that cause disease,” Julie answered, a confident smile on her face.

“Wrong,” Monk said.

Her smile faded. “That’s the right answer. I know it is.”

“The correct answer is everything.”

“Everything?”

“All organisms cause disease. Name four sources of pathogens.”

Julie bit her lip, thought for a moment, then ticked off the answers one by one on her fingers. “Another person, a contaminated object, an animal bite, and the environment.”

“Wrong,” Monk said. “The correct answer is everything.”

“Everything?”

“The entire world is a pathogen. Next question: What are the four major groups of pathogens?”

Julie tapped her fingers on the table. “Um, viruses, bacteria, fungi, and protists.”

“Wrong,” Monk said. “The correct answer is—”

“Everything,” Julie interrupted.

“Correct.” Monk smiled and handed the paper back to her. “You’re going to ace this test.”

“But what about the other study questions?”

“There’s only one answer for all of them.”

“Everything?”

Monk nodded. “Life is simpler than you think.”

 

Julie finished her homework and went to her room to IM her friends. I put away everything, expecting Monk to join me at any moment to lecture me on the proper arrangement of pots and pans or something, but he didn’t show.

The phone rang. It was Joe.

“We didn’t get a chance to talk when you came by,” Joe said. “And then you went across the street and didn’t come back. I kept waiting for you to come back.”

“Oh,” I said. Brilliant answer, huh?

There was an awkward silence, the likes of which I hadn’t experienced since high school.

“You missed all the excitement,” Joe said. “A bunch of people from the city engineer’s office and the Public Utilities department were here. Turns out Dumas has a tunnel under his house to the sewer and another one from the sewer into our basement.”

“I know; Mr. Monk was the one who figured it out,” I said. “Dumas has been digging up Roderick Turlock’s treasure of stolen gold coins.”

“Did he kill Sparky?”

“Afraid not,” I said. “Mr. Monk is still working on that one.”

“What about the mystery of your disappearing panties? Are you having any luck with that one?”

I almost said he could help me solve that mystery himself, but caught myself in time. Instead I said, “I’m really looking forward to seeing you Wednesday night.”

I supposed that could have been interpreted as conveying almost the same thought as what I didn’t say, but not so brazenly.

I don’t know how he interpreted it, because suddenly I heard the fire alarm bell go off at the station.

“Me, too, Natalie. I’ve got to run,” Joe said.

“Be careful,” I said, and we hung up.

My heart was racing, but for a whole lot of different reasons. One, I was excited. Two, I was nervous. And three, I was terrified, and not about our date. It was that alarm. It meant Joe was going to be rushing off to some fire. I knew that was what he did for a living—he was Firefighter Joe, after all—but the thought of him charging into some inferno made me queasy. I hadn’t felt that kind of queasiness since Mitch used to go off on his tours of duty. I felt it every time until the one mission when he didn’t return.

I went down the hall on my way to my room and walked past the open door of the guest room. I saw Monk lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling, his arms folded across his chest as if he were resting in a coffin.

I went into his room and sat on the edge of the bed. “Are you okay, Mr. Monk?”

“Yeah.”

“What are you doing?”

“Waiting,” he said.

“For what?”

“The facts to fall into place.”

“Is that what they do?”

“Generally,” he said, sighing.

“And you just wait.”

He sat up and leaned back against the head-board. “What’s frustrating about these murders is how simple they are. We know how they were done and we even know who did them. The challenge is finding evidence where none appears to exist.”

“You’ve had bigger challenges than this before,” I said. “You’ll figure it out.”

“This is different,” Monk said. “I usually have a lot more space to think.”

“Space?”

“I start and end my day in an empty house. There aren’t any people or distractions. Everything is in its place. Everything is in order. All that’s left is just me and my thoughts, and sometimes my LEGOs. And that’s when the facts of a case fall naturally into place, and the ones that don’t point me to the solution of the mystery.”

“And that’s not happening now,” I said.

“I’m still waiting.”

In other words, our messy house and our messier lives were too much for him. He longed for the peace, solitude, and sterility of his house. He was homesick. And my house was about as unlike his as it was possible to get.

“Would you like me to find you a hotel room, Mr. Monk?” I tried to make the offer as nicely as possible, so he wouldn’t think I was angry or offended, which I wasn’t.

“No, of course not,” he said. “This is great.”

At first I thought he was being dishonest, but then I wondered if, compared to the alternatives, staying with us really wasn’t so bad.

A hotel could be even worse. Maybe he’d hear the TV next door, or a couple making love upstairs, or kids playing in the room below. Even if he didn’t hear anything, maybe just knowing so many people were in the building would be enough to distract him. Or, worse, what if he couldn’t stop thinking of the hundreds of people who’d stayed in his room, slept in his bed, and used the bathroom? And if that wasn’t enough stuff to distract him, what about the horror of mismatched wallpaper?

Compared to all of that, our guest room must have felt like a padded cell—in a good way, if there is such a thing.

So what he was really talking about was me and Julie.
We
were the ones creating all the distraction.

I got up from the bed. “I’ll leave you alone to your thinking.”

“No, no, I’ll go with you,” he said, getting up.

“But what about all those facts that need to fall into place?”

“They’ll fall later,” Monk said. “The problem with having so much space is that I never get a chance to help someone with their homework.”

I smiled to myself. As afraid as he was of human contact, it was nice to know that even Adrian Monk still needed it.

 

 

 

 

When I got up at six on Tuesday, Monk was already showered, shaved, and dressed, and the bathroom tub was clean enough to perform surgery in. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he spent the night in the bathroom just to make sure he got to it first. If so, it’s a good thing neither Julie nor I got up in the middle of the night to pee.

The three of us had Chex cereal for breakfast in our brand-new bowls and swapped sections of the
Chronicle
among ourselves. There was an article on a back page about a warehouse fire last night, and how the roof caved in and sent two firefighters to the hospital. My throat went dry. Could that have been the fire Joe was called to? What if he was one of the firefighters who was hurt?

It was seven thirty, too early to call the fire station, unless I wanted to wake everyone up. I’d call later. Or maybe it would be better, I thought, to call now.

I was yanked out of my worries by the sound of a car horn outside, signaling that Julie’s ride to school had arrived.

Julie shoved all her books into her backpack, grabbed her sack lunch, and was heading out the door when I stopped her.

“Don’t forget your raincoat,” I said, taking it off the coat tree by the door.

She hated wearing her raincoat. She would rather get soaked from head to toe. The thing is, just a year earlier she had needed that raincoat more than anything else on earth. It was what everyone was wearing, and without it she would have been shamed out of adolescent society. The raincoat cost $100 at Nordstrom, but I found one for less than half that much on eBay. It was probably stolen, or a knockoff, but it saved Julie from disgrace, and she wore it every day, whether there were clouds in the sky or not. And then something happened, some great cosmic shift in society and culture. Raincoats were out; getting drenched was in.

“Mom,” she whined. “Do I have to?”

“There’s a sixty percent chance of rain,” I said. “Just take it with you. It’s better to be prepared.”

“So I get wet,” she said. “Big deal.”

“Take it,” I said.

“It’s only water,” she said. “It’s not like it’s acid.”

I didn’t have the time or patience to argue. I unzipped her backpack, rolled her raincoat into a ball, and shoved the raincoat inside.

“You’ll thank me later,” I said.

“You sound like
him
.” She motioned to Monk. It wasn’t meant as a compliment.

I was about to scold her for her rudeness, but he didn’t notice her disrespectful behavior. He was sitting straight up in his chair, lost in thought, and shrugging his shoulders as if neither one fit in its socket quite right.

Julie marched off and slammed the door behind her, but by that point her drama was wasted on me. I was watching Monk. I knew what all that shifting around in the chair meant—the facts were falling into place.

He knew what Breen left behind.

And I couldn’t help noticing that his breakthrough didn’t happen in some blissfully sterile environment of solitude, cleanliness, and order. It happened in my messy kitchen in the midst of a typical breakfast-table squabble between a sane, reasonable, rational mother and her deranged, unreasonable, irrational daughter.

“Do you have a computer with an Internet connection?” Monk said.

“Sure,” I said. “It’s not like we live in a cave.”

I regretted the comment right away, because I knew he’d take it as a dig. I didn’t mean it to be one; I just forgot for a moment that Monk doesn’t have an Internet connection at his house. He’s afraid of catching a computer virus, which is also why he doesn’t have a computer.

I went back to my room, got my laptop, and brought it to the kitchen table. I have a technogeek neighbor who designs Web sites for a living out of his apartment. He took pity on us and let us piggyback on his wireless network to use his high-speed connection. I was up and running and surfing the Net in seconds.

“What do you need?” I asked Monk.

“Can you get me detailed information on what the weather in San Francisco was like on Friday night?”

That was too easy. I was hoping for something a little more challenging so I could show off my Web-surfing prowess.

I quickly Googled my way to a site that tracked weather patterns, zeroed in on Friday night in San Francisco, and showed Monk his options. He could check out the temperature, rainfall, humidity, dew point, wind speed, direction, and chill. He could peruse satellite photos, Doppler radar, and 3-D animated views of the fog patterns and the movement of the jet stream.

“Can you show me when it was raining, hour by hour?” Monk said.

It wasn’t as impressive as watching the fog roll in and out in 3-D, but sure, I said, I could show him the rainfall, which was tracked in a straightforward graph. Bor-ing. The least they could have done was jazz it up with a few animated rain-drops rolling down the screen.

“Look,” he said excitedly. “There was intermittent drizzle and rain until about nine thirty, then it let up until about two A.M.”

How thrilling,
I thought. But what I said instead was something along the lines of, “What does it mean?”

“I’ll show you,” Monk said. “Could you search the Web and bring up the photos of Lucas Breen taken at the ‘Save the Bay’ fund-raiser that Disher showed us?”

I did a quick Google search that gathered about a dozen photos from the “Save the Bay” home page, various newspaper Web sites, and a couple of snarky gossip blogs (one of which speculated that Mrs. Breen’s trip to Europe the morning after the party was for “another facial refreshening” at a plastic surgery resort in Switzerland).

The photos were the same ones we had seen before of Breen arriving at the Excelsior in the rain with his wife and then the two of them leaving at midnight with the governor.

Monk pointed to the screen. “When Breen arrived, it was raining. You can see that he’s huddled under his umbrella and wearing an overcoat.”

Then Monk pointed to the picture of the Breens leaving the party. “But here, his umbrella is closed under his arm and he’s not wearing his overcoat.”

“Because it’s not raining anymore.”

“So where’s his coat? Why isn’t he carrying it?”

Good question. In light of everything that happened, I could think only of one answer.

“He left it in Esther Stoval’s house,” I said.