Mr. Monk Helps Himself (28 page)

“No, no,” Monk repeated. But his protest was interrupted by a familiarly shrill voice.

“Mommy, is that you?” It was coming closer.

In a second, Monk was at the connecting door to the rest of the house, pushing the little thumb lock. Just in time, too. The doorknob jiggled and turned. “Mommy? Are you home?”

Alicia looked at the door, then at Monk. “Yes, sweetie, I’m home. Surprise!”

A squeal erupted. “Mommy, Mommy. I knew you’d come.”

“Happy birthday, sweetie. I’ll be there in a minute.”

“Why is the door locked?”

“Because I have a surprise for you. A birthday surprise.”

“Is it a clown? Is it J. P. Tatters? I love J. P. Tatters. He’s so funny.”

“Go back to the party, sweetie. I’ll be there in a minute.”

“Yay . . .” And the squealing voice faded along with her galloping footsteps.

Monk stood staring at the door, trying to figure out how to get out of this mess, when he was hit over the head by what was later determined to be a wooden baseball bat.

His last thoughts before passing out were, “At least I don’t have to be a clown. Death is better.” Or so he told me.

In the minutes after the garage door rolled down, we sat in the Subaru, discussing our options. Should we just wait it out? After all, Monk, despite all his Monk-ness was an ex–police detective, with my number on his speed dial.

Should we knock on the door politely? Should we draw our weapons and demand to be admitted? Should we have Devlin jimmy the lock to the pedestrian door, which would be an illegal and desperate move, but might save his life? Stottlemeyer suggested we anonymously call in a fire. There was a firehouse a few blocks away. They could be here in no time.

We kept giving Monk an extra minute. Another extra minute. Devlin got out and circled the house, scaling the fence on the right, then coming back over the picket fence on the left. “Nothing,” she reported as she got back in. Nothing but the screams of a dozen kids and the pleading voice of the Bulgarian housekeeper.

“Should we call in a domestic disturbance?” she asked.

We were all leaning toward the fire call when the pedestrian door to the garage opened and the staggering figure of J. P. Tatters emerged onto the driveway.

Stottlemeyer gasped. “Oh, my God. What have they done to him?”

It was a horrifying sight: the yellow fright wig, the red nose, the black-painted stubble, the hobo clothes that Monk had insisted on washing and starching and ironing for no logical reason except that he might have foreseen just such a nightmare scenario. The starched tatters, springing out at all angles, could have been the basis for a new series of horror movies.

Stottlemeyer turned to me. “This’ll put him back years. Natalie, get Dr. Bell on standby.”

No one followed him out of the house. All on his own, he walked uncomfortably, self-consciously to the sidewalk. Then, instead of crossing the street, he made a right turn, picked up a little speed and headed for the corner.

I canceled my call to Dr. Bell, revved the Subaru, put it in gear, and made a quick three-point turn in a neighbor’s drive. By the time we turned the corner, the stumbling clown was halfway down the residential block. Luckily it was a one-way street, so driving up beside him wasn’t a problem.

Captain Stottlemeyer leaned out the window. “Monk?” But he kept on walking, even faster now. He had already crossed another street and was onto the next block. “Monk!” Why wasn’t he stopping? Or speaking? “Monk!”

I looked over from my driving and saw the one thing that Stottlemeyer didn’t. “It’s not him,” I shouted. Sure, this guy was about the same size and same build and covered nearly head to foot in horrible distractions. But I could tell.

The clown must have heard me, because he started running now. It took all of us a second to get over the shock. Then Devlin was out of the car and chasing him down. Halfway along the next block, the clown made a sharp right, heading up a driveway, probably into someone’s backyard. Devlin followed.

We sat there, Stottlemeyer and me, trying to make sense of it. It didn’t take long for us to realize the only explanation. “Back to the house,” Stottlemeyer shouted. “Now!”

I stepped on the gas and almost ran the next stop sign.

I knew I needed to take a right. But the next street was one-way, which meant I had to take Broadway, which was always busy. The next possible right was Octavia, but that put me straight into Lafayette Park, where I had to take a left until Gough. The streets in this city can be so maddening.

By the time I got back in front of the Sacrament Street house, the damage had been done. The garage door was open again and the Mercedes was gone. Stottlemeyer drew his badge and pounded on the front door. “Police.”

A beefy Bulgarian woman with brassy blond hair finally answered. “Police?” she said, examining the held-up badge. “Good. Arrest me. For anything. I go peaceful.”

We stormed our way past her into the Armageddon that used to be a living room. Crepe paper hung in shreds from the ceiling. So did the head of a shattered donkey piñata. Hard candies littered the floor, along with donkey legs and the detritus of two dozen unwrapped presents.

The perpetrators of this chaos, from the sound of it, were all over the house now, thumping over our heads and running past the doorways like aliens in a high-voltage video game, except that we, the players in the midst of it, weren’t equipped with AK-47s.

“Where are the Harrimans?” Stottlemeyer barked.

“They gone,” Marina said. It was almost a wail. “Mrs. Harriman come in for two seconds. It makes the kids all crazy. Then they go to garage, mister and missus. I don’t know what happens in garage. But they drive off. They drive off and leave me with the crazies.”

“Where’s the clown?” I asked.

“What clown?” Marina said. “The clown don’t come. You think things would be like this with good clown?”

“So no one else came in from the garage? No one?”

“No one. Do you come to arrest me? Please arrest me.”

Devlin sprinted through the living room door, her service revolver drawn. She was breathing heavily.

“He got away.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Mr. Monk’s Vanishing Act

O
ne thing good about Captain Stottlemeyer: He knows crowd control.

Right away he sent Devlin and me to round up the kids, then ordered Marina to start making calls. Within ten minutes, the mothers started coming in their SUVs. Within half an hour, we were down to two resident little monsters: Celine and her slightly older brother, Thaddeus. Stottlemeyer then doled out a hundred dollars from his own wallet and told Marina, politely but firmly, to drive them over to the Swensen’s Ice Cream Parlor on Hyde Street. His treat.

“Ice cream?” Marina complained. “No. no. They have too much sugar now. Look at them.”

Stottlemeyer didn’t have to look. He could hear them through the walls. “This is a police matter, ma’am. Keep them out for an hour. Give them a salad if you want. But personally I’d recommend a double scoop of Sticky Chewy Chocolate.”

Once they were safely out the door, the three of us split up and made an illegal search from attic to basement to every corner of the garage. No Monk or hint of Monk.

“Is this a crime scene?” I asked, my heart in my throat.

“Technically, no,” said Devlin.

“What do you mean, no? Adrian’s been kidnapped.”

“We don’t know that,” said Stottlemeyer.

“Excuse me?” Alicia Harriman had just walked in through the connecting door between the garage and kitchen. That’s the trouble with hybrid cars. Half the time, you can’t hear them. “Who are you?” she demanded. “Where are my children? Where’s the party?”

Trying to explain something like this to someone who obviously knows more than we do . . . that’s above my pay grade. I let the captain take the lead, and he made an executive decision.

“I’m Captain Leland Stottlemeyer of the San Francisco police. We got a call from Adrian Monk from this address.” He pretended to check his notes. “Mr. Monk is a police consultant. He also works on the side as a clown.”

“A detective and a clown?” she asked, cocking her head curiously.

“It’s not as rare as you think,” said Devlin with a straight face.

“Your husband hired Mr. Monk to entertain at a party at this address,” the captain continued. “Would you mind telling us what happened?”

Yes, he was lying. She knew he was lying. But it was still a question that needed an answer.

“He just walked out,” Alicia said, raising her hands helplessly. “When I got home, he was in the garage, changing into his costume. He seemed distracted. I think the poor man has emotional problems. Does he have emotional problems?”

Suddenly the captain was on the defensive. “That’s not the question, Mrs. Harriman. What happened?”

“I think he has emotional problems. He was babbling something about clowns and murder. Then he just walked out.”

“That wasn’t him,” I said.

“What do you mean?” Alicia asked, her brow attempting to furrow. This woman was smooth. “Of course it was him.”

“Where is your husband?” Devlin asked.

“I told him what happened with the clown and he went out looking for him. We were very concerned.”

“And where did you go?” asked Stottlemeyer.

“I did the same. I took my car and started scouring the neighborhood. We were being Good Samaritans, Captain, trying to help a man who is obviously disturbed. You would think the police would thank us for this. Instead, I come back and find you in my house and everyone else gone. . . . Where are my children? You haven’t answered me.”

The captain stuck to the truth on this one. The guests had been sent home. The kids were at an ice-cream parlor, on his nickel, and the housekeeper was ready to run back to Bulgaria.

“Where is he?” I demanded. “Where’s Adrian Monk?”

“I don’t know,” said Alicia, her face hardening. “He came here pretending to be J. P. Tatters, a clown who seems to be deceased. Then he changed into his costume and walked out of the garage. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have my children to take care of and a dozen parents to apologize to.”

“That wasn’t him,” I said. “He would never dress as a clown.”

“And yet this was his part-time job.”

There really was no response to that, so I didn’t try.

Alicia escorted us to the door. “If you have any more questions, I’d advise you to contact our lawyer. I know we’ll be contacting him.”

The captain and I took a cab to the station, leaving Lieutenant Devlin with my Subaru parked conspicuously across the street. It wasn’t bad to have a visible presence, not in a case like this.

“They’re obviously in it together,” I said, pacing back and forth in the captain’s office with the door closed. “And she’s the brains. You can tell.” I stopped and took a breath. “Are they going to kill him?”

It was something neither one of us wanted to consider. “They’re not real killers,” said Stottlemeyer, “even though they’ve killed four times. They’re poisoners. There’s a difference between that and someone who has to face his victim and get his hands bloody. I think it buys us some time.”

“Do they own a gun?”

He had already checked. “No gun permits in their record. But obviously, they can’t let him go.”

“The question is, where did they take him?”

Stottlemeyer was at his desk, already thumbing through the Harriman file. “It’s a weekday, so their office is out of the question. They don’t own or rent any other properties in the city, not in their names or their company’s name.”

“It has to be somewhere fairly close.”

“There is one other possibility,” he said reluctantly.

I knew where he was going to go. I could tell from his tone and from the way he’d reacted when Alicia Harriman told her story. “It wasn’t Monk. I could tell.”

“But it’s not unreasonable,” he argued. “If Monk sucked it up enough to change into a clown, then maybe it got to be too much and he had one of those breaks Dr. Bell talks about.”

“A dissociative break,” I said.

This was certainly possible. Monk has done strange things when pushed too far, like one time having a gold grill put in his teeth when he was working for a gangsta rap artist. Who knows what he would do if forced into clown attire and makeup? But I knew what I’d seen. “It wasn’t him.”

“Look, I’m not saying the Harrimans are innocent. But maybe Monk is out there somewhere, catatonic and hunkered down. We have to consider that.”

I wasn’t about to. And I was angry with him for doubting me. I was just about to say as much when the phone rang. Stottlemeyer instantly picked it up and put it on speaker. “Devlin?”

“John came home.” She was calling from the driver’s seat of my Subaru. “He was on foot.”

“How was he dressed?” asked the captain.

“Same as before. Jeans, sneakers, Forty-niners sweatshirt. Nothing clown-related that I could see.”

“Okay. Keep us posted.” And he hung up.

“That doesn’t prove a thing,” I said. “Alicia drove off to meet him. He changed in her car, then walked home. They know we’re watching.”

“You’re positive it wasn’t Monk?”

“Captain.” I tried to control my temper. “If things were reversed, if that was me in the garage and Monk in the car, would you believe him? Don’t answer. You wouldn’t even think twice. You would trust Monk.”