Mr. Monk in Trouble (12 page)

“A man is dead,” I said.

Gorman set down the plate, wiped his mouth on his bare arm, dropped a few dollars on the table, and got up from his stool.

“Manny isn’t going to get any deader if I have a little snooze.”

He walked out just as Crystal came out with our breakfast. She set the plates down in front of us. Monk’s toast was cut perfectly square and was evenly browned but he didn’t notice. He was staring at Gorman’s plate.

“Will there be anything else?” she asked.

“I’d like you to take away that plate, please,” he said, pointing at it. “And have it destroyed.”

CHAPTER NINE

Mr. Monk and the Mine

W
e walked to the police station after breakfast to alert the chief about the mysterious man who’d asked Gorman about Manny. And we needed directions out to Clifford Adams’ place.

Kelton was standing at the front counter going over a stack of files when we came in. He smiled when he saw us, but I wanted to think it was mostly for me.

“Perfect timing,” he said. “These files just arrived from Captain Stottlemeyer. They’re people Manny sent to prison who might carry a grudge against him and were recently released.”

“Maybe we can help you narrow down the list,” Monk said. “There was a guy in town asking about Manny a few days before the murder.”

Kelton’s face got tight. “Nobody told me that. How did you find out?”

“We kind of stumbled on it,” I said. “Bob Gorman told us. The guy stopped by the garage. I don’t understand why Gorman never told you about it.”

Kelton frowned. “Because we’re the only ones who think Manny’s murder was personal and not about stealing something from the museum. Even so, Bob should have said something. He’s a nice kid, but not too bright.”

“That’s an understatement,” Monk said. “Did you know that he mixes his pancakes with his eggs and that his hands are as black as coal?”

“Shameful,” Kelton said. “Did Bob get the guy’s name?”

“No,” I said. “But he’s going to stop in to see you on his way to work and give you a description of the man. All Gorman could tell us was that he was driving a sixty-four Thunderbird.”

“That’s something, I guess,” Kelton said. “We’ll see if that matches anything in the files. What’s your game plan for the day?”

“We’d like to talk to Clifford Adams, the engineer of the Golden Rail Express,” I said. “Can you tell us how to get out to where he lives?”

Kelton drew a map on a piece of paper and gave me the directions.

“The Adams place is about five miles outside of town at the end of an unpaved dirt road,” Kelton said.

“Why isn’t it paved?” Monk asked.

“Because nobody paved it.”

“Roads should be paved,” Monk said. “Everything should be flat, smooth, and even.”

“Wouldn’t that make life pretty bland?” Kelton said.

“Yes,” Monk said. “As it should be.”

“Paving isn’t one of my responsibilities,” Kelton said.

“You enforce the law, don’t you?”

“There’s no law on the books requiring paved roads.”

“It’s a matter of basic human decency,” Monk said.

“That’s out of my jurisdiction, too. Don’t wander off the road if your car breaks down. The land out there is dotted with abandoned mine shafts and unstable tunnels held up with decaying timbers.”

“We’d never leave the road, even an unpaved one,” Monk said. “Otherwise we’d run the risk of encountering nature.”

“How can you have a problem with nature?” Kelton asked. “It’s everywhere.”

“Exactly. It’s out of control.”

“You mean it’s out of
your
control,” Kelton said. “Welcome to life.”

“I don’t find life all that welcoming,” Monk said.

“I wouldn’t have guessed,” Kelton said.

The drive out to Clifford Adams’ place was slow-going, bumpy, and dusty, and we ran through that superhighway of butterflies again, splattering my windshield with bug goo.

Monk whimpered in misery the whole way.

I turned on the radio to drown him out but the only signal I could get was from an outlaw radio station run by some crackpot who was convinced that the migration of butterflies was the omen of an imminent alien invasion.

Maybe he was right. In fact, it looked like the alien invasion had already come and gone. As we drove across the broad, desolate landscape, I didn’t see any indications of life, only the remnants of it. There were a few dilapidated houses, the rusted hulks of abandoned cars, and the weed-choked entrances to a couple of mines dug into the ragged hillsides. It was a bleak, sun-bleached, rocky, and totally uninviting place.

The road ended at a weather-beaten Quonset hut, one of those prefabricated, corrugated metal structures that was mass produced for the military during World War II and later sold as surplus to the public. There were Quonset huts all around Monterey and Salinas when I was growing up. They were cheap, durable, and could be used for anything from warehouses to restaurants.

This particular hut was about twenty feet wide and fifty feet long and looked like an enormous pipe half buried lengthwise in the dirt. It was surrounded by scrapped cars and trucks, oil drums, appliances, sheets of corrugated metal, stacks of railroad ties, and assorted junk.

Underwear and socks and a set of pin-striped, denim overalls dangled from a clothesline strung between the hut and a wooden water tower that was probably as old as Trouble.

On the other side of the water tower was a tangle of pipes, engine parts, duct tape, pulleys, and conveyor belts that ended in a funnel that spilled out over several piles of gravel. The contraption was erected at one end of a set of rail tracks that ran ten yards up a hillside and into a mine opening. A trolley full of rocks was parked at the top of the track.

I expected Monk to leap out of the car the instant we came to a stop, but he didn’t move.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

He looked at me sorrowfully. “Everything.”

“Could you be a little more specific?”

“If Trouble is hell,” Monk said, “this is hell’s hell. The man who lives here must be a Neanderthal. I can’t decide what’s deadlier, staying in this rolling bucket of pestilence or going out there.”

“Let me see if I have this straight,” I said. “I’m a tornado of filth and my car is a rolling bucket of pestilence.”

“They tend to go hand in hand,” Monk said.

“You’re not winning any points with me today, Mr. Monk.”

“I’m the employer and you are the employee,” Monk said. “I’m the one who has all the points and you’re the one who is supposed to earn them.”

“I’m the one who is supposed to earn money,” I said. “Employers pay employees and you still owe me last week’s paycheck.”

That would have shut him up if we hadn’t both been silenced by the snap of a door slamming.

The sound came from a tiny wooden shack set out by itself a good twenty-five yards away from the Quonset hut.

Clifford Adams stood in front of the shack, adjusting the shoulder straps of his faded bib overalls. He took a pin-striped, pleated engineer’s cap out of his chest pocket and put it snugly on his head and then walked purposefully towards the hut.

Adams was a trim, tough-looking man in his seventies with a fine layer of dust on his clothes and his leathery skin. His eyes were flinty, his face as craggy as the land he lived on.

“What do you suppose that tiny shack is for?” Monk asked.

It was obvious to me and probably would be to anyone else but Monk. I could never understand how a man who knew so much about so many esoteric subjects had so little common knowledge.

And yet Monk often saw things that nobody else did, obscure details that would turn out to be the key clues to solving a murder.

So I guess in the cosmic scheme of things, it all evened out, which, if you were to ask Monk, was all that mattered. Life for him was the pursuit and maintenance of balance, symmetry, and order.

“It’s an outhouse,” I said.

“A
what
?”

“A shack for a toilet.”

“He put a toilet way out there, far away from where he lives.” Monk nodded appreciatively. “That shows a real dedication to sanitary conditions. I may have misjudged him. It must have taken considerable effort to run a water line out that far in this wasteland.”

Monk started to open his door.

“He didn’t run plumbing to the outhouse,” I said.

Monk paused, the door open a crack. “That’s ridiculous. If he didn’t do that, what kind of toilet could he have in there?”

“A seat with a hole in it placed over an open pit.”

Monk let out a little horrified squeak and then slammed the door shut and locked it.

“I’m staying in the car,” he said.

“How do you intend to talk with him from inside the bucket of pestilence?”

“You can bring him to the window,” he said. “But not too close.”

I got out and Monk immediately locked my door. I met Adams halfway between the outhouse and his hut.

“Mr. Adams?”

“Are you a bill collector? Because if you are, you’ll have to wait here while I go get my rifle.”

“I’m not a bill collector,” I said. “If I was, would you shoot me?”

“That depends if you’re still here when I come back with my rifle and how fast you can drive away. Are you a process server?”

“Do you shoot them, too?”

“I try,” he said.

“Do you shoot the police?”

“Are you a cop?”

“I’m not, but my boss is, sort of.” I motioned to the car. Monk slunk down a little bit in his seat. “Adrian Monk is an investigative consultant to the San Francisco Police Department.”

“I haven’t been to San Francisco in ten years,” Adams said.

“We’re helping the police in Trouble investigate the murder of a guard at the Gold Rush Museum.”

Adams squinted at me. “What happened?”

“It was after-hours. The guard was doing his rounds. Somebody jumped out from behind the Golden Rail Express and hit the guard over the head with a pick.”

“What was stolen?”

“Nothing,” I said.

Adams shook his head. “Makes no damn sense.”

“That’s why Mr. Monk is here. He specializes in making sense of things that make no sense,” I said. “As part of his investigation, Mr. Monk learned about the train robbery and thinks he can solve that case, too.”

Adams squinted at Monk. “Why bother with that after all this time?”

“It’s what he does,” I said. “He can’t help himself.”

Adams nodded. The explanation seemed to have struck a nerve with him.

“I know what that’s like. I’ve been trying to get gold out of that old mine up there for fifty years even though it’s pointless.”

“You must have found some gold or you wouldn’t have kept at it.”

“Just enough to keep me alive and thinking I’m finally close to that big strike,” Adams said, looking up wistfully at the mine. “She’s a tease, has been since the Gold Rush, but I keep coming back for more. I can’t help myself, just like all the men who owned this godforsaken hole before me.”

I pointed to the big contraption beside the water tower. “Does that have something to do with mining?”

“That machine grinds up the rocks so I can sort out the gold,” he said. “At least, it’s supposed to. I spend half my time going through scrapyards for parts to keep it running. If you look closely at that, you’ll see mattress springs, an outboard motor, the blades of a combine, and the innards of a Mr. Coffee.”

“What does the coffeemaker do?”

“Nothing, that’s why I threw the damn thing into the maw,” he said.

He trudged to the car, went to the passenger door, and knocked on the window. “What do you want to know?”

Monk waved me over and motioned for a wipe. I took one out of my purse and he pantomimed washing the window with it where Adams had knocked. I shrugged to indicate my helplessness and pointed to my purse on the seat. He grimaced and leaned away from the window, as if the germs from Adams’ knuckles could leach through the glass.

“Is he going to get out or what?” Adams asked me.

“I don’t think so. Mr. Monk is allergic to dirt and there’s a lot of it out here.”

Adams shrugged and faced Monk again. “If you’ve got a question, mister, spit it out. I’ve got things to do.”

“Tell me what happened the night of the robbery,” Monk said, his voice muffled by the glass.

“I wish I knew,” Adams said.

“You were there, weren’t you?” I said.

“The train never stopped from the time we left Sacramento until we arrived in Trouble. I didn’t know there’d been a robbery until we got to the station. Lenny McElroy—he was the boiler man—and I were up front, oblivious to the whole thing, just keeping the train chugging along. The passengers had been warned under threat of death by the masked robbers not to say or do anything to slow the train down.”

Monk tucked his hand into his sleeve and knocked on the window with his covered arm. “I didn’t hear you. Could you speak up and repeat what you just said?”

“No.” Adams looked at me. “Is that all?”

“Do you think Ralph DeRosso was in on the robbery?” I asked loudly so Monk could hear me.

Adams shook his head. “I’m not convinced he was killed by those two robbers, either.”

“What other explanation could there be for him falling off the train?”

“Sometimes I wonder if he jumped off the train before the robbery even happened.”

“Why would he do that?”

“It was the final run of the Golden Rail Express. It was the end of an era that was long overdue. All Ralph ever wanted to be, all he knew how to be, was a conductor. I think he felt his life was over,” Adams said. “Of course, the sad irony is that because of the notoriety from the robbery, the train kept on running for another twenty years for tourists. Maybe if it hadn’t, Lenny might have lived longer.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Lenny spent more than half of his life shoveling coal into that boiler and breathing in the soot,” Adams said. “I hear that when he died, his lungs were black. If he’d left in sixty-two, his lungs might’ve cleaned out some and he’d still be alive. But he considered that boiler his and wouldn’t go until the train’s last day. The stubborn bastard died a few years before that day came.”

“Why did you stay?”

“I was the last of a dying breed. I figured I might as well see it through to the end. Besides, all I had going for me was this hole in the ground and the one that’s waiting for me someday. Maybe it’s the same one. My luck, that’ll be the day I hit my pay streak.”

Monk knocked on the window to get Adams’ attention and spoke up loudly. “How do you think the robbers got the cash and the gold off the train?”

“People have all kinds of outrageous theories, but the simple explanation makes the most sense to me. They threw the bags to somebody on the ground.”