Mr. Monk in Trouble (5 page)

CHAPTER FIVE

Mr. Monk and the Golden Rail Express

T
he Gold Rush Museum occupied the town’s former train station. It was stuffed with artifacts from the period, like scales and measuring instruments to weigh the gold, and all kinds of prospecting paraphernalia, from shovels and picks to a wide assortment of pans, rockers, and sluices used to separate gold from the dirt.

The museum’s walls were covered with dozens of original daguerreotypes, photographs, sketches, paintings, and documents that illustrated the grubby, hardscrabble frontier life of the forty-niners.

There were a wagon, a carriage, a stagecoach, and a full-sized cross section of a miner’s cabin.

And there were several hokey dioramas with mannequins adorned in Western garb and posed in the midst of building a cabin, panning for gold, and digging in the mines.

The only items of any obvious monetary value were the gold-laced quartz rocks, the gold nuggets, and the glittering pile of gold dust in one of the display cases.

The centerpiece of the museum, however, was the engine of an enormous steam locomotive and one of its passenger cars. It was, according to the information placard in front of the display, the “famous” Golden Rail Express.

“This is where Manny was killed,” Kelton said. “The assailant was hiding behind the train and hit him from behind with a pick.”

“Did you recover the weapon?” Monk asked.

“It was taken from the prospecting diorama over there.” Kelton gestured to the diorama on the far side of the museum.

The diorama depicted a bearded, chubby prospector crouching beside a rock formation, examining the rocks while his recalcitrant donkey tugged at a loose strap on his overalls.

I wasn’t an expert in California history, but the diorama didn’t strike me as historically accurate. It felt more like history Disney-fied, turning the miner into a lovable cartoon character and anthropomorphizing the donkey to create a humorous vignette out of an isolated moment of dull prospecting.

“We don’t have a forensics unit, so I called in the state police crime lab to process the crime scene for me,” Kelton said. “The pick was wiped clean, of course, and since this is a museum that thousands of people have walked through, fingerprints and fibers are dead ends.”

“Did Manny have a patrol routine?” Monk asked.

Kelton nodded. “He walked the perimeter of the building every hour. Along the way, he had to swipe his security ID into a special reader that logged the time of his patrol. This way the museum director can be sure that he didn’t spend his shifts sleeping at the front desk.”

“How did the intruder get in without setting off the alarm?”

“I think he came in sometime during the day as a regular visitor and hid somewhere in the museum until after closing. He used Manny’s card key to leave at 2:32 a.m. so he wouldn’t set off the alarm when he left either. We found the card key outside by the door. No prints on it, of course.”

“What do the security cameras show?”

“There aren’t any cameras,” Kelton said. “The museum staff figured an alarm and a security guard were enough. It’s not like we’ve got the crown jewels or the
Mona Lisa
in here.”

“What about the gold?” I gestured to the display with the nuggets and the dust. “It must be valuable.”

“It might be worth a few hundred dollars,” Kelton said. “It’s not worth killing a man for.”

“People are killed for a lot less every day,” I said.

“In San Francisco or Boston,” Kelton said. “But not here.”

Monk held his hands out in front of him, framing the scene with his thumbs and index fingers like a director. Then he tilted his head from side to side, did a little pirouette, and began moving around the museum in what looked like a fumbling, slow-motion ballet.

Kelton watched him. “What is he doing?”

“Surveying the crime scene,” I said. “I call it Monk Zen.”

“Does it work?”

“He hasn’t failed yet,” I said. “So what do you think happened?”

“I have a few theories that I’m exploring. One is that the murder had nothing to do with an aborted robbery or the museum at all. Killing Manny was the objective.”

“Why do it here and not in his house or on his way to or from work?” I asked.

“To make it look like a robbery,” Kelton said.

“But the killer didn’t steal anything,” I said.

“That’s one of the problems with that theory.” Kelton glanced at Monk again, who was now peering around the train.

“So what’s your other theory, Chief?” I asked.

“Maybe the killer was after something here that wasn’t worth a lot of money but has priceless sentimental or collectible value to him or whoever he was working for.”

“How are you going to figure that out?”

“I’ve asked the museum director to check into the history of the pieces to see if there’s any controversy attached to any of them—besides the train, of course.”

“This train?” Monk said, stepping out from behind it.

“That’s the Golden Rail Express,” Kelton said.

“So?” I said.

“The
famous
Golden Rail Express,” Kelton said.

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“Neither have I,” Monk said.

“Really?” Kelton said. “The way they talk about it here, I assumed everybody in California knew about it.”

“I wish they did,” said someone behind us. We turned to see a rotund man in a golf shirt and slacks walking our way. He looked like a peach that had been granted its wish to become human. He was accompanied by a uniformed security guard. “We’d be packed with tourists all the time.”

“This is Edward Randisi, the museum director,” Kelton said. “And this is Bob Gorman, our local auto mechanic. Well, at least he was.”

“Bob has agreed to come on as our new security guard,” Randisi said.

“I was real sorry to hear about Manny, but this job was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up,” Gorman said. He was tall and gangly, with an Adam’s apple so large it looked like he was trying to swallow a baseball.

“No worries, Bob. I understand,” Kelton said. “This is Adrian Monk, a homicide consultant with the San Francisco Police Department, and his associate, Natalie Teeger. I would appreciate it if you gave them your full cooperation and unrestricted access to the museum.”

“Of course, Chief,” Randisi said. “I’m here during the day, except for lunch from noon to one at the Chuckwagon, and Bob will be doing the night shift starting tonight.”

“I’m gonna bring my uncle’s twelve-gauge to work with me,” Gorman said. “Any of those drug-crazed devil worshippers comes after me, I’ll send ’em to hell with both barrels.”

“What makes you think Manny was killed by a ‘drug-crazed devil worshipper’?” Kelton asked.

“That’s what I heard,” Bob said.

“It makes sense to me,” Monk said.

We all turned to Monk.

“Based on what?” I said.

“The way these people are living,” he said.

I forced a smile. “Mr. Monk is joking.”

“I am not,” he said.

I elbowed him. “So tell me, Mr. Randisi, what makes this train famous?”

Randisi smiled and rubbed his hands together with pleasure, dismissed Bob Gorman, and then began telling us the story.

“The Golden Rail Express was a private railroad for the wealthy and elite that carried them from their mansions in San Francisco to their gold mines in Central California. Trouble was the last stop on the line,” he said. “But the incident that would make the train famous happened almost a hundred years later.”

Randisi clearly relished the opportunity to talk about the train, leading us up the steps and through the cab, past the soot-stained furnace where the engineer shoveled in the coal that kept the boiler going.

The Golden Rail Express remained private for another decade or so after the end of the Gold Rush and then was opened to the public. The route was eventually shortened to just the gold country stretch between Sacramento and Trouble. It continued in operation, its ridership steadily declining, until 1962, when its final run was commemorated with a high-stakes poker game with a pot of gold coins, worth over $100,000 at the time, as the prize.

The game was a publicity stunt concocted by a developer to generate attention and investors for a massive housing tract he wanted to build outside of Trouble. The plan was for the entire train to be stripped of its fittings and scrapped after its final run.

Things didn’t go as planned.

The Golden Rail Express was robbed midway into the trip by at least three men masquerading as passengers. They covered their faces with masks and robbed everybody in the gambling car of their cash and the entire pot of gold. During the robbery, two men were killed—a security guard, who was shot, and the conductor, who fell from the moving train. Since the train never stopped during the crime, it was assumed that the robbers were among the passengers.

The crew and all the passengers were searched when they got off the train in Trouble. Two of the robbers were caught because they had some of the distinctive gold coins in their pockets. They were tried and sent to prison for fifteen years to life, but they never revealed who their co-conspirators were and what happened to all the cash and gold.

The police investigation was based on the theory that there must have been one or more accomplices who leaped off the moving train with the loot or they tossed the bags to an accomplice already on the ground and that the bags were buried for later retrieval.

There were lots of problems with that theory. Many believed that the jump from the moving train would have badly injured or killed the accomplices and that the heavy sacks would have broken open on impact with the ground, scattering cash and gold coins all over the place. But all they found along the tracks were the robbers’ guns and their masks. A fingerprint recovered from one of the guns matched one of the two men who’d been captured.

In the nearly fifty years since then, tens of thousands of people have scoured the route and the surrounding area looking for the treasure. Not one of the coins has ever turned up.

“The train was supposed to be decommissioned after that fateful run, but thanks to the enormous publicity generated by the robbery, the Golden Rail Express continued in operation for two more decades as a tourist attraction before it was finally taken off the tracks,” Randisi said. “It was sold off as scrap, but not before the entire train was torn apart and meticulously searched, inch by inch, for hidden compartments. None were found. We managed to save the locomotive as the centerpiece of our museum.”

“What happened to the developer and his housing tract?” I asked.

“He went bankrupt before it could be built,” Randisi said. “It was his gold that was lost in the robbery.”

Monk rolled his shoulders and tipped his head from side to side. “The gold was never found?”

Randisi shook his head and smiled. “Maybe you can find it.”

There were no maybes about it. Monk was hooked. We wouldn’t be leaving now until we solved both mysteries, even if one of them was nearly fifty years old.

“Where can I learn more about the Golden Rail Express and the two men who robbed it?” Monk asked.

“You’ll want to talk with Doris Thurlo, our town historian. Doris runs the historical society and the chamber of commerce out of the Box House at the end of the street,” Randisi said. “You can’t miss it. The building is perfectly square.”

Monk blinked hard. “Perfectly square?”

“Even the windows,” Randisi said. “It’s been a curiosity in this town for over a hundred and fifty years.”

“I’ve got to see it.” Monk started for the door. Kelton stepped in front of him.

“You’re going sightseeing?” Kelton said. “I thought you came here to offer your assistance on the murder investigation.”

Monk stepped around him and continued walking. Kelton and I followed after him.

“You should have the museum staff do an inventory of the offices and desks, not just the collection,” Monk said. “Perhaps what was taken wasn’t something on display. It could be a file or some personal item belonging to one of the employees.”

“I’ll have Ed Randisi get right on it,” Kelton said. “Any other thoughts or observations?”

“You said that Manny was killed with a pick from the prospecting diorama and that the murder occurred beside the train.”

“There’s no mystery there,” Kelton said. “It’s a fact, at least according to the state police forensic team.”

“But the diorama is on the other side of the museum,” Monk said, walking out the door.

“What does that have to do with anything?” Kelton said, hurrying after him onto the sidewalk.

“Why did the killer go all the way over there for a weapon when there were other, closer items that he could have used?”

“Maybe he was hiding in the diorama until closing time so he grabbed the pick out of convenience.”

“Maybe,” Monk said, heading with determination down the street, watching his feet to make sure he stepped on the right boards. “But if the killer came here intending to murder Manny, why not bring a weapon with him?”

“I don’t know,” Kelton said. “Nothing seems to fit.”

“Everything fits,” Monk said. “That is the natural order of things. We’re just missing a few pieces. I’ll find them.”

I took Kelton by the arm, slowing him down to allow Monk to get a bit ahead of us and out of earshot.

“You can take that as a guarantee, Chief. Mr. Monk won’t be able to go on if he doesn’t solve the mystery.”

“Go on with what?”

“His life,” I said. “Manny Feikema’s murder will be all that he can think about until he solves it. He won’t give up, even if it means staying in a town full of drunks and drug-crazed devil worshippers.”

I didn’t see any point in mentioning that Monk would be solving the Golden Rail Express robbery, too. That crime wasn’t one of Chief Kelton’s priorities.

“That’s dedication,” Kelton said.

“That’s obsession,” I said.

He shrugged. “Whatever works. If you will excuse me, I’m going to have a few martinis and sacrifice some goats on my altar to Satan. Afterwards, I’ll arrange accommodations for you both at the motel. One room or two?”