Mr. Monk is Cleaned Out (22 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Mr. Monk Breaks the Perfect Alibi

C
aptain Stottlemeyer looked like he was in pain. He was grimacing and rubbing his forehead.

The car wash was closed off, police officers were taking reports from witnesses, and the forensic techs who’d taken Monk’s clothes were now going over Anna Sebes’ Mercedes and what was left of my Buick Lucerne, which was now shaped like bow-tie pasta.

Monk was wearing a gray SFPD sweat suit, which he had refused to put on until Stottlemeyer assured him that it was brand-new and that just because it was called a sweat suit, that didn’t mean any sweat was added to the garment in the manufacturing process. He eventually changed clothes in the sterile environment of the forensics van.

Disher was talking to Anna Sebes, scribbling furiously in his notebook to keep up with her rapid speech and vivid profanity.

“Why isn’t she in handcuffs?” Monk asked.

“Because I’m not entirely sure who is at fault here,” Stottlemeyer said.

“She tried to kill us,” I said.

“It was self-defense,” Anna snapped and marched over to us. Disher rushed to keep up.

“Oh, give me a break,” I said. “You weren’t in any danger.”

“The hell I wasn’t,” Anna said, pointing a gnarled, white-gloved finger at Monk. “That crazy man followed me here from my house. The moment I stopped my car, he ran up to my door, pounded his fists on my window, and demanded that I get out. So I drove into the car wash to get away and that psycho threw himself on the hood, staring at me the whole time with the twisted, insane look on his face that serial killers have.”

“I know that look,” Disher said. “It’s sort of like this.”

He furrowed his brow, flared his nostrils, and snarled. It looked to me like an expression of severe constipation rather than inherent evil.

“When his enabler blocked the exit with her car”—Anna gestured to me—“I was certain it was an ambush and that my life was in danger. So I called the police.”

“A very clever move to throw suspicion off of you,” Monk said. “But it failed.”

“Suspicion of what?” she asked.

“Do you deny that you came here to wash the dirt off your car?”

“Of course I don’t. I came to the car wash to wash my car. Isn’t that what car washes are for, to wash your car? I wasn’t aware that was a crime.”

“It is when the dirt is evidence. The forensic experts will confirm that the bird doo-doo and berry stains on your car are a day old and came from Golden Gate Park, where Duncan Dern was strangled yesterday. This proves that you were there.”

“As I often am, along with thousands of other San Franciscans, but I didn’t kill Duncan Dern.” She took off her gloves and showed us her arthritic hands. “If I was capable of strangling anybody, which sadly I am not, I would strangle you right now.”

Stottlemeyer looked like he was tempted, too. “Is that true, Monk? Did you follow her here, pound on her window, and jump on the hood of her car?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“To protect the filth,” Monk said.

Stottlemeyer stared at him in disbelief. “Did I hear you right? Did you just say ‘to protect the filth’?”

“That filth puts this car in Golden Gate Park yesterday. You’ll also find Dalmatian hairs and pine needles in the car, proving that she’s also been to Lincoln Clovis’ home and Russell Haxby’s backyard.”

“Of course I have, you lunatic. Both of those men worked with Bob for years and were dear friends. Or at least we thought they were until they swindled all of Bob’s clients and framed him for their crimes.”

Stottlemeyer took a deep breath and turned to me with an expression not unlike the one Disher demonstrated earlier.

“Can I speak to you for a moment in private?”

It wasn’t a request as much as it was an order. I followed Stottlemeyer over to the car wash, out of earshot of Monk, Disher, and Anna Sebes.

“Adrian Monk threw himself on a dirty car to stop it from being cleaned,” Stottlemeyer said. “If that doesn’t scream out to you that he’s completely lost his mind, nothing will.”

“Mr. Monk knows what he’s doing. It’s all part of his cunning plan.”

“You’re forgetting who you’re talking to, Natalie. I’ve known Monk a lot longer than you have. You have no idea what he’s doing and he doesn’t either.”

“He’s building his case.”

“There is no case. The deal is off.”

“You can’t do that,” I said. “He’s solved the murders.”

“I can’t support him after this. Any reasonable person who found themselves in Anna Sebes’ shoes today would have done the same thing that she did.”

“Mr. Monk told you why he jumped on her car.”

“And it’s insane,” Stottlemeyer said. “She’s right. The crap on her car and the dog hair inside of it prove absolutely nothing. He’s just lost whatever credibility he had left with us or with the feds.”

“So forget the deal. You’ve still got to take Mr. Monk back to confront Bob Sebes and make his case.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“Because if Mr. Monk is right, Bob Sebes murdered three people and is damn close to getting away with it. But if Mr. Monk is wrong, you can cut him out of the investigation and any future police work without feeling any lingering doubt or guilt about it.”

“What makes you think that’s what I’d feel?”

“Because you know that solving crimes is what Mr. Monk was born to do and that he’s never been wrong about murder before. I know he sounds crazy today, but in the end, it always makes sense.”

“This might be the one time that it doesn’t.”

“It might be,” I said. “But we won’t know until it’s over. Can you live with not knowing?”

Once again, Monk insisted on wearing a crime scene jumpsuit, gloves, and booties before entering Bob Sebes’ house. He also brought along his stack of newspapers, but only after he’d carefully picked off the bits of shattered glass from the car crash.

Stottlemeyer drove me and Monk to the house while Disher drove Anna, who refused to be in the same car with us, which was fine with me. I didn’t want to be near her, either. The fact that she’d trashed my car, and what that was going to cost me, was just beginning to sink in.

We all walked up to the front door of the Sebes house together, causing a flurry of interest from the press photographers.

Bob met us at the door in a polo shirt, shorts, and leather flip-flops, his Triax XG7 8210 ankle bracelet prominently displayed for the media. He and his wife dramatically embraced, as if they’d both survived a harrowing experience and a long separation. It was a wonderful performance.

We went into the house and Sebes slammed the front door shut, immediately confronting Stottlemeyer.

“How can you bring Monk into my house after he brutally assaulted my wife? She barely escaped with her life. Why isn’t he behind bars where he belongs?”

“Why aren’t you?” I asked.

“I demand an explanation,” Bob said, ignoring my remark.

Stottlemeyer glanced at Monk. “That’s your cue.”

“You killed Russell Haxby, Lincoln Clovis, and Duncan Dern,” Monk said. “And I can prove it.”

“Oh God, not this insanity again. I am under house arrest. I’ve got a GPS tracking unit bolted to my leg, and my house is surrounded day and night by a pack of reporters. Why are you still listening to this madman’s rantings?”

Bob turned his back to us and stomped into the living room with its spectacular view of the bay. I was sure the drapes on the window were open for the benefit of the photographers outside. He was going to do everything he could to use the incident at the car wash to his advantage in the media, to portray himself and his wife as victims.

“You’re right, except for the ranting-madman part,” Monk said as we followed Bob into the living room. “The tracking unit is absolutely tamperproof and you couldn’t walk outside that door without being seen.”

“So you’re saying that his wife is the killer and she did it for him,” Disher said.

Monk shook his head. “No, I’m not. The way they were killed rules her out. Anna couldn’t have killed them, not with her arthritic hands. Bob is the murderer.”

“So how did I do it, Monk?” Bob said. “Teleportation? Astral projection? Or maybe I simply willed them to die and they did.”

“For me, the key to figuring out how you did it was to accept two facts—the tracking device on your ankle is tamperproof and your wife is physically incapable of being the killer. And that explains everything.”

“It does?” Disher said.

“Why do you think Bob is always wearing shorts and modeling his tracking unit in front of this picture window?”

Disher shrugged.

“To remind everybody that he’s wearing a tamperproof tracking unit,” Monk said. “Why do you think Lincoln Clovis was hung and Duncan Dern strangled when there were so many other, more efficient ways to kill them?”

Disher shrugged again.

“To clear his wife as a suspect in the murders,” Monk said. “But that arrogance is his undoing.”

“You’re babbling incoherently,” Bob said, “but I suppose that’s to be expected from a lunatic.”

Anna went to her husband’s side and put her arm around him. “Do we really have to be subjected to any more of this senseless drivel?”

“There’s no harm in hearing him out,” the captain said. “But it would be nice if you’d just get to the point, Monk.”

“Here’s what happened . . .”

As soon as Monk said those magic words, my heart raced and I couldn’t help smiling. He said it with such confidence and contentment that I had no doubt that everything was going to fit, that balance would be restored, and that our troubles would be over.

Monk explained that Sebes knew his Ponzi scheme was on the verge of collapse and inevitable discovery days, perhaps weeks, before it happened because so many people were withdrawing money and he didn’t have the cash to cover it all. Sebes also knew that he would be doomed if Haxby, Clovis, and Dern ever became government witnesses. His only hope for freedom, or lesser charges, was to keep them from talking, and he couldn’t do that from a jail cell.

“So you had your lawyer fight for house arrest instead of imprisonment before trial. He persuaded the judge that you weren’t a flight risk and that with the Triax XG7 8210, the most secure tracking device on Earth, strapped to your ankle, you couldn’t go anywhere,” Monk said. “The judge agreed, and was so convinced by your lawyer’s argument that she specifically ordered that the police use the Triax XG7 8210 on you. What she didn’t know was that the reason your lawyer argued so passionately for that particular model was because you’d already purchased one for yourself weeks earlier.”

“What good would that do him?” Stottlemeyer asked. “We supplied the unit and placed it on his ankle. There was no way he could have swapped it out with his own tampered unit without being detected.”

“The extra unit wasn’t for him,” Monk said. “It was for his wife. He calibrated her device so it was emitting the same unique signal as the one around his ankle.”

Now I knew why everything fell into place for Monk during his session with Dr. Bell.

“They were on the same wavelength,” I said.

“Exactly. Whenever he wanted to slip out of the house, she would strap the device to her ankle and activate it. That way, he could block the signal on his device without the breach being detected by the police.”

“So it was Anna who was home drinking while her husband was out murdering Lincoln Clovis,” I said. “They didn’t realize the Triax XG7 8210 also measured alcohol consumption. That mistake almost torpedoed everything.”

“It did,” Monk said. “It just took me longer than I would have liked to figure it all out.”

I looked at the Sebeses. Bob and Anna were clutching each other even tighter now and they both looked a little pale. I would, too, if I was facing the death penalty. It probably made a possible hundred-year prison sentence for financial crimes look attractive by comparison.

“That doesn’t explain how Bob was able to get in and out of the house without being seen,” Disher said. “Have you found the secret tunnel?”

“Bob didn’t need a tunnel,” Monk said. “He just walked right out the front door.”

“He would have been seen,” Stottlemeyer said.

“He was,” Monk said, and held up one of his newspapers, which showed a picture of Anna Sebes leaving the house wearing an enormous hat, big sunglasses, and gloves. “Bob walked out dressed as his wife.”

The reason Anna left the house every single day, Monk explained, was so it would become routine and mundane, the press would get used to it, and nobody would question her coming and going anymore or bother to follow her.

“Those blisters on his pestilent feet aren’t from his raging case of
tinea pedis
but from wearing women’s shoes,” Monk said. “Either he was wearing his wife’s or she bought an identical, slightly larger pair for him.”

“You can’t prove any of that,” Bob said.

“You are slightly taller than Anna, but when you wear heels, that difference in height is substantially greater.” Monk laid several newspapers down on the coffee table. “Each of these pictures appears to show Anna Sebes leaving the house at different times. In all three of these pictures, she is wearing the same shoes, but only in two of them is she the same height relative to windows she is passing.” Monk pointed to one of the photos. “In this one, she’s markedly higher. How is that possible if she’s wearing the same shoes?”

“It’s obviously an optical illusion created by the camera angle,” Anna said.

“That may be an illusion, but the search warrant I’m going to get certainly won’t be,” Stottlemeyer said. “And I’m sure the additional Triax XG7 8210 and the extra pair of women’s shoes that we’re going to find won’t be illusions, either.”

Monk took a step toward Sebes and looked him right in the eye. “You’re finished, Bob. The only upside to your tragic downfall is the warning it will send to others for generations to come: This is what can happen if you don’t practice good foot hygiene.”

While Disher placed Bob and Anna Sebes under arrest and read them their rights, Stottlemeyer called a judge for a search warrant, explained the situation, and immediately got the authorization he needed to proceed.