Mr. Monk on Patrol (26 page)

“What was Mrs. Goldman like?” I asked.

“I didn’t really know her. I only saw her when she came into the city for shopping or dinner with her husband. She seemed very nice to me. Was there something specific that you needed?”

“We understand that Mr. Goldman did a live broadcast from his office at nine a.m. on the day his wife was killed,” Monk said.

“No, that’s not correct,” she said. “It was at ten and ended at eleven. He does one every month. I’m the producer and director.”

She bobbed a little bit with pride.

“What’s that involve?” Monk asked.

“Well, there’s only one Web camera, so I just make sure that he’s nicely framed, leaving enough room for the chat feed at the bottom of the screen and space at the upper edges for the video. My biggest responsibility is selecting the questions and integrating them into the show.”

“May we see where it was shot?” Monk asked.

“Of course,” she said. She turned and opened one of the doors behind her. “This is his make-believe office, the one we use for the webinars. It’s what they call a practical set in the movie business. His real office is the
room next door. It has a big window that looks out on Park Avenue.”

I immediately recognized the desk, the paisley-papered wall, and the bookcase. There were lights, the kind used for taking pictures or movies, positioned at either end of the desk and a tiny Web camera mounted on a tripod in front of it, a cable running from it to a desktop computer in the far corner. On another desk there were three screens, two of which faced Goldman’s desk.

“That’s where I sit during the show,” she said, gesturing to the corner desk. “I send him text messages on the screen, letting him know what questions have come in, whether they are live video, voice calls, or e-mails. The other monitor shows him the live feed that’s going out on the Net.”

“Who needs a television network anymore to be a star?” I said. “All you need is a broadband connection, a computer, and a YouTube account and you can be Oprah Winfrey.”

“That’s exactly the way Mr. Goldman looks at it,” she said. “He calls it
sniper
casting, aiming for a specific target audience and striking a direct hit with your full message rather than
broad
casting and splattering everyone indiscriminately with message shrapnel.”

Monk walked around the room, tilting his head, framing the scene between his outstretched hands.

“Looks like he wants to be a director,” she said.

“You said the show ended at eleven,” I said. “What did Mr. Goldman do after that?”

“He went back in his office to proof the galleys of his next book.”

“You were here the whole time?” Monk asked.

“Yes, I was, right outside this door.”

“What did you two do for lunch?”

“We had salads,” she said.

“Did you go out for them or were they delivered?”

“They were leftovers from the day before that we had in our refrigerator,” she said. “What does what we ate have to do with anything?”

“We’re confirming that he didn’t leave the office around lunchtime.”

“He was in the office until five and then he went home.”

“Why so early?” I asked.

“He always does that on webinar days, since he has to come in earlier than usual. On most days, he doesn’t come in until ten a.m.”

Monk turned to me. “We’re done here.”

I smiled at Trina. “Thank you for all of your help.”

“If there’s anything more that I can do, please don’t hesitate to ask,” she said. “Do you need a parking validation?”

“We took the train,” I said, then pointed to my badge. “But this is all the validation we need.”

We walked out and headed for the stairs in silence. The interview with Trina Fishbeck had been a waste of time and we both knew it. We’d learned nothing we hadn’t known already.

As we made our way back to Penn Station, a blue and white NYPD police car roared past, the siren making that distinctive rapid wail that sounded like the
Enterprise
firing its lasers. I wished the Summit police cars could do that instead of just their loud, sustained wail.

There was something thrilling about seeing and hearing one of those NYPD patrol cars. They were as much a part of New York as the Empire State Building, the subway, and corner hot dog vendors.

And that’s when it suddenly hit me.

I was in New York City!

Of course, I knew that. I’d felt it walking from Penn
Station to Goldman’s office. And yet it wasn’t until that moment that it really sank in.

I looked around anew, breathing in the sights and sounds of the Big Apple, reinforcing that I was really, truly there.

It seemed foolish not to take advantage of the rare opportunity and go see Times Square, walk through Central Park, and stroll through Greenwich Village.

But then I remembered I was a cop on duty and that I was with Adrian Monk, two situations that severely limited my possibilities.

Visiting New York for fun would have to wait until I had a day off, if I even got one, before going back to San Francisco.

So I settled for grabbing a hot dog from the first vendor I came across.

This, naturally, horrified Monk.

But I managed to shut out his whining and complaining about what I was doing, so successfully in fact that I can’t even recount it here for the record.

I slathered the hot dog with cheese, mustard, ketchup, and onions and ate it as I walked, well aware that I was messing up my face and making Monk hyperventilate, and I didn’t care.

I was a uniformed police officer eating a hot dog in New York City.

That’s
what mattered.

If someone had told me a week earlier that this would be happening to me, I never would have believed it.

It was an experience I wanted to savor and remember.

And feeling the mustard on my cheek, and tasting the hot dog in my mouth, made it real.

Listening to Monk’s complaints would have just made it annoying. I could experience that at home.

We were early for the train, so I stopped by a shop that sold food, novelties, and periodicals in Penn Station to get the
New York Post
and something to drink for the ride back to Summit.

On those rare occasions when I visited New York, I always grabbed the
Post
. I loved its snarky, sensationalistic headlines and admired how it managed to accurately and thoroughly report the news but with the colorful, scandalous attitude of a sleazy tabloid, which put it in sharp contrast to the more staid and stuffy
New York Times
.

The
Post
’s story on the ongoing problems in Summit perfectly epitomized that precarious editorial balance. It got all the facts right, but the tone was undeniably snide and smirking, pointing out that there was so much government corruption in Summit that pretty soon every city employee would be behind bars and recently transplanted San Franciscan Randy Disher would be the only one left to do every job.

At least the article recognized that none of the town’s
woes were Disher’s fault. But I wondered how charitable the media would be once word got out today that Lindero and Woodlake, while guilty of burglary, were innocent of murder and that a killer was still on the loose.

Browsing through the
Post
reminded me of how dull it was living in a one-newspaper town. I used to enjoy reading the original old evening edition of the
San Francisco Examiner
, which cast itself as the mischievous-bad-boy alternative to the snooty and musty morning-edition
San Francisco Chronicle
, with which it reluctantly shared publishing facilities and a joint Sunday edition.

Then again, I liked sneaking peeks at the
National Enquirer
to see what celebs it was outing as “flabulous” with unflattering bathing suit pictures in any given week. It made me feel better about my own losing battle with age and cellulite.

I went up to the counter with the newspaper, along with a can of Diet Coke and a Milky Way bar to clear my palate.

Monk joined me and set a bottle of Fiji water and a Rubik’s Cube on the counter beside my stuff. I glanced at him.

“I’m not your mother,” I said. “You can buy your own drinks and games.”

“My wallet burned in the fire,” Monk said. “I have no cash.”

I’d forgotten about that.

“Okay, this is my treat, but don’t get used to it. I can’t afford to support us both.”

“Welcome to my world,” Monk said.

I handed my credit card to the cashier, an unshaven African-American guy with a head as black and shiny as a bowling ball, and he rang up the purchases.

“Do you have a gift box for the Rubik’s Cube?” Monk asked him.

The cashier reached under the counter and handed Monk a wrinkled plastic bag with a grocery store logo on it.

“That’s not a box,” Monk said.

“It’s all I’ve got,” he said.

“It’s not even a fresh bag,” Monk said. “It’s used.”

“I’m conserving our natural resources,” he said. “I’m going green.”

“Then shouldn’t you be offering customers paper bags?” Monk asked.

The cashier reached under the counter again, pulled out a stuffed brown-bag-lunch bag, emptied out a sandwich, a hard-boiled egg, and an apple onto the counter, and handed the empty bag to Monk. “Happy now?”

“Never mind,” Monk said. He picked up the cube and the water and walked out.

I took the plastic bag, dropped my candy bar and newspaper into it, and thanked the cashier for his help.

We headed for the Dover Line track and our train to Summit. I gestured to the cube in Monk’s hand.

“There’s something different about that Rubik’s Cube,” I said.

“This one is corrected,” he said.

“Corrected?”

“The original Rubik’s Cube has six individually rotating faces made up of nine squares, divided into three rows of three, each square painted in one of six colors. When those rows are properly aligned, it creates a cube with six faces, each with a different solid color.”

“I’ve seen a Rubik’s Cube before,” I said. “What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s all threes,” Monk said, “which makes it repulsive.”

“And yet they’ve sold tens of millions of them around the world.”

“This one is a vast improvement,” Monk said and held up his cube. “It’s called Rubik’s Revenge, though a better name would have been Rubik’s Correction.”

“That doesn’t have quite the same zing as ‘revenge,’” I said. “So what makes this superior to the original?”

“This one has six faces made up of sixteen squares, divided into four rows of four, which adds up to fifty-six squares, eight corners, and twenty-four edges displaying two colors each. All even numbers.”

“Not all,” I said. “There are eight corners that show three different colors.”

He stopped abruptly, turned around, and marched back the way we had come. I hurried after him.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“To return this,” he said. “I’m not going to give Ellen Morse a defective product.”

I stepped in front of him, cutting him off.

“It’s not a defect, it’s an odd number inherent in every single one of those puzzles and Ellen Morse isn’t going to care. She’s going to love it.”

“Because she adores crap,” Monk said.

“Because it’s sweet that you thought of her.” I looked past Monk to the
ARRIVALS AND DEPARTURES
screen. “We don’t have time to return it anyway. Our train is here.”

He reluctantly turned back and we got on the train. On the ride to Summit, he scrambled the cube and solved the puzzle twice. I read my
New York Post
and tried not to show my irritation. I could spend my entire life working on that cube and never solve it.

When we walked out of the train station, instead of heading left on Springfield Avenue toward police headquarters, Monk took a right, in the direction of Ellen Morse’s store.

Monk shielded his face with his hand, as if Poop were shining a bright light at us, and turned his back to the storefront when we got there.

He handed me the Rubik’s Cube. “Could you please go in and give this to her with my compliments?”

“No,” I said. “You do it.”

“I can’t go in there,” he said.

“You were in there before and came out unscathed.”

“I’m scathed,” Monk said.

“I don’t see any scathing.”

“It’s emotional and psychological at the moment, but only because the physical effects haven’t metastasized yet.”

“But you’re willing to send me in there.”

“You seem to have a natural immunity,” he said, “perhaps gained from long-term exposure.”

“So you’re saying that I lead an unsanitary, disgusting life.”

“My God, you’re finally getting the message. How many years has it taken?” Monk said. “Perhaps now you can begin the road to recovery.”

“Gee, thanks. Since you’re being so kind to me, I’ll compromise. I’ll go in and ask her if she’ll come out and chat with you.”

“Okay,” Monk said. “But ask her to wash her hands first.”

I didn’t bother to respond to that. I went into the store just as a woman was coming out, carrying some dung-paper greeting cards. I wondered if she was sending them to friend or foe.