Mr. Monk on the Couch (18 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

I
t wasn’t until I got home that Saturday afternoon that I finally opened the file that Captain Stottlemeyer had given me in his office.

He’d printed out four photographs of Walter O’Quinn taken on the bed in the Excelsior. They would be much less awkward to show around than photographs of a corpse on a morgue slab.

I set the photos aside and turned to the rest of the pages, which I hoped would reveal who Stacey O’Quinn and Rose were, and where I could find them.

But the papers contained no information about the O’Quinns at all. What Stottlemeyer had given me were dossiers on Jerry Yermo, Gene Tiflin, William Tong, and Corinne Witt.

What was Stottlemeyer trying to accomplish by slipping me the material? Was this his way of saying he wanted Monk and me to continue investigating an angle that he’d been ordered to drop?

I stuck a pepperoni Hot Pocket in the microwave, added hot water to a cup of Folgers crystals, and sat down with my instant, late lunch to go through the material.

What I soon discovered was that the four of them had a common motive for keeping the diamonds for themselves: They were all in deep financial trouble.

Jerry had bought property and cars, creating a lifestyle that was well beyond his means. Death in San Francisco simply hadn’t kept up with his spending. But rather than downsize, he kept right on buying more and more, compulsively adding to his credit woes. It made no sense.

Gene Tiflin was in debt even before the economy devastated the construction business in California. He had a wife and three teenage kids to support and was paying a steep mortgage on a house in the East Bay that was now worth two hundred thousand dollars less than he’d paid for it.

William Tong had lost his teaching job two years ago. If that wasn’t bad enough, his wife had left him for a woman, emptied their savings account, and moved to Sweden. Bill collectors swarmed him and picked his wallet clean. He’d been forced at age thirty-five to move back in with his mother. He had a net worth of zero and his self-esteem was probably hovering at about the same level.

Corinne Witt was living frugally in a studio apartment in a former motel that now rented its drive-up rooms to UCSF students by the month. But she was carrying enormous student debt from college and was in arrears on both her rent and her medical school tuition. She was facing imminent eviction or expulsion. Something had to give.

And that was when they found the diamonds.

Now that I knew the financial pressure that they were all under, I could better understand why they’d killed Stuart Hewson.

After the euphoria of finding the diamonds, their salvation, it must have seemed like a bitter, brutally unfair twist for Hewson to come along and demand a share.

What had he done to earn it? They didn’t weigh the pros and cons of murder. They simply reacted out of anger and possessiveness. They were a team, they had a bond forged by gore and heavy debt, and Hewson was an opportunistic, greedy outsider threatening their safety and financial security.

Killing him wasn’t one of several options. It was the
only
option.

As much as I may have understood what they had done now, it didn’t bring me any closer to finding a way to prove everything that Monk had so brilliantly deduced.

We were still, as Captain Stottlemeyer had so eloquently put it that morning, screwed.

 

It was early evening, and I was still sorting through the garbage bags, rescuing my dirty laundry and washing my clothes, when there was a knock at my front door.

I dropped the load of clothes I was carrying on my coffee table, peeked through the front door peephole, and was surprised by whom I saw staring back at me as if she were facing a security camera.

It was Lieutenant Amy Devlin.

I opened the door. “It’s not polite to look directly at the peephole when you knock at someone’s door.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s aggressive,” I said.

“Why pretend that you aren’t aware that you are being watched?”

“It’s called a social nicety,” I said and beckoned her inside. “Sort of like bringing a bottle of wine or flowers or a pastry when you visit someone’s home for the first time, especially when you show up uninvited.”

Devlin reached into the pocket of her leather jacket. “I think I’ve got a mint from a restaurant in here somewhere.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “Never mind.”

She walked around the living room, examining my shelves, artwork, and furniture.

“Your place feels very lived in,” she said.

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“How do you do that?”

“Take a compliment?”

“Make a place feel lived in?”

“You live in it,” I said. “What can I do for you, Lieutenant?”

She looked at the file on the table and sorted through the pages that Stottlemeyer had given me. “I see you’ve read my report on Yermo’s crew.”

“Did you know that the captain gave that to me?”

She nodded. “I recognized the file when he handed it to you. That’s my coffee cup ring on the cover.”

“Is that why you’re here, to pick up the file?”

“No,” she said. “Monk solved these two cases. He’s right about who the killers are. It was our job to make the arrests and we didn’t.”

“Monk isn’t blaming you, Lieutenant. Or the captain.”

“I don’t care what Monk thinks. I’ve got a problem being told to stand down when I know who the killers are.”

“None of us are happy about it,” I said.

“Until recently, I was an undercover cop. I’m not used to being part of a team, working in an office under direct supervision, having to deal with rank and politics. I’m used to being on the street, working from within the criminal organization, going with my instincts and manipulating the people and the situation so it plays out my way.”

“You can’t do that now.”

“I think I can,” she said. “I’ve got an idea how we can bring down Yermo’s crew and nail Rico Ramirez, too.”

“So tell the captain,” I said.

She shook her head. “My approach is unorthodox and a career killer if it goes wrong. Probably even if it doesn’t. But I don’t care.”

“Why tell me?”

“Because I can’t do it alone,” she said. “I’ve called in a lot of markers on this, but I still need your help.”

I thought about it for a moment. Devlin hadn’t told me a single detail about her plan, but the fact that she had one, and that she was sharing it with me, someone she didn’t like much, revealed the depth of her commitment to seeing that the right thing was done.

It was a big step for her. It also told me a lot about who she was beneath that hard skin of hers.

“How dangerous is it?” I asked.

“The first stage, not at all,” she said. “The second stage, potentially fatal. But you don’t have to worry about that part. I’ll be doing that solo.”

“If we do this together,” I said, “we do it together to the end.”

“Let’s see how stage one goes,” she replied. “Because if that fails, there won’t be a stage two and we might both be in jail.”

“Jail?” I said.

“Do you still have a key to that room at the Excelsior?”

“How did you know I have a key?”

“I’m a cop,” she said. “Do you have it?”

I nodded.

“Good.” She looked at my laundry on the coffee table. “Do you have anything sexy to wear?”

 

Devlin explained her plan to me as she rummaged through my closet and my dresser. I didn’t think her idea was unorthodox at all. I thought it was insane.

I also thought it just might work.

It would also be the most daring thing I’d ever done, and that had a certain appeal.

Apparently, none of my clothes were right for the job. So she went out to her car, a 1990 Firebird, and rooted around in a suitcase that she kept in the trunk.

She came back with two sheer, black, skintight minidresses, one sleeveless and one strapless, and two pairs of high-heeled shoes.

“We’re lucky we’re about the same size,” Devlin said.

“Those dresses are too small and too tight for either one of us.”

“Exactly,” she said. “Take your pick.”

 

The vast, seventeen-story atrium lobby of the Hyatt Regency Hotel, with its glass elevators, huge spherical sculpture, and glittering lights, always made me feel like I’d stepped into a 1970s science fiction movie like
Logan’s Run
. That night with Amy Devlin, I felt that way more than ever before.

That’s because in
Logan’s Run
, the future offered the “perfect world of total pleasure,” a life of nonstop sex and partying with just one little catch: No one was allowed to live past the age of thirty. If you didn’t shuffle off voluntarily to the death chamber, you were chased down and killed by cops called Sandmen.

When we showed up at the lobby bar, the place was packed with young professionals in their twenties mingling with the business travelers, conference attendees, and other hotel guests looking for action on a Saturday night.

I felt every one of my thirty-and-then-some years. I half expected a team of Sandmen to come rushing in after me, laser-cannons blasting.

“Relax,” Devlin said. “You’re a hot, single lady looking for a good time.”

“Easy for you to say. You don’t look like a grandmother trying to pretend that she’s twenty-one.”

In fact, Amy Devlin looked dazzling in her strapless minidress. She’d transformed herself into another person entirely.

The way she moved, the way she spoke, the way she wore that dress, were all completely different from the Amy Devlin that I knew. The tough, streetwise, cynical cop without a trace of femininity was gone. This Amy Devlin exuded casual self-confidence, a mischievous nature, and raw, unabashed sexuality. All the eyes in the bar—the eyes of men and women alike—were on her.

“How you look is only part of it,” she said. “It’s what you’re thinking. It’s the way that you move. It’s what you express with your eyes. That’s what people see and respond to. Don’t dress the part, become it.”

It was true. She hadn’t done much to her hair and almost nothing to her face, beyond adding a little makeup. And yet, she was a new woman. I wouldn’t have recognized her myself, especially out of the context of a police station or crime scene.

“Ignore the twentysomethings,” she said. “They are set decoration. He may lust for them, but he knows they are out of his league.”

“So are you,” I said.

“Which is why this is going to be so easy,” she said. “You just be there when I need you.”

I tried to match her walk and confidence. I tried to think of myself as a sensual creature, living only for the night and the pleasure I could find in it.

And then I tripped on my high heels.

Devlin caught my elbow, saving me from a fall, and gestured toward an empty table.

I took a seat and watched her as she continued on without me, moving with feline grace to the bar and William Tong.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

T
ong’s attention was so totally fixated on Amy Devlin that I doubted he’d even seen me. And if he had, he clearly didn’t make the connection between Devlin’s friend in the black minidress and the frumpy detective’s assistant that he’d seen briefly at two crime scenes.

I hadn’t believed Devlin when she said that’s what would happen, but she was right. She apparently knew more about how men looked at women, or at least what they remembered about women, than I did.

I couldn’t hear what she and Tong were saying to each other, but I watched the seduction with fascination—the way she arched her body toward his, allowing herself to brush against him in the tight crush of people, and how she always looked him in the eye and smiled, licking her lips every so often.

Tong didn’t stand a chance against her, not that he’d even attempted to resist. It was probably all he could do not to weep with gratitude at his good fortune.

But we knew that before we got there.

We were depending on it.

“The man has been neutered,” Devlin told me as we were heading to the Hyatt. “He lost his job, his wife left him for a woman, and he’s living with his mommy. The guy probably sits down to pee now.”

“That’s an image I could have lived without, thank you.”

“Tong is desperate to reaffirm his manhood any way he can. So every night, he’s at the bar, itching to score. Any woman with a pulse will do, but they can smell his insecurity.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve been watching,” she said. “I’ve been looking for our way in.”

“There are a lot of bars in the city. Why the Hyatt?”

“Because he can’t take a woman to his room in Mommy’s house. How pathetic would that be? If the woman he picks up isn’t a guest at the Hyatt, or doesn’t want to take him back to her place, he can probably get a room there at a cut rate,” she said. “Jerry’s got a deal with the hotel to handle their unattended deaths and any messes where lots of bodily fluids are involved. They keep him pretty busy.”

“I don’t even want to think about it,” I said.

“The man just scored a fortune in diamonds and killed a man,” Devlin said. “For the first time in months, he’s feeling like he’s taken charge, like he’s tough, like he’s a man again. He’ll want to prove it with a woman. And that’s going to be me.”

“Lucky you,” I said.

“Unlucky him,” she said.

And now it was going just the way she knew it would. He was so distracted by her cleavage that he never saw the roofie that she dropped in his drink. I didn’t see it, either, but I knew when it happened because she gave me the signal—she tugged at her earlobe.

I waited until I saw him take a sip of his drink. I knew we didn’t have much time to get him out of there before the drug took effect.

She whispered something to him. He quickly paid for their drinks. Devlin took his arm in hers and they started to leave the bar.

I caught up with them. “Leaving me behind, Trixie?”

“I saw him first, Brittany,” she said.

“You two are friends?” Tong asked me, no recognition at all in his eyes, a dopey smile on his face.

“Bosom buddies,” Devlin said.

“But she has all the luck,” I said. “I’ve struck out tonight. Plenty of boys around, but so few men.”

Devlin nibbled on his ear. “Do you mind if Brittany and I share you?”

“Just this once,” Tong said, trying to appear nonchalant, but his wide eyes betrayed him. “I’m feeling charitable tonight.”

I took his other arm and we led him out of the hotel.

 

We went to the Excelsior in a taxi and by the time we got Tong up to my room, he was disoriented and barely conscious, but his dopey smile hadn’t waned.

We dropped him on the bed and told him to take off his clothes. He gladly complied and managed to get down to his underwear before he passed out, his pants bunched around his feet.

Devlin put on a pair of rubber gloves from her purse, removed his watch and rings, and then bound his hands to the bedpost with his belt, tight enough to secure him but loose enough so that he could free himself with some effort.

While she did that, I put on gloves, too, and sorted through his pockets, extracting his wallet and keys. I left his breath mints, condoms, and Gas-X pills behind.

We put Tong’s valuables in evidence bags, gathered up all of O’Quinn’s stuff, and dumped everything in the file box that I’d left behind before.

We gave the room a quick once-over, picked up the box, and walked out, leaving the “Do Not Disturb” sign behind on the doorknob.

“I gave him a big roofie,” she said. “That should give us about eight hours before he comes around and wonders how he ended up naked in a dive hotel.”

“Are you sure he won’t remember anything that happened?”

“He’ll be lucky if he still knows his own name,” Devlin said. “And whether he does or not, he’s going to be so ashamed of himself, he’ll want to forget the night that he forgot.”

“Well, we know that’s not going to happen,” I said.

Her car was parked around the corner from the Excelsior. She got inside and changed clothes while I stood watch, and then she did the same for me.

We drove to the Embarcadero and the dark back alley where Tong illegally parked his old VW Passat every night, accumulating scores of tickets that he never paid.

The alley was narrow and a dead end, leading to the loading dock of an empty warehouse. It was strewn with trash and reeked of urine and stale beer.

It was a good place for killing.

Devlin had a lot of work left to do and not much time to accomplish it. I handed the evidence bags containing Tong’s belongings to her and took the box of O’Quinn’s things back to my car, which was parked a few blocks away in an underground garage across the street from the Hyatt.

I drove to Monk’s house, parked in a red zone, and waited anxiously for Devlin’s call.

It came thirty minutes later.

“I’m ready to send the black-and-white for Corinne,” she said. “Are you sure we need Monk for this?”

“She’ll expect him,” I said. “If he’s not there, it’s not going to look right. It will play stronger with him than without him.”

“Unless he ruins everything,” she said.

“That’s a definite possibility.”

But she knew as well as I did that we really didn’t have any choice. I hung up on her and called Monk. He didn’t bother to say hello. Nobody else called him in the middle of the night except me.

“Who died?” he asked.

“William Tong,” I replied.

 

The alley was harshly lit by two tall halogen utility lights and was sealed off with bands of yellow police tape that fluttered in the cold night air. The light washed over Tong’s car, illuminating dark splashes of blood on the dashboard and windshield. Numbered yellow cones marked spots where evidence had been recovered at various places on the alley floor.

Monk and I stood at the mouth of the alley watching Devlin, who was crouched beside the open driver’s side door, carefully picking up a bloody wallet and dropping it into an evidence bag as two police officers led Corinne Witt to the car.

“Who are you?” she asked Devlin.

“I’m Lieutenant Amy Devlin, homicide. I believe you already know Adrian Monk, who advises us on murder cases, and his assistant, Natalie Teeger.”

Corinne cast a nervous glance in our direction, then shifted her attention back to Devlin.

“Am I under arrest?”

“Nope,” Devlin said.

“Then why have you dragged me out of bed in the middle of the night and brought me down here?”

“To show you your future. Or maybe it’s your tragic end. I’m like the last ghost in
A Christmas Carol
, only with an attitude and a badge. Do you know what happened here?”

“No, of course not,” Corinne said.

Devlin looked past her to Monk. “What can you tell us, Monk?”

He cleared his throat and rolled his head. “The way the blood has been splattered on the windshield and dashboard, it appears that someone has been garroted or decapitated.”

It was an artful answer. He’d stated the truth. There was no lie to catch him in. He wasn’t responsible for any implications or misinterpretations that Corinne drew from his words. Devlin and I might be, though.

Devlin reached into the car and handed Corinne an evidence bag containing Tong’s watch and rings. “Do you recognize these?”

The color drained from Corinne’s face and she looked at the car again, seeing it in a new light. “I’m not sure.”

“Maybe this will help,” Devlin snatched the bag from her and handed her the one containing the bloody wallet, which was opened to reveal William Tong’s driver’s license.

Corinne let out a little whimper and shook her head. “No, this can’t be.”

“We think Tong tried to sell his share of the diamonds to a fence,” Devlin said. “Word got back to Rico Ramirez, and he hunted Tong down.”

Corinne shuddered. “Where’s William now?”

Devlin shrugged and glanced at me. “What do you think Rico did with the body, Natalie?”

“He’s keeping it so he can deliver it in pieces to the others as a warning,” I said. “You know, like the horse in
The Godfather
. Who knows what Corinne might find in her bed when she gets home?”

Devlin nodded and looked at Corinne. “You’ll be sure to let us know, right? A head, a pinkie, an earlobe, whatever. You give us a call and we’ll come get it.”

“You can’t be serious,” she said.

“Thank you for confirming that these were Tong’s things. It spared us from having to bring his mother down here,” Devlin said. “The officers will take you home now. You have a good night.”

“How long will they be staying?” she asked.

“They won’t be,” Devlin said.

“But what if Rico comes for me?” Corinne asked. “What if he’s there already?”

Devlin shrugged. “Call the police. We’ll send a patrol car down as soon as we can. But with all the budget cuts, we’re spread pretty thin. It might be twenty or thirty minutes.”

“You can’t leave me alone to die,” Corinne said. “I need protection.”

“Stay with friends,” Devlin said. “Or adopt a dog.”

Corinne turned to Monk. “Tell her, Adrian.”

Monk shook his head. “The police have limited resources, Corinne. If you want police protection, you will have to give the lieutenant a compelling reason why you think your life is in danger from Rico Ramirez.”

Corinne pointed to the car. “That’s it, right there. That’s why I need protection.”

“You will have to do better than that,” Devlin said. “What’s your connection to Rico Ramirez? Why would he be angry with you? What do you have that he might want? You will need to make a strong case if you want me to allocate manpower for you.”

“I have a Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination,” Corinne said, her eyes welling with tears.

“Yes, you do,” Devlin said. “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be held against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney, and if you can’t afford one, one will be provided for you.”

“Am I under arrest?”

“No,” Devlin said. “I am just informing you of your rights so there’s no question that you understand them before you decide whether or not to convince me that you need help.”

Corinne closed her eyes and tears rolled down her cheeks. “This is a nightmare.”

“One of your own making,” Monk said.

She opened her eyes, took a deep breath, and faced Devlin. “We took Rico’s diamonds.”