Mr. Monk Gets Even Read online

  The Monk Series

  Mr. Monk Gets Even

  Mr. Monk Is a Mess

  Mr. Monk on Patrol

  Mr. Monk on the Couch

  Mr. Monk on the Road

  Mr. Monk Is Cleaned Out

  Mr. Monk in Trouble

  Mr. Monk and the Dirty Cop

  Mr. Monk Is Miserable

  Mr. Monk Goes to Germany

  Mr. Monk in Outer Space

  Mr. Monk and the Two Assistants

  Mr. Monk and the Blue Flu

  Mr. Monk Goes to Hawaii

  Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse

  MR. MONK

  GETS EVEN

  A NOVEL BY

  LEE GOLDBERG

  Based on the USA Network

  television series created by

  ANDY BRECKMAN

  AN OBSIDIAN MYSTERY

  OBSIDIAN

  Published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Obsidian, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © 2012 Monk © Universal Network Television LLC. Licensed by NBCUniversal Television Consumer Products Group 2012.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  OBSIDIAN and logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  GOLDBERG, LEE, 1962–

  Mr. Monk gets even: a novel/by Lee Goldberg; based on the USA Network television series created by Andy Breckman.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-101-59857-3

  1. Monk, Adrian (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Private investigators—Fiction. 3. Eccentrics And eccentricities—Fiction. 4. Obsessive-compulsive disorder—Fiction. 5. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 6. San Francisco (Calif.)—Fiction. 7. Mystery fiction. I. Breckman, Andy. II. Title.

  PS3557.O3577M727 2013

  813'.54—DC23 2012031430

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  To Valerie and Madison

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This is the end for me and my long, wonderful association with Adrian Monk. The series of books may continue, but this is my fifteenth and final Monk book.

  The association began when Monk creator Andy Breckman hired me and my then screenwriting and producing partner William Rabkin to write an episode of the TV series titled “Mr. Monk Goes to Mexico,” which would end up being the first of three episodes we wrote for the show.

  At the time, Bill and I were about to begin writing and producing the Lifetime TV series Missing and I was deep into writing the Diagnosis Murder novels, which were based on the TV series of the same name that we’d also written and executive produced.

  When Andy was approached by NAL about writing the Monk novels, he declined the opportunity and recommended that I write them instead.

  I took the assignment, which was an insane thing to do, since it would mean writing a new book by night every ninety days, alternating between Monk and Diagnosis Murder, while also running a TV series during the day.

  That’s how much I loved Adrian Monk.

  I kept up that brutal pace for two years before finally ending the Diagnosis Murder book series.

  Andy liked my first Monk novel, Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse, so much that he hired Bill and me to adapt it into an episode of the TV show. The episode, titled “Mr. Monk Can’t See a Thing,” may be the first time in American TV history that a tie-in novel of a TV show has been adapted into an episode of the series . . . and by the author of the book, no less. (If it’s ever been done before, we haven’t found it. And if it has been done, it’s obviously a rare occurrence!)

  If it wasn’t for Andy’s enthusiasm and support, I doubt I would have written so many Monk novels or had so much fun doing them. He gave me his trust and the creative freedom to make the book series entirely my own, and for that I will always be grateful.

  I want to thank Kerry Donovan, who has been my editor on this series from the very beginning, my agent Gina Maccoby, who put together the deal, and my go-to medical and forensic expert, Dr. D. P. Lyle. I also regularly leaned on my “cop buddies” Paul Bishop, Lee Lofland, and Robin Burcell for their expertise on police matters, and I hope I didn’t embarrass them too much with the great liberties I took with the information they gave me.

  It’s not easy writing two books a year, particularly if you’re doing it part-time while making your living in television. I can trace my life in these books, like Mr. Monk in Outer Space and Mr. Monk Goes to Germany, both of which I wrote while writing, producing, and shooting a movie in Berlin and Cologne. They kept me sane, and out of trouble, while I was far away from home.

  For the most part, though, the time I spent on these books was time I didn’t spend with my family, particularly on this last one, which required more than a few all-nighters. So, with deep appreciation, I want to thank my wife, Valerie, and my daughter, Madison, for the sacrifices they made during the past seven years while I pretended to be a woman assisting an obsessive-compulsive detective on his investigations.

  And finally, I want to thank all of you for being such devoted readers, and for the many e-mails, letters, and kind words you’ve shared with me over the years about these books. It meant a lot to me.

  Lee Goldberg

  Los Angeles, California

  June 2012

  Contents

  Also in this series

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author's Note and Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

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sp; Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  CHAPTER ONE

  Mr. Monk Is Murder

  I’d never gone so long without a murder.

  Investigating one, that is.

  In the six months since I’d moved to Summit, New Jersey, to work as a police officer, I hadn’t come across a single homicide.

  And for me, that was a major adjustment. That’s because for years I was the personal assistant to Adrian Monk, the famous detective and consultant to the San Francisco Police Department, and it seemed like we couldn’t go anywhere or do anything without getting involved in a murder investigation.

  The man was a murder magnet. It used to drive me crazy (that, and his obsessive-compulsive disorder). It didn’t matter whether we were at a family wedding, on a flight to Paris, attending a play, visiting a winery, or shopping for groceries—we’d inevitably find a corpse. He couldn’t go two days without ending up in the middle of a homicide investigation.

  And now, after all my complaining, I actually found myself missing the murders. Let me qualify that before you write me off as a terrible person. It’s not the violent loss of someone’s life that I missed, but rather the intensity, complexity, and high stakes of the investigation that often followed.

  The crimes I investigated in Summit weren’t nearly as interesting, complicated, or important as murder, which I suppose was a good thing—at least for the community I was serving, and for police Chief Randy Disher, who’d recruited me. He was formerly a lieutenant at the SFPD, where he’d been the right-hand man to Captain Leland Stottlemeyer, the guy who Monk worked for.

  Disher got to know me well while I was Monk’s assistant, but not as well as he got to know Monk’s previous assistant, Sharona Fleming. The two of them fell in love and he moved to Summit to be with her.

  Disher warned me that things moved a little slower in Summit than they did in San Francisco, and that was true. Except, of course, for the short time Monk was here, when suddenly there was an armed robbery, a firebombing, and a murder all in the space of a couple of days.

  Since then, though, the biggest crime I’d had to contend with was one that Monk, with his obsessions for cleanliness and order, would have actually considered truly heinous: I was investigating a string of laundry detergent thefts from area grocery stores, including more than twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth from a single store in Summit.

  That’s what led me to spend my day off in Sharona’s old, dented Volvo wagon in the grocery store’s parking lot, waiting for the thief to strike again. Since we were only a six-person force, I was doing the stakeout on my own. But I figured that after facing countless murderers I could handle a mere detergent thief by myself, even if he was the Professor Moriarty of his field of crime.

  Although life in Summit wasn’t particularly exciting, I still enjoyed being a cop. Next to being Monk’s assistant, it was by far the best job I’d ever had and the first one I’d earned based on my skills and proven performance rather than being something that I’d just chanced into (like working for Monk) or grabbed out of financial necessity (like every other job I’d ever had).

  So I took enormous pride in the badge and gun that I carried and the uniform that I usually wore, even if I was often bored, homesick, and lonely.

  I hadn’t had a chance to find an apartment in Summit yet, so I was living at a local hotel at a discounted “law enforcement” rate (which meant I was also the unofficial “house detective” for the hotel and got called whenever a guest got rowdy or anything disappeared). So it wasn’t as though I was living in solitude.

  And I certainly didn’t lack dating opportunities. Plenty of men in Summit hit on me—I just wasn’t interested in pursuing a relationship. I wasn’t missing out on the excitement of life in the big city, either, not with New York just a forty-five-minute train ride away.

  What I missed was San Francisco itself and my life there. I missed the fog and sourdough bread, the cable cars and the Golden Gate, the steep hills and bay windows. But most of all, I missed my twenty-year-old daughter, Julie, even though she’d moved away from home to live across the bay and attend UC Berkeley long before I left.

  Now she was on summer break and working as Monk’s temporary assistant. Julie was living in our house again since we hadn’t had any luck renting it out, and she was trying to save what little money she was earning. Nobody would ever get rich working for Adrian Monk.

  At first, I’d called her two or three times a week . . . until she stopped answering my calls. I got the subtle hint. So I cut my calls back to once every few weeks so she wouldn’t find me quite so needy and irritating.

  And as infuriating, demanding, and frustrating as Monk was, I missed him, too. I had known that I would, but I hadn’t expected to miss him quite so much.

  He’d called me a few times since I’d moved, mostly to talk about Julie. He’d usually start by saying what a great assistant she was, and then complain that her car was a rolling death trap (because the tires on her car were a mix of brands and didn’t have matching tread designs) or that she drank smoothies (he was afraid of milk and couldn’t stand the idea of various fruits being blended together) or that she expressed a wanton disregard for human decency (for wearing a bracelet on one wrist without a matching one on the other). These were all deficiencies in her character that naturally he attributed to lazy parenting on my part.

  You’d think that infuriating diatribes like that would make me thankful that I was a few thousand miles away from him, but the anger and irritation he caused only made me more homesick.

  It’s crazy, I know.

  And I had to keep my craziness a secret from both Julie and Monk.

  So I pumped Ellen Morse for information about them during her biweekly trips from San Francisco back to Summit to manage her store, Poop, where she sold products made from excrement, including shampoo, artwork, stationery, incense, and even coffee. She’d opened a second store in San Francisco just to be closer to Monk, who’d improbably and miraculously started a relationship with her during the short time that he was in Summit, despite the fact that he was repulsed by what she did for a living.

  But Ellen was slightly obsessive-compulsive herself, at least as far as symmetry and organization went, and loved Monk, though she was frustrated by his crippling fear of intimacy. They hadn’t kissed yet and he’d held her hand only once, just long enough to give it a squeeze, and then had immediately slathered his hands with disinfectant cream, which killed not only germs but also the slightest shred of romance.

  The way I looked at it, Ellen was lucky he touched her at all, considering she regularly handled poop products—such as fossilized dinosaur dung and greeting cards made from buffalo crap—with her bare hands. She’d repeatedly assured Monk that the products were totally safe and sanitary, but he didn’t see how that was possible if they were derived from poop. Intellectually, I knew she was right. But instinctively, even I had to side with Monk.

  He was on my mind while I sat on that boring stakeout because of the nature of the crime that I was investigating—detergent thefts—and because in a few short days I would be back in San Francisco, taking an early vacation to attend the wedding of Monk’s agoraphobic brother, Ambrose. He was marrying Yuki, his ex-con, biker-chick girlfriend and live-in assistant.

  That was bound to be a memorable event.

  Before I could give much thought to it, my attention was drawn to a short man in his thirties wearing an untucked red flannel shirt over a gray hoodie. He was rushing out of the grocery store and pushing a cart filled with jugs of Tide detergent.

  I was pretty sure he hadn’t paid for any of it and that he’d managed to slip past the busy cashiers without being noticed. So I got out of my car and met him just as he popped the trunk on a 2005
Chevy Malibu with badly oxidized blue paint. Monk would have arrested him just for the lousy paint job.

  The man was jittery, and all his facial features looked like they were crammed way too close together, as if his head had been scrunched by some heavy object, so he appeared to be wincing even before I pulled out my badge and flashed it at him.

  “Excuse me, sir. I’m Natalie Teeger, Summit Police,” I said. “What’s your name?”

  “Jack Badelaire,” he said.

  “Can I see some ID?”

  “What’s the problem?” He took out his wallet and handed me his driver’s license. He was indeed Jack Badelaire, and a resident of Summit.

  “I’ve never seen anybody buy so much detergent at one time,” I said.

  He shrugged. “I’m a very clean person.”

  He obviously didn’t know who he was talking to. I got right in his face. “The hell you are. I spent years working for Adrian Monk, the cleanest man on earth. He wipes his bottles of disinfectant with disinfectant. He cleans his brooms after every use and replaces them weekly. He washes his doorknobs in the dishwasher. Once a year, he removes his flooring and scrubs the concrete foundation underneath. So don’t you dare tell me that you’re a very clean person, because compared to him, you live in filth.”

  He looked frightened now, and not because I was a cop who’d caught him committing a crime. He thought he was dealing with an armed lunatic. Perhaps he was.

  “I know,” he said. “That’s why I need detergent.”

  “All this is for you?”

  “I have a big, dirty family.”

  I nodded. “Can I see your receipt?”

  He made an elaborate show of looking through his wallet and his pockets. “I must have lost it.”

  “No problem. We’ll just go back inside the store and find your cashier. I’m sure she’ll remember you. It’s not often they get a guy buying a dozen jugs of Tide.”