Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse mm-1 Read online

  “You don’t,” I said.

  “Groovy.”

  And with that, he got into my car and buckled his seat belt.

  2

  Mr. Monk Moves In

  I live in Noe Valley. It’s south of the much more colorful and well-known Castro District, with its energetic gay community, and to the west of the multiethnic Mission District, which is surely next in line to be conquered by the unstoppable forces of gentrification, Williams-Sonoma catalogs gripped in their fists.

  Noe Valley feels like a small town, far away from the urban hustle and chaos of San Francisco, when, in reality, the bustling Civic Center, overrun with politicians and vagrants, is only about twenty blocks away, on the north side of a very steep hill.

  When Mitch and I bought our place, Noe Valley was still a working-class neighborhood. Everybody seemed to drive a Volkswagen Rabbit, and all the houses were slightly neglected, in need of a fresh coat of paint and a little loving attention.

  Now everybody is driving a minivan or SUV, there’s scaffolding up in front of every other house, and Twenty-fourth Street—a shopping district that was once lined with bakeries, diners, and barbershops—is overrun with patisseries, bistros, and stylists. But the neighborhood hasn’t gone completely upscale. There remain lots of homes in need of care (like mine), and enough little gift shops, secondhand bookstores, and mom-and-pop pizza places that Noe has managed to hold on to its quirky, Bohemian character (equal parts of which are now authentic and manufactured). It’s still very much a bedroom community, filled with young, struggling families and comfortable retirees with nary a tourist in sight.

  On the drive down Divisadero to my house, Monk asked me to adjust my seat so it was even with his. I explained to him that if I did that, I wouldn’t be able to reach important things like the gas pedal, the brakes, and the steering wheel. When I suggested instead that he move his seat, he ignored me and began fiddling with the passenger’s-side mirror so it was tilted at the same angle as the mirror on the driver’s side, which I’m sure he figured would compensate for the natural imbalance created by the uneven seats.

  I don’t get the logic either. That’s why I keep a bottle of Advil in my glove compartment at all times. Not for him, of course. For me.

  When we got to my little Victorian row house, I let Monk get his own suitcases out of the car while I rushed inside for one last look around for things that might set him off. It’s not like he hadn’t visited my place before, but this was the first time he was staying there for more than an hour or two. Little things that he might have been able to summon the willpower to overlook before might become intolerable now.

  Standing there in my open doorway, looking at my small living room, I realized my house was a Monk minefield. The decor is what I like to call thrift-shop chic, the furniture and lamps an eclectic mix of styles and eras. There is some Art Deco here and a little seventies chintz there, because I bought whatever happened to catch my eye and meet my meager budget. My approach to interior design was to have no approach at all.

  In other words, my entire house, and my entire life, was the antithesis of Adrian Monk. There was nothing I could do to change that now. All I could do was open the door wide, welcome him in, and brace myself for the worst.

  So that’s exactly what I did. He stepped in, surveyed the house as if for the first time, and smiled contentedly.

  “We made the right decision,” he said. “This is much better than a hotel.”

  It was the last thing I ever expected him to say. “Really? Why?”

  “It feels lived-in,” he said.

  “I thought you didn’t like things that were lived-in,” I said.

  “There’s a difference between a hotel room that’s been continuously occupied by thousands of different people and a home that’s . . . ” His voice trailed off for a moment. And then he looked at me a little wistfully and said, “A home.”

  I smiled. In his own way, that may have been the nicest thing he’d ever said to me. “Let me show you where you’ll be staying, Mr. Monk.”

  I led him down the hall, past Julie’s closed door, which had a big, hand-drawn, yellow warning sign taped to it that said: PRIVATE PROPERTY. NO TRESPASSING. STAY OUT. KNOCK BEFORE ENTERING. Since it’s usually just the two of us in the house, the sign struck me as adolescent overkill. I had a sign like that taped to my door, too, when I was her age, but I had brothers to worry about. She had only me. Below that sign, Julie had also taped up a diamond-shaped DANGER! HAZARDOUS WASTE placard that she’d found somewhere.

  Monk glanced at the placard, then at me. “That’s a joke, right?”

  I nodded.

  “It’s very humorous.” He tried to chuckle, but it came out sounding more like he was choking. “Do you confirm it periodically?”

  “Confirm what?”

  “That it’s a joke,” he said. “Children can be very mischievous, you know. When I was eight, I once went a whole day without washing my hands.”

  “You’re lucky you survived.”

  Monk sighed and nodded his head. “When you’re young, you think you’re immortal.”

  I gestured to the room beside my daughter’s. “This is our guest room.”

  Actually, until the night before it had been our junk room, where we stored all the clutter we couldn’t fit into the rest of the house. Now it was all temporarily jammed into my garage.

  Monk took a few steps into the room and regarded the furnishings. There was a full-size bed, the first one Mitch and I ever bought, and the walls were decorated with some cheaply framed sketches of London, Paris, and Berlin landmarks that we bought from street-corner artists when we eloped to Europe. The dresser was a garage-sale find with one missing drawer knob, a flaw I hoped Monk wouldn’t notice but knew that he would. It was his astonishing powers of observation that made him such a great detective. He could probably tell by glancing at the sketch of Notre Dame if the artist was left- or right-handed, what he ate for lunch, and whether or not he smothered his elderly grandmother with a pillow.

  Monk set his suitcases down at the foot of the bed. “It’s charming.”

  “Really?”

  This was working out much better than I’d hoped, though I noticed he was shielding his eyes from the dresser as if it were emitting a blinding glare.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “It oozes charm.”

  Before I could ask him what he meant, exactly, by “oozes,” someone rang the doorbell. I excused myself and went to see who was at the door.

  There was a burly guy with a clipboard standing on my porch. Behind him I could see two men unloading a refrigerator from a moving truck in front of my house.

  “Does Adrian Monk reside here?” the man asked. He smelled of Old Spice and Cutty Sark. I wasn’t sure which was more unsettling to me: the mingling of odors or the fact that I could identify them.

  “No, I reside here,” I said. “Mr. Monk is just a guest.”

  “Whatever,” he said, then turned and whistled to the guys on the street. “Start unloading the truck.”

  “Whoa,” I said, stepping out onto the porch. “What are you unloading?”

  “Your stuff,” he said, thrusting the clipboard and pen at me. “Sign here.”

  I looked at the papers on the clipboard. It was a moving-company invoice listing all the furniture, dishware, bedding, and appliances they were transporting from Monk’s house to mine. This was Monk’s idea of roughing it?

  “It’s about time you got here,” I heard Monk say behind me. I turned to see him holding the door open for the two guys hauling in his refrigerator. “Be careful with that.”

  “Hold it,” I shouted at the movers, and then I turned to Monk. “What is all this?”

  “Just a few necessities.”

  “There’s a big difference between staying with someone and moving in.”

  “I know that,” he said.

  “Then how do you explain this?” I pointed at his refrigerator.

  “I have special diet
ary needs.”

  “So you brought your own refrigerator and all the food that’s in it?”

  “I didn’t want to be a bother,” he said.

  I waved the clipboard at him.

  “This is everything you own, Mr. Monk,” I said. “To accommodate all of your belongings, I’d have to move everything of mine out of the house.”

  Monk gestured to the movers. “I’m sure they’d be glad to help. They’re professionals.”

  I took a deep breath, shoved the clipboard into the burly man’s hands, and said to him, “You’re taking all of this back where you got it.”

  “They can’t,” Monk said.

  “Why not?”

  “The building is tented by now,” Monk said. “And filled with poison.”

  “Then you’ll just have to put it in storage, Mr. Monk, or leave it on the front lawn. Because it’s not going in this house.”

  I stomped back inside, slammed the door, and left Monk to work things out with the movers.

  It was only when I was standing in the middle of my living room, trying hard to control my anger, that I finally realized that I’d been home for fifteen minutes and hadn’t seen or heard my daughter. I went to her door and knocked.

  “Julie?” I pressed my ear to her door. “Are you in there?”

  “Yes,” she said softly. “Stop putting your ear to my door.”

  I stepped back guiltily, even though I knew she couldn’t have seen me. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Mr. Monk is here,” I said.

  “I know,” she replied.

  “Is that why you’re hiding in your room?”

  “I’m not hiding.”

  “I thought you liked Mr. Monk.”

  “I do,” she said.

  I’m human and a single mother, and I was already pretty keyed up by Monk and the movers, so I wasn’t in the mood for petulant behavior.

  “Then get your butt out here and be polite,” I said.

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’ll think I’m a baby,” she said, and then I heard what sounded like a muffled sob.

  I immediately felt a pang of guilt for snapping at her instead of being the intuitive, caring, all-knowing mom I should be. I decided to ignore the warning signs on her door and heed the one I heard in her voice. I opened her door.

  Julie was sitting on her bed, tears streaming down her cheeks. She’d taken out all the stuffed animals that she’d stowed deep in her closet six months ago, after declaring she was “too grown-up” for them. Now she’d gathered them all around her and was hugging them close.

  I got onto the bed beside Julie and put my arm around her. “What’s wrong, sweetie?”

  “You’ll think it’s stupid.” She sniffled.

  I kissed her cheek. “I promise I won’t.” “Maddie called,” she said, referring to one of her friends from school. “Sparky is dead. He was killed.”

  And with that she started sobbing. Completely lost, I drew her close and stroked her hair. I hated to ask, but I had to . . .

  “Who is Sparky?”

  Julie lifted her head, sniffled hard, and wiped the tears from her eyes. “The firehouse dalmatian. The one that Firefighter Joe brings to school every year during his talk about fire safety.”

  “Oh, that Sparky.” I still had no idea what she was talking about. “What happened?”

  “Someone hit him on the head last night with a pickax,” Julie said with a shiver. “Who would want to murder an adorable, trusting, innocent dog?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  She started to cry again and hugged me tight.

  “I’ll find out,” Monk said softly.

  Julie and I both looked up to see Monk standing in the doorway. How long had he been there?

  “You will?” Julie asked.

  “It’s what I do.” Monk shifted his weight. “Solving murders is kind of my thing.”

  Julie reached for a Kleenex on her nightstand, blew her nose, and tossed the wadded-up tissue toward her garbage can. She missed.

  “Do you really think you can catch the person who killed Sparky?” she asked.

  Monk stared at the tissue on the floor as if he were expecting it to crawl away. “Yes.”

  Julie turned to me. “Can we afford him?”

  It was a good question. I looked back at Monk, who was watching the tissue and twisting his neck like he had a kink in it.

  “Can we?” I asked him.

  “I’ll bring the killer to justice if you will do me one huge favor.”

  “What?” Julie asked.

  I hoped it didn’t involve letting him move everything he owned into my house, because that wasn’t going to happen, no matter how many puppies, baby seals, or bunny rabbits were murdered.

  “Pick up that tissue, place it in a sealed plastic bag, and remove it from this house immediately.”

  “I can do that,” she said.

  “Thank you.” Monk looked at me and tipped his head toward the placard on her door. “It’s no joke.”

  3

  Mr. Monk and the Fire Truck

  Saturday is Julie’s “activity day.” Tae kwon do. Soccer practice. Hip-hop class. And, of course, the inevitable birthday party. Let’s be honest here: No parent wants to spend their weekends chauffeuring their kids around. So I organized a carpool schedule with the other neighborhood mothers (it’s always the mothers who get stuck with this drudgery). That particular Saturday happened to be one of my carpool days off, so another overworked, dead-tired mother was driving a bunch of unruly kids to their classes, practices, and birthday parties.

  I always intend to spend that special “alone” time pampering myself with a good book, or a long walk, or a luxurious soak in a hot bath. But I inevitably end up running errands and catching up on all the things I’ve fallen behind on, like doing laundry, shopping for groceries, cleaning up the house, and paying bills.

  So on that Saturday afternoon I was free to assist Monk, who been hired by my daughter to investigate the murder of a firehouse dalmatian.

  Our first stop was the fire station, which was over in North Beach, the neighborhood between Chinatown and Fisherman’s Wharf. There’s no beach there, of course—that was buried under a landfill, and the waterfront extended farther north decades ago, so the name is kind of a cheat. It’s perhaps better known locally as Little Italy, even though now there’re as many Chinese living there as Italians, so maybe that name is a cheat, too.

  North Beach is also known for beat writer Jack Kerouac, and stripper Carol Doda, whose enormous hooters used to be up in lights in front of the Condor Club. There are a few remaining vestiges of the neighborhood’s beatnik past, mostly for the sake of the tourists. A couple strip joints still cling to life on Broadway, but their seedy allure is almost comically dated, and they’re losing ground fast to coffeehouses and art galleries.

  Gentrification, beautification, and renovation are everywhere, my friends. It’s not just happening with buildings and neighborhoods. Go down to L.A. and you can see they’re gentrifying, beautifying, and renovating people there now, too.

  The streets were still damp from Friday’s intermittent rains, but the skies were clear and bright, with a crisp, cold wind blowing off the white-capped bay. I could smell the sea, mingled with a hint of fried food wafting up from Chinatown.

  The firehouse was on top of a hill with dramatic views of the Transamerica Pyramid and Coit Tower. It was a redbrick building from the mid-1900s with a stone carving of the SFFD emblem, an eagle with its talons gripping crisscrossed axes over licking flames, mounted above the arched garage doors.

  “When I was a kid,” Monk said, “I wanted to be a firefighter.”

  “You did?” I said.

  “I loved everything about it,” he said. “Except the firefighting part.”

  “Then what was it about being a firefighter that you loved?”

  “This.”
r />   Monk turned to the firehouse and opened his arms as if to embrace the sight in front of him. Both of the garage doors were open, letting the breeze stream into the station, where half a dozen firemen scrubbed and shined the two gleaming fire trucks, the sunshine glinting off the sparkling chrome and polished red metal.

  “Isn’t it great?” He sighed.

  I followed his gaze as he took in the fire hoses, neatly folded atop one another on the fire trucks; the spotless cement floors of the garage scrubbed and mopped to a marblelike sheen; the neat rows of fire hats, coats, and helmets aligned in open racks of dazzling steel; the pickaxes, shovels, and other tools mounted on the wall in order of size, shape, and function. The beauty of cleanliness, efficiency, and order.

  His eyes were wide in childlike awe and appreciation. He was ten years old again, though I must confess that in a lot of ways I’m not convinced he’s ever really grown up.

  Monk approached the captain, who stood beside a rolling cart of neatly folded white towels and a laundry basket, watching his men at work. His short-sleeved blue uniform was perfectly pressed and starched, his badge gleaming so bright that it was nearly pure light. He was in his fifties, with the kind of hard, chiseled features that only soldiers, comic-book characters, and statues usually possess.

  “May I help you?” the captain asked.

  “Actually, we’d like to help you,” Monk said. “I’m Adrian Monk and this is my assistant, Natalie Teeger.”

  “I’m Captain Mantooth.” He offered his hand to Monk. “You’re the detective, right?”

  Monk shook his hand, then held his open palm out to me for a disinfectant wipe. I gave him one. If Mantooth was offended, he didn’t show it.

  “I’ve been hired to investigate Sparky’s murder,” Monk said as he wiped his hands.

  “Are you working for Joe?” Mantooth asked.

  “Who is Joe?” Monk replied, and handed the wipe back to me.

  “Firefighter Joe,” I supplied, stuffing the wipe into a Baggie in my purse. By the end of a day my purse was usually overflowing with little Baggies of wipes. “He and Sparky were a team.”