Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse Page 5

  Julie watched all this with rapt attention. It took her mind off her sadness, that’s for sure.

  While we ate, I filled her in on what we’d learned so far, which didn’t sound very substantive to me but seemed to impress her. She gave Monk a hug and went back to her room to IM her friends.

  I told her once that when I was her age we didn’t have instant messaging to communicate with our friends. We used something called a telephone. You know what she said to me?

  “I’m glad I live in the modern age.”

  I felt like a dinosaur.

  Monk insisted on doing the dishes after dinner, and I didn’t argue with him. While he worked I sat at the table and relaxed with a glass of wine. I decided there were some definite benefits to having a clean freak as a houseguest. I wondered what it would take to get him to do the laundry, but then I imagined him trying to sort our bras and panties without touching them, or even looking at them, and knew it would never work. On the other hand, it might be amusing to watch.

  The phone rang. What would some anonymous cold caller in Bangladesh try to sell me tonight? I was tempted to let Monk answer the phone and put Rajid through the living hell he deserved, but I was merciful and snatched up the receiver myself.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Natalie Teeger? This is Joe Cochran. I hope I’m not bothering you.”

  He was, but in a good way. I reached for my glass of wine and took a preemptive gulp to slow down my heart. It didn’t work.

  “Not at all,” I lied.

  “I was wondering if you might be interested in having dinner with me sometime,” he said.

  “That would be nice,” I said, trying to sound casual about it when, in fact, I wanted to scream with glee.

  “Is tomorrow too soon? My next night off duty isn’t for a couple of days.”

  “Tomorrow works for me.” Ten minutes from now would have worked for me, too, but I didn’t want to seem too eager. We set a time and I gave him my address.

  When I hung up the phone, Monk was drying the dishes and giving me a look.

  “What?” I said.

  “You’re going on a date with Firefighter Joe?”

  “It appears that way,” I said, smiling giddily.

  “Who is going to take care of Julie?”

  I wasn’t as concerned about that as I was about who would take care of him. I’d have to sit Julie down for a detailed briefing.

  “I was hoping you’d keep an eye on her for me,” I said. Then I lied, “A sitter is going to be hard to get on such short notice. Do you mind?”

  “Will there be any shenanigans?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Will I have to organize any activities?”

  “She’ll probably just stay in her room,” I said. “She’s at that age.”

  “Me too,” Monk said.

  On Sunday mornings, Julie and I like to get into our grungiest old sweats, grab the Sunday Chronicle off the porch, and go to the Valley Bakery, where we order blueberry muffins, coffee for me, hot chocolate for her, and forage through the paper.

  Julie likes to read the comics, of course, and the capsule movie reviews in the Datebook, also known as the pink section for its colored pages. Each review is accompanied by a drawing of a little man in a bowler hat sitting in a movie theater chair. For a great movie he leaps out of his chair, hands clapping, eyes bugging out, hat flying off his head. If the movie stinks, he slumps in his seat, sound asleep.

  Sometimes, as I go through the week, I picture that guy sitting in his chair, reviewing my life as it plays out in front of him. Most of the time he’s sitting ramrod straight in his seat, mildly interested, which is a mediocre review. Rarely do I imagine him leaping out of his chair in ecstatic glee on my account.

  After breakfast we take a long walk up a very steep hill to Delores Park, where the view of the Castro, the Civic Center, and the Financial District is spectacular. But that’s not the view we go to see. We like to sit under a palm tree on the grassy knoll and people-watch. We see all kinds of people of every race in every possible combination.

  Take the couples, for instance. We see men and women, men and men, women and women, and people who fall somewhere in between. We see mimes performing, kids playing, families picnicking, bands playing, groups protesting—all of it against the panoramic downtown backdrop. It’s the best show in town.

  We usually stay in the park for an hour or so, talking about the week that was and the week that’s coming, and then, once we’ve caught our breath and had our fill of the show, we make the easy walk downhill. Once we get home, around noonish, we take our showers, change into fresh clothes, and do whatever chores and errands need doing.

  But our routine was shaken up on that Sunday by a couple of things. First there was the weather. The city was socked in by thick fog and soaked by drizzle. And then there was Monk.

  He woke me up at six A.M. with his incessant scrubbing. I dragged myself out of bed in my T-shirt and sweats to find him in the hall bathroom.

  Monk, his hands in dish gloves, was on his knees in the bathtub polishing the drain. He was wearing a matched set of pajamas, and sheepskin slippers, which would have been adorable if he weren’t an adult.

  Obviously I’d cleaned the bathroom before he arrived, but not to the point that you needed sunglasses to tolerate the glare off the linoleum, which was what he’d done to it. On the sink there was a bar of soap still in its wrapper, a brand-new toothbrush enclosed in plastic, and a fresh tube of toothpaste. His electric razor was plugged into the outlet.

  “It’s six o’clock in the morning, Mr. Monk,” I whispered so as not to wake Julie.

  “I didn’t know you’re such an early riser.”

  “I’m not,” I said. “What are you doing?”

  “Getting ready to take a shower,” he said.

  “You do this before every shower?”

  “And after,” he said.

  I shook my head and trudged to the kitchen. He was still in there two hours later. Julie was up by then and she was sitting at the table in her bathrobe, eating a bowl of cereal and shaking her leg.

  “I really have to go to the bathroom, Mom.”

  “I’m sure Mr. Monk will be out in a minute,” I said.

  “You said that an hour ago,” she said. “I’ve had two glasses of orange juice since then.”

  “That wasn’t very smart, was it?”

  “I didn’t think he’d be in there forever,” she said. “Couldn’t you knock?”

  “Is it that bad?”

  “It’s that bad,” she said.

  So we both got up and went to the bathroom door. I knocked.

  “Mr. Monk?” I said. “We really need to use the bathroom.”

  “Does it have to be this one?” he asked from behind the door.

  “It’s the only one in the house,” I said.

  He opened the door, still holding his toothbrush. The bathroom gleamed the way it had at six. There was no sign at all that he’d used it. Julie bounced and shifted her weight from foot to foot.

  “How well do you know the neighbors?” he asked.

  “Not that well,” I said. “We’re going to have to share this bathroom.”

  “I don’t see how that is going to work,” he said.

  Julie groaned in frustration, pushed past Monk, and went straight for the toilet. He scrambled out of the bathroom in terror and slammed the door closed behind him before she could even lift up the lid of the toilet seat.

  Monk stood there looking at me. I looked at him.

  “There’s only one bathroom and three of us,” I said.

  “It’s barbaric,” he said. “Does the health department know about this?”

  “You’ll just have to get used to it.”

  “How can you live this way?” he said.

  “If you paid me more,” I said, “I wouldn’t have to.”

  That shut him up. I knew it would.

  The only thing stronger than
Monk’s compulsion for cleanliness and order is his stinginess with money.

  6

  Mr. Monk Meets the Queen

  I spent an hour acting as Julie’s social secretary, arranging a playdate for her at the home of one of her friends so she would be under a parent’s supervision for the day while I assisted Monk on his investigation.

  Since, technically, Monk was working for Julie, she didn’t mind that I was dumping her at her friend’s house. It didn’t hurt that her friend had an Xbox, a PlayStation, a Game Boy, and every other computer game gizmo ever devised by man. The downside for me was that Julie would come home demanding, for the hundredth time, that I buy her all that stuff, too.

  Monk and I were out the door at 10 A.M. The first stop Monk wanted to make was at the home of Gregorio Dumas, the man who lived across the street from the firehouse and was, according to Firefighter Joe, Sparky’s only enemy and therefore our number one suspect.

  We knocked on Gregorio Dumas’s front door a half hour later. He look as if he patronized the same groomer as his dog. His fluffy mane of golden hair was styled into an enormous, flowing pompadour. His silhouette reminded me of a French poodle, which, by the way, was the animal he happened to own.

  Coincidence? I don’t think so.

  The guy was short and fat, with gold rings on every finger and necklaces and medallions draped around his neck. All his bling had a tacky canine theme, like the enormous, diamond-encrusted dog bone on the gold chain around his neck. He stood at his front door in a silk kimono, smirking with haughty superiority and evident distaste at his guests on the stoop, who happened to be Mr. Monk and me. Behind the two of us was the fire station where Sparky was killed.

  “You obviously like dogs,” Monk said after introducing us and explaining why were there.

  “You are a detective,” Gregorio said in a voice that was equal parts Ricardo Montalban and Fran Drescher. “Are all your deductions as brilliant as that?”

  He stepped aside to let us in. It looked like he’d inherited his home furnishings from an elderly relative who did a lot of shopping at Levitz in 1978. The upholstery reminded me of the Impala station wagon my parents used to have.

  An entire wall of shelves overflowed with dog show trophies, award ribbons, and framed photos of Letitia and her proud owner. Seeing the pictures, I was convinced I was right about their sharing the same groomer.

  “If you like dogs so much,” Monk said, “you must be heartbroken about what happened to Sparky.”

  “He was a rapist,” Gregorio said. “A canine sex offender.”

  “C’mon,” I said. “We’re talking about dogs here.”

  “Letitia is not a dog; she’s a symbol of perfection and beauty, the reigning queen of the canine world,” Gregorio said. “Or she was until Sparky ruined her life.”

  He swept his arm in front of the wall of honors. “She’s won hundreds of American Kennel Club competitions, including Best in Show at the Tournament of Champions. Letitia earned over sixty thousand dollars in prize money and endorsements last year alone.”

  “So you’re living off your dog,” Monk said.

  “She enjoys the fruits of her success,” Gregorio said. “She lives better than I do.”

  “She couldn’t live worse,” Monk muttered.

  Gregorio led us through the kitchen. The laundry room was a modified pantry, and Monk paused to look in at a fresh load of clothes, underwear, and towels folded on the dryer.

  “Mr. Monk,” I said, drawing his attention away before he started to refold everything or, worse, began giving his lecture on the importance of separating clothes by type of garment into their own stacks.

  Gregorio opened the door to the backyard, which was dominated by a miniature Victorian cottage with a cedar-shingled roof, gables, cupola, bay windows, and a wraparound porch with flower boxes. There were a bunch of rubber chew toys on the porch, including a bone, a squeaky ball, a hot dog, and a cat. There was a high fence ringed with razor wire surrounding the yard.

  “You’ve got to treat royalty like royalty,” Gregorio said.

  “All that,” I said, “for a dog? I could live in there.”

  “How many bathrooms does it have?” Monk asked.

  “Show dogs are judged by teeth, muscle tone, bone structure, coat texture, and, most important, how they carry themselves. Their gait, their balance, how all the elements fit together. A dog who lives in a castle walks like a queen. That’s what she was, a queen.”

  “You keep talking about Letitia in the past tense,” Monk said. “What happened to her?”

  “Sparky’s lust,” Gregorio said. He whistled for the dog.

  Letitia bounded out of her mansion. The French poodle still had her astonishingly white, fluffy hair and her regal bearing, but she was almost as rotund as her owner.

  “Sparky knocked her up,” Gregorio said.

  She went straight for Monk and shoved her nose toward his crotch. Monk blocked her with his hands and squealed when her wet nose made contact with his skin.

  “I’ve been hit,” he said, backing into the living room while the dog pushed him along, trying to get her nose past his hands.

  “Now she’s just a pregnant bitch,” Gregorio said as he returned to the living room. I followed him. “Soon she’ll be fat and swollen with big, bloated udders. But that’s nothing compared to what she’s going to look like after she squeezes out a litter of puppies.”

  Monk grabbed a pillow from the couch and placed it protectively in front of his groin. So the enthusiastic dog angled around for a sniff at his butt instead. He dropped into a chair, covered his lap with the pillow, and pinched his knees together.

  I could have helped Monk, of course. But after the morning ordeal with the bathroom, I was enjoying some payback.

  “Surely she can get back into shape,” I said. After all, I thought, I bounced back to my old form after my pregnancy, didn’t I?

  “Sagging teats, wrinkly skin, bloodshot eyes; that’s her future,” he said. “A shriveled-up shell of her old self. I warned those firemen something bad would happen if they let their spotted monster run wild through the neighborhood whenever they left the station.”

  There was a mirror on the wall. I looked at my reflection, wondering if that was what Joe was going to see at dinner tonight: sagging teats, wrinkly skin, bloodshot eyes.

  “It’s not like she bred with a show dog. Sparky was common street trash,” Gregorio said. “Can you imagine what those mixed-breed mongrel monsters are gonna look like? I won’t shed any tears over Sparky.”

  Letitia jumped up on the couch beside Monk and started licking his cheek.

  “Help,” Monk squeaked.

  “Sounds like you hated Sparky enough to kill him,” I said.

  “Except I didn’t,” Gregorio said.

  “Is that the best you can do?” I said.

  “Help,” Monk squeaked again.

  I grabbed Letitia by the collar and pulled her away from Monk, who bolted out the front door and closed it behind him.

  “If I was gonna kill him, I would have done it before he knocked up Letitia,” Gregorio said, taking Letitia from me. “What good would it do me now?”

  “How about revenge?” Monk said from outside, his voice muffled by the door.

  “I won’t say it didn’t cross my mind,” Gregorio said.

  “What?” Monk said.

  “It crossed my mind,” Gregorio yelled. “But I’m suing the San Francisco Fire Department for Letitia’s lost earning potential instead.”

  “Where were you last night between ten P.M. and two A.M.?” I asked Gregorio.

  “Here,” Gregorio said. “Alone.”

  “That’s not much of an alibi,” I said.

  “I don’t need one,” Gregorio said. “Because I didn’t do it.”

  “Could you speak up?” Monk called out.

  “I didn’t do it,” Gregorio yelled back. “Ask the fireman.”

  Monk opened the door a crack, just enough to stick
his face in. “What fireman?”

  “The one I saw coming out of the station about ten thirty,” Gregorio said.

  “But they all left at ten to fight a fire,” I said.

  “I know that. Don’t you think I’ve got ears? It’s a real joy to live across the street from a fire station, let me tell you. Anyway, the blaring sirens at ten; then a half hour later that damn hell-dog of theirs starts barking. I looked out my window to see if he was trotting over here to defile Letitia some more, but the barking stopped and I didn’t see anything. Five minutes later, Letitia starts barking, so I look out the window again, thinking Sparky’s on his way over for some action, and I see a fireman walking out.”

  “How do you know it was a fireman?” Monk asked.

  “I could see his helmet and heavy coat,” Gregorio said.

  “But not his face,” I said.

  “He had his back to me,” Gregorio said. “And it was nighttime, and he was across the street. Now if you will excuse me, I’ve got things to do.”

  He ushered me to the door. The instant I stepped outside, Monk waved his hands frantically in front of me, as if ants were swarming all over them.

  “Wipe, wipe, wipe,” he said.

  I gave him about thirty of them as we walked to the car, which was parked in front of the fire station.

  “I need to shower,” Monk said. “For a year.”

  “Who does he think he’s kidding?” I said. “He expects us to believe that a fireman killed Sparky? How lame is that? He’s just trying to deflect attention from himself.”

  “He’s not the guy,” Monk said.

  “How can you say that? Sparky knocked up his cash cow—or cash poodle—whatever. The point is, Gregorio lost sixty thousand dollars per year. That’s plenty of motive for murder, and he lives right across from the fire station, so he knows exactly when the firemen come and go.”