Mr. Monk is Cleaned Out (18 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Mr. Monk Goes Home

T
he Victorian house in Tewksbury, just over the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin County, was unchanged since the time Monk grew up there with his older brother, Ambrose. The Monks don’t like change.

Ambrose was every bit as brilliant as Monk and just as messed up. He made his living writing instruction manuals, encyclopedias, and textbooks and could recite them entirely from memory in a dozen different languages (including Dratch, which is only spoken by elephant- nosed aliens on a cult sci-fi TV series). That made him a self-proclaimed expert on just about everything, something he was glad to demonstrate given the slightest opportunity.

He was also a fair handyman, able to do his own electrical, plumbing, and carpentry work and repair household appliances (it didn’t hurt that he’d written the owner’s manuals for most of them). I’d schlepped out to Tewksbury a dozen times just to have him fix my broken blenders, hair dryers, toasters, and answering machines.

Ambrose developed those skills out of necessity because he was afraid to leave the house. He’s only stepped outside twice in thirty years. That isolation meant he had little face-to-face exposure with people. Hardly anybody ever came to see him. Most of his interactions were conducted over the phone or the computer. So he was awkward and inexperienced in even the most basic of social interactions, especially with women.

But he was a sweet, exceedingly polite guy, and, despite his awkwardness, I liked him a lot. In many ways he was more self-sufficient than his younger brother, whom he admired as an outgoing, risk-taking, thrill-seeking rebel.

Yeah, I know, it’s hard to believe.

Ambrose must have heard us drive up, because his front door was open and he was standing several steps back from it in the shadows of the entry hall, as if he might inadvertently get sucked out into the street otherwise.

He had on his customary long-sleeve flannel shirt, buttoned at the collar and cuffs, an argyle sweater-vest over it, corduroy pants, and a pair of shiny Hush Puppies shoes tied with neat, perfect bows.

“Natalie, what a delightful surprise. Do come in,” Ambrose said, standing as stiffly as a soldier at attention. “You can come in, too, Adrian.”

“Thank you, Ambrose,” Monk said as we stepped inside.

Monk looked into the living room and scowled. It was lined with filing cabinets and crammed full with about forty years’ worth of newspapers and magazines, neatly stacked and laid out in perfect rows.

I knew that the cabinets contained every piece of mail that had ever been delivered to the house as well as the notes for Ambrose’s various books.

“You’re always welcome, Adrian. This is your house, too, though you’d never know considering how rarely you come to visit.”

“It’s not my house anymore,” Monk said. “It’s yours.”

“It’s
ours
,” Ambrose said. “It was left to both of us in Mom’s will.”

“But you live here.”

“I don’t have a choice.”

“Of course you do,” Monk said. “The door is right there. All you have to do is step outside.”

“Not everyone is as fearless as you,” Ambrose said and nudged the front door closed with his foot. As soon as the door was shut, his whole body seemed to loosen up, as if he’d been released from suspended animation. “Can I offer you a marshmallow?”

“No, thank you,” I said.

“Are you sure? In 2000 BC, they were a pleasure reserved solely for the enjoyment of the pharaohs. Now everybody can have them whenever they want. But I save them for special occasions.”

“This isn’t a special occasion,” Monk said.

“It is for me. It’s not often that I have such beguiling guests.” Ambrose smiled at me, then glanced at his brother. “And you, too.”

“Maybe you’d have more visitors if you got rid of all this garbage.” Monk gestured to the newspapers and file cabinets.

“That’s probably what Julius Caesar said before he burned the Library of Alexandria. I suppose if you had your way we’d gut the Smithsonian as well.” Ambrose turned his back on Monk and devoted his attention to me. “How about a refreshing glass of chilled water?”

“You have water?” Monk said.

“Of course I do,” he said, still refusing to face his brother. “I can’t survive without it. Nobody can.”

“Oh my God, you haven’t heard,” Monk said. “I was afraid of that.”

“What are you talking about?” Ambrose asked, turning now to Monk again.

Monk took a deep breath. “There’s no easy way to say this. The news I am about to share is shocking and will change your life, so prepare yourself. There’s no more Summit Creek. It’s gone. We’re going to die.”

Ambrose looked at his brother for a long moment.

“
That’s
why you came all the way over here, to tell me that? I knew that Summit Creek was going under months before it happened.”

“You did?” Monk said. “How?”

“I’m living in a house, Adrian, not a cave.”

Ambrose turned his back on his brother again and walked into the kitchen. Monk rushed after him.

“You knew and you didn’t tell me?”

“You’re a man of the world,” Ambrose said. “I figured you knew.”

“I didn’t,” Monk said. “It came as a horrible surprise.”

Ambrose took three glasses from a cabinet, set two of them on the kitchen table and one on the counter beside him. “Don’t you watch TV, read the newspapers, or surf the Web?”

“I don’t have as much idle time as you do.”

“So if you didn’t come here to warn me about the water, what brought you?”

Monk sat down at the table and laid his hands, palm down, on top of it. I sat down beside him.

“I’ve lost my water, my job, my life savings, and my home. It turns out I am not a man of great expectations after all. I have been bred to no calling and I am fit for nothing. So I have returned to whence I came, to my common little home on the marshes, for want of a clean bed to sleep in and a roof over my head.”

It was true that he’d suffered a tragedy of Dickensian proportions, but I still thought Monk was laying it on a little thick.

“Now you know why I don’t leave the house,” Ambrose said. “You definitely need a drink.”

He opened the refrigerator and took out three bottles of Fiji water and gave one to each of us. He remained standing. I’m not sure whether he stood as a courtesy to Monk or if he was just as phobic about symmetry and even numbers as his brother was and felt three people at a table for four would topple the balance of the universe.

Monk examined the bottled water. “What is this?”

“Rain that fell through the virgin skies of emerald blue on the pristine mountains of Viti Levu island in 1515 and percolated slowly through layers of silica, basalt, and sandstone into a subterranean chamber,” Ambrose said, “where it remained sealed and pure until it was drawn out and captured in the bottle you now hold in your hands.”

Monk held the bottle up to the light and licked his lips. “It looks good.”

“Have as much as you want.” Ambrose opened his bottle and poured it into a glass. “I’ve got a ten-year supply.”

I filled my glass and took a sip. “It’s delicious. I think it’s even better than Summit Creek.”

Truthfully, it tasted like tap water to me. But maybe that was five hundred years old, too.

“I spent weeks researching the best alternative to Summit Creek and this is what I found,” Ambrose said.

Monk unscrewed the cap on his bottle, closed his eyes, and took a tentative sniff of the water. “The fragrance reminds me of Mom.”

Ambrose nodded. “Me, too. That’s when I knew it was right.”

I sniffed my water but I couldn’t detect any fragrance at all.

Monk poured a little of the water into the glass. He swirled the liquid around a bit, held the glass up to the light, scrutinizing it for any impurities, then he took a tiny sip.

He rolled it around in his mouth and then swallowed it hard, like it was a golf ball instead of a teaspoon worth of water.

Monk waited a moment, as if expecting some sort of immediate, adverse physical reaction. When none came, he took another, larger sip and smiled at his brother.

“You’ve saved me, Ambrose,” Monk said, his eyes tearing up. He turned to me and pointed to his eyes. “That’s Fiji water.”

We spent the next few hours drinking five- hundred-year-old water and eating marshmallows as if we were the pharaohs of Marin County.

The more water Monk drank, the more relaxed and talkative he became. He told Ambrose all about the murders of Russell Haxby and Lincoln Clovis.

As I listened, I became absolutely convinced that Sebes was guilty and disheartened that there was no way we could prove it, especially since we were no longer even remotely associated with the investigation. And if we tried to nose around, we were sure to get slapped down hard by Captain Stottlemeyer.

Monk finished his story by declaring emphatically that Bob Sebes was the killer and that the alcohol reading on the Triax XG7 8210 proved it.

Ambrose nodded thoughtfully and sipped his water.

“There’s a major flaw in your theory, Adrian.”

“What’s that?” Monk asked.

“Bob Sebes couldn’t have committed the murders,” Ambrose replied.

Monk dismissed the argument with a wave of his hand. “You’re just saying that because he’s wearing a GPS monitoring unit and his house is surrounded by reporters and police officers.”

“There might be a way out of the house,” Ambrose said, “but there’s no way to beat the XG7 8210.”

“How would you know?”

“Because I wrote the book on it. Well, the technical manual anyway. I’ve got one of the units upstairs.”

“So you could write about it?” I asked.

He nodded. “And because I like to wear it from time to time.”

At first I thought he might be joking, but the expression on his face was dead serious.

“Why would you want to wear it?” Monk said. “Is it so people will think that there’s a sane reason why you can’t leave the house?”

“I wear it as a precaution in case I ever wander out.”

“How would that happen?” Monk asked.

“What if I became a sleepwalker one night, wandered out the front door, and woke up hours later”—Ambrose glanced at the window and shuddered—“out there?”

“Is that something you dream about?” I asked.

“It’s something I have nightmares about.” Ambrose knocked back some water as if it was whiskey.

Monk shook his head. “That’s just silly. Who is going to come get you if your XG7 8210 sends out an alarm that you’ve left the house?”

Ambrose smiled at me. “I have it set to call Natalie.”

“Why me?” I asked.

“Because I know that I can depend on you.”

“Why not me?” Monk asked.

Ambrose looked at his brother. “Are you going to get in an automobile, find me wherever I am, and bring me home safely?”

“Of course I would,” Monk said. “I’d call Natalie, she’d pick me up, and we’d be right over.”

“I’m not family,” I said. “What makes you so sure you can depend on me?”

“Because Adrian does,” he said.

“I don’t depend on her,” Monk said. “I employ her. There’s a difference.”

“Are you employing her now?” Ambrose asked.

Monk shifted in his seat. “Yes and no.”

“Yes and no?” Ambrose said. “How does that work?”

“I can’t wait to hear this,” I said.

“She’s still working for me,” Monk said, “but I am not paying her for it.”

“Then why do you suppose she’s doing it if she’s not getting paid for it?” Ambrose asked.

“Because it’s a higher calling.”

Ambrose shook his head. “That’s not why, Adrian.”

Maybe I’d underestimated Ambrose. Perhaps he understood people and relationships more than I thought he did. He certainly understood them better than his younger brother.

Ambrose looked at me, but when I caught his eye, he immediately shifted his gaze, suddenly self-conscious.

“There have been times when I’ve imagined what it would be like if I sleepwalked out of the house and you rescued me.”

“Is that one of your nightmares, too?” I asked.

Ambrose shrugged. “That one might qualify as a dream.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Mr. Monk Has Style

I
wanted to break our record of always being fired after just one day on the job, so I tried to anticipate all the things Monk might do that could offend, infuriate, or horrify our new employer.

On our drive downtown to the Bayview Mall the next morning, I ordered Monk not to round up or down any charges on the register, not to rearrange the clothing in the store to fit his own sense of order, and not to criticize the fashion choices of any of his customers.

“Your job is to make the customer happy,” I said, “not yourself.”

“That’s easy,” Monk said. “I’m never happy.”

“Glad to hear it,” I said.

“If people want to make foolish decisions, what do I care? I’m hydrated.”

“Did you spend all night drinking?”

Monk nodded. “We partied like I was back in college. It was unhooked.”

“Unhooked?”

“The Monk brothers aren’t as buttoned-down as you think we are.”

Monk’s shirt was buttoned to the collar, his sleeves were buttoned at the cuffs, and he was wiping down my dashboard with a disinfectant wipe. He couldn’t have been more buttoned-up, literally or figuratively, if he’d tried.

“You are two wild and crazy guys,” I said.

“We went through an entire box of Cap’n Crunch,” Monk said. “With Crunch Berries, which are a synthetic fruit.”

“That’s edgy.”

“Don’t ever tell anyone that we’ve recreationally indulged in synthetic fruits. I wouldn’t want people to get the wrong idea about us. I’m sure you’ve got your vices.”

“One or two,” I said.

I found a spot on the second floor of the parking structure and we went into the mall, which was designed to look like an idealized version of an iconic San Francisco street. All the interior storefronts had bay windows and Victorian architectural flourishes. A cable car even ran through the mall on a winding track that ended up in a food court made to look like Fisherman’s Wharf, only without the panhandlers, the crapping seagulls, the souvenir shops, the gum on the sidewalks, or the smell of the bay, a heady mix of salt water and outboard motor exhaust.

Monk loved the fake streets, of course. They were exactly the way he wanted the world to be—unnaturally clean, free of nature, sanitized and climate-controlled.

But I wondered why anyone but Monk would trade the experience of walking down the real San Francisco streets outside for the fake ones in the mall. You might as well be in Owensboro, Kentucky, or Walla Walla, Washington.

Fashion Frisson was a long, narrow clothing store tucked between a RadioShack and a jeweler. The store featured contemporary, brightly colored fashions with a slightly retro, ’70s feel.

The layout of the store was straightforward, with women’s clothing on one side and men’s on the other. That even division appealed to Monk’s sense of order, symmetry, and separation of the sexes.

Fashion Frisson’s proprietor was Kiana Claire, an energetic, overaccessorized brunette with a squeaky voice that made me wonder if she inhaled helium whenever our backs were turned.

I’d brought our résumés along but she wasn’t interested in seeing them.

“Randy’s recommendation is enough for me,” she said. “He’s a fantastic judge of character. Plus it saves me from having to run background checks on you both, which is going to be standard procedure for me from now on.”

Not every crook and pervert has been arrested before, but I wasn’t going to tell her that. Nor was I going to admit that I actually had a criminal record, though not for anything major, mostly for civil disobedience. Monk was falsely arrested and convicted of murder once, but I wasn’t going to mention that, either.

“How do you know Randy?” I asked.

“He’s a longtime customer,” she said. “Have you ever heard him sing?”

Unfortunately, I had. He’d only written and performed one song, at least as far as I knew.

“Oh, yes,” I said. “It was unlike anything I’ve ever heard before.”

“It’s a catchy tune,” Monk said. “But it’s no ‘867-5309.’ ”

Monk liked the Tommy Tutone 1982 hit song, also known as “Jenny,” because the numbers added up to thirty-eight.

“He’s got Bob Dylan’s depth and Pitbull’s party-hearty, raw sexuality,” Kiana said. “Randy has got a cult following in France, you know.”

I did. The cult was a dozen French women with cop fixations. I’d seen them for myself and it was something I tried hard to forget.

Monk raised his hand. “Excuse me, but I have a confession to make.”

“No, you don’t,” I said. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be good.

“I have no fashion sense,” he said, ignoring my protests.

“Of course you do,” Kiana said.

“I do?”

“Look at how you’ve dressed. It’s fresh and original. It defines your character and reveals a powerful awareness of how fashion can express personal identity. I’m blown away by it. You have style, Adrian.”

Monk smiled at me. “I have style.”

“What about me?” I asked her. “How’s my fashion sense?”

She hesitated. “We’ll work on it.”

Kiana proceeded to explain our duties to us. They weren’t too complicated. We would help customers with their purchases, manage the dressing rooms, keep the place orderly, and ring up purchases at the register. She would be in the back office most of the day, taking care of the invoices and other paperwork that had piled up since she’d fired her salespeople two weeks ago.

“I was afraid to hire anyone after what happened,” she said. “But I have complete faith in you. This job is ninety-eight percent people skills and I can see that you’re people persons.”

Monk started to raise his hand again to make another confession, but I slapped it down, and held it down, until she was in the back room.

The morning was slow, which gave Monk a chance to make sure that all the hangers were facing in the same direction, to wash the windows and vacuum the floors, and to arrange the clothes by size, while I handled the few customers who came in. It worked out nicely for both of us. It was certainly less stressful than going to crime scenes and questioning suspects. I didn’t miss seeing corpses every day, though I hadn’t had much of a break from that.

“I love this job,” Monk said.

“You haven’t waited on any customers yet.”

“I hope it stays that way,” he said.

I did, too, because it reduced the odds that Monk would do something that would get us fired. But business picked up around lunchtime. Luckily, most of the customers were women, who preferred to have me wait on them while Monk manned the register. I didn’t know anything about fashion but I knew how to kiss up. Mostly I told the women how nice they looked in whatever garment they tried on and how it made them look slimmer and yet curvier.

My customers bought everything they tried on, which was a good thing, not only because it racked up sales but because, as I only realized in hindsight, it postponed a disaster.

Monk cleaned and disinfected the dressing rooms after each customer used them, which should have been my first hint of the trouble to come. He didn’t offend any of the customers with what he was doing because he didn’t start sanitizing their dressing rooms until they were at the register, paying for their purchases, their backs to him.

The trouble started with the first customer who didn’t buy the clothes that she had tried on. Unfortunately, she was also Monk’s first customer of the day. She was a short, stout woman who dressed too young for her age, probably to the embarrassment of her children. (No sooner did I think that thought than I wondered if I was projecting just a little.) She handed three blouses to him with a dismissive frown.

“You can take these back,” she said.

“You’re not buying them?”

“These make me look fat.”

“You should have thought of that before you wore them,” Monk said, dropping them into a trash can.

“Excuse me?”

“You can’t just put on clothes and not buy them.”

“There’s no obligation to buy when you try clothes on,” she said.

“Of course there is,” Monk said.

“How else can you see if they fit?”

“Use your imagination,” Monk said. “We can’t sell these now. They’re contaminated.”

“They’re
what
?”

I quickly excused myself from my customer and rushed over to the dressing rooms, forcing a laugh.

“Don’t mind him. He’s got a strange sense of humor,” I said and gave Monk a playful punch on the shoulder. “Just because there are curtains here doesn’t mean it’s your stage.”

“These clothes will have to be incinerated,” Monk said.

The woman laughed. “For a moment there I thought you were nuts.”

“Would you like to try on something else?” I asked.

“I’m thinking about that V-neck sweater,” she said, pointing to a display on the other side of the store.

“Mr. Monk will be glad to get you one in your size.”

“When was the last time you bathed?” Monk asked.

She laughed again. “He’s actually pretty funny.”

“He’s a riot.” I faked a laugh of my own, then shoved Monk. “Get the lady her sweater, Leno.”

Monk went off. I excused myself again, and returned to the customer I’d abandoned.

Before Monk returned to the dressing rooms, I intercepted him.

“Do not say another word to that woman except
thank you
or
good-bye
,” I whispered.

“I totally agree. She’s a psycho,” Monk whispered. “Who knows what she might do next?”

Thankfully, the stout woman ended up buying the sweater. She was leaving the store when Kiana emerged from the back room to ask us how everything was going.

“It was going great until she came in,” Monk said, gesturing to the customer.

“Why? What happened?” Kiana asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “She bought a V-neck sweater.”

“And soiled three blouses that she wore without buying,” Monk said.

“Soiled?” Kiana said.

Monk nodded grimly. “Where’s your incinerator?”

“Why would I have an incinerator in a clothing store?”

“He is just joking with you,” I said.

“There’s nothing humorous about the black death,” Monk said. “Who knows how many germs are swimming in the sweat that those blouses are drenched in?”

“The black death didn’t come from people trying on clothes,” I said. “It was rats.”

“Who lived in nests of soiled clothing and ate pizzas.”

Kiana laughed and clapped Monk on the arm. “Stylish and funny, too. No wonder you and Randy are such good friends. Why don’t you two take off for lunch? I recommend the food court. Mall employees get a twenty percent discount.”

“Sounds great to me,” I said. “Thank you for the tip.”

We walked out, Monk rubbing his shoulder. “Why do women keep hitting me?”

“Because you don’t think before you speak,” I said.

“Maybe I should get shoulder pads.”

“Maybe you should take a vow of silence.”