Mr. Monk on Patrol (22 page)

“Because you’re a good cop.”

“You can’t know that,” I said. “I’ve only worn a uniform and a badge for one day.”

“I know it because you’re second-guessing your actions. A hard-charging wannabe cop who is just in it for the thrills wouldn’t be. You understand the consequences of what you’re doing out there.”

“Someone could get killed,” I said. “By me.”

“That’s true,” Monk said. “But if it happens, I know it will be someone who would have killed you first if given the chance. Or me. Or somebody else.”

“Thank you, Mr. Monk,” I said.

“You’re welcome,” he said. “Partner.”

We submitted our reports, changed back into the street clothes we’d brought with us that morning, and drove our squad car over to Ellen Morse’s house. It was weird to be back in the squad car again without our uniforms on, but it was the only transportation we had.

We pulled up to the curb in front of her house.

“Pop the trunk,” Monk said.

“What for?”

“So I can get my hazmat suit, of course.”

“Ellen has invited us to her home for dinner. You are not walking into her house wearing a gas mask and gloves. It’s beyond rude.”

“You expect me to walk in there unprotected when
there could be poop on the floors, poop on the walls, and poop in the air? The house itself could be made out of bricks of dung.”

“It’s a chance you’re going to have to take.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s the polite thing to do.”

“You’re talking to me about polite?” Monk said. “It’s considered polite to bathe regularly with soap, not wash yourself in excrement. She’s the one who is impolite.”

“Millions of people in India bathe with the soap that she sells in her store.”

“Have you smelled the people who use that soap?”

“No, have you?”

“Perhaps there’s a reason they are on the other side of the planet and we’re here,” Monk said.

“That’s stupid and racist,” I said.

“That’s no way to talk to your boss,” he said.

“You’re not my boss, remember? You’re my partner. Now get out or we’re going to be late and I don’t think you can live with that.”

It was a low blow, but an effective one. He couldn’t tolerate being late, even if it was to the home of the devil herself.

We went up the front walk to Ellen’s door, Monk trailing behind me. My guess was that if she opened her door and a torrent of poop spilled out, he wanted to be sure I got hit with it first and he had time to run.

I rang the bell. She opened the door and made a show of checking her watch.

“Six fifty-eight,” she said. “You’re early. I thought I told you to be here at seven.”

“We can wait,” Monk said. “Or we can leave and not come back.”

“I’m joking, Adrian. Where’s your sense of humor?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m still looking.”

She laughed and beckoned us inside. “That’s more like it.”

What she didn’t realize was that he was being serious.

I stepped inside. Monk hesitated, trying to get a good look at the interior from the safety of the porch first.

I’m sure that what Monk saw in the entry hall and adjoining living room surprised him as much as it did me.

The furniture was all matching sets, seemingly arranged with laser-guided precision according to exact mathematical calculations that guaranteed that each piece would not only be centered but set in perfectly equal and balanced relation to every other piece.

The works of art on the walls were in identical frames and arranged by size in symmetrical groupings. Even the images within those frames, whether they were painted, sketched, or photographed, were symmetrical.

It all felt manufactured and synthetic, as if I’d walked into a home designed, built, and occupied by androids.

It made that open house in San Francisco, the one dressed for showing, seem lived in and authentic by comparison (minus the dead Realtor, of course).

“You have a beautiful home,” Monk said, stepping inside. “So warm and comfortable.”

Only if you find the ambience of mausoleums, hospital operating rooms, and morgues relaxing, which Monk did, primarily because they were so stainless and sterile.

“Thank you, Adrian,” she said.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was as if she and Monk shared the same interior decorator, a supercomputer
or perhaps some alien being that had never actually been in an earthling’s home before but was nonetheless trying to create one.

I’m sure he didn’t expect that. I certainly didn’t.

“It’s perhaps the nicest home I’ve ever seen,” he said, looking awed. You would have thought we were touring the Palace of Versailles.

“I’m truly flattered,” she said.

The décor had to be a show for Monk’s benefit. But if it was, she’d pulled off a monumental undertaking that was accomplished with extraordinary speed and care.

“Is this really how you live?” I asked her.

“Oh, of course not,” she said, closing the door behind her.

I sighed with relief. “I didn’t think so.”

“I stashed all of my coprolites and dung art away so I wouldn’t offend Adrian.”

“And the rest of this?” I said, sweeping my arm to indicate the entire house.

“I’m sorry I didn’t have a chance to clean up,” she said. “But I barely had time to hide the art and make dinner as it is. I hope you brought your appetites.”

She led us into the living room, where there was a bottle of white wine for us and a bottle of Fiji water for Monk, and some hors d’oeuvres, a bowl full of roasted almonds and an assortment of canapés—toasted squares of bread topped with minced olives, mushrooms, shrimp, deviled eggs, and slices of cheese.

Monk and I sat down on the couch and I gobbled up a bunch of the canapés. Once they were in my mouth, I realized I was ravenous. I’d never gotten that Hot Pocket I went into the mini-mart to buy.

“Delicious,” I said, and I am ashamed to admit that my mouth may have been full at the time.

It took all the self-control I had not to scarf down all the canapés then and there, so I reached for a handful of almonds to fill my hand and my mouth.

Monk eyed the food suspiciously, which Ellen noticed with obvious amusement.

“I assure you that nothing I will be serving you tonight was made with anything predigested, and that includes the dishware,” Ellen said, opening the wine and filling our glasses before taking a seat across the coffee table from us.

“Was everything washed with real soap, including the plates and the linens?” Monk asked.

She nodded. “With common, brand-name dish soaps and laundry detergents found in any grocery store.”

With that disclaimer, Monk bravely reached for an olive canapé and ate it. I took two more of the shrimp ones and another handful of almonds.

“Very tasty,” he said and took another, popping it in his mouth.

“I grew the olives and mushrooms myself in my own garden,” Ellen said.

Monk suddenly went pale. “Using fertilizer?”

She smiled. “They were grown in soil enriched by a compost heap made up of decomposed organic matter like banana peels, grass clippings, eggshells, leaves, potato skins, uneaten fruit that went bad in my refrigerator, coffee grounds, that sort of thing. No chemicals and no excrement were used.”

Then again, her coffee grounds probably included beans that had once passed through the intestinal tract of a civet, but I didn’t see any need to make that clarification. I took a sip of the wine and it was delicious, so I hoped it was covered in her disclaimer and wasn’t derived from rare grapes crapped by some exotic animal I’d never heard of.

“You’re obviously a woman who appreciates cleanliness, order, and balance,” Monk said. “So how can you possibly peddle poop, much less surround yourself with it?”

“That’s exactly why I can,” she said.

“That makes no sense,” Monk said.

“It does if you understand my approach to life. For one thing, I can’t stand waste.”

“Neither can I,” he said.

“I prize efficiency and order.”

“Me, too,” Monk said, then turned to me. “Now we are getting somewhere.”

“That’s why I believe that anything and everything that
can
be recycled
should
be recycled, and that includes the excrement from all living things.”

“Okay, now you’re talking crazy,” Monk said. “It’s sad because you were doing so well before.”

“I’m a big believer in the importance of symmetry and circles,” she said.

“Now you’re talking sense again. Hold on to those concepts and you’ll finally begin to see reason.”

“I try my best to lead a balanced life.”

“Of course you do,” Monk said. “It’s only natural. Balance is something we should all strive to achieve.”

“That’s exactly what I’m getting at, Adrian. When we use something and recycle what’s left of it, and then that product is itself recycled, and if that process is continually repeated, it creates a perfect circle and a natural balance. But when there is waste, when something is just thrown away, that circle is broken and an imbalance is created. And so it is with poop. If we can find ways to recycle it for energy, art, fertilizer, gunpowder, food, soap, paper, and other products, then that circle, and that balance, are maintained.”

There was a long silence, broken only by the sound
of me eating the remaining canapés and washing them down with wine. Finally, Monk rolled his shoulders and spoke.

“You’re right.”

I stared at him now, shocked. “She is?”

“Her argument makes a kind of sense,” he said. “It would make perfect sense if it didn’t include one thing.”

“What’s that?” Morse asked.

“Poop,” Monk said.

“Don’t think of poop as something repulsive and unhealthy that was extruded by a creature,” Morse said.

“But that’s exactly what it is,” he said. “So if you want to keep clean, how can you have poop everywhere? It’s an untenable contradiction.”

“I’ve adjusted my thinking,” she said.

“You mean you’ve lost your mind,” he said.

I would have chided Monk for insulting our hostess in her own home, but my mouth was full, so speaking up at that precise moment wouldn’t have been too polite, either.

Besides, she clearly wasn’t offended by his remark. If anything, she found it compelling. She leaned forward, narrowing the distance between them, and looked him in the eye.

“Think of poop as a by-product in the process of manufacturing a product or creating energy, like sawdust or scrap metal or a banana peel,” Morse said. “If you do, you’ll see it as something left over, a part that no longer fits anywhere, that has to be organized and reintegrated in some way or the natural balance is thrown completely out of whack.”

Monk cocked his head and looked at her for a long moment.

“I’ll try,” he said.

It would have been huge if all Monk had done was agree to consider someone else’s point of view on a matter that he’d already had a strong opinion about.

That alone would have represented a major breakthrough for him.

But what he’d done actually went way, way beyond that, because the subject he’d agreed to reconsider was…

Poop.

Something that had to be at the top of his list of things that he reviled and feared the most.

The fact that he’d agreed to even consider adjusting his beliefs about something he found so repugnant was truly a miracle, one that probably never could have happened before Trudy’s murder was solved.

It was such a big moment, such a Monk milestone, that I wouldn’t have been surprised if Dr. Kroger, his late shrink, had risen from the grave and knocked on the door to congratulate him.

But if Monk recognized the profound significance of
this moment, he didn’t show it at all. He sat calmly through dinner, politely complimenting Ellen Morse on her homemade ravioli and fresh asparagus, all the spears the same size and set side by side on our plates.

It was the perfect meal for Monk, who’d hated her so vehemently just an hour ago, and yet there he was, being slowly charmed by her.

Maybe she really was the devil.

Monk was now at ease around Ellen Morse but I was becoming seriously creeped out, not by her take on poop but by the obsessive-compulsive way she lived in her home, especially since she didn’t seem to express those tendencies in any other aspect of her life—at least not as far as I’d seen.

Who was this woman?

So I grilled her—politely, of course.

Under my relentless questioning, she told us that her parents were outspoken liberals with shared political views but sharply different personalities. Her father was a buttoned-down mathematician, very organized and rational, while her mother was a free-spirited dancer/performance artist/painter, notoriously flighty and disorganized. By all rights, their marriage should never have lasted.

But somehow it did. They loved each other as passionately as they fought, so they found ways to compromise, to strike a balance that allowed them to be who they were without driving each other crazy and to create a peaceful home for their four kids.

That dichotomy of personalities lived on in Morse. She had her father’s sense of order and organization to the hilt, but hated math. She had her mother’s love of creative expression, but did nothing creative to express herself.