Mr. Monk on the Road, page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
CHAPTER ONE - Mr. Monk and the Big Changes
CHAPTER TWO - Mr. Monk and the Seventeen Steps
CHAPTER THREE - Mr. Monk Gets Hooked
CHAPTER FOUR - Mr. Monk Has Breakfast
CHAPTER FIVE - Mr. Monk Meets Lieutenant Devlin Again
CHAPTER SIX - Mr. Monk and the Dirty Knife
CHAPTER SEVEN - Mr. Monk Has a Plan
CHAPTER EIGHT - Mr. Monk and the Happy Birthday
CHAPTER NINE - Mr. Monk and the Devil
CHAPTER TEN - Mr. Monk Hits the Road
CHAPTER ELEVEN - Mr. Monk and the Mystery Spot
CHAPTER TWELVE - Mr. Monk and the Police
CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Mr. Monk Drives Through
CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Mr. Monk and the Trailer Park
CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Mr. Monk and the First Night
CHAPTER SIXTEEN - Mr. Monk and the New Day
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - Mr. Monk and the Gum
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - Mr. Monk and the Murder
CHAPTER NINETEEN - Mr. Monk and the Big Step
CHAPTER TWENTY - Mr. Monk and the Peanuts
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - Mr. Monk and the Weird Sisters
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - Mr. Monk and the Duel
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE - Mr. Monk on the Mother Road
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR - Mr. Monk and the Grand Canyon
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE - Mr. Monk at the Drive-in
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX - Mr. Monk Goes to Yosemite
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN - Mr. Monk Finds His Balance
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT - Mr. Monk Goes Home
The Monk Series
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
OBSIDIAN
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Copyright © 2011 Monk © USA Cable Entertainment LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:
Goldberg, Lee, 1962-
Mr. Monk on the road: a novel/by Lee Goldberg.
p. cm.
“An Obsidian mystery.”
“Based on the USA network television series created by Andy Breckman.”
eISBN : 978-1-101-49546-9
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AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
If you haven’t watched the final episode of the TV series Monk, and you don’t want the solution to the murder of Adrian’s wife, Trudy, ruined for you, don’t read this book yet, because I am going to give it all away in the first few pages.
This story picks up a few months after the events in my book Mr. Monk Is Cleaned Out and the final episodes of Monk. But don’t worry, you won’t be lost if you haven’t read the previous Monk books or missed the TV show.
I have invented all of the campgrounds described in this book and took several geographic liberties to serve my creative needs, so any attempt to replicate Monk’s road trip, or to see what Ambrose saw out of the window of their motor home, will be frustrating.
I want to thank Martin Onken at Expedition Motor Homes in Calabasas, California, and Jim Royal at Niel’s Motor Homes in North Hills, California, for their help.
I also found several books extremely useful, including The Complete Idiot’s Guide to RVing by Brent Peterson, RVing Basics by Bill and Jan Moeller, RV Vacations for Dummies by Shirley Slater and Harry Basch, Road Trip USA: Pacific Coast Highway by Jamie Jensen, Frommer’s Exploring America by RV, and Frommer’s Best RV & Tent Campgrounds in the U.S.A. But I am especially indebted to the late William C. Anderson for a key clue, which was inspired by a memorable anecdote he related in his very funny and entertaining book Please ... Don’t Tailgate the Real Estate.
And I owe Sean Vitousek a nod for the mathematical equation regarding the stresses on the Bixby Creek Bridge.
As usual, I have to thank my good friend and cardiologist Dr. D. P. Lyle for his advice on all things medical, which I have undoubtedly screwed up, much to his shame and disappointment. And, finally, this book would not have been possible without the continued support of Andy Breckman, Gina Maccoby, Kim Niemi, and Kerry Donovan.
But most of all I thank you for continuing to read these books and letting me know what you think of them. You have truly been my inspiration. I look forward to hearing from you at www.leegoldberg.com.
CHAPTER ONE
Mr. Monk and the Big Changes
A drian Monk thinks change is fine as long as everything stays the same. That may sound like a contradiction to you, but it’s not one in the parallel universe that Monk lives in.
He wants everything in his life to be orderly, consistent, symmetrical, and even numbered. But now he’s closer than he’s ever been to achieving that balance and he owes it all to change.
It’s an irony he’ll never appreciate.
That’s because irony is a humorous contradiction and Monk doesn’t have a sense of humor and can’t accept incongruity. I think it has something to do with his obsessive-compulsive disorder, which got so bad after the murder of his wife a decade ago that he was thrown off the San Francisco police force as psychologically unfit. But it’s his OCD and his almost supernatural ability to see details the rest of us take for granted that make him such a brilliant detective, so the police ended up hiring him as a homicide consultant.
That’s another irony that’s lost on him.
Irony seems to go hand in hand with the changes in Monk’s life and he had a lot of them happen all at once.
California had been hit hard by the bad economy, and as a result his consultancy job—and with it my employment as his long-suffering assistant—was constantly at risk because of budget cutbacks. Twice he’d been fired because the city couldn’t afford, financially or politically, to keep him on the payroll at the same time they were making draconian cuts in jobs and services. It made us both very nervous. Luckily, I was able to use Monk’s ability to solve a particularly puzzling, high-profile homicide as leverage to get him a three-year, pay-or-play contract, giving us both some job stability.
Uncertainty is a kind of imbalance, so giving Monk that job security was an important change, even if all I did was keep everything the same for three more years. Sameness was a change he could embrace.
But as much as he wanted everything to remain the same, there was one ever-present thing in his life he was yearning to change.
And it finally happened.
For more than a decade, he’d been haunted by his inability to solve the murder of his wife, Trudy, a reporter killed by a car bomb a few days before Christmas. The solution to her murder eluded him even though he solved every other homici
He was painfully aware of the cruel contradiction. It was a constant, nagging imbalance at the center of his being that didn’t change no matter how even, symmetrical, and orderly he managed to make everything else in his life.
But the cruelest twist was still to come. It turned out that the solution to Trudy’s murder had been right in front of him all along.
On the day of her death, Trudy videotaped a message for him, put the tape in a box, and wrapped it as a Christmas gift, which, after her murder, he couldn’t bring himself to open.
It wasn’t until he’d been poisoned by an assassin and his own death seemed certain (a false alarm, fortunately) that he finally opened the gift and watched her final message.
In the tape, Trudy revealed that she’d had an affair with a married law professor a few years before she’d met Monk. She’d gotten pregnant, and the baby died in childbirth in the midwife’s arms. Now the professor was being appointed as a judge and insisted on meeting Trudy, who agreed to see him even though she felt very uneasy about it. She recorded the video so Monk would know the truth if something terrible happened to her.
Armed with this knowledge, Monk was able to find the evidence that proved that the judge killed both Trudy and the midwife who helped deliver the baby, to keep his adultery and the pregnancy from ever becoming a public scandal. The judge ultimately took his own life rather than face prosecution.
Solving the mystery of Trudy’s murder gave Monk the peace and internal sense of balance that he’d lost. It didn’t cure his OCD, but it lessened the sadness that he’d carried with him every day since her murder.
Trudy was still gone, but he no longer felt as if he’d failed her, too.
A few days later, he learned that Trudy’s baby didn’t actually die as she’d been told but had been secretly given up for adoption by the midwife.
Captain Leland Stottlemeyer, Monk’s oldest friend and his boss on the SFPD, found the now-adult child. Her name was Molly Evans and she worked as a movie critic for the San Francisco Chronicle.
She was a sweet young lady and gladly welcomed Monk into her life. It gave them both something they were desperate for: a lasting connection with Trudy.
Those weren’t the only changes that happened in Monk’s world. The people around him also saw their lives change in significant ways.
Captain Stottlemeyer had a whirlwind romance with a magazine reporter and married her, all in the space of a few weeks.
Her name was Trudy. Honestly. I’m not kidding.
And if you think that’s strange, get this: Lieutenant Randy Disher, Stottlemeyer’s right-hand man, abruptly quit the force to become the chief of police in Summit, New Jersey. He didn’t take the job just because it was a wonderful opportunity to be the boss and run his own department.
He did it to be close to his girlfriend, a recently divorced woman.
Her name?
Sharona Fleming.
That’s right, Randy fell for Monk’s former nurse and the woman who preceded me as his assistant.
As for me, some big changes were going on in my life at the same time, too. My daughter, Julie, left home to live in the dorms at UC Berkeley, and I got into a pretty serious relationship with navy lieutenant Steve Albright, who’d been a friend of my late husband, Mitch, a navy pilot who was shot down over Kosovo.
I knew that Steve spent a lot of time at sea in a submarine. But what I didn’t know was that he had a girl in every port and that he wasn’t going to drop them just because he had a girl in this one. So I gave him the heave-ho and was back to being single, and I was feeling it more than ever before now that Julie was gone and I had the house to myself for the first time.
After that flurry of change, though, things settled down and Monk and I went back, more or less, to our old lives. And yet I detected a difference. Monk seemed content in a way that I’d never seen before.
One day in his apartment, as he was cleaning his cans of disinfectant spray with disinfectant wipes, he actually admitted it.
“Have you noticed that things seem a lot more even lately?”
“You’re saying that you’re happy.”
“I’m saying that I don’t see as many things that don’t match, or that are out of place, or that are oddly numbered.”
“Maybe that’s because you aren’t looking for them as much,” I said. “You’re easing up.”
Monk shook his head. “No, that can’t be it. The world is just more even.”
“And why do you suppose that is?”
“Because my years of hard work are finally paying off,” Monk said.
“With your shrink,” I said.
“With humanity,” Monk said. “People around here are finally seeing reason.”
“And that makes you happy?” I said.
He rolled his shoulders. “It makes me slightly less miserable.”
An essential part of Monk’s even life was routine. And for us, it was routine to start a day looking at a corpse. A few minutes after that conversation, we got invited to see one.
It’s going to sound odd to say this, and I mean no disrespect to the dead, but it felt like all was right with the world.
CHAPTER TWO
Mr. Monk and the Seventeen Steps
We weren’t going to a murder. We were going to a suicide.
That didn’t mean there was anything suspicious about the case. It was standard procedure for the police to investigate unattended deaths, especially those involving a gun.
But Monk wasn’t usually called for suicides unless there was a connection to another case he was investigating, or the victim was really high profile, or the situation was just plain weird, like someone killing himself by gorging on Ding Dongs.
None of those scenarios applied this time. In fact, it was so routine that it wasn’t even Captain Stottlemeyer who called us. We got the call from an officer at the scene who didn’t know any of the details except the victim’s name and address in Dogpatch, the industrial flatlands between Potrero Hill and the decaying shipyards of the city’s eastern waterfront.
Nelson Derrick, the dead man, lived on Tennessee Street in one of a handful of surviving Victorian-style single-family cottages built on narrow strips of land in the 1880s for the workers who toiled in the factories and shipyards.
Derrick’s cottage was built over a garage that would be a tight fit even for a Corolla. The front of the house was covered in gray scalloped shingles, with a heavy, protruding cornice arched like a raised eyebrow over the single front window, as if the cottage disapproved of having to look at the weedy asphalt parking lot across the street. A long, steep staircase spilled from the front door to the ground next to an inconveniently placed electrical pole that bore the scars of numerous violent encounters with car bumpers.
There was a warehouse on one side of the house and a once-identical cottage on the other that some moron had contemporized into blandness by removing the cornices, adding a huge picture window, and smearing every surface with stucco. There was a “For Sale” sign stuck in the neighbor’s flower box.
We climbed up the front steps, Monk counting each one as we went, until we reached the young police officer who was manning Derrick’s door. He looked barely older than my daughter.
“Seventeen,” Monk said.
“I’m twenty-three,” the officer said, clearly self-conscious about his boyish appearance.
“I was talking about the number of steps.”
“Oh,” he said, his cheeks reddening slightly. “Is that significant?”
“Very,” Monk said, stopping to examine the door, which had obviously been broken open.
“What does the number of front steps have to do with the man committing suicide?” the officer asked.
“That’s like asking me if going completely broke, being diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer, or being dumped by his wife for his best friend might have contributed to a suicidal depression.”
Monk studied the doorknob, the dead bolt, and then the splintered doorframe and the chain-bolt assembly that had been torn, screws and all, from its mounting by the force of someone’s well-placed boot.
