Mr. Monk Goes to Hawaii (6 page)

The wedding ceremony took place in the hotel’s secluded luau garden, which was ringed by a sunburst of blossoming tropical flowers—white orchids, crimson bougainvillea, yellow allamandas, blazing red anthuriums, cups of gold, and birds-of-paradise. Those flowers were complemented by stunning bouquets prepared for the wedding and placed throughout the garden. Even the guests themselves were flowery. All the guests, with the exception of Monk, wore fresh plumeria leis and floral aloha wear.

A Hawaiian band sang
“Ke Kali Nei Au,”
which was to the islands what Peter, Paul, and Mary’s “The Wedding Song” is on the mainland. But the music was hardly necessary. The singsong chirp of island birds and the natural rhythm of the waves was music enough.

Candace and Brian faced the Hawaiian minister in front of the grass-skirted stage where, at night, the hula dancers performed during the luau.

Candace wore a white wedding
holoku,
a long, formfitting
mu’umu’u,
and a
haku
lei of white dendrobium orchids, baby’s breath, and roses on her head. She was aglow with happiness. It brought tears to my eyes.

Brian stood at her side in a white aloha shirt with a light floral pattern, white linen pants, and a
maile
lei of green leaves draped around his neck.

The minister, a heavyset Hawaiian in his thirties, also wearing an aloha shirt, performed the Hawaiian wedding blessing, which involved a lot of stuff in Hawaiian and the exchanging of elaborate leis. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Monk fidgeting. I prayed that he wasn’t about to jump up and interrupt the wedding to reorganize some flower arrangement that didn’t meet his criteria.

The minister started to say something in English, catching my attention again.

“If anyone here knows of any reason this couple shouldn’t be joined in holy matrimony, speak up now or forever hold your peace.”

I heard Monk clear his throat. I turned around and looked at him. Everybody did.

He raised his hand.

“Yes?” the minister said.

Monk looked around. “Are you calling on me?”

“Yes, you,” the minister said. “Is there something you’d like to say?”

Monk stood up and tipped his head toward Brian, whose face was tight with rage.

“He’s not twenty-eight years old,” Monk said.

“Yes, I am,” Brian said.

“You have a smallpox vaccination scar on your shoulder. They stopped giving those shots in the United States in 1972.”

“I got mine later, before I went to Somalia with the Peace Corps,” Brian said. “Can we go on with the wedding now?”

Candace glared at me. I flushed with embarrassment. This was all my fault, and I felt terrible about it.

“That’s another thing,” Monk began.

If looks could kill, Monk would have been executed by a firing squad. Every single person in that garden was glaring at him.

“The marines engaged in relief efforts in Somalia in 1992,” Monk said, “but the Peace Corps hasn’t been there since 1970.”

“Not
officially,
” Brian said. “This was a covert operation.”

Candace looked at Brian skeptically. “The Peace Corps runs covert missions?”

“Peace is a dangerous business, honey. Look, what does any of this have to do with why we’re here today? We’re getting married, aren’t we? We love each other and we want to spend the rest of our lives together. That’s what’s important.”

Candace smiled and nodded, taking his hands in hers. “Yes, of course.” She turned to the minister. “Let’s go on.”

“Marlins don’t have teeth,” Monk said.

The minister looked up, clearly irritated. So was everybody else. “Excuse me?”

“Brian said he was bitten on the leg by a marlin while crewing on a fishing trawler. But marlins have no teeth and are fished only for sport, not commercially.”

“It could have been a tuna, I don’t know. It was a big fish and it had teeth. Does it matter what kind it was?” Brian said. “What is your problem? You got a thing for Candace or something?”

“I have a thing against pathological liars,” Monk said. “You said you spent the summer in Australia and that it was sweltering in July. But the seasons are reversed south of the Equator. July is actually the dead of winter down under.”

“It’s hot in Australia all year round,” Brian said.

“I don’t think you were there at all,” Monk said. “I think you were lying to cover the fact that you were actually with your wife.”

Candace stared at Brian. “Your
wife
?”

“I’m not married,” Brian said, then turned to Monk. “I’m trying to get married, but you keep interrupting.”

“You’ve been very careful not to develop a tan line from your wedding band, but you have a slight callus where your ring finger meets your palm,” Monk said. “It takes years to build up a callus from the slight friction of a ring against the skin. So, I’d say you’ve been married for at least five years now.”

Candace grabbed Brian’s left hand and ran her fingers over his palm. Her face reddened. “Oh, my God. He’s right. You
are
married.”

There were gasps from the shocked guests. There was probably a gasp from me in there, too. I’d seen Monk do these amazing deductions before, but never in a situation like this, never outside the setting of an investigation.

Candace staggered back from Brian. “Who are you?”

Brian shifted his weight nervously. He was caught, and he knew it.

“The man who loves you,” Brian said. “A love so powerful that I wouldn’t let a marriage to another woman prevent me from having you in my life.”

“Is there a single thing you’ve told me about yourself that isn’t a lie?”

“I’m in the furniture business,” he said.

Candace slapped him across the face, the smack as loud as a gunshot.

“I never want to see you again,” Candace said, her voice quavering. She yanked the lei off her head, threw it at Brian’s face, and marched away. I started to go after her, but she dismissed me with a wave of her hand.

I turned back to Brian. “How could you?”

“How could I not? She’s incredible,” Brian said, crying now. “I love her.”

“What about your wife?” I asked.

“I love her, too,” he said. “I’m cursed with a tremendous capacity for love.”

“You were going to divide your time between the two of them,” Monk said, “and blame your absences on business trips.”

“They never had to know about each other,” Brian said. “I would have made Candace very happy.”

“Where does your wife live?” Monk asked.

“In Summit, New Jersey,” Brian said. “With the kids.”

There was a path lined with palm trees that meandered through the resort property and along the beach. I found Monk standing on the path in front of the hotel, watching the tourists splashing around in the waves.

He stood there in his long-sleeved white shirt buttoned at the cuffs, his gray slacks, and brown loafers while everybody around him was in bathing suits or T-shirts and shorts or colorful aloha wear. There was something melancholy and Chaplinesque about him, so apart from the world around him.

Beyond him, I saw the azure sea and the frothing surf and all the people in the water, having fun bodysurfing, swimming, and just getting knocked around by the waves. It looked so inviting, especially after spending an hour with my heartbroken friend. I wanted to run right past Monk into the waves and forget all my troubles.

But I didn’t. Like most people, I’m a lot more carefree in my fantasies than I am in my life. I wondered, for a moment, if maybe Monk was the same way. Did he ever have the impulse to roll up his sleeves? To take off his loafers and walk barefoot in the hot sand?

Monk looked back at me and then shook his head. “Unbelievable, isn’t it? How can people do that?”

I nodded in agreement. We hadn’t seen each other since I left the aborted wedding to comfort Candace, so we hadn’t had a chance to talk about it. “I don’t understand how a person can claim to love someone and then deceive them so completely.”

“Oh, I understand that.” Monk started to stroll along the path following the beach going toward the private bungalows. “What makes no sense to me is swimming in the ocean.”

“It’s hot out, we’re at the beach, and the water is warm and inviting,” I said. “It’s what people do in Hawaii.”

“Don’t they know that thousands of creatures live, eat, and empty themselves in there?”

“Empty themselves?”

“Fish don’t have indoor plumbing,” Monk said. “They swim around in their own excrement. And when we flush our toilets or wash something down the drain, where do you think it goes? Out there.”

When he put it like that, even I had second thoughts about taking a swim. Two women in bikinis walked toward us. Monk lowered his gaze to his feet until they passed.

“How’s your friend?” Monk asked his feet.

“Gone,” I said. “She packed her bags and went straight to the airport.”

“Why did she do that?”

“She’s hurt, angry, and humiliated, Mr. Monk. She feels like a complete fool. You could have spared her the embarrassment if you’d told me that Brian was a fraud
before
the ceremony.”

Monk raised his head again and was startled to see three women in bathing suits coming toward us. Instead of lowering his gaze, he looked over their heads.

“I didn’t realize it until I was sitting there,” Monk said, eyes on the sky.

“But he told you all that stuff yesterday.”

“I heard what he said but I didn’t recognize the significance in my altered state. That’s why you should just say no to drugs,” Monk said, glancing at me after the women walked by. “Are you mad at me?”

I was and I wasn’t.

“I wish you could have found a way to expose Brian without humiliating Candace in front of all her friends. But you saved her from making a terrible mistake, and for that I’m grateful. Maybe someday she will be, too.”

We approached a fork in the path. Two couples were walking toward us. The women were in bikini bottoms and wet T-shirts, the men in Speedos. Before we could pass one another, Monk yanked me onto the other path as if saving me from being run over by a truck.

“Does this mean we’re going back to San Francisco today?” he asked eagerly.

“The tickets and reservations are nonrefundable, so Candace said I might as well stay and enjoy myself.
You’re
welcome to go home if you like.”

Monk stopped and cocked his head, looking at something. I’m not sure he even heard what I’d said.

I followed his gaze. We’d stopped in front of the private bungalows, which were shaded by lazy palms and shielded from prying eyes by a wall of greenery and flowers. The path we were on cut between two of the homes and ended in a tiny cul-de-sac, where I could see a black van marked
Medical Examiner
and two police cars.

Oh, hell,
I thought.

“I wonder what’s going on,” Monk said.

“It’s none of our business.”

“Someone is dead.”

“People die all the time. It doesn’t mean it’s murder.”

“But it
could
be.” Monk jumped up, trying to see over the hedge of bougainvillea, hibiscus, and heliconia into the backyard of one of the bungalows.

“Even if it is, so what?” I said. “
We’re
on vacation.”

“You told Candace when we arrived that this was a working vacation.” Monk crossed in front of me to the opposite hedge.

“I lied,” I said.

“And you still don’t understand how people can deceive the ones they love?” Monk jumped up a couple of times. “This is the house.”

He squatted down and separated the hedge to see into the yard. I crouched behind him and looked over his shoulder.

On the other side of the hedge was the hot tub, which doubled as a fountain, water spilling over the edge and splashing down some large lava rocks into the black-bottomed, pebbled lap pool.

The dead woman was floating faceup in the hot tub. Her eyes were wide-open and her skin was unnaturally white. Her lips were stretched in a taut rictus of a grin, her artificially red hair fanned out in the water like an Afro. She looked like an obscene parody of a circus clown.

She must have been in her late sixties and wore a one-piece bathing suit, the kind with an industrial-strength bra to hold up an enormous, sagging bosom and a skirt to hide the butt. My grandmother had a suit like that. The instant a woman puts one of those things on she’s transformed into one of the elephant ballerinas from
Fantasia.
There should be a warning label sewn into those suits.

Two Hawaiian morgue assistants in short-sleeved white uniforms lifted the corpse out of the hot tub and laid it on a body bag on the patio.

A crime scene photographer took pictures of the dead woman and a bloodstained coconut on the patio, not far from the palm tree that shaded the hot tub.

A few yards away there was a chaise longue with a white blanket laid out on top of the thick cushion. I could see the spine of a John Grisham hardcover, a glass of water, and a big, floppy sun hat on the coffee table beside the chaise.

A uniformed police officer observed everything from the shade of a patio umbrella, sweat dampening his short-sleeved shirt.

“’Ey! No make li’dat, bruddah.” Someone spoke sharply behind us.

We looked up to see a big Hawaiian guy in his thirties standing in the path, hands on his hips right above the gun and the badge clipped to his belt. He was in shorts, flip-flops, and an aloha shirt that depicted a vintage seaplane landing on a tropical isle. There were laugh lines around his eyes and his chubby cheeks made me think he found more joy in life than sorrow. But he wasn’t looking very happy at that moment. He was looking downright mean.

“Are you the detective in charge of this investigation?” Monk asked, rising to his feet.

“Ass right, brah. LT Ben Kealoha, Kauai police. Why boddah you?”

“I have no idea what you just said. I’m an American from America. I’m Adrian Monk and this is my assistant, Natalie Teeger.”