Mr. Monk Goes to Hawaii (9 page)

I dove into the waves and tried not to think about Monk’s description of the ocean, but I couldn’t get it out of my head, no matter how warm and wonderful the water felt. All I could see in my mind was raw sewage and fish excrement.

That’s what Monk does to a person. It’s insidious.

I let myself drift in the waves back toward the shore. Weaving my way through all the people on towels and beach chairs, I strode up the hot sand and, to my delight, found an empty hammock between two palms.

Lying there, gently swaying in the humid breeze, letting the sun dry the water from my skin, was like being cuddled by Mother Nature herself. I felt warm, safe, and incredibly relaxed. I drifted into a sweet, languorous nap.

I was awakened by a slight chill. I opened my eyes to see a dark cloud blocking the sun. Within an instant I was soaked by a tremendous downpour of hard-driving rain. My instinct was to run for shelter, but it was a warm rain, and I was in my bikini, so I stayed right where I was, giggling like a child.

I wasn’t the only one. The tourists in the ocean and the pool continued splashing around as if nothing had changed. Most of the people on the beach and on the chaise longues simply covered their heads with their towels, mostly to protect their magazines and books, Game Boys and laptops.

Even in the rain, Hawaii was paradise.

Almost as quickly as it began, the rain stopped and the cloud moved on. The sun shone even brighter, and so did everything else, the plants and flowers glistening with raindrops. The smell of the rain and all the fresh flowers filled the air and mingled with the salty spray of the sea.

Within a few minutes I was dry again, and thirsty. I needed something sweet and cold. I rolled out of my hammock, feeling all loose and lazy, and strolled slowly over to the poolside bar—a thatched-roof hut with several rattan bar stools in front.

I gave the bartender my room number and ordered a Lava Flow, a delicious concoction of frozen strawberries, coconut rum, piña colada mix, and bananas all whipped together and topped with a slice of pineapple and the requisite umbrella. I took my first sip and closed my eyes. I was so relaxed, I felt like I might dissolve into a puddle.

“Your husband misses you.”

I opened my eyes to see Dylan Swift, the psychic, slide onto the stool beside me. He didn’t bother introducing himself. I guess when your face is on a million books, and you’ve got your own TV show, you figure everybody knows you. Judging by the way everybody around the pool was staring at us, he was probably right.

“I’m single,” I said, giving him the information his lame pickup line was designed to draw out of me. I’m not famous, but I didn’t bother introducing myself, either. He could wait for my book, assuming I ever wrote one.

“You’re a widow,” Swift said, his gaze intense and piercing, like a surgical laser. It felt like my vision was improving just looking into his eyes. “And the bonds between you and your husband haven’t been severed by death.”

I was angry at the invasion of my privacy and pained by the truth of his observation, but I tried not to reveal either emotion.

“Am I supposed to be impressed?” I reached casually for my drink and nearly knocked it over.

“He’s anxious to communicate with you, to ease your pain,” Swift said. “But I sense it’s not your mourning that he wishes to relieve. No, it’s something else. Some unfinished business. You feel that he was wronged in some way.”

“Mitch was killed two days before his twenty-seventh birthday,” I said. “I’d say that was wrong.”

I was surprised at how close to the surface my anger was and how easily I revealed it. I guess when it came to Mitch, my emotions were pretty raw.

Swift took the umbrella from my drink and twirled it between his fingers. “It was an accident that took him from you.”

“He was shot out of the sky by enemy fire,” I said. “It was hardly an accident.”

“What I meant was that it wasn’t his fault,” Swift said. “He doesn’t blame himself for what happened in Kosovo and neither should you.”

“I don’t,” I said.

“But somebody does, and that troubles you,” Swift said. “It fills you with rage and frustration. No matter what anyone in the military tells you, Mitch wants you to know he did everything a soldier should do. He wants you to be proud of him, to know that he was courageous, and not to doubt that he was the man you loved, right up until the end.”

Against my will, tears were welling in my eyes, and that really pissed me off. The last thing I wanted to do was cry in front of this man. Or any man.

“I’m still not impressed,” I said, taking another sip of my Lava Flow and trying to act as if we were discussing something like baseball or the weather instead of the death of my husband.

“I’m not trying to impress you or anybody else,” Swift said. “I’m just relaying a message. You want to know what really happened to Mitch, don’t you?”

“Can you tell me?” I asked, upset at how quickly I spoke and the desperation that revealed.

“I can’t, but Mitch can,” Swift said. “Unfortunately, the images, the symbols, they aren’t so easy to read. Other voices and other sensations are crowding them out.”

“I don’t understand.”

“My relationship with the spirit world is complicated. Imagine a thousand spirits in a room and just one cell phone for them to call out with. I am the cell phone. They are all fighting to be heard. But you know how unreliable cell phone reception is sometimes. It would be hard enough just hearing them clearly, but they don’t speak to me in words so much as in feelings, images, tastes, smells, and sounds.”

“Tell the others to wait their turn,” I said. “Let Mitch talk.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” Swift said. “And like a cell phone, I can’t control who uses me. Sometimes, when I am near someone, a spirit who wants to reach that person will come through very forcefully. In other cases people come to me and ask to reach a specific loved one who has crossed over to the great beyond. That’s more difficult.”

“You have to make the cell phone ring on the other side and you hope the right spirit answers it.”

Swift smiled enigmatically. I had a feeling he worked hard perfecting the enigmatic part. “Something like that.”

“You haven’t told me anything about my husband that you couldn’t have found in a Google search or safely assumed based on the circumstances.”

“You’re a skeptic.”

“I’m a realist,” I said. I was lying. I wanted more than anything to believe he was talking to Mitch, and I hated myself for that yearning. “What do you want from me, Mr. Swift?”

“Call me Dylan, please.”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“I don’t want anything from you, Natalie.”

“So you
do
know who I am,” I said accusingly.

“I know you were with Adrian Monk, and I need to see him,” Swift said.

“Why?”

“To relay a message from the dead. Someone is desperate to communicate with him.”

“Anyone in particular?” I asked.

“Helen Gruber,” he said.

“That’s pretty specific, considering the spirits rarely introduce themselves to you.”

Swift smiled again, though there was nothing enigmatic about it this time. He was pleased.

“You’ve watched my show?”

“When I was stuck at home with the flu. I caught a few minutes here and there between my vomiting.”

I was trying to be cutting, to dispel some of that smug confidence of his, but he seemed unperturbed.

“I’ve never felt such a strong connection to a spirit before. My bungalow is a few doors down from hers,” Swift said. “It was as if her spirit contacted me on her way to the other side, moments after she was killed.”

“How do you know she was killed?”

“I felt it. It was sudden. It…” He struggled for the right words. “It didn’t come from inside, like a natural death. It came from behind. Someone came up behind her and struck her on the head; that’s what I’m sensing.”

He could have picked up most of the vague stuff he’d told me so far from the hotel staff or one of the police officers at the crime scene. It didn’t take a psychic to presume a murder has taken place when you saw a morgue wagon and police cars parked on the street.

“There are things she wants me to share with Monk,” Swift said.

He was putting me in an awkward predicament, forcing me to weigh my own selfish desires against my ethical duties as Monk’s assistant.

It was bad enough that Monk had found a murder to solve, but he was so desperate to avoid enjoying Hawaii that he was ready to launch an investigation into how his minibar was stocked.

Now here was Dylan Swift, a guy who supposedly talked to dead people, saying he had a collect call from the other side from the victim of the murder Monk was investigating.

If I brought Swift to him now, Monk would dedicate whatever time we weren’t spending on the hoicide investigation to exposing the celebrity medium as a fraud. In fact, Monk was ready to do it when we stumbled on the filming of Swift’s TV show the day before, an incident I hoped he was too drugged-up at the time to remember.

But that would change if Swift showed up claiming to speak for Helen Gruber. And I could kiss goodbye any hope of enjoying one moment of my vacation.

So I rationalized that part of my job as Adrian Monk’s assistant was to be his gatekeeper and keep people from wasting his time. If Swift actually had something useful to contribute, I would bring him to Monk right away. But if he didn’t, I’d spare Monk an unnecessary distraction and, in doing so, buy myself a little vacation time in paradise. No harm done.

I managed to convince myself I wasn’t being selfish at all. I was being extraordinarily considerate and helpful.

“Share them with me,” I said. “And I will pass them along to Mr. Monk.”

He stared at me for a long moment, trying to come to a decision. That was fine with me; it gave me a chance to enjoy some more of my Lava Flow. Finally he sighed and began speaking.

“She doesn’t know who killed her,” Swift said. “But she’s flooded my mind with images and sensations. The smell of lilac. The light, sweet taste of
liliko’i
pie. I see Captain Ahab hiding in the shadows. I sense love taking flight. I feel barbed wire against flesh. I see a glimpse of a lumberjack standing by a pine tree holding a porcelain doll. You’re not writing any of this down.”

“I have a good memory,” I said. “Did she give you anything more concrete than that?”

“She’s not alone,” he said.

“You mean she’s not the first victim?”

“All I know is that there are other spirits who wanted to communicate with me about this. It didn’t make a lot of sense to me then and it doesn’t now. But I’m sure it will become clear as time goes on.”

“The spirits said they’d call back?”

He rose from his stool and gave me a smile, this one full of amusement. Swift had quite a repertoire of smiles.

“Spirits this disturbed never stay quiet. They’ll persist until their message is heard.”

I was right not to take Swift to see Monk. Not only was none of his gibberish the least bit helpful, but he was obviously an attention-seeking fraud, trying to horn in on whatever publicity might arise from the murder investigation.

Swift started to walk away, then he stopped and looked over his shoulder at me.

“Mitch still likes that bikini on you,” Swift said, nodding with approval. “I can see why.”

I felt a shiver, as if Mitch himself had brushed his lips against the back of my neck.

I got a towel, wrapped it around my waist, and went to the lobby, Dylan Swift and his messages from beyond still very much on my mind.

I was on my way to the elevators when I saw Monk at one of the kiosks in the wide shopping arcade. The stand was made to look like a beach hut and was devoted to island jewelry. Monk was methodically sorting through the display of shark-tooth necklaces, to the obvious displeasure of the middle-aged Hawaiian proprietress behind the counter.

“Shopping, Mr. Monk?” I said as I approached.

Monk turned around, saw me in my bikini top, and looked right over my head. “I don’t shop.”

“Then what are you doing?”

“Having fun. That’s what a vacation is for, isn’t it?”

“It’s okay if you look at me.”

“I don’t think so.” He shifted his gaze back to the necklaces, which he was rearranging on a little carousel necklace tree. Each necklace had a single white shark tooth dangling from it.

“We’re at the beach. All the women here are wearing swimsuits, tank tops, or halters,” I said. “Look around and you’ll see.”

“I’d rather not.”

“They’re breasts, Mr. Monk, not wild animals.”

“That’s how they behave.”

I sighed, giving up. “So if you’re not shopping, what are you doing?”

“I’m arranging the teeth by type of shark and where they belong in the jaw.”

“You call that fun?”

The proprietress groaned in misery.

Monk nodded enthusiastically, continuing to sort the necklaces. “It’s a blast. There are about thirty-three kinds of sharks in Hawaii, and some have as many as thirteen rows of teeth. An average shark sheds eighteen hundred teeth a year, fifty thousand in a lifetime. There are all kinds of shark teeth on the necklaces here, hundreds of them, in no order whatsoever.”

“So it’s like a giant, enormously complex jigsaw puzzle.”

“You can’t do this at home. Only in Hawaii,” Monk said. “I was lucky there wasn’t a line when I got here.”

“Or anybody since,” the proprietress muttered.

“You can actually tell the difference between one shark tooth and another?” I asked.

Monk snorted derisively. “Of course. Who can’t?”

“How long have you been here?”

“I’ve lost track of time in all the excitement.”

“Three hours,” the proprietress said. It was obvious by the stony expression on her unhappy face that she’d felt every single second of those hours pass by.

“I haven’t had this much fun since those summers when my brother and I would shell a large bag of roasted peanuts, mix everything up, and compete to see who could reassemble the most nuts. Then we’d eat them. Those were some wild, wild times.”

Looking past Monk, I noticed Lance Vaughan at the front desk with his luggage. He appeared to be checking out.

“Mr. Monk, look.”

He shook his head. “I thought we settled that.”

“Not at
me,
at the front desk.”

Monk glanced at the front desk, then turned back and smiled at the proprietress. “This has been great. Really rad.”

“Rad?” I said.

Monk looked at me, forgetting for an instant that I was in a bikini top. He quickly averted his eyes.

“Yes. That’s what they say now. You really ought to try to stay in step with popular culture or you’ll be left behind.” Monk turned to the proprietress again. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

“We’re closed tomorrow,” she said.

“When will you be back?”

“When are you going home?”

“Tuesday,” he said.

“Wednesday,” she said.

“Why are you closed so long?”

“A family emergency,” she said.

Monk sighed sadly. “Are there any other shark tooth attractions on the island?”

“There are lots of places that have shark teeth,” she said. “Lots of places
outside the hotel
.”

“Oh, good, because I’m just getting warmed up,” Monk said. He glanced over my head, which was his way of looking at me without looking at me. “Maybe you and I could go a round together sometime.”

“Organizing shark teeth.”

“It’s a vacation, isn’t it?” Monk said. “Have some fun.”

With that, he headed over to the front desk, where Tetsuo was waiting on Lance.

“Going somewhere, Mr. Vaughan?” Monk said.

Lance, startled, turned around. “I’m changing rooms. I couldn’t stay in that bungalow after…” His voice got so choked up, he couldn’t finish. He cleared his throat and tried again. “I’m sure you understand, Mr. Monk.”

“When we asked you about your wife, you didn’t mention anything about her hearing voices.”

Lance’s expression hardened. “Where did you learn about that?”

Tetsuo lowered his head guiltily but didn’t escape Lance’s notice. Lance glared at him a moment, then shifted his gaze back to Monk.

“I didn’t see the point of saying anything,” Lance said. “Helen was a strong woman—that’s how I want her to be remembered, not as someone who was slipping into dementia.”

“How long had she been slipping?”

“She’s been forgetful and disoriented for a while now, but she didn’t start hearing voices until we got here. To be honest, it scared me. I had to get out of the house, get my own head straight, you know?”

“Is that why you went on the snorkeling trip without her?”

“Sure, it was one of the reasons,” Lance said. “But I also have to keep myself fit. I couldn’t spend two weeks here sitting by the pool. I’m a very physical guy; I need to work my body. As much as she wanted to, she couldn’t keep up with me. Few people can. She accepted that. It was the only concession she made to her age.”

“You could have made concessions instead,” I said.

“And let my body go to hell?” Lance shook his head. “She wouldn’t have liked that any more than I would have. She wanted me to be in top shape.”

I was sure she did, in the same way a guy liked his young trophy wife to be thin, blond, and stacked. I doubted Helen would have married a guy thirty years younger than her if he had two chins and a beer gut. She could have found guys like that her own age.

Tetsuo handed Lance a card key. “Your room is ready, sir, courtesy of the Grand Kiahuna Poipu.”

“Thanks.” Lance took the key and looked at Monk. “Is there anything else?”

Monk shook his head. Lance picked up his suitcases and ambled off toward the elevators.

“You think he’s the guy?” I asked.

Monk looked in my general direction, but not at me, and shrugged. “Who else could it be?”

“But he has an alibi,” I said.

“The clever ones always do.”

We started to walk away ourselves when Tetsuo called out to Monk.

“Sir, you have a phone message.” Tetsuo handed Monk a slip of paper.

Monk glanced at it. “Lieutenant Kealoha has some information. He’d like me to give him a call or stop by the station.”

It would have been easier to call Kealoha, but I wanted to get out of the hotel and see some more of the island.

“Let’s go to him,” I said. “We need to get a rental car anyway.”

“There’s a Paradise Car Rental outlet located at the parking lot entrance to the shopping arcade,” Tetsuo offered politely.

I went back up to my room, quickly changed into shorts and a shirt, and met Monk in the lobby again five minutes later. We started at one end of the U-shaped arcade and headed toward the exit, and the car rental counter, at the other end.

We rounded the corner and saw Brian, Candace’s would-be husband, standing with his luggage at the rental counter, right in front of the exit to the parking lot. He was talking to the rental agent, a young white guy with sun-bleached blond hair wearing an aloha shirt covered with Paradise Car Rental’s orchid logo. When Brian saw us, his face turned red with fury.

“There they are,” he said, wagging a finger at us. “They probably know who did it.”

“Did what?” Monk asked as we approached.

“Trashed my car,” Brian said, tipping his head toward the parking lot. “Someone at the wedding did this. I’m certain of it.”

We stepped outside and looked at Brian’s Mustang convertible, parked in a row with several other identical Mustangs. But his was easy to spot. It was the one with the shattered windshield and a big rip down the center of the soft-top. Monk walked over and surveyed the car.

“This was an act of pure malice,” Brian said.

“What about what you did to Candace?” I said.

“See?” Brian said to the agent. “She’s practically admitting her involvement in this. But the joke is on her and her coldhearted, vindictive friends. I’m completely covered by insurance.”

“Was there any other damage to the car that you’d like to report?” the agent asked. His name tag identified him as Tom, from Hermosa Beach, California.

“No,” Brian said, as Monk returned.

“There’s a scratch on the back bumper, three dings on the driver’s door, bird droppings on the trunk, and a amoeba-shaped stain of indeterminate origin on the passenger seat,” Monk said. “And he returned it with an uneven odometer.”

“An uneven odometer?” Tom asked, clearly perplexed.

“It’s at two hundred and seven miles. He didn’t even have the common human decency to go the extra mile.” Monk sneered at Brian. “How can you look at yourself in the mirror?”

Tom handed Brian a document on a clipboard.

“All you have to do is sign here and the shuttle bus will take you to the airport.” He motioned to a Paradise Car Rental van idling at the curb a few yards away.

“You didn’t note the scratches, dings and stains,” Monk said to the agent.

“It doesn’t matter,” Tom said.

“That’s a permanent stain.”

“The interiors get stained all the time,” Tom from Hermosa Beach said. “The red dirt alone will ruin the interior, if all the rain and sea air don’t ruin the exterior first. Don’t even get me started on what people spill in the cars or what we find under the seats. You don’t want to know.”

Monk shook his head. “No, I don’t.”

“And people drive them with no care or respect. Cars don’t last long here. Luckily, there’s a great body shop in Kapaa. All the companies use it.”

Brian signed the document and handed the clipboard back to the agent.

“I hope you enjoyed your stay,” Tom said.

Brian glowered at Monk and me, picked up his suitcases, and marched off to the shuttle. The agent turned to us.

“So what can I do for you this evening?”

“We’d like to rent a car,” I said.

“Take your pick.”

“We want one that’s fresh off the boat,” Monk said. “A car driven by only one or two very clean, sanitary people.”

Tom looked at the wrecked Mustang. “That was the newest car we had. The rest have been here a couple months. You might try Global Rental in Lihue.”

I glanced at the shuttle, which hadn’t left yet. There were plenty of rental-car places at the airport.

“Mind if we hitch a ride on the shuttle to the airport?” I asked.

“Be my guest,” Tom said.

I started walking to the shuttle.

“Do you really want to ride in a bus with that pitiful excuse for a man?” Monk said, walking alongside me.

“I’m not the one who is going to be uncomfortable,” I said. “He is.”

“Because seeing you staring at him will silently remind him of how he wronged your friend?”

“Who said anything about being silent?” I said. “I’m going to remind him as loudly, and as colorfully, as I possibly can for the entire drive. If you’ve got sensitive ears, you might want to keep them covered.”

Brian would have bolted from the shuttle the instant we got to the airport, but he was slowed down by his luggage, so I got a few more choice words in before he escaped. Monk was so embarrassed by my language, I think he was tempted to run out, too.

The major car-rental companies, along with a few smaller operations, were all grouped together in a cul-de-sac adjacent to the airport parking lot. The shuttle dropped us off in front of Paradise Car Rental, but they didn’t have any “fresh off the boat” cars available, so we went across the street to Global.

The rental agents at Global were young, Hawaiian, and apparently under strict orders never to stop smiling. They probably spent their off-hours with sore cheeks and grim faces to avoid the pain. Like their counterparts at Paradise, the pattern of their aloha shirts was their logo, which was the Earth as a steering wheel.

“We can’t rent a car here,” Monk said.

“Why not?”

“Look at this place,” Monk said. “It’s in complete disarray.”

I looked at the lot. I saw a hundred different Ford models parked in neat rows in numbered spaces. Monk should have been thrilled. “I don’t see the problem.”

“You must have jet lag. The vehicles are parked out there willy-nilly.”

“Willy-nilly?” I said. “They are in numbered parking spots.”

“They should be arranged by make, model, color, and year of production,” he said as if it were a matter of common sense. “This is anarchy. If this is a sign of how organized they are, imagine how they maintain their cars.”

I pointed across the street. “Look at the other rental companies, Mr. Monk. Their cars are all parked willy-nilly, too.”

“At least now I know where the term ‘willy-nilly’ came from,” Monk said. “It’s Hawaiian for ‘chaos.’”

An agent named Kimiko came over to help us. I asked for a convertible. Monk didn’t care what we got as long as the car was fresh off the assembly line. Kimiko led us to a Mustang with only thirty-eight miles on the odometer—she said it had never been rented.

While Monk was inspecting the car for imperfections and I was filling out the rental form, a couple in their twenties, both sunburned, drove in with a Mustang that had been clipped on the front passenger side, shattering the headlight and crumpling the hood.

The couple told Kimiko they were sideswiped by a hit-and-run driver and gave her a copy of the police report. First Brian, now them. I checked the boxes on the form for every insurance plan they offered. It was going on Monk’s credit card anyway.

“What a nice couple,” Monk said, peering into their dented car.

“What makes you say that?” I said. “You don’t know anything about them.

“They brought the car back with an even odometer. One hundred and twelve miles.”