Mr. Monk Helps Himself (13 page)

“Exactly the way I did,” I said, still a little embarrassed.

“But it wasn’t poisoned, so what’s the point?”

I didn’t have an answer. “Can’t you do something with the envelope?” I asked. “At least figure out where it was postmarked?”

“We have our tech guys trying to lift residue ink. I’m not sure how much that will tell us.”

I stretched and yawned. I couldn’t help it. “Well, I should get home. If Mr. Monk . . . I mean, Adrian. If Adrian has a big day tomorrow, then I have a bigger one.”

The captain chuckled. “I like the way you’re doing this.”

I smiled, took my keys from my bag and crossed to my Subaru. I was parked in Monk’s private spot, which he never uses because he has a chauffeur instead of a car.

•   •   •

The next morning started early, at least for Devlin and me. The stress from yesterday’s poison scare and the lack of a full night’s sleep had combined to give me a headache that only seemed to get worse. I took two Tylenols, my last two from the bottle, and hoped for the best.

We met at the seedy apartment on Willow Street with our supplies and worked from the front door inward. Along the way we checked on the canaries in the bedroom. After Monk’s visit, Devlin was going to take them to her niece and nephew in Alameda, where they’d be sure to get a good home.

The trick was to prepare the crime scene, hiding or minimizing the clown references without compromising anything that might be critical. The business sign by the front door was easy, as was the circus painting in the hall. We draped them in black plastic, cut from garbage bags, making sure that all the corners were cut straight and the tape evenly spaced. It wouldn’t be smart to cover them up, only to have Monk fixate on the covering.

The clown shoes under the bed took more thinking. We decided to hang a sheet of construction paper in front of their offensive presence and write ”shoes” on it in big letters. If Monk wanted to lift up the paper and examine the yellow monstrosities, he could. Otherwise, they’d be out of sight.

Devlin and I wore plastic booties and rubber gloves, since the place was an active crime scene and might still have some atropine residue lying around. By ten o’clock we’d finished, just in time for the captain and Monk.

“I know this is a clown house,” Monk whispered to me as soon as he saw the covered-up sign.

“I know. But you’re powering through it. Out of sight, out of mind.”

He rolled his shoulders, put on his booties and gloves, and walked into the building. “You’ll tell Ellen I’m trying, right? I’m capable of change.”

“You’re doing great, Adrian. Great.” My morning headache, which had never really left, was starting to work overtime.

The captain led our little parade into the front hallway. “Okay, Monk, what are we looking for?” It was what we all wanted to know.

“We’re looking for a reason,” he said. “The reason the killer felt safe.”

“What do you mean?”

“Put yourself in his position. He’s being blackmailed by someone who’s been in his house. It could be a maid or a repairman or a friend. He doesn’t know. All he has is a post office box where he’s supposed to send the money—”

Devlin interrupted. “The boxes are protected under the Privacy Act. Our guy could have hung around the O’Farrell Street branch to see who opened box eight forty-nine. But that’s far from a sure thing, and he’d only get one shot.”

“Why didn’t he hire someone to monitor the post office twenty-four-seven?” I asked. “Some sleazy PI,” said the woman who hadn’t even passed her PI exam.

“Involving someone else is a loose thread,” said the captain. “So, instead, our guy poisoned the money, hoping it would do the job, which it did. What did you mean about the killer feeling safe? Monk?”

Monk had walked right past the plastic-covered painting and into the living room. “Mr. Smith took something from that garage, some piece of evidence he could send to the police or the guy’s wife or whatever . . . in case Harriman refused to be blackmailed.”

“Sure,” said Devlin. “You always need leverage.”

“So, the killer knows there’s evidence floating around. But he still feels safe enough to go through with his anonymous plan.”

“So, what is this invisible evidence we haven’t been able to find?” I think I was speaking for everyone.

“I’ll know it when I see it.”

The rest of the morning was a fascinating type of torture. The four of us squeezed our way from room to room, avoiding contact with everything, staying out of Monk’s framed sight lines and, most important, keeping his eyes and mind away from anything remotely clownish.

“Do you have any aspirin?” I asked Devlin as we made our way out of the living room. She didn’t. So I asked Stottlemeyer. “Aspirin, Cemedrin, Tylenol . . . ?” He didn’t either. What is it with cops? Don’t they ever need pain relievers?

In the bathroom we had another close call when Monk opened a cabinet and found the top shelf lined with clown makeup. His face instantly froze. I called him Adrian and begged him to concentrate. But we only really got through the moment when Devlin suggested that he visualize it as Kabuki makeup.

“Smith was a Japanese actor in traditional white face,” she said.

“Or a drag queen,” Stottlemeyer said. “Maybe Smith did a drag show somewhere in the Castro. Don’t even think clown.”

“Clown?” Monk gasped.

“Not a clown,” I corrected him. “Think of a drag queen . . . who does Kabuki.”

The two detectives managed to rush him out of the clown’s claustrophobic bathroom. I could hear him wheezing in the hall as they talked him down. Meanwhile, I had a head that was ready to explode.

“Aspirin, Cemedrin, Tylenol . . .” I said to myself, repeating the words like a mantra. If I could just get hold of some aspirin, Cemedrin or Tylenol. And then I saw it. It was on the top shelf, beside the row of makeup. A single lifesaving bottle of Cemedrin lying sideways in a ziplock baggie.

I was sorely tempted. That tells you just how much pain I was in. I was inches away from tampering with a crime scene and filching a couple of Cemedrin from the victim’s bathroom. My hand was halfway up to the baggie when a thought struck in the very back of my brain. Why did he keep his Cemedrin in a baggie? It struck but it didn’t stick.

Suddenly I found the baggie in my hand, my other hand fiddling with the zipper. “Natalie, don’t.” I nearly jumped out of my skin.

It was Monk, right behind me. He was focused now, not a whiff of fear or distraction about him. He held out his hand for the zip-locked bottle.

“This is it,” he said, turning to face the others in the bathroom doorway. His face was triumphant. “I was distracted by some Kabuki drag queen’s makeup. That’s why I didn’t notice. Stupid, stupid.”

“Notice what?” asked the captain.

“This. A 2009 bottle of Cemedrin,” he announced. “Early 2009.”

“If you’re telling me it’s past its expiration,” I said, “I don’t care.”

“You should.” He was serious. “They redesigned the bottle in 2009. Four months later, they were forced to redesign it again. Do you remember why?”

There was maybe a five-second pause. “Dear Lord,” said Stottlemeyer.

“Oh, my God,” I said a second later. And to think, I’d been this close to taking one. “You don’t mean . . .” My head began to throb even more.

“What? People didn’t like the first design?” Devlin laughed. We didn’t laugh.

She hadn’t been living in San Francisco back then, hadn’t lived through it. It was an FBI case that Monk hadn’t been involved with, given his testy relationship with the bureau at the time. If he had, the homicides might not have gone unsolved.

“You never heard of the Cemedrin murders?” the captain asked his lieutenant. “Three deaths in one week, all in the Bay Area. It was like the Tylenol murders in Chicago back in the eighties.”

“Yes, of course I’ve heard of them.”

Everyone had. In response to the seven Tylenol deaths in Chicago, the industry had invented tamper-proof containers. Two decades later, some sicko copycat in San Francisco figured out how to bypass the plastic cap seals on a few bottles of Cemedrin and place them in stores. Two children and an older man died.

I remembered it vividly. Julie was a senior, and at her high school, there were posters showing the bottle and telling everyone to turn them over to the FBI. Two more poisoned bottles were discovered, one in a grade-school nurse’s office.

Cemedrin’s parent company nearly went bankrupt as a result. And the sicko was never caught, just like in Chicago.

“It was a solid cyanide compound,” Monk told us, holding up the plastic baggie and the bottle. “If I’m not mistaken—and I’m not—that’s what’s in here.”

“You’re saying this is what Dudley Smith found in the Harriman garage?” asked Devlin. “When he was changing into his . . . entertainer uniform.”

Monk nodded. “John Harriman, maybe his wife, tampered with the bottles back in 2009 in the garage. Somehow he or she didn’t dispose of all the evidence. That’s how it is with garages. They’re insidious.”

“And when Dudley Smith saw this, he knew what it was?” Devlin asked.

“It was on every channel. In every paper,” said Stottlemeyer. “I would have recognized it myself if I hadn’t been so distracted by Monk getting so distracted.”

“Now we know why the killer was willing to take a chance,” said Monk. “Without someone’s eyewitness testimony about finding the bottle, it doesn’t mean much.”

Stottlemeyer lifted the baggie gingerly from Monk’s hand. “Smith was smart enough to preserve it. Maybe we can lift some prints or DNA. Good job, everyone.”

“At least we have motive,” I pointed out, more than a little proud of Monk and me. Yes, me. I’m the one who found it. Let’s forget for a second that I was about to open it and pop a couple.

“This guy likes his poison,” said Stottlemeyer. “I have to believe we’re on the right track.”

We were all kind of giddy at the prospect. A dead case, a famously dead case. And it was coming back to life in front of our eyes.

“This is wild,” Devlin said, almost in a hush. “The FBI works for years hunting the Cemedrin killer, thousands of hours of work. And he’s caught on a fluke by some clown in a garage.”

“Don’t say ‘clown,’” said the rest of us, pretty much in unison.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Mr. Monk Shakes on It

T
he captain gave us the rest of the day off, although for him and Devlin I’m sure the work day was just beginning.

I dropped Monk off for his regular session with Dr. Bell. He was down to once every Thursday, which was quite an improvement. For many long years, he’d seen his psychiatrist three times a week. And when things were unusually stressful, four.

Ever since he had solved his wife’s murder, Monk and Dr. Bell have had less and less to talk about. So it was a bit of a surprise when I finished my hour of power-shopping at the nearby Real Food and picked him up in front of the two-story medical building.

“I need to go back Saturday,” he announced as he got in, and fastened his seat belt. “Dr. Bell doesn’t normally do Saturdays. I had to spend half of today’s session talking him into it.”

I was tempted to point out that he might not need a session on Saturday if he hadn’t spent half of today’s session talking the doctor into it.

“I can’t bring you on Saturday,” I said, shifting into gear and pulling away from the curb. “I’m going away.”

“Another weekend with the girlfriends?”

“Same as before, yes. BPM is doing a special retreat at the Sanctuary. And, no, you can’t come. Not even for lunch.”

“I have a session anyway. And don’t worry about driving me. I have my ways.”

“You keep saying that. What ways? No, don’t tell me. I prefer not to know.”

Monk shrugged and changed his grip on his seat belt. “Dr. Bell says Ellen is being unreasonable.”

Oh, so that was what triggered his sudden need for analysis. “I’m sure he didn’t say that.”

“He said someone was being unreasonable. I assumed he meant her.”

“He meant you, Adrian.”

“He also said you should start calling me Mr. Monk again.”

“I don’t think he said that.”

The next morning at exactly nine, we met Stottlemeyer and Devlin at the station. The fact that the captain closed the door to his office and the fact that the patrolmen, Garcia and Chandler, weren’t in attendance should have been a signal that something was up.

“All right, we’ve made progress,” the captain said, settling behind his desk. “First off, we lucked out with Google Earth.” He turned around a photo and shoved it over. “This street view was taken eight months ago. Ain’t technology grand!”

He also shoved over a magnifying glass, the one he kept in his bottom drawer beside his emergency bottle of scotch. It was a remarkably clear street view of the house on Sacramento. And the purplish pink stalks on both sides of the garden were lush and perfectly symmetrical. “It’s foxglove,” I confirmed.

“We put a rush on the pill analysis,” the captain added, turning around and shoving across a one-pager. “A solid cyanide compound, just like in oh-nine. Just like Monk said.” And another one-pager, turned and shoved. “The bottle. There were prints all right, but the oils had decayed and they were smudged. We’ll be lucky to get one or two points of comparison, which means nothing. Not even a search warrant.”