Mr. Monk and the Blue Flu (3 page)

“I appreciate that, Monk.”

“Listen to me carefully, follow my instructions to the letter, and you’ll be all right. Take your shoe off very slowly and place it in the bag.”

Stottlemeyer bent down.

“Wait!” Monk yelled, startling Stottlemeyer and almost causing him to lose his balance.

“What?” Stottlemeyer snapped angrily.

“Gloves,” Monk said.

Scowling and hopping on one foot, Stottlemeyer reached into his pocket, put on a pair of rubber gloves, then slowly removed his shoe.

“What I wanted to tell you is that the rank and file in the department have been working without a contract for over a year now,” the captain said. “The city wants to make deep cuts in our pay, medical benefits, and pension contributions. Our union reps have been trying to talk sense to them for months, but the city won’t budge on their demands.”

Stottlemeyer handled his shoe, for Monk’s benefit, as if it were nitroglycerin, gently sliding it into the bag that I held open in front of him.

“Seal the bag,” Monk said.

I did.

“The point is,” Stottlemeyer said, “negotiations collapsed this morning. Both sides walked away from the table.”

Monk waved the forensic tech over and motioned for him to take the bag from me.

“Take it to a remote location at least fifty miles from the nearest populated area and burn it,” Monk instructed the tech, then turned back to Stottlemeyer. “Now the sock.”

The tech went off to make arrangements with NASA to have the bag launched into deep space.

The captain groaned and took off his sock. I held open another bag and he dropped the sock into it. I gave the bag to him.

“You think there might be a strike?” I asked.

“It’s against the law for police officers to strike,” Stottlemeyer said. “But I hear a nasty strain of the flu is going around.”

Monk covered his nose and mouth with his hands and staggered backward. “May God have mercy on your soul.”

“It’s not an actual flu, Monk. It’s the Blue Flu,” Stottlemeyer said. “It’s what happens when all the officers call in sick even though they aren’t.”

“Why would they want to do that?” Monk said.

“To make a statement to management,” Stottlemeyer said. “It’s the only leverage we have if we can’t strike. It could happen in the next day or so, but you didn’t hear it from me.”

“Why are you telling us?” I asked.

“Because it means you might not work for a while,” Stottlemeyer said.

“What about the criminals?” Monk asked. “Are they going to take a sick day, too?”

“I wish they would,” Stottlemeyer said, and hopped on one foot back to his car.

The local newscasts that night led with the announcement that negotiations between the police officers’ union and city negotiators had reached an impasse. It appeared the failure of the talks only hardened the resolve on both sides not to budge from their positions.

San Francisco mayor Barry Smitrovich vowed to bring the city’s budget under control and not bow to pressure to make concessions to the police officers.

“Everyone in this city is going to have to make some painful sacrifices,” Smitrovich said, standing behind a podium erected outside his family’s popular seafood restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf. “That includes our police officers, who have enjoyed higher salaries and better medical and pension benefits than most of their fellow city employees. We can’t afford that any longer.”

Smitrovich was a heavyset, balding man with a bulbous nose, big hands, and a perpetual blush. He looked to me like he’d be a lot more comfortable on a fishing trawler than standing in a suit behind that podium.

“We all appreciate the hard work, dedication, and courage of our city’s police force. It is the finest in the nation. But we can’t ignore the fiscal realities facing this city,” he said. “Let me remind the fine men and women in blue that they have sworn to uphold the law, including those that forbid them from striking and putting the public’s safety at risk.”

Biff Nordoff, leader of the police union and an ex-cop himself, had a face like a tire tread. You could see every year he’d spent on the force. He gave a statement in front of a police car.

“When you’re a cop on the street, you expect your partner to be there to watch your back, to look out for you, to support you, to keep you safe,” Nordoff said. “Today our partner, the city of San Francisco, said they weren’t going to do that anymore. They said they didn’t care if our families are cared for, if our kids get an education, if we will be secure in our old age. And yet they want us to put our lives on the line without anyone watching our back. That’s just wrong.”

That story was followed by KGO-TV reporter Margo Cole, who had more synthetic parts than the Bionic Woman, reporting live from Potrero Hill. She stared gravely into the camera with her fish lips. Her grim expression probably had more to do with her Botox injections than the story she was reporting.

“The killer who has been preying on female joggers has claimed a third victim, identified as Serena Mirkova, twenty-three, a recent immigrant from the Republic of Georgia. She was found this morning in McKinley Park.”

Margo repeated details on the other killings and underscored the police department’s lack of progress on the case, although there was a shot of Stottlemeyer, looking stiff and uncomfortable on camera, saying that the department was pursuing several potential leads. Then it was back to Margo for the final word.

“The killer’s reign of terror is driving women off the streets after nightfall. They are shuddering in fear behind their locked doors and windows, wondering when or if the police will finally catch the Golden Gate Strangler.”

Well, at least now the killer had a name.

Margo didn’t mention anything about the missing running shoes because the police were holding back that detail from the media.

The next morning 70 percent of the city’s police force called in sick, and several sources in city government told the
San Francisco Chronicle
that they feared the city could be swept by a crime wave.

I figured that was just inflammatory rhetoric spread by City Hall in an effort to turn public opinion against the cops. But as much as I supported Stottlemeyer and Disher, I was worried that the sick-out did leave average citizens like myself more vulnerable than usual.

Luckily, I got paid my pitiful salary whether Monk was on a case or not. I wasn’t simply his investigative assistant—I was also his driver, his secretary, his spokeswoman, his personal shopper, and his Sherpa through the urban jungle of San Francisco.

The one thing I wasn’t was his maid. But I didn’t have to worry about his ever asking me to do his dishes, sweep his floor, or clean his windows because he enjoyed doing those tasks himself way too much. In fact, I often had to restrain him from cleaning my house, too.

It’s not that I wouldn’t appreciate his taking over all my housework. I hate housework, can’t afford a maid, and never have enough time do all the things that need doing. The problem is that he’s overzealous where tidiness is concerned.

Believe it or not, there’s such a thing as a house that’s
too
clean and
too
orderly.

The one time I let him straighten up my place, it looked like a model home afterward, and not in a good way. There was none of the domestic disorder that naturally comes from living in a house and that makes a home, well, homey. He made it creepy. Not only that, it smelled like a hospital.

I also like to have some privacy, which isn’t easy when you’re a single mother raising a twelve-year-old daughter. The last thing I wanted was Monk rummaging around in my closet.

Since Monk had no investigation to occupy his time, and he’d cleaned his place as much as he could without opening his walls and buffing the studs, I took him shopping with me. Julie needed new school clothes, and there was a big clearance sale at the Nordstrom in the San Francisco Centre mall.

Julie was unbelievably brand-conscious. I could buy a pair of jeans for ten dollars at Wal-Mart, slice them up with a knife, and run over them with my car, and they’d look just like the jeans she wanted that cost $150. But no, she had to have the name brand or face becoming a social outcast, forever exiled to the geek corner of the cafeteria. Or so she claimed.

I wanted my daughter to know that who you are is more than the sum of the designer trademarks that you wear, but it was a losing battle. If her clothes and shoes didn’t scream Von Dutch or Juicy, Hard Tail or Paul Frank, True Religion or Nike, she refused to be seen in public.

The only way I could afford the clothes and shoes that she absolutely had to have was to wait like a vulture for the big sales and then pounce the moment the stores opened, which is what I was doing with Monk.

While I sorted through the clearance items, wrestling with other desperate, henpecked mothers over pants, blouses, running shoes, and T-shirts, Monk was occupied at one of the carousels of bargain blouses, which were arranged in groups according to size.

The arrangement of blouses wasn’t good enough for him. He didn’t like the blouses all mixed up like that. He organized them by brand, color, and pattern, then by sizes within those groups. Any blouses without a match in brand, color, or design he set aside in a section (more like a purgatory) of their own.

I was glancing at Monk when a hugely pregnant woman snatched a blouse from right in front of me, the last one in Julie’s size. The woman looked like she was about to deliver twins, or perhaps quadruplets, at any moment.

“That’s mine,” I said.

“That’s funny, lady, since it’s in my hand and not yours.”

“I had it in front of me,” I said.

“The whole table is in front of you,” she said. “Does that mean all of the blouses on it are yours too?”

Her purse slid off her shoulder onto the floor. When she bent over to pick it up, I was half tempted to kick her in the butt, but I restrained myself. I knew what it was like to be pregnant. The hormones can turn you into a monster. Maybe she was a sweet, good-natured woman when she wasn’t knocked up.

She walked away and I saw Monk looking at her, too. From the expression on his face, he didn’t seem any fonder of her than I was. He went back to organizing the carousel and I continued searching for values.

I ended up finding a Juicy jacket, a pair of Von Dutch pants, a couple of Paul Frank T-shirts, and a pair of running shoes that altogether cost less than any one of those items would individually at their original prices.

I felt so good about my shopping prowess that I took Monk to the Nordstrom café for a snack, my treat. It wasn’t particularly magnanimous of me, since I knew that all he’d order was a bottle of Sierra Springs water.

On the way to the café he nearly collided with an old man who came around a pillar wheeling an oxygen tank behind him. He was wheezing, the tiny tubes from the tank running up to his nose. Now that I saw him up close, he wasn’t as old as I thought he was, maybe in his sixties. His grizzled cheeks were sunken and his eyes were fierce.

“Pardon us,” I said, and hurried along.

But Monk didn’t move. He was examining the man as if he were another species.

“Smoke three packs a day for thirty years and you can have one of these, too,” the man wheezed, and knocked his knuckles against the tank.

Monk cocked his head and narrowed his eyes. I went back, tugged him by the sleeve, and led him into the café. We sat at the bar, where a flat-screen TV was tuned to the midday news. I ordered Monk his water and got myself a coffee and a strawberry tart.

I noticed that the pregnant woman was in the café too, sitting at table, eating a piece of cake. It looked like she hadn’t bought the blouse after all. I was tempted to run back to the kids’ department and look for it.

Monk was still staring at the old man with the oxygen tank, who was walking through the aisles in the men’s department outside the café.

“Stop staring,” I said. “It isn’t polite.”

“I’m not staring,” Monk said. “I’m observing.”

“Could you at least try to be subtle about it?”

Monk smiled. “That’s like asking a snake if he can slither.”

He picked up a menu, held it in front of his face, and peered over the edge, observing the old man and then observing the pregnant woman and then observing a nun who was sipping a cup of coffee and idly toying with the cross around her neck. By trying to be subtle, he’d made himself even more obvious. People were staring at
him
now.

I decided to ignore him and glanced at the TV. Mayor Smitrovich was holding a press conference from City Hall. I thought it might be news about the Blue Flu, so I asked the bartender to crank up the volume so I could hear what the Mayor was saying.

“. . . which is why I’m announcing a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar reward for any information from the public leading to the arrest and conviction of the Golden Gate Strangler,” the mayor said. “Please call the number on your screen if you can help in any way.”

I plucked the menu from Monk’s hands and gestured to the TV. “Listen to this.”

“We can’t let one man terrorize the city,” Smitrovich was saying. “Especially now, when our police force has abandoned their responsibility to our citizens with their illegal walkout.”

I jotted the phone number on a napkin. “This could be a big opportunity for you, Mr. Monk.”

And for me, too. If he got the $250,000 reward, he could give me a fat raise and I wouldn’t have to wait for clearance sales to buy my daughter clothes.

“I’m not eligible for the reward,” Monk said. “I’m already on the case. I’m a city employee.”

“You were. Now you’re just a private citizen who is going to get a quarter of a million dollars for solving the murders.”