Mr. Monk Gets on Board (18 page)

“Good old Facebook. How did you get access to Braun’s page?”

“Turns out Braun was Facebook friends with the victim, old man Melrose. We had legal access to his computer, so no laws were broken. Pretty cool, huh? My idea.”

“Did you confirm it?”

“I called Gretchen at work. She confirmed it. We didn’t want to make Ms. Braun too nervous, which is why we didn’t do a check in person. What is Monk’s theory?”

“He won’t tell me. Could you go over and confirm it personally?”

“You think Gretchen is lying?”

“You won’t know until you check,” I said.

“You mean tonight?” Devlin paused, and I could hear the glug-glug of her wine leaving the bottle. Again, no sympathy. “Can I have my rotisserie chicken first? It’s getting cold.”

“If it’s already cold, you may as well heat it up later,” I said. “Monk would really like confirmation of Portia’s whereabouts all day today, the sooner the better.”

Devlin grudgingly agreed. “Fine. I’ll e-mail you and text you as soon as I know.”

After the call, I decided not to go back to the morgue. Monk didn’t need me and I didn’t need to be there. It had been quite a day and I didn’t feel like eating, especially in the dining room, where some member of the B. to Sea Conference might ask me where Malcolm was tonight. I didn’t feel I had the strength to lie.

Instead, I went outside and wandered around.

It was still dinnertime and the Calypso deck was pretty much deserted, the way it had been on the night Mariah died. I decided to make my way once around the ship’s perimeter, starting at the three o’clock position and meandering counterclockwise. I was stopped more than halfway around, near the stern, between seven and six, by the sight of four women standing by the railing. Something about them made me step back into the shadows.

They were the four women from the street vendor’s cart: Daniela, Ruth, and the other two. All were holding roses, red roses, like the ones from Mariah’s memorial last night. Their words were drowned out by the breeze, but one by one they tossed their roses into the sea, then stood in a moment of contemplation, their faces still.

Monk had been right with his stupid comment this afternoon. Despite the different ages and races and heights and weights, there was something so oddly similar about these four women, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

But the oddest thing to ponder was the full bottle of liquor at their feet, inches from the railing. From the shape of the bottle and the color, I assumed it was bourbon or maybe whiskey. What was my AA sponsor doing with an unopened bottle of the hard stuff?

I might have spent more time watching them from a distance and trying to figure it out, but the sight of the bottle reminded me that I had an unopened bottle of California merlot waiting for me in my cabin.

   C
HAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Mr. Monk and the Lady Pirates

I
had only one glass of wine that evening—I swear. Then I fell into bed without dinner, exhausted but sleepless.

For the next few hours I lay there, drifting and thinking, the scene from the Calypso deck playing over and over. Four wealthy, married women by themselves in some sort of bizarre memorial, not all that different from the crew’s memorial the night before, except for the bottle of whiskey. Did these women all have some connection to Mariah? If so, I was completely unaware of it.

I don’t know what made me reach for Solomon Lao’s vandalism report. An edge of it was visible in the smaller of my bags on the empty bed, poking out from under one of my two remaining pairs of clean underwear. Maybe I was looking for something to read or feeling guilty for having ignored our one paying case, even if we had been hired by Mariah’s killer as a blatant distraction.

I sat up, turned on the reading light, and browsed the report’s headings: Balcony Railing. Passenger Tender. Ice Sculpture. Mariah Accident. Bar Electrocution. I was on my second pass when I focused on a list of names: Monk/McGinnis, Grace, Weingart, Winters, Sung. Next to each name was a cabin number: 457, 432, 444 . . . The cabins with the vandalized balconies, now all repaired.

It took me another few seconds to make the connection. Daniela Grace, Ruth Weingart, Sondra Winters, and Lynn Sung. The four best friends. And the only other cabins with the vandalized balconies.

The great thing about working for a decade with Monk is that you know a big clue when you see one, even if you don’t know what it means.

Under normal circumstances, I would have knocked on Monk’s door. But the sound of a vacuum cleaner told me he was still awake and might not be able to hear a civilized knock, so I used my key card, one of several that I’d been collecting over the past few days. Monk looked up from the perfect herringbone pattern of rug nap.

“Where did you get a vacuum cleaner?” I asked.

“You broke into my room at one a.m. to ask about vacuum cleaners?”

“No, you’re right. I have other questions. Sit down.”

“Just let me get in six more laps. Shouldn’t be more than a half hour.”

“No. Now.” I switched off the small Electrolux and made him sit on his bed. “Those four women, the ones you say look alike? All of their balconies were rigged to collapse, just like yours.”

I had expected some brilliant response, followed by “here’s what happened.” But he just stared blankly. So I told him about the secret memorial service just a few hours ago with the roses and the whiskey.

Monk still stared blankly, but this time he had a question. “What does Darby McGinnis do for a living besides drink?”

“Dr. McGinnis is a surgeon,” I said, recalling Darby’s statement at the business seminar. “If you can believe it. Cosmetic and reconstructive.”

Monk stood up and marched up and down his own herringbone pattern, making a total mess of it, touching the far window and the doorknob at each turn, as if he were doing laps. On his sixth lap, he turned the doorknob and raced out in the hallway. I followed.

By the time we got down to level four, Monk had taken a key card out of his pocket. By the time we got to cabin 457, he had it ready to insert.

Monk recoiled as soon as he opened the door. He almost retched in horror. “What a mess.”

It’s true. Darby’s cabin was a mess. But at least it was empty and no one was dead. Monk steeled his nerves and tiptoed, actually
en pointe
like a ballerina, to a stained blue blazer crumpled on top of a soiled section of carpet. “Tweezers,” he demanded of me. “Or tongs. Or industrial-strength gloves.”

“I get the point,” I said, and without any protection whatsoever, lifted the jacket. Underneath it was a spilled bottle of Jack Daniel’s, almost completely drained onto the floor. “Augh, it’s worse than I thought,” he said, and shot back out the door.

“Adrian, where are you going?”

I followed, of course—what else do I do?—down another flight to the Calypso level and out to the deserted deck. He was still way ahead when he rounded the last bend. “Stop,” I heard him shout a few seconds later. “It’s not too late. Don’t do it.”

I don’t know what I was expecting to see. This was the spot where Daniela and her friends had been performing their little ceremony, although at the moment I didn’t understand how that fit in.

There they were, all four of them, from early middle-aged to elderly, trying to heft the bloated, unconscious body of Darby McGinnis over the railing and into the churn of the Pacific.

“Put down the drunk,” Monk ordered them. They didn’t obey him as much as let Darby slip back onto the deck. He landed with a thud. “Good. Now step away from the drunk.”

“We can explain,” said Ruth Weingart, as though there could be some sort of innocent explanation.

“I know.” Then Monk proceeded to do the explaining for them. Meanwhile, I stood by, openmouthed. And Darby? He remained crumpled on the deck, snoring.

All four friends, Monk explained, had had cosmetic procedures back in San Francisco. That’s why Monk had seen the resemblance. Their sculpted eyes and noses and cheeks were all similar, all the product of a single surgical artist, Dr. Darby McGinnis.

But there had been a fifth, the friend Daniela had mentioned at the AA meeting, killed one horrible day exactly a year ago by their irresponsible, intoxicated doctor.

“We talked Samantha into it,” said Daniela, taking up where Monk left off. There was so much sorrow in her voice. “She was happy with the way she looked. But no, we knew better. We had this great surgeon who worked miracles. And who cared if he enjoyed a cocktail or two after work or on the weekends! We all knew it. It was like a joke.”

“Sam died the next day,” said Ruth. “A combination of infection and lidocaine and painkillers. She tried to call Dr. McGinnis, but he was in the bar at his golf club and didn’t pick up. The investigation blamed it on an accident, bad luck, a failure of communication. No charges were brought. But we knew better.”

“I gave up drinking that same day,” said Daniela. She looked at me. “By the way, Natalie, how is it going? I’ve been meaning to check in, but we’ve been distracted.”

“Doing fine,” I assured her. “Day by day.”

“Good.”

“So.” Monk picked up the narration. “You learned McGinnis was coming to this conference and thought it would be perfect.”

“It seemed like destiny,” said Ruth. “On the anniversary of her passing. According to the books I read, it’s easiest to kill someone and get away with it when they’re someplace out of their element.”

“Accidents happen on these boats,” Monk agreed. “Boats are deathtraps. Of course, you couldn’t unscrew just one railing. That would have been suspicious. So you unscrewed your own and hoped for the best. Your later stuff was even riskier, like the poolside bar.”

“He was there every afternoon, drinking piña coladas, both feet on the footrail.”

“Other people were there, too,” I reminded them.

“I know,” said Daniela. “We weren’t thinking straight.”

“You put innocent people at risk,” I said. “What if one of them had died instead?”

“We’re not experts at killing,” said Daniela, in the understatement of the day. “McGinnis almost drowned when we sabotaged the shore boat in Catalina. We were all on board, standing guard while Sondra tried to hold him under.”

“I grabbed onto him and pretended to panic,” said Sondra with pride. “Screaming and pulling him. You know us black folk. We can’t swim.”

“It might have worked, too,” said Ruth. “Except a guy from the crew pulled her off and dragged him back to the boat.”

“Didn’t he recognize you?” I asked. “Four of his old patients? You were stalking him all day today in San Marcos, right? Hanging outside that bar?”

“We thought that might be a problem,” said Ruth. “But he’s had so many patients. We were just paychecks.”

“That’s what gave us the idea for tonight,” said Daniela. “His desperate search for a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.” She looked down at the twisted, snoring blob on the deck. “Don’t worry. We didn’t poison him.”

“Then you can still get out of it,” I said. “You’re not killers. You’re women in pain. And you proved you could do it. There’s no reason to ruin your lives and your husbands’. Does Darby know you drugged him?”

“We left the bottle gift wrapped outside his cabin door,” said Ruth. “A present from the captain.”

“Then he’ll never know—if we get Darby back to his cabin before he recovers. Adrian?” I looked at my partner. “Don’t you agree?”

“I don’t,” said Monk firmly. “It’s attempted murder. Plus destruction of property, aggravated assault, willful endangerment. You’re like a bunch of female pirates.”

“Adrian, please.”

“We were hired to solve the vandalism. It’s professional pride. Not to mention getting paid.”

“Adrian?”

“We’ll pay you to walk away and let us finish the job,” said Daniela. “Fifty thousand.” She said it like it was nothing.

“How much?” asked Monk, suddenly thinking it over.

“Fifty thousand.”

“And you promise to get rid of him?”

“Adrian!”

He turned to me and shrugged. “This isn’t a normal person, Natalie. It’s Darby McGinnis.”

It’s never a good sign when I’m the sole voice of reason. “Adrian, you can’t let them kill him.”

“Party pooper.” Monk sighed. The expelled air was mixed with a low groan and lasted about thirty seconds. “Okay, you’re right.” He turned to the women. “Sorry, girls. Natalie, get the captain.”

“No!” shouted Daniela. She seemed about ready to faint. Despite the snoring drunk at their feet, they all looked so helpless.

“Hold on,” I told Monk. “Maybe we can come to a compromise. Meet somewhere in the middle.”

“You mean arresting only two of them?” asked Monk. “That hardly seems fair.”

It took some more convincing, but I knew how Monk thought, and we eventually got it worked out. Darby would live. I would keep an eye on the news, just to make sure. But I trusted them now. This moment had been cathartic, and the impulse would pass.

“We won’t try again,” said Lynn Sung. Up until now she’d been the quiet one. “We just had to do something. We didn’t care about the repercussions.”

“Samantha wouldn’t want you to ruin your lives,” I suggested. And they agreed.

The hard part now would be getting Darby back to his cabin.

We tried several times, all six of us. But drunken flab is almost impossible to lift. And even if the man could be lifted and carried, there was no guarantee that we could get him there without being seen.

“How did you get him here in the first place,” I asked.

“He was still stumbling,” said Ruth. “All we had to do was guide him along. Obviously, things have changed.”

“Just leave him,” Monk suggested. “He’s woken up in worse places.”

And that’s what we wound up doing. It had been a long, emotional day for everyone. The temperature was well above freezing, almost balmy, and Darby’s bulk would keep him from sliding under the railing.

Mission accomplished.