Mr. Monk Goes to Hawaii (11 page)

It was a heart with wings.

Love taking flight.
Dylan Swift’s words came back to haunt me and a sudden chill brought shivers to my skin. That image was one of the things Helen Gruber’s spirit had supposedly shared with him.

It could have been coincidence that a woman on the boat with the murdered woman’s husband just happened to have a tattoo that could be interpreted as “love taking flight.”

It could have meant nothing.

Or it could mean everything. I had to know which was the case.

I hurried back to the table, where Monk was still working on his signature.

“You’ve been signing your name for thirty years. You should have the hang of it by now.”

“These are not exactly the optimum conditions. It’s a tiny receipt with a minuscule space allotted to sign my name. It’s tricky balancing the proportion of the letters with space between them and getting everything to fit. If I rush it, I could end up jamming my last name against the edge of the paper. I’ve seen it happen before.”

I glanced back at the woman. She handed her credit card to the hostess, who rang up her bill.

“You’re not being graded on your penmanship, Mr. Monk. It’s just a signature.”

“It’s more than that,” Monk said. “It’s verification of your identity. It’s an extension of who you are.”

The woman signed her credit card receipt. It took her about one second. Nobody could possibly spend as much time signing his name as Monk did. I suspected there was another motivation besides attaining the perfect proportion and balance between his letters.

“I’m on to you, Mr. Monk,” I said, reaching into my purse and getting some cash. “I don’t think this has anything to do with getting your signature right. I think this is all about you being cheap.”

“I don’t understand what you mean,” he said.

I grabbed the receipt from him, tore it into pieces, and slapped some money, enough to cover our meals and the tip, on the table.

“You hate to pay,” I said, getting up from the table. “So you do this thing with the signature until I get so frustrated that I pick up the tab. It’s like you said; you can be cunning when you want to be.”

“I only use my cunning for the good of mankind,” Monk said, picking up his credit card and rising from his seat. “Not for personal gain.”

I didn’t bother arguing, but I promised myself that the next time we went out to dinner, I would let him sit there all night signing his name and I still wouldn’t pay.

The woman gathered up her bag and walked out of the restaurant just ahead of us. We followed a few yards behind her through the tropical garden to the parking lot. Luckily for me, her Jeep was parked only a couple of spots down from our Mustang.

The night sky was much darker than in San Francisco, but the stars twinkled brighter here. The air was pleasantly warm, like a bed in the morning, and the fragrance was sweet, like freshly laundered sheets. I must have been tired, because I was obviously thinking about bed a lot.

“It’s a great night for a drive,” I said, putting the soft-top down. I had no idea how far the woman was going to take us, and I needed an excuse if she journeyed far from our hotel.

“That sounds nice,” Monk said amiably.

The woman pulled out of her spot and, using skills I learned from watching
Rockford Files
reruns, I let a couple of cars slip in between us and her as she headed down Poipu Road. It was dark, the road lit only by the moon and the headlights of passing cars.

She made a left on Kapili
,
which took us down to the water, where the rays of the crescent moon reflected off the waves. There was no beach there, just black, craggy lava rocks, the surf smashing up against them in a frothy spray, creating a mist we could feel on our skin as we drove along Hoonani Road, which hugged the shoreline. On the other side of the street were condo complexes and private homes facing the water.

“It’s so beautiful here, isn’t it? Even when all you can see are the silhouettes of the palm trees cast against the moon.”

“Not to mention the Jeep the woman from the catamaran is driving.”

“Huh?” I said. That was really the best I could do under the circumstances.

“We’re following one of the tourists who was on the Snorkel Rob cruise this morning.”

“We are?” I tried to sound surprised and not guilty. Now I knew how the bad guys felt when he revealed their crimes.

“She was at the counter of the restaurant when we left.”

“Really? Your powers of observation are absolutely amazing. I never would have recognized her.”

“So it’s a coincidence that we’re following her.”

“Of course it is,” I said. “We’re just taking a drive along the water.”

“Then why did you slow down to let two cars get between us and her?”

“Because I’m a very courteous driver.”

“I watch
The Rockford Files,
too. We watch it together.”

She pulled into a condominium complex and parked behind one of the waterfront units. The condominiums were called the Whaler’s Hideaway, the name written in rusted metal-strip scrawl on the low lava-rock wall that ringed the complex. Another one of Dylan Swift’s images came back to me.

Captain Ahab hiding in the shadows.

A whaler hiding? It was a stretch, but here she was at Whaler’s Hideaway. The image fit, just like “love taking flight” matched her tattoo. I felt a shiver go through me, and the opening notes of
The Twilight Zone
theme song played in my head.

I drove around to the front of the building, where it faced the Pacific, and parked on the street so we could see the unit she entered as well as all the others in the complex. Everybody had their drapes wide-open to take in the view. We could see into every unit, including hers.

And we could see Lance Vaughan greet her at the door, giving her a kiss on the lips. She squeezed his butt and took their food to the table on their lanai.

Monk turned to me. “How did you know?”

“Would you believe I deduced it?”

“No.”

“Why not?” I said.

“Because if there was something to deduce, I would have deduced it. Deducing is what I do.”

I sighed with defeat. I really didn’t want to tell him, but I had to now.

“I had some help.”

“From who?”

“Helen Gruber.”

Monk gave me a look. “She’s dead.”

“I know, but she left you a message this afternoon.”

“How could she if she’s dead?”

“She talked to Dylan Swift,” I said. “From the great beyond.”

On the way back to the hotel and up to our adjoining rooms, I told Monk all about my encounter with Dylan Swift at the poolside bar. I recounted everything Swift said about the murder and the images and sensations Helen shared with him from the great beyond—the smell of lilac, a lumberjack holding a porcelain doll, the taste of
liliko’i
pie, Captain Ahab hiding in shadow, barbed wire against flesh, love taking flight, and a pine tree.

I sat on the edge of my bed and he sat in one of the two rattan easy chairs. I expected him to explode with anger or something, but he didn’t. He just sat there calmly looking at me.

“I haven’t checked but I bet there are two Toblerones in my minibar.”

“Mr. Monk, did you hear a word I said?”

He nodded.

“And?”

“I wonder how many Toblerones are in your minibar.” Monk got up and went to my minibar.

“I know I should have brought Swift straight to you but I was skeptical about this whole talking-tothe-dead thing.”

“Because it’s impossible. He’s a fraud. Nobody can talk to the dead,” Monk said, tugging at the minibar door. “You did the right thing keeping him away from me.”

“I did?”

“He would have distracted me from the investigation, which needs my full attention,” Monk said. “Where is the minibar key?”

“I gave it back to the front desk,” I said. “I didn’t want to be tempted by the stuff in there.”

“I need a wipe and a hairpin,” he said.

I opened my purse, found a Wet Ones and a hairpin, and gave them both to Monk. He used the wipe to clean the hairpin of all my deadly germs.

“You say Swift is a fraud, but two of the images that Swift saw connect Lance Vaughan to the woman on that boat,” I said. “We wouldn’t have known there was a relationship between Lance and her if it wasn’t for Swift.”

“So now you believe him?” Monk worked the hairpin into the minibar lock. “You think he talks to ghosts?”

“I don’t know. But if those two images gave us a lead in the case, maybe the other stuff he told me will, too.”

“You
want
to believe him,” Monk said.

“No, I don’t.”

“Yes, you do. That’s why you’d rather believe he can communicate with spirits than consider the most obvious explanation for his accuracy.”

“Which is?”

“Swift must have seen Lance and that woman together before. When he learned that Helen was murdered, Swift figured there was a way to use that information to make it seem as if he were communicating with the dead and bolster his reputation as a medium.”

The minibar lock clicked. Monk smiled, pleased with himself, and opened the little refrigerator. “Look at that, two Toblerone bars but one of everything else.”

“Maybe Toblerone bars are simply more popular than everything else.”

“You’re so gullible,” Monk said, closing the minibar. “But even so, to get you to believe in something as outrageous as talking to ghosts, Swift still would have had to win your sympathy first.”

“He didn’t win anything from me,” I said.

“He softened you up somehow. He had to make you want to believe him,” Monk said. “And I can only think of one way he could do that. He gave you a message from Mitch.”

“I’m not that easy.” I felt my eyes tearing up, my emotions betraying me. “You are the only person I’ve ever told about what happened to Mitch.”

“You don’t know what happened to Mitch,” Monk said. “You only know the navy’s version.”

“They told me he was shot down over Kosovo, that he survived the crash but panicked on the ground, getting himself killed and endangering the lives of his crew.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s true,” Monk said as he sat down beside me on the edge of the bed. “The only people who know what really happened are the two crew members who survived. They could be lying to cover
their
cowardice, not Mitch’s.”

“The point, Mr. Monk, is that Swift knew all about that. None of it was ever made public.”

Monk shook his head. “He only knew what you told him.”

The tears really started coming now, but I didn’t care. I was too angry and hurt.

“You think all it takes is one drink by the pool and I’ll tell the first attractive man who comes along my most painful secrets?”

“You didn’t know you were doing it.”

“I wasn’t drunk. I know what I said.”

“Dylan Swift works in much the same way I do,” Monk said. “He looks at a person and makes deductions. And then he uses that information to get you to tell him what he doesn’t already know.”

“I didn’t tell him,” I insisted, sniffling.

“What he does is called cold reading. I saw him do it yesterday during his show. It’s a bit of trickery in which he pumps a person for information while simultaneously making it seem like he’s getting his facts from the beyond. It’s much easier to pull off with a crowd than with one person. What he did with you takes real finesse.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, beginning to get hold of myself.

“Let’s start with how he works a crowd. Last night, he wandered into the audience, sensing the letter
G
. Immediately a guy jumped up, said his name was Gary, and asked if the message was for him. In that instant, he told Dylan Swift the most important thing of all—that he was eager to be fooled and would do everything he could to help dupe himself. So, naturally, Swift picked Gary for the reading.”

Monk went on to explain that as soon as someone responded, Swift looked at the person’s age, hair-style, jewelry, clothes, and the friends or family with him and made some simple deductions. Then Swift started throwing out educated guesses in questions that were shrewdly framed as statements.

Monk told me that instead of agreeing or disagreeing with Swift’s guesses, most people would try to help him. They would freely volunteer additional information, giving Swift material with which to make more reasonable assumptions, and if he was right, they would think the dead were whispering in his ear. But if he was wrong, he could claim there was static on the line and, nine times out of ten, people would give him some suggestions to help him clarify the transmission.

“Swift told Gary that a woman he was very close to was reaching out to him. It was Gary who suggested it might be his sister,” Monk said. “Swift said he ‘sensed’ that her name began with an ‘M’ or an ‘E,’ but to increase his odds of success, he refined the guess by saying the letters might just be in the name somewhere. It was Gary who volunteered that Swift must be talking about his sister Margaret.”

I remembered it now. I could see how Swift got Gary to feed him the information he needed to appear as if he were channeling a spirit. But I didn’t see how he did it with me.

“That’s not what happened with me, Mr. Monk. The first thing he said to me was that my husband missed me. He already knew stuff….”

“I’m sure he did,” Monk said. “But think about what you gave him. A standard ploy a medium uses is to say your dead loved one has some unresolved issues to deal with, that he was cheated or wronged. Did he say that?”

I nodded and sniffled.

“And what did you say?”

I remembered exactly what I said.

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

“It was an accident that took him from you,” Swift said.

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

I might as well have typed up Mitch’s biography and handed it to Swift.

“Oh, my God, I’m such a fool.” I started to cry again.

“No, you’re not.” Monk took my hand. “You just miss your husband very much.”

I did and I always would; I knew that. What I didn’t know was how close to the surface those feelings were and how easily I could be manipulated by them. I was ashamed of myself.

“Tissue,” he said.

I sniffled, reached into my purse, and handed him a tissue.

“It’s for you,” he said.

I blew my nose and, in deference to Monk and his kindness, I took a Ziploc bag from my purse, put the Kleenex in the bag, and tossed the bag into the trash can.

It was obvious that Dylan Swift was a fraud. And yet something he said still gave me goose bumps.

“Everything you’re saying makes sense, Mr. Monk, except for one thing. You remember that bikini I was wearing?”

Monk flushed with embarrassment and looked at his feet, as if I were wearing it at that moment.

“Vaguely,” he said.

“I’ve had it for years. I bought it in Puerto Vallarta, where Mitch and I went for a weekend of romance, sun, and tequila, much to my parents’ horror.”

“I don’t need to know this,” Monk said.

“I lost my top making out in the water with Mitch. He had to get an emergency bikini from a beachside vendor while I stayed in the water. That was the one he picked out for me. After that, every time he saw me in that bikini, he’d remember how I lost the last one. He loved to see me in it.”

“I don’t want to know this,” Monk said.

“Swift said that Mitch still loved my bikini. There’s no way he could have known whether Mitch had ever seen me in it. For all Swift knew, I bought it last week.”

“You still want to believe in him.”

“I want to understand how I was fooled.”

“These con men are very smart. They study up on fashion, songs, hairstyles, everything that is or was in vogue. He must have known the bathing suit was an older style, cut, or pattern and made a lucky guess.”

“But what if he’d been wrong?”

“He’d have said, ‘What Mitch is saying is that he still thinks you’re beautiful and will always love you.’”

I felt my eyes tearing up again and it pissed me off. Was I that weak? That vulnerable?

“You’d better go, Mr. Monk, or I may cry all night.”

“That’s okay,” Monk said. “I don’t mind as long as you’ve got plenty of tissue.”

We sat there without talking; the only sounds were my sniffles. I was aware, though, of the sting of the tears on my cheeks and the warmth of Monk’s hand in mine.

“But I do wonder about those Toblerone bars,” Monk said.

“You’d better go check.”

“Maybe I should.” Monk got up and paused at the open door to his room. “If I find two, would you like one of them?”

He wouldn’t be able to sleep with two pieces of the same candy in a minibar filled with one piece of everything else. Even so, it was a nice gesture.

“Sure,” I said. “I’d like that.”

I ate the extra Toblerone and called home to talk with Julie and my mom. I left out everything about my day except the time I spent at the beach. Julie informed me I was boring. It sounded like Mom had already bought Julie enough clothes to last her until high school, so my daughter was in no hurry for me to get back.

I fell asleep within seconds of resting my head on the plump pillow. I was exhausted. I was jet-lagged. I was emotionally depleted. It was a deep, rejuvenating, dreamless sleep that ended at eight
A
.
M
. with the crowing from a chorus of roosters.

It was the last sound I expected to hear on a tropical island. Parrots, maybe. Or macaws. Not roosters. But I awoke totally refreshed.

I didn’t knock on Monk’s door to see if he was up. Instead, I slipped into a T-shirt and sweats and went down to the beach for a walk.

The sand had been smoothed by the surf during the night and was damp from the morning drizzle. The air was moist, warm, and heavy.

There were a half dozen others walking on the sand, but it still felt as if I had the beach to myself. I walked past the Grand Kiahuna Poipu bungalows, but couldn’t see over the hedges, even walking on my tippy-toes.

Farther up the beach, just above the surf line, an enormous seal and her pup were lying on the sand. A worker from the hotel was roping off a wide area around them with yellow caution tape. I stopped at the edge of the tape and looked at the seals.

The mother had a scarred brown coat; her pup’s was jet-black. They both had faces that reminded me of golden retriever puppies. The mother looked back at me with her marble eyes.

“Those are monks,” the hotel worker said. He was Polynesian, with a deeply tanned, deeply lined face.

“Monks?”

“Named for their solitary existence,” the worker said. “They are an endangered species.”

I nodded toward the mother. “What are those scars?”

The worker smiled slyly, showing all his crooked teeth. “From all her good lovin’. The male seals like it rough.”

I gave the monk seals, and the hotel worker, a wide berth and continued on my walk.

The beach ended at a rocky point of lava rocks that stretched out into the bay. A well-worn footpath wound around the base of the point and ended at the sidewalk on Hoonani Road, right in front of the Whaler’s Hideaway. As I walked past the condos, I glanced up at the woman’s unit, but the drapes were closed.

I crossed the street and went into the Whaler’s Hideaway parking lot, following it around to the management office. There were doughnuts on the counter and a middle-aged woman behind it. She had a beehive hairdo and a willingness to talk.

I learned she was semiretired and worked part-time to subsidize her island lifestyle, which she couldn’t manage to do with the money she’d saved as a schoolteacher. I learned her children and grandchildren never visited her when she lived in Flagstaff, but now that she had moved here, they wanted to see her all the time. And I learned the names of the “lovely couple” in condo A-3.

Roxanne Shaw and her boyfriend Curtis Potter. Both from Cleveland.