Mr. Monk Goes to Hawaii (3 page)

I had to leave the house at five
A
.
M
. to make my eight-o’clock flight to Honolulu. I drove to the airport, stowed my car in long-term parking, and took the shuttle to the terminal. I stood in a long line at check-in and waited in another at security and still got to the gate with twenty minutes to spare before boarding.

Adrian Monk was the furthest thing from my mind as I settled into my narrow economy-class seat for the five-hour trip.

The flight attendants were all Hawaiian or Polynesian women wearing floral aloha shirts and red hibiscus flowers in their hair.

A video of palm trees, waterfalls, and pristine Hawaiian beaches screened on all the plane’s TV monitors. Hawaiian music—that gentle rhythm of ukulele, ukeke, steel guitar, and native chants flowing like the tide, lapping at the white sand—played softly throughout the cabin.

I closed my eyes and sighed. The plane was still on the tarmac at LAX, but mentally and emotionally I was already more relaxed than I’d been in weeks. The clatter of passengers getting settled, the murmur of conversation, the wail of babies crying, the hum of the engines, and even the sweet Hawaiian music all faded away.

And before I knew it, I was sound asleep.

I was awakened seemingly an instant later by the gentle nudge of a flight attendant asking me if I wanted breakfast.

“You have a choice between a cheese-and-mushroom omelet, macadamia-nut pancakes, or a fruit platter,” she said, pulling out trays from her cart and showing me the entrées.

All of the choices looked gross to me. Even the fruit looked as if it had been soaked in grease.

“No, thanks,” I said. I glanced at my watch and was surprised to discover I’d actually slept through takeoff and had been snoozing away for forty-five minutes.

“If she’s not going to have it, I’ll take it,” a man said. I knew the voice, but I had to be wrong. It couldn’t possibly be who it sounded like.

“You already have a meal, sir,” the flight attendant said. I tried to see who she was talking to, but I couldn’t see past her cart.

“But I’m almost finished with my omelet, I’m still hungry, and I’d like to sample the pancakes,” he said. “If she’s not going to eat her meal, what difference does it make who does?”

No, it wasn’t him. He’d never say what I’d just heard. He’d never get on a plane. And he’d certainly never sit in an odd-numbered seat in row thirty-one.

What I was hearing was my guilt tormenting me. Yes, that had to be it.

The stewardess forced a smile, took a tray of pancakes and handed it to the passenger on the other side of the cart.

“Mmmm,” the familiar voice purred. “Looks mighty tasty. Thank you, sweetheart.”

It can’t be.

She pushed her cart along, and Monk smiled at me from across the aisle, his mouth full of pancakes.

“You don’t know what you’re missing,” he said. “This is delicious.”

I blinked hard. He was still there.

“Mr. Monk?”

“Hey, we’re off the clock, sister. The Monk says, let’s keep it casual.”

“The Monk?”

“You’re right, still too formal. Call me Chad.”

“Chad?”

This was too much, too fast. I was either still asleep and dreaming this whole encounter, or, worse, I was awake and delirious.

Monk leaned into the aisle and whispered, “Chad is more tropical than Adrian, don’t you think?”

“What are you doing here?” I whispered back.

“Going to Hawaii, of course,” he said.

“But you hate to fly.”

He ignored me and nudged the heavyset man sitting beside him. The passenger was wearing a too-tight bowling shirt and plaid Bermuda shorts.

Monk motioned to the man’s breakfast plate. “Are you going to finish that sausage?”

The man shook his head. “It’s too salty and I’m on a restricted diet.”

Monk speared the half-eaten sausage with his fork. “Thanks.”

The man stared at Monk in shock and so did I.

“You’re not going to eat that,” I said in disbelief.

He sniffed the sausage. “It smells good. I think it’s smoked.”

And with that, he chomped half the sausage and offered the remainder to me across the aisle.

“Want the rest?”

I shook my head and pushed his hand away. The sausage fell off the fork and landed on the floor. Monk snatched it up.

“Two-second rule,” he said before plunking it into his mouth.

Now I was convinced that this couldn’t really be happening. I turned to the child in the seat beside me. She was about ten years old and was listening to her iPod.

“Excuse me,” I said.

She pulled out her earphones. “Yes, ma’am?”

“Do you see a man in the seat across the aisle from me?”

She nodded.

“Could you describe him?”

“He’s a white guy wearing a dress shirt that’s buttoned up to his neck and a sport coat,” she said. “Isn’t he going to be awfully hot in Hawaii?”

“What’s he doing?”

She looked past me and giggled. “Sticking his tongue out at me.”

I turned and looked at Monk, who was pulling his mouth open wide with his fingers, wiggling his tongue, and rolling his eyes at the girl.

I swatted him.

“What is the matter with you?” I asked.

I was relieved to know I wasn’t nuts. But that didn’t explain Monk’s bizarre behavior, or what he was doing on my flight to Hawaii.

He licked his lips and smacked them a couple of times.

“My mouth is dry,” Monk said, and turned to the passenger beside him. “You’re right; that was a salty sausage. I need a drink. You mind?”

He picked up his tray and held it out to the passenger to hold for him. The man took it.

“Thanks.” Monk lifted up his tray table and went down the aisle toward the back of the plane. I looked over my shoulder and saw him filling a paper cup with water from the plane’s dispenser. Before I could say anything, he drank it all.

I bolted out of my seat and hurried down the aisle after him. “Are you insane, Mr. Monk? That’s the deadliest water you can drink.”

“People drink out of water fountains every day.”

“Drinking airplane water is like drinking out of a toilet.”

“Dogs do it without a problem,” Monk said. “Doesn’t kill them. Chill out, hotcakes.”

Hotcakes?

“Mr. Monk,” I said firmly, hoping to get his complete attention. “Are you on something?”

“I thought we agreed you were going to call me Chad.”

“You
are
on something.”

“It’s a prescription Dr. Kroger gave me once to relieve my symptoms in extreme circumstances.”

“What symptoms?”

“All of them,” he said. “As long as I’m up, I think I’ll use the restroom.”

“You’re kidding,” I said. Wherever we were in San Francisco, he always made me drive him home to go to the bathroom.

“Where else would you suggest I relieve myself?”

He edged past me, opened the restroom door, and went inside. Monk was using a public lavatory. I would never have believed it could happen.

I continued back to the galley and asked the flight attendant for a drink.

“What would you like?” she asked.

“A scotch,” I said.

Monk emerged from the bathroom a moment later, not caring at all that he was trailing a piece of toilet paper from his shoe.

“Better make it two,” I said.

The rest of the flight was a living hell.

Although Monk wasn’t obsessing about how things were organized (or, more accurately, disorganized) or freaking out about little stuff that normal people would take in stride, he was irritating in an entirely new way. He was like a restless child.

What did he do? Let’s see, where should I start?

He led a
Hawaii Five-O
singalong with everybody making up their own lyrics to the theme. His lyrics went like this:

 

If you get in trouble, call the Monk, that’s me.

If you find a dead body, I’m the guy to see-eee.

Stop! In the name of the law.

Stop! Murder sticks in my craw.

I’ll find the killer. Call the Monk, that’s me….

 

There were more lyrics, but those are bad enough. I couldn’t get them out of my head for the entire flight. It was a crime against humanity, since I certainly wasn’t the only one suffering. (Even now, when I least expect it, those lyrics will come back and torment me for hours.)

He took off his shoes and roamed barefoot up and down the aisles, striking up conversations with startled passengers.

“I’m the Monk,” he said to one woman. “That looks like an interesting book you’re reading. Can I read a chapter? I know—let’s read it aloud.”

And he did.

He also went to the galley and hounded the flight attendants for their macadamia-nut-pancake recipe and refused to believe them when they insisted they simply reheated frozen food.

“But they taste so fluffy and fresh,” he said.

And he ate twenty-one bags of roasted peanuts, leaving the wrappers all over the plane.

“Everything should be dry-roasted,” he proclaimed to one and all. “Has anyone here ever tried dry-roasted chicken? Or dry-roasted granola? The possibilities are limitless!”

I thought the flight would never end. Finally we made our descent into Oahu. It says something about the beauty of Hawaii that the moment I glimpsed the island out the window, all my frustration with Monk disappeared.

Our approach to Honolulu International Airport took us over Pearl Harbor and gave me a terrific view of Waikiki and Diamond Head. The colors were so bright, the mountains so lush, and the water so blue, it didn’t seem real. It didn’t help that I was seeing it through a tiny porthole. I was separate from it. It was too much like seeing it on TV.

Television was my entire frame of reference for Hawaii anyway. I couldn’t look at the Waikiki shoreline without thinking of that shot from the
Hawaii Five-O
main titles, the camera zooming up from the water to the rooftop of a hotel tower to find Jack Lord standing there, grim faced and stoic in his blue suit.

And that memory naturally brought Monk’s atrocious improvised lyrics back into my head.

As we deplaned, we were greeted by airline hostesses who draped fragrant flower leis around our necks and welcomed us to the islands.

Much to my surprise, Monk accepted the lei and the kiss the hostess gave him on the cheek. It was a good thing he didn’t ask me for a wipe, because I didn’t bring any with me.

We had a one-hour layover in Honolulu before our forty-five-minute flight to Kauai. The airport was so nice, it wouldn’t have bothered me to wait twice that long. The main terminal was an enormous open patio that wrapped around a Japanese garden and a koi pond filled with Jurassic carp that could probably chew off my arm. The balmy trade winds blew through the airport, giving the entire place the feel of a resort hotel.

We had to take the Wiki Wiki shuttle bus to the Inter-island Terminal for our connecting flight to Kauai. Luckily it was a short distance, because Monk couldn’t stop repeating, “Wiki Wiki,” and giggling during the drive.

As soon as we got there, I ditched Monk in the terminal on the excuse that I had to use the ladies’ room. Which was the truth, but I also wanted to make a call in private.

I reached Dr. Kroger on my cell phone and told him what had happened.

“Amazing,” Dr. Kroger said. He sounded astonished and not the least bit horrified. He obviously didn’t see the situation from my point of view.

“That’s one word for it,” I said.

“I’m disappointed that he couldn’t conquer his anxieties about being alone. On the other hand, this represents remarkable progress. Acting impulsively like this, going on a trip without forethought and obsessive planning, is a gigantic step for Adrian.”

“He’s not himself,” I said.

“Everybody changes, Mrs. Teeger. Every day we’re evolving into a new version of our previous selves. Don’t shackle him to your preconceptions about who he should be.”

I’d never heard such crap in my life.

“You don’t understand, Dr. Kroger,” I said. “Monk isn’t evolved. He’s on drugs.”

“What drugs?”

“Whatever you gave him for his OCD.”

“Dioxynl,” Dr. Kroger said. “I prescribed that for him some time ago when his condition became totally debilitating for him. I’m surprised he took the medication again. He said he never would.”

“Why did he say that?” I said. “Are there side effects?”

“Mild ones, but his were unique. The drug diminishes some aspects of his personality that mean more to him than relief from the limitations of his phobias and obsessions.”

“You mean like losing all self-control and common sense?”

“The drug takes away his gift, the extraordinary deductive skills from which he derives his identity,” Dr. Kroger said. “In other words, Mrs. Teeger, when he takes the drug, he’s a lousy detective.”

No wonder I’d never seen him take it before, no matter how bad his OCD was.

“How long do the effects of this pill last?”

“About twelve hours,” Dr. Kroger said. “Depending on the dosage.”

I glanced at my watch. Assuming he took the pills shortly before the flight, there were about six more hours of hell for me to endure, give or take an hour, until the pill wore off and I’d begin experiencing the hell I was more familiar with.

“What do I do when the drugs wear off and he’s back to being Monk?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean this was supposed to be my vacation.”

“That’s between you and Adrian to work out,” he said. I could envision the amused smile on his face. “Who knows? Maybe the two of you will have some fun together.”

I hung up. I couldn’t help wondering if Dr. Kroger put Monk up to this trip as a way of getting even with me.

When I got to our gate, I couldn’t find Monk, though I have to admit I didn’t look very hard. It’s not like I wanted Monk to intrude on my vacation—not that I could even call it that anymore.

A heavyset Polynesian gate agent in a Hawaiian Airlines aloha shirt and blue slacks announced that our flight was ready for boarding.

Monk came rushing over just as passengers began filing into the plane. He was wearing a bright yellow aloha shirt decorated with hula dancers and was eating chocolate-covered macadamia nuts right out of the box. The shirt and jacket he had worn on the plane were stuffed into his large shopping bag.

It may have been the first time I’d ever seen his naked arms. Usually he wore long-sleeved dress shirts buttoned at the cuffs.

I don’t know what was more shocking to me: that he’d put his clothes into a bag without folding them or that he’d bought a brightly colored shirt with a pattern that didn’t match at the seams.

I settled on the shirt and said so. “I can’t believe you bought that shirt.”

“Isn’t it nice?”

“Yes, it’s very nice,” I said. “But it’s not really you.”

“We’re in Hawaii. I’m feeling the aloha spirit. Aren’t you?”

“Not yet.”

“You need to loosen up,” Monk said. “Stop being so uptight.”

“
You’re
calling
me
too uptight?”

“That’s what the Monk is saying.”

I narrowed my eyes at him accusingly. “Did Dr. Kroger put you up to this? Did he suggest that you follow me to Hawaii?”

“No,” Monk said. “I wanted to get away from the rat race.”

“You don’t commute, you don’t work in an office, you don’t punch a time clock, and you hardly deal with people at all,” I said. “What would you know about the rat race?”

“I live on the track. I saw two rats run across my fence last night,” Monk said. “Or at least I think I did.”

“It was probably a squirrel.”

“Commonly known as an enormous rat.” Monk smiled at the gate agent and tipped the open end of the candy box in his direction. “Would you like some?”

“Sure.” The agent smiled, reached his hand inside the box, and took one of the nuts. “
Mahalo,
bro.”

“Aloha.” Monk popped another nut into his mouth and headed jauntily down the gangway into the plane.

I had an awful feeling that it was going to be a very, very long week. And I didn’t even know about the murders then.