Authors: Lee Goldberg

Mr. Monk in Outer Space (10 page)

BOOK: Mr. Monk in Outer Space

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No wonder the fans were upset. I’d seen a few minutes of
Eat Your Flesh III
on Cinemax. It made snuff films look like Disney cartoons. The
Eat Your Flesh
films were incredibly bloody and inexplicably successful horror movies about a sadist who kidnaps nubile women and hunky guys and puts them in grisly situations where they have to chew off their own arm or eat someone else in order to survive. If you ask me, films like that are worse than pornography.

But they made money. Lots of it.

“The fans in this Galactic Uprising—” Stottlemeyer said.

“The Fen,” Hibler interrupted.

“Yeah, whatever,” Stottlemeyer continued. “How upset would you say they are?”

“They want to prosecute Stipe for crimes against fandom,” Hibler said. “They are out for blood.”

“You think they’d go that far?” I asked.

“
Beyond Earth
is their culture and their religion,” Hibler said. “Go back through history and look at what people have done to protect what they’ve believed in from being destroyed. Remember the Crusades? The Spanish Inquisition? New Coke?”

That’s when the crime scene investigator returned. He was in his twenties and looked, judging by his pockmarked cheeks, like he’d spent half of those years picking at zits on his face.

“The swabs came back negative, Captain. No GSR. He’s clean.”

Stottlemeyer nodded. “Okay, Mr. Hibler, that wraps things up for now. All that’s left is for Lieutenant Disher here to take your statement.”

“And blood and urine samples,” Monk said.

“What for?” the CSI asked.

“Drugs,” Monk said.

“We aren’t looking for evidence of drug use, Monk,” Stottlemeyer said.

“We don’t have to,” Monk said, looking Hibler in the eye. “It’s right in front of our faces. If we’re lucky, it’s not too late to rescue the virgin.”

“Lots of men my age still live at home with their parents, ” Hibler said indignantly. “That doesn’t make us virgins!”

“I can vouch for that,” the CSI said.

“Thanks. That’s good to know.” Stottlemeyer took Monk by the arm and pulled him out of the room. “We’re leaving now, Monk.”

“I’m very sexually active,” Hibler yelled after us. “With other people!”

Mr. Monk and the Bad Breakfast

“I understand that the behavior of these
Beyond Earth
fans offends your sensibilities,” Stottlemeyer said to Monk in the hallway. “But if you can’t see past that, you’re no good to me or this investigation. I need you to control yourself.”

“What about them?” Monk gestured to two women who were walking past us.

Both of the women were dressed like Starella and had four breasts, two of which I presumed were falsies. I didn’t want to contemplate the alternative.

“They don’t work for me,” Stottlemeyer said. “You do.”

“I’ll do my best,” Monk said. “But it’s going to be an ordeal.”

“It usually is,” Stottlemeyer said. “I’m going to the Belmont with Randy. I’d like you to stay here and see if you can spot anything that doesn’t fit.”

Monk glanced at the two women again. They each had a tail.

“It’s all wrong.”

“You’ve got to learn about the show and the world of these fans,” Stottlemeyer instructed Monk. “You don’t know what’s normal in this particular world yet.”

“There’s nothing normal about them.”

“Not to you or me, but I guarantee you that they’ve got their own rules,” Stottlemeyer said. “Once you know what those rules of behavior are, you’ll immediately see what’s amiss and the murderer is as good as caught. That’s your gift.”

“And my curse,” Monk said. “I’d like a copy of the security camera footage of the shooting.”

“Sure thing,” Stottlemeyer said. “We’ll meet up later at the Belmont or at headquarters and compare notes.”

He gave us two “all-purpose passes” to the convention and walked away.

I really admired the way the captain had handled Monk this time and made a mental note to copy the technique myself. Stottlemeyer gave Monk a clear mission, a structure for dealing with the madness around him. If Monk focused on the underlying framework of everyone’s behavior, he might not be so distracted by the behaviors themselves. It was a brilliant strategy.

In fact, Monk seemed calmer and more centered already.

“Let’s go visit the convention,” he said, taking a deep breath. “Have your wipes at the ready.”

“They always are,” I told him.

We headed for the convention center, stopping first at the registration desk to pick up a program book. According to the schedule, there were three parallel tracks of panel discussions every hour throughout the day.

The panel topics included “Earthies vs. Earthers: Charting the Evolution of
Beyond Earth
Fandom,” “The Galactic Economic Impact of the Cosmic Commandments of Interplanetary Relations,” “Theories on the Creation of the Holocaust Satellite,” “How to Write Compelling
Beyond Earth
Fanfiction,” “Interspecies Sexuality and Captain Stryker,” and “When Will Trekkers Give Earthers the Respect We Deserve?”

It might have been fun to listen in on a few of those panel discussions, but when we got to the convention center, there was a sign announcing that the entire program for the day had been canceled out of respect for Conrad Stipe.

The lobby outside the main hall was crowded with costumed attendees sharing their grief and seeking consolation. They were hugging each other, sobbing, and looking generally shell-shocked.

Monk had the same look, only for entirely different reasons.

“What is wrong with these people?” he said.

“The creator of the show they love was just killed, Mr. Monk. Surely you understand grief.”

“Yes, of course I do,” Monk said. “What I don’t understand is their devotion to a TV show.”

“
Beyond Earth
wasn’t a typical series,” I said. “Stipe created an entire universe of his own and then told stories within it. If you wanted to watch the show, you had to learn all about his universe and how it worked. You couldn’t watch it as casually as your basic cop show. I guess some people got into it a lot more than others.”

I thought about Hibler and his ears and cringed.

“How do you know so much about
Beyond Earth
?” Monk asked.

“I participate in this thing we call American popular culture.”

“I wouldn’t tell too many people that you’re a member, ” Monk said, lowering his voice. “If word gets out, it could come back to haunt you.”

“Everyone in America and in most of the civilized world is steeped in it,” I said. “Except you.”

“What if you ever decide to run for public office? The press will dig up your involvement. Your name isn’t on any of their membership lists, is it?”

“There isn’t a list, Mr. Monk.”

“There’s always a list,” he said.

I decided to drop the subject before I got one of Stottlemeyer’s Monkaches.

“Do you want to know about the show or don’t you?” I asked.

“I guess I don’t have much of a choice if I want to solve this murder.”

“Okay, so it goes like this,” I said. “When Earth’s first starship
Discovery
broke the boundary of our galaxy, it passed an alien satellite that had been sitting there for millions of years and triggered its automated program.”

“That’s the show?”

“I’m just getting started,” I said.

“Oh God,” he said.

“The satellite fired a missile that destroyed Earth, then it generated a wormhole and sent a signal of some kind through it. An instant before the wormhole collapsed, the
Discovery
flew into it and was hurled light-years into the unexplored reaches of deep space. So with Earth destroyed, the multiethnic crew of the
Discovery
, the planet’s best and brightest, are all that remains of humanity.”

“That’s a terrible show.”

“I’m still at the beginning,” I said.

“There’s more?”

I explained that the crew soon discovers that they aren’t the only ones in this terrible plight. They join up with the survivors of other worlds that met the same fate. They band together and create the Confederation of Planets. Their shared goals are to find the evil alien race responsible for this galactic genocide and prevent it from happening to any other worlds, to find new planets on which to reestablish their races, and to promote peace and understanding throughout space.

There were about a dozen characters on the show, but I told Monk about only the major ones.

The big three were the adventurous Captain Stryker, of course, and the sexy and mysterious Starella, and the brilliant Mr. Snork. But there were others also: teenage stowaway Bobby Muir, and the intellectual scientist slug-creature Glorp, and pioneering surgeon Dr. Kate Willens, and, finally, the unspeakably evil Sharplings, the aliens with inside-out bodies who ate souls for snacks.

“How could their bodies be inside out?” Monk said to me.

“Their organs were on the outside of their bodies instead of inside.”

“Then what was inside?”

“Their outsides,” I said.

“That makes no sense,” Monk said.

“But it was scary,” I said. “Whenever the Sharplings came on, I had to watch the show from outside the room.”

“How could you be scared by something that makes no sense?”

“You’re scared of phone booths,” I said.

“But that makes sense. They’re death traps,” Monk said. “That’s why you don’t see them anymore.”

“You don’t see them anymore because now we have cell phones. Phone booths aren’t scary at all. But aliens with intestines hanging from their bodies who can suck your soul out through your eyeballs are terrifying.”

In fact, as I said it, someone dressed as a Sharpling walked past and I almost grabbed Monk for protection. I knew it was just someone in a suit, but it still gave me the shivers.

“Phone booths exist,” Monk said. “Sharplings don’t. They have no basis in reality.”

Neither did Monk, but I didn’t say that.

“Not all shows can be as good as the Weather Channel, ” I said.

BOOK: Mr. Monk in Outer Space

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