Authors: Lee Goldberg

Mr. Monk in Outer Space (12 page)

BOOK: Mr. Monk in Outer Space

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Goldkin had a stack of xeroxed autographed scripts in front of him that he was selling for $15 each. There were no takers.

There were more
Beyond Earth
guest stars and production personnel along the aisle selling their wares and their memories, but I avoided them. It was too depressing and pathetic.

Instead, I turned my attention to a dealer who was selling books, comic books, novelizations, and magazines about
Beyond Earth
as well as the DVDs and videos of the original series and the Saturday-morning cartoon.

I was tempted to buy Monk a DVD, just so he could see the show, but the boxed set was fifty dollars and I wasn’t sure the SFPD would consider the purchase a legitimate expense.

The last booth—the one closest to the exit—was devoted to the Galactic Uprising. A couple dressed up like Mr. Snork and Starella were standing behind the table handing out leaflets to conventioneers as they passed by.

Behind the couple was an enormous poster depicting the starship
Discovery
and the original cast, covered with bold type that demanded that the UBS Network immediately halt production on the show and bring back the “true classic” with the “beloved original actors.”

The poster touted that the campaign was endorsed by “superstars” Kyle Bethany and Minerva Klane, as well as “famed writer” Willis Goldkin, which made me wonder why he wasn’t sitting with his comrades in the rebellion rather than by himself two booths away.

I took one of the leaflets from the woman and stuck it in my purse.

“If you go to our Web site, you can download the JPEG of the poster and e-mail or text-message it to everyone in your address book, put it on your site, your blog, your MySpace page, your Facebook profile, and your Yahoo group,” she said. “It’s the individual responsibility of every single member of fandom to stand up and be counted in this epic struggle.”

Mr. Snork spit and growled and coughed up something.

“My name is Natalie Teeger and I work for this man, Adrian Monk.” I tipped my head to Monk, who was involved in his own epic struggle to avoid looking at the woman’s four breasts. “He’s a consultant to the San Francisco Police Department. Can you tell me who is in charge of the uprising? We’d like to talk with him.”

Mr. Snork hacked and grunted and gurgled.

“Ernie is,” she said, referring to the guy in the Snork makeup. “He’s the one who first heard about what Stipe was going to do and he’s been fighting the fight ever since. His dedication to fandom is unbelievable. Never say die!”

She looked at him with unabashed admiration.

“And you are?” Monk asked.

“His girlfriend, Aimee Gilberman,” she said. “Before I met Ernie, I knew nothing about
Beyond Earth
. But now that I do, for the first time in my life I know what it really means to love.”

“Aimee, I have a very, very dumb question for you, so please be patient with me,” I said. “Aside from the fact that the producers aren’t using the original cast, what’s your problem with the new version of
Beyond Earth
?”

Ernie coughed and barked and made some choking sounds while waving his arms around.

The woman nodded in agreement with Mr. Snork and turned to me.

“They are changing everything,” she said. “They are turning the characters, and I quote, into ‘deeply flawed individuals.’ Captain Stryker wasn’t deeply flawed. He represented the very best of what it means to be human. They all did, even the aliens. But worst of all, they are turning Mr. Snork into a woman. Can you imagine that?”

“I assume you know by now that Conrad Stipe was murdered right outside that door.” Monk motioned to the nearby exit. “Did you hear or see anything unusual this morning? By that I mean, above and beyond the twisted behavior that’s occurring all around us at this very moment.”

Ernie grunted and gagged and heaved and gestured wildly with his hands.

“Does anyone here know the Heimlich maneuver?” Monk said. “This man is choking.”

Ernie stood up and gurgled and growled and coughed some more.

“He’s not choking,” Aimee said. “He’s speaking in Dratch.”

“Dratch?” Monk said. “What is that?”

She looked at Monk like he was a complete imbecile.

“Mr. Snork is a Dratch,” Willis Goldkin said, stepping out from his booth and approaching us. “Ernie here is speaking the language of their home-world. You can blame me for it.”

“You put him up to this?” Monk said.

Goldkin shook his head. “I wrote the episode where the crew visited a settlement of Dratch refugees. We were running a couple of minutes short, so I stuck in a pointless scene where Mr. Snork talked to his people in his native tongues.”

“Tongues?” Monk said.

“The Dratch have three tongues,” Aimee said. “One for catching insects, one for grooming themselves, and one for love. They speak with all three—hence the unique sound. It takes incredible skill for a human to speak it, but Ernie has achieved it.”

“It was gibberish that I wrote in a drunken stupor. I was too wasted to write a real scene with actual dialogue, ” Goldkin said. “We recorded it twice and laid it over the original track to create the unusual sound. If you’d told me back then that thirty years later some linguist would analyze those lines, write his thesis on it, and extrapolate that into an entire language, I would probably still be a drunk today.”

“Ernie has vowed to only speak in Dratch until either they do
Beyond Earth
right or cancel the current abomination,” Aimee said. “He’s doing it to show his solidarity with the character of Mr. Snork and the ideals that he represents.”

Ernie gesticulated wildly, made some guttural sounds, and spit on the floor. Monk recoiled.

“What’s Ernie saying?” Monk asked.

“If you want to understand him, and the values of
Beyond Earth
, learn Dratch,” Aimee said. “If everyone would do that, if we all just made the effort to learn how other people think, the world would be a much more peaceful and accepting place to live.”

“So by refusing to translate for us, you’re making a statement,” I said to her. “You want us to try to understand him and, by doing so, see the necessity of working hard to understand our fellow man.”

Aimee nodded proudly. “We’re living the values and the message of every episode of the original
Beyond Earth
.”

This prompted Ernie to gurgle and gag and bark like a sea otter.

Monk turned to Goldkin. “Do you know what he’s saying?”

“Hell no,” Goldkin said and reached for an enormous book on the dealer’s table. “But if you want to, you’re going to need this.”

Monk looked at the book and gasped. It was as if he’d stained his carpet all over again.

“What is it?” I asked.

I assumed the sticker price was an odd number, or the price tag was crooked, or the symmetry of the cover was out of whack.

He held the book up so I could see it.

The title of the book was
The Dratch Dictionary: Words, Phrases, and Grammar of the Most Evolved Language in the Universe.

The author was Ambrose Monk.

“Sweet Mother of God,” Monk said. “My brother is one of
them
.”

Mr. Monk Is Thrown for a Loupe

Monk had had enough. He left the building.

I stuck around for a few more minutes and looked through some of the other nonfiction books on the dealer’s table. There were a lot of them, with titles like
The Official
Beyond Earth
Episode Guide
,
The
Beyond Earth
Compendium
, and even
The Ultimate Book of
Beyond Earth
Facts.

Ambrose had written them all.

The good news was this meant that Monk wouldn’t have to return to the convention to learn more about the show. All he had to do was go home. When I told Monk that during the drive to the Belmont Hotel, it didn’t make him feel any better.

“I always knew my brother was mentally ill,” Monk said, “but I had no idea that he was a freak.”

“He’s not a freak, Mr. Monk.”

“Did you see what he wrote?” Monk exclaimed.

“What’s the difference between writing a book like
Beyond Earth
and an owner’s manual for a blender?”

“You don’t see people dressing up like blenders and speaking puree, do you?” Monk said. “It’s a good thing my brother never leaves the house—he’d be locked up.”

Monk glanced over his shoulder.

“What are you looking for?” I asked.

“I’m making sure we aren’t being followed.”

“Why would anyone want to follow us?”

“Because they’re freaks, and freaks do freakish things,” Monk said. “I don’t want any of them knowing where I’m going.”

“One of them might show up at your door and offer you a bowl of thirty-year-old cereal.”

“Exactly,” Monk said and shivered.

He kept to himself the rest of the drive.

The Belmont Hotel was right in the heart of Union Square and was one of the oldest, grandest, and stodgiest places to stay in the city. It was a five-star hotel with a six-star attitude. So they probably weren’t too happy to have vehicles from the police department, the crime scene unit, and the morgue parked in front of their lobby.

Obviously, someone else had been killed. I wondered why nobody had called Monk.

I parked with the rest of the official vehicles and we went inside to find Stottlemeyer. It wasn’t hard. We just asked the concierge where we could find the corpse.

Luckily for me and for Monk, the body was in a room on the sixth floor, an even-numbered room, with only a dozen flights of stairs for us to climb. It could have been worse for Monk. The dead body could have been on the nineteenth floor. It wouldn’t have been so bad for me; I would have taken the elevator.

The sixth floor was cordoned off by police officers, but Disher was in the hallway, interviewing a maid at her cart, so he stepped away from her and cleared us to go through.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“We were just beginning to interview some of the convention’s special guests who are staying here when the hotel manager came rushing over to us,” Disher said. “A maid found a guy bludgeoned to death in one of the rooms. So we dropped what we were doing, secured the scene, and began an investigation.”

“Two Belmont guests killed in one day,” I said. “That can’t be good for business.”

“Stipe wasn’t killed here,” Monk said, “so technically his death doesn’t count in the official tally.”

BOOK: Mr. Monk in Outer Space

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