Authors: Lee Goldberg

Mr. Monk in Outer Space (15 page)

BOOK: Mr. Monk in Outer Space

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We all looked at Paola, who chewed on her lip some more. Things weren’t going well for her and she knew it. So did we.

“You’ve convinced me, but we aren’t going to be able to make a case on how she folds sheets,” Stottlemeyer said. “The DA would laugh me out of his office.”

“Use the wineglasses,” Monk said. “The lipstick on the rim is hers. It’s as good as a fingerprint. The DNA aside, her upper lip is chapped, which is why she chews on it. The lipstick impression is an exact match.”

Stottlemeyer nodded. “Read this woman her rights, Lieutenant, and arrest her.”

While Disher did that, I asked Monk the one question I still had.

“How did Paola know that Emilia would be sick today?”

“She poisoned her, of course,” Monk said.

“I told Roger it would never work,” Paola said, shaking her head. “But he said it was foolproof, that we’d be long gone before anyone realized what had happened.”

“You probably would have been, too, if it wasn’t for Monk,” Stottlemeyer said.

I had to give the captain credit. He never tried to minimize Monk’s brilliance for his own benefit. He always made sure that Monk knew his work was appreciated and that he got full credit for it, even if it was at Stottlemeyer’s or the SFPD’s expense.

Stottlemeyer had his faults, but failing to acknowledge the accomplishments of others to relieve his own insecurities wasn’t one of them.

“So, Paola, are you going to tell us where to find Roger?” Stottlemeyer asked. “Or are you going to take the murder rap for him while he enjoys piña coladas on a beach somewhere with his new girlfriend?”

“He’s in room 717,” she said without an instant’s hesitation.

Stottlemeyer glanced at Monk. “You want to come along for the arrest?”

Monk shook his head. “Seven-seventeen is a very odd number, and that can’t be good.”

Stottlemeyer glanced at the corpse. “It certainly wasn’t for him.”

Mr. Monk Sorts Out the Nuts

Solving a murder put Monk in a much better state of mind. He’d set the world right and, in doing so, seemed to center himself, too.

He was eager to talk with anyone who’d been involved with Conrad Stipe—as long as they were in the Belmont and not back at the convention.

So we headed downstairs to the bar, where Stottlemeyer had left Kingston Mills, the new executive producer, and Judson Beck, the actor playing Captain Stryker.

I think part of the reason Monk was so motivated to stick around and work on the case was to avoid going home and dealing with the fact that Ambrose might be an Earthie. Or an Earther. Or whatever the
Beyond Earth
fans were calling themselves these days (I missed the panel discussion on that topic at the convention so I didn’t know which term was politically correct in the “
Beyond Earth
-verse”).

I was eager to get to the bar, too, but for an entirely different reason. I was starving.

We were in the stairwell, two flights from the lobby, when Monk stopped on the landing, something occurring to him.

“I forgot to trade cases with the captain,” Monk said.

“Yes, you did.”

“I should have made the deal with him
before
I solved the Bozadjian case. If I’d done that, we’d be on our way home by now and solving the Stipe case would no longer be my job.”

“You got caught up in the moment,” I said. “You were on a roll.”

“I wish my whole life rolled.”

“Don’t we all,” I said and passed him, continuing down the stairs. I was too hungry to stand around in a stairwell. “Besides, even if you did trade, you wouldn’t have been able to walk away from the Stipe investigation.”

“Yes, I would.”

“Not as long as the case remained unsolved. You wouldn’t have been able to stop thinking about it.”

“I would have gladly endured the mental anguish,” Monk said. “It would be easier than having to be around those crazy people.”

“People like Ambrose?” I said, opening the door to the lobby and, metaphorically speaking, a whole lot more.

Monk ignored the question, as I knew he would, and walked past me to the bar, which was off to one side of the lobby.

It was a very masculine space, all dark woods and leather and bookcases filled with leather-bound literary classics, which were glued into place in case, God forbid, someone was gripped by the mad desire to actually read one of them.

I had no idea what Kingston Mills or Judson Beck looked like. But I knew that Beck was an actor, and probably something of a celebrity, so I looked for two men sitting alone and other people stealing furtive glances at them.

Using that strategy, I spotted the men in about ten seconds. They were sitting at a table in the back, where they could be seen by everyone in the room and, at the same time, could see everyone who came in. There were several empty glasses on the table and two bowls of mixed nuts.

Mills wore an untucked aloha shirt in a futile attempt to hide his big belly, which spilled over his khaki slacks. His shirt was so colorful that it seemed illuminated in the dim light of the bar.

Beck was in form-fitting Abercrombie & Fitch clothes that were stylishly pre-faded, pre-torn, and pre-stained and showed off all of his muscular build. He seemed acutely aware of everyone who was looking at him, which included himself, since he kept admiring his reflection in the mirror behind the bar.

I marched up to the two men with as much authority as I could muster, Monk trailing me.

“Mr. Mills, Mr. Beck, I’m Natalie Teeger and this is Adrian Monk, a special consultant to the police. Captain Stottlemeyer sent us down to talk to you.”

“You’re the famous Adrian Monk?” Kingston Mills stood up and offered his hand to Monk, who shook it. “Somebody pitched me a series about you.”

“A series?” Monk motioned to me for a wipe. I gave him one.

“A weekly detective show for TV.” Mills grinned and gestured at Monk cleaning his hands. “You really do that?”

“What?” Monk gave me the used wipe, which I put into a Baggie and shoved in my purse.

“Clean yourself with a disinfectant wipe every time you shake hands with somebody.”

“Doesn’t everyone?”

Mills chuckled and glanced at Judson Beck. “I thought it was just a gimmick the writer came up with for his pitch. The writer even rearranged the papers on my desk and put the magazines on my coffee table into chronological order.”

“I hope you thanked him,” Monk said.

“It was a good pitch,” Mills said, “but I said the series would never work.”

“Why not?” I asked as we sat down with them at the table.

“Who wants to watch a clean freak every week? It would be too damn irritating. So we worked on it over lunch and came up with something a lot better—a detective who is a sex addict. Can you see it?”

Monk’s eyes widened in horror. “Oh God, I
can
.”

“And his assistant is a stripper. We’re going to Showtime with it next week,” Mills said. “It fits right in with their shows about the dope-dealing mother, the Vancouver lesbians, the bigamist, and the cop who is a serial killer.”

“What are you calling it?” Beck asked.

“Murdergasm.”

“Cool,” Beck said. “If
Beyond Earth
tanks, think of me for that part.”

“I think of you for every part, Jud. You’re that versatile and unique.”

Monk looked at me with a pained expression. “I can
still
see it.”

“Think of something else,” I said, then turned to Mills. “We’re more interested in
Beyond Earth
and who might have had a motive to kill Conrad Stipe.”

“Who?” Beck asked.

“The creator of the show you’re starring in,” I said.

“Oh, you mean the old guy,” Beck said.

“Jud didn’t have much interaction with him,” Mills explained to me. “Stipe was really on the creative periphery of the show.”

“But he created it,” I said.

“Yes, but I
reimagined
it,” Mills said.

Monk grabbed my arm. “Help me. It won’t go away.”

“Look.” I pointed to the two bowls on the table.

“Mixed nuts. And pretzels, too.”

It worked. Monk immediately forgot about the sex addict detective and focused instead on this urgent public health crisis.

“What were they thinking?” Monk reached into his jacket for rubber gloves and prepared to deal with the problem. “You might want to push your chairs away from the table. This could get ugly.”

I turned to Mills. “So what was Stipe’s role on the show?”

“We were contractually obligated to give Stipe a consulting producing credit, but it was meaningless. He wasn’t actually part of the day-to-day production,” Mills said. “We only kept him around for publicity purposes and to draw the niche viewers.”

“Niche viewers?” I asked.

Monk laid out napkins on the table, emptied the bowls onto them, and began sorting the nuts and pretzels.

“The original fans,” Mills said, watching Monk. “We’re only using them as a publicity hook. It gets us press. But it’s just a launching pad for a larger promotional offensive. Our goal is to expand the franchise to a much broader, mainstream audience of intelligent, educated, free-spending consumers who have heard of the original show but probably never saw it.”

“Don’t you think the fans know what you’re doing and resent being used?”

“They’re morons who dress up in Halloween costumes and speak a fictional language from a crap TV show,” Mills said. “Who cares what they think?”

I waved the waitress over. I ordered a hamburger and fries for myself and six empty bowls for Monk to use for sorting and sent her away before he could lecture her on the dangers of mixing nuts and baked goods.

“If you have such disdain for Stipe, the fans, and the original series, why are you bothering with
Beyond Earth
at all?”

“Because it’s a pre-sold franchise,” he said. “A brand.”

“But it was a failure,” I said.

“That doesn’t matter,” Mills said. “It existed before and people know that.”

“Why not just come up with something new?”

BOOK: Mr. Monk in Outer Space

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