“I didn’t say it was going to be easy. It’s a long shot and a hell of a lot of work, but that’s how you, and me, and everybody who isn’t Adrian Monk break cases. It takes sweat and dogged determination.”
Monk stood up. “Lucas Breen killed Esther Stoval and Sparky the dog. If we don’t find that overcoat, Breen will get away with murder. Captain, we have to search that garbage.”
“I can’t,” Stottlemeyer said. “But there’s nothing stopping you from searching the trash.”
“Yes, there is,” Monk said. “There’s me.”
“My hands are tied. Of course, all of that could change if you were to stumble on, say, a scorched overcoat that belongs to Lucas Breen.”
“It could take us weeks to go through all that garbage,” I said.
“I’d really like to help; you know that. But I can’t,” Stottlemeyer said. “You’re on your own.”
Before we left Stottlemeyer’s office, I shamed the captain into calling Grimsley at the dump and asking him to hold the thirty tons of trash for a couple of days so we’d have a chance to search it. Stottlemeyer was careful, though, to say it wasn’t an official request but more along the lines of a personal favor.
Grimsley said he was he was glad to do whatever he could to help the police in their investigation.
But we weren’t ready to go out to the dump that afternoon. Monk had an appointment with his shrink, Dr. Kroger. Facing the likelihood of having to dig around in a mountain of trash, Monk really needed some help with his anxieties, so canceling the session was out of the question.
I had some anxieties of my own. I don’t have Monk’s aversion to germs, but I certainly wasn’t looking forward to spending a day wading in other people’s garbage.
I called Chad Grimsley and told him we’d be out in the morning.
While Monk was having his session, I waited outside the building and gave Joe a call at home. He answered on the first ring, his voice full of energy and good cheer.
“How can you sound so peppy after a burning warehouse collapsed on your head?”
“It’s just another day at the office,” he said.
“Is there anything I can do for you?”
“You’re doing it,” he said. “How’s your investigation going?”
I told him the broad strokes, but I left out Lucas Breen’s name and occupation. I didn’t want Joe doing something stupid like beating the crap out of Breen.
My subtle omission of key details wasn’t lost on Joe. “You’ve neglected to mention the name of the guy who killed Sparky and who belongs to that overcoat.”
“I did,” I said.
“You don’t trust me?”
“Nope,” I said. “But I mean that in the nicest possible way.”
“What happens if you don’t find that overcoat?”
“The killer gets away with killing Sparky and the old lady.”
“If that happens,” Joe said, “will you tell me his name then?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“You’re a smart lady,” he said. “And pretty, too. Are we still on for tomorrow night?”
“I am if you are,” I said, “And if you don’t mind being with someone who has spent the day in thirty tons of garbage.”
“Stop,” Joe said. “You’re getting me all excited.”
I laughed and so did he. It had been a long time since I’d met a man who made me laugh with him instead of at him. Even so, I felt a tickle of anxiety in my chest as I flashed on the image of him charging into a fire.
It’s just another day at the office.
We agreed to meet at my house the next night for our date, and then we said our good-byes.
I parked the Jeep in the driveway. Monk and I got out and saw Mrs. Throphamner on the other side of my low fence. She was in her backyard, kneeling on a rubber pad in the wet mud, toiling over her patch of vibrant roses. They were blooming, and the fragrance was overwhelming.
“Your roses are beautiful,” I told her.
“It’s hard work, but it’s worth it,” she said, holding a little shovel in her hand.
“They smell wonderful.”
“Those are the Bourbons,” she said and pointed her shovel at the large, raspberry-purple flowers. “The Madame Isaac Pereire variety. They’re the most fragrant rose there is.”
I opened up the trunk, we got out the groceries we bought on the way home, and we carried them into the house.
“Do roses bloom all year?” Monk asked me.
“They do in her yard,” I said. “Mrs. Throphamner constantly switches them out since she started her garden a few months ago. She likes lots of color all the time.”
While I unpacked the groceries, Monk got the water boiling and insisted on making dinner for the three of us. I didn’t argue. It’s not often I get a night off, and besides, I knew he wasn’t going to leave a mess for me to clean up.
When Julie got home, I helped her with her homework at the kitchen table while Monk prepared what he called his “famous” spaghetti and meatballs. Pretty soon, though, Julie and I were too captivated by Monk’s unusual preparations to pay any attention to textbooks.
The sauce was out of a jar from Chef Boyardee (“Why bother competing with the master?” Monk said), but he made his meatballs by hand (gloved, of course, as if performing surgery), carefully measuring and weighing them to ensure that they were perfectly round and identical.
He boiled the spaghetti noodles, poured them into a strainer, and then selected individual noodles, laying them out on our plates to make sure they were equal in length and that we had exactly forty-six noodles apiece.
When we sat down to dinner, Monk served us our spaghetti on three separate plates: one for the noodles, one for the sauce, and one for our four meatballs each. We barely had room on the table for all the plates.
“Aren’t the noodles, sauce, and meatballs supposed to be mixed all together?” Julie asked.
Monk laughed and shook his head at me. “Kids—aren’t they precious?”
And then he took a noodle on his fork, wound it around the prongs, stabbed a meatball, then dipped it all in the sauce and put it in his mouth.
“Mmmm,” Monk said. “That’s cooking.”
After dinner, we each relaxed in our own way. Julie went to the living room to watch TV. I sat at the kitchen table, sipping a glass of wine and leafing through an issue of Vanity Fair. And Monk did the dishes.
I like reading Vanity Fair, but I’m thinking of canceling my subscription anyway. There are fifty pages of ads before you even get to the table of contents, it sheds an endless number of subscription postcards all over the house, and the magazine smells like a cheap hooker. Not that I’ve ever smelled a hooker, cheap or otherwise, but I imagine they’re drenched in perfume.
“The night is young,” Monk said. “Let’s party.”
I was sure I’d misunderstood him, dazed as I was by the wine and perfume.
“Did you just say you wanted to party?”
“Call Mrs. Throphamner; ask her to come over and watch Julie.” Monk pulled off his apron and tossed it on the counter in a show of devil-may-care abandon. “We’re going clubbing. I mean that in the party sense, not the baby-seals sense.”
I set down my magazine. I couldn’t imagine why Monk would want to go somewhere filled with loud music and writhing people pressing their sweaty bodies against one another.
“You want to go dancing?”
“I want to go to Flaxx and talk to Lizzie Draper, Breen’s mistress,” Monk said.
“You sure you don’t just want another look at her enormous buttons?”
“I think I can turn her,” Monk said.