Monk remained on his back on the floor, staring up at the ceiling. He didn’t move. He didn’t blink. I was afraid he was catatonic. I leaned down beside him.
“Mr. Monk? Are you okay?”
He didn’t say anything. I looked over my shoulder at Julie.
“Get me a bottle of Sierra Springs from the fridge.”
She nodded and ran off to get it.
“Please, Mr. Monk. Answer me.”
He blinked and whispered hoarsely, “This day has been a nightmare.”
“Yes, it has.”
“No, I mean really,” Monk said. “The city dump. The homeless encampment. The dentures in my lap. All of that didn’t really happen, did it?”
Julie returned with the bottle. I opened it and offered it to Monk.
“I’m afraid so, Mr. Monk.”
He sat up, took the bottle from me, and guzzled it as if it were whiskey.
Monk tossed the empty bottle over his shoulder. “Keep ’em coming.” He looked at Julie. “You’d better go to bed, honey. This is going to get ugly.”
21
Mr. Monk and Marmaduke
Monk drank two more bottles of Sierra Springs and carried another four off with him to bed, slamming the door behind him.
In the morning I found him sleeping facedown and fully dressed on top of his bed, the floor littered with empty water bottles. I quietly gathered up the plastic empties and left the room without waking him.
It was my morning to carpool Julie and her friends to school, and I have to admit, I was worried about leaving Monk alone. I wasn’t concerned that he was suicidal or anything dire like that—however I was afraid of what he might do in my house if left unsupervised. Would I return to find my closets reorganized? My clothes rearranged by size, shape, and color?
I toyed with waking him up and dragging him along on the carpool, but the thought of him stuck in an SUV filled with rowdy adolescent girls made me reconsider. Yesterday was nightmarish enough for him and, frankly, for me, too.
I decided to take my chances and left him alone. I rushed Julie through breakfast, wrote a note to Monk telling him where I was, and hurried off to pick up the other kids and ferry them to school.
Monk was still asleep when I got back forty-five minutes later. I was relieved and worried at the same time. It wasn’t like him to sleep in, at least not during the time he’d been staying with us. I was debating whether to call Dr. Kroger when Monk finally got up around nine, looking as if he’d spent the night barhopping. His clothes were wrinkled, his hair was askew, and his face was unshaven.
I’d never seen him looking so rumpled, so human. It was kind of endearing.
“Good morning, Mr. Monk,” I said as cheerfully as I could.
Monk acknowledged my greeting with a nod and trudged barefoot into the bathroom. He didn’t emerge from his room again until noon, dressed in fresh clothes and looking his tidy best. But instead of coming to the kitchen for breakfast, he simply returned to his room and closed the door to suffer his purified-water hangover in peace.
I wasn’t sure what to do, so I busied myself with household chores like paying bills and taking care of the laundry. While I worked, I tried not to think about Lucas Breen and the murders he committed. I also tried not to think about Firefighter Joe and my lingering anxieties about our nascent relationship. So, of course, Lucas Breen and Firefighter Joe were all I could think about.
I couldn’t prove that Breen was guilty of murder, but I figured out what was bothering me about Joe. Yeah, I know, it’s obvious what it was, and I can see it clearly now, but I couldn’t then. That’s how it is when you’re in the middle of a relationship, even if it’s only been two dates. You’re too wrapped up in your own insecurities, desires, and expectations to see what’s right in front of you.
Maybe it’s the same way when you’re a detective in the middle of an investigation. You’re under so much pressure to solve the case, and you’re bombarded with so many facts, that it’s almost impossible to see everything clearly. You see static instead of a picture.
I imagine that it was often like that for Stottlemeyer or Disher. I saw how much they invested themselves in their investigations, how hard they had to work at it.
For Monk, it’s all inside out. The investigation looks easy and everything else is hard.
We’re so distracted by how difficult it is for him to accomplish even the simplest things in life that we don’t notice the effort that he puts into solving crimes and how much of himself he puts on the line.
Figuring out the solutions to puzzling mysteries seems to come so fast and so naturally for him, we just shake our heads in wonder and chalk it up as miraculous. We don’t stop to consider the mental and emotional resources he has to marshal to pull that “miracle” off.
After all, we’re talking about a man who finds it virtually impossible to choose a seat in a movie theater and yet somehow manages to sort through thousands of possible clues in a case to arrive at a solution. That can’t be as easy as it looks. There’s got to be some heavy lifting involved. And I’m sure even he has times when he can’t see what’s obvious to everybody else or, in his case, what would ordinarily be obvious to him.
Who can he possibly turn to who can understand his anguish at times like that? Nobody. Because there’s no one else like Adrian Monk, at least not that I know of.
Even so, I resolved to give it my best shot. I went to his room and knocked on the door.
“Come in,” he said.
I opened the door and found him sitting on the edge of his bed, a book open on his lap. He grinned and tapped a finger on the page.
“This is priceless,” he said.
I sat down beside him and looked at what he was reading. It was a collection of single-panel comic strips about Marmaduke, a Great Dane the size of a horse.
In the comic Monk was looking at, Marmaduke was returning to his doghouse with a car tire in his mouth. The caption read: Marmaduke loves chasing cars.
“That Marmaduke,” Monk said. “He’s so big.”
“It’s a joke that never gets tired,” I said.
It was a lie, of course. I couldn’t imagine what Monk, or anybody else, found amusing about that comic strip. But at least now I knew the secret to recovering from a night spent binge-drinking purified water.
“He is so mischievous.” Monk turned the page and pointed to a comic where Marmaduke takes his owner for a brisk walk, lifting the poor man right off his feet. The caption read: There’s always a windchill factor when I walk Marmaduke!
“How are you feeling?”
“Dandy,” Monk said without conviction. He turned another page.
“You’ll get Lucas Breen, Mr. Monk. I know you will.”
“What if I don’t?” Monk said. “Captain Stottlemeyer could be demoted and Julie’s heart will be broken.”
“They’ll survive,” I said.
“I won’t,” Monk said, and turned another page in the book. Marmaduke jumps into a swimming pool, creating a splash that empties out all the water. Who invited Marmaduke to our pool party?
Monk shook his head and smiled. “He’s enormous.”
“You can’t solve every case, Mr. Monk. You’re asking too much of yourself.”
“If I can find the person who killed my wife, I won’t need to solve another murder ever again,” Monk said. “So until that day comes, I have to solve them all.”
“I don’t understand.”
“There’s an order to everything, Natalie. If I can’t get justice for Esther Stoval, Sparky the fire dog, and that homeless man, how can I ever hope to get it for Trudy?”