“Would you like me to find you a hotel room, Mr. Monk?” I tried to make the offer as nicely as possible, so he wouldn’t think I was angry or offended, which I wasn’t.
“No, of course not,” he said. “This is great.”
At first I thought he was being dishonest, but then I wondered if, compared to the alternatives, staying with us really wasn’t so bad.
A hotel could be even worse. Maybe he’d hear the TV next door, or a couple making love upstairs, or kids playing in the room below. Even if he didn’t hear anything, maybe just knowing so many people were in the building would be enough to distract him. Or, worse, what if he couldn’t stop thinking of the hundreds of people who’d stayed in his room, slept in his bed, and used the bathroom? And if that wasn’t enough stuff to distract him, what about the horror of mismatched wallpaper?
Compared to all of that, our guest room must have felt like a padded cell—in a good way, if there is such a thing.
So what he was really talking about was me and Julie. We were the ones creating all the distraction.
I got up from the bed. “I’ll leave you alone to your thinking.”
“No, no, I’ll go with you,” he said, getting up.
“But what about all those facts that need to fall into place?”
“They’ll fall later,” Monk said. “The problem with having so much space is that I never get a chance to help someone with their homework.”
I smiled to myself. As afraid as he was of human contact, it was nice to know that even Adrian Monk still needed it.
14
Mr. Monk and the Rainy Day
When I got up at six on Tuesday, Monk was already showered, shaved, and dressed, and the bathroom tub was clean enough to perform surgery in. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he spent the night in the bathroom just to make sure he got to it first. If so, it’s a good thing neither Julie nor I got up in the middle of the night to pee.
The three of us had Chex cereal for breakfast in our brand-new bowls and swapped sections of the Chronicle among ourselves. There was an article on a back page about a warehouse fire last night, and how the roof caved in and sent two firefighters to the hospital. My throat went dry. Could that have been the fire Joe was called to? What if he was one of the firefighters who was hurt?
It was seven thirty, too early to call the fire station, unless I wanted to wake everyone up. I’d call later. Or maybe it would be better, I thought, to call now.
I was yanked out of my worries by the sound of a car horn outside, signaling that Julie’s ride to school had arrived.
Julie shoved all her books into her backpack, grabbed her sack lunch, and was heading out the door when I stopped her.
“Don’t forget your raincoat,” I said, taking it off the coat tree by the door.
She hated wearing her raincoat. She would rather get soaked from head to toe. The thing is, just a year earlier she had needed that raincoat more than anything else on earth. It was what everyone was wearing, and without it she would have been shamed out of adolescent society. The raincoat cost $100 at Nordstrom, but I found one for less than half that much on eBay. It was probably stolen, or a knockoff, but it saved Julie from disgrace, and she wore it every day, whether there were clouds in the sky or not. And then something happened, some great cosmic shift in society and culture. Raincoats were out; getting drenched was in.
“Mom,” she whined. “Do I have to?”
“There’s a sixty percent chance of rain,” I said. “Just take it with you. It’s better to be prepared.”
“So I get wet,” she said. “Big deal.”
“Take it,” I said.
“It’s only water,” she said. “It’s not like it’s acid.”
I didn’t have the time or patience to argue. I unzipped her backpack, rolled her raincoat into a ball, and shoved the raincoat inside.
“You’ll thank me later,” I said.
“You sound like him.” She motioned to Monk. It wasn’t meant as a compliment.
I was about to scold her for her rudeness, but he didn’t notice her disrespectful behavior. He was sitting straight up in his chair, lost in thought, and shrugging his shoulders as if neither one fit in its socket quite right.
Julie marched off and slammed the door behind her, but by that point her drama was wasted on me. I was watching Monk. I knew what all that shifting around in the chair meant—the facts were falling into place.
He knew what Breen left behind.
And I couldn’t help noticing that his breakthrough didn’t happen in some blissfully sterile environment of solitude, cleanliness, and order. It happened in my messy kitchen in the midst of a typical breakfast-table squabble between a sane, reasonable, rational mother and her deranged, unreasonable, irrational daughter.
“Do you have a computer with an Internet connection?” Monk said.
“Sure,” I said. “It’s not like we live in a cave.”
I regretted the comment right away, because I knew he’d take it as a dig. I didn’t mean it to be one; I just forgot for a moment that Monk doesn’t have an Internet connection at his house. He’s afraid of catching a computer virus, which is also why he doesn’t have a computer.
I went back to my room, got my laptop, and brought it to the kitchen table. I have a technogeek neighbor who designs Web sites for a living out of his apartment. He took pity on us and let us piggyback on his wireless network to use his high-speed connection. I was up and running and surfing the Net in seconds.
“What do you need?” I asked Monk.
“Can you get me detailed information on what the weather in San Francisco was like on Friday night?”
That was too easy. I was hoping for something a little more challenging so I could show off my Web-surfing prowess.
I quickly Googled my way to a site that tracked weather patterns, zeroed in on Friday night in San Francisco, and showed Monk his options. He could check out the temperature, rainfall, humidity, dew point, wind speed, direction, and chill. He could peruse satellite photos, Doppler radar, and 3-D animated views of the fog patterns and the movement of the jet stream.
“Can you show me when it was raining, hour by hour?” Monk said.
It wasn’t as impressive as watching the fog roll in and out in 3-D, but sure, I said, I could show him the rainfall, which was tracked in a straightforward graph. Bor-ing. The least they could have done was jazz it up with a few animated rain-drops rolling down the screen.
“Look,” he said excitedly. “There was intermittent drizzle and rain until about nine thirty, then it let up until about two A.M.”
How thrilling, I thought. But what I said instead was something along the lines of, “What does it mean?”
“I’ll show you,” Monk said. “Could you search the Web and bring up the photos of Lucas Breen taken at the ‘Save the Bay’ fund-raiser that Disher showed us?”
I did a quick Google search that gathered about a dozen photos from the “Save the Bay” home page, various newspaper Web sites, and a couple of snarky gossip blogs (one of which speculated that Mrs. Breen’s trip to Europe the morning after the party was for “another facial refreshening” at a plastic surgery resort in Switzerland).
The photos were the same ones we had seen before of Breen arriving at the Excelsior in the rain with his wife and then the two of them leaving at midnight with the governor.
Monk pointed to the screen. “When Breen arrived, it was raining. You can see that he’s huddled under his umbrella and wearing an overcoat.”