“What do you think happened?” I asked him. Now that we were away from the body, I was feeling a little better. I could almost forget someone was murdered here. Almost.
“Looks to me like a professional hit,” Stottlemeyer said. “The dead man is Arthur Lemkin, a stockbroker. Maybe he was skimming funds or somebody didn’t like the way he invested their money. There’s a knock at the door; Lemkin opens it and gets popped. Nobody heard a thing. The hit man used a small-caliber gun and a pillow to muffle the shot. Very slick, very simple.”
“We need your help,” Monk said.
“Monk, can’t you see I’m working a crime scene here? One murder at a time, okay?”
Monk shook his head. “This really can’t wait.” “This was a guy you would have liked, Monk,” Disher said, emerging from the bathroom and leaving the medicine cabinet open behind him. “He kept himself real clean and wore identical shirts every day. And have you seen the rest of his apartment? Everything matches, all nice and symmetrical.”
“Not really. The paintings on the wall aren’t quite the same size.” Monk turned to Stottlemeyer. “Captain, please, all I need is for you to take a few minutes to listen to what I have to say and then a few more minutes to make a phone call or two.”
“I need to gather the evidence here while it’s fresh,” Stottlemeyer said. “You know how important the first few hours in an investigation are. Give me a couple of hours and then we can talk, but not now.”
“His wife killed him,” Monk said. “Now can we move on?”
Stottlemeyer froze. We all did.
“You’ve just solved the murder,” said Stottlemeyer in such a way that it managed to be a statement and question at the same time.
“I know I should have solved it five minutes ago, but I’m a little off my game. I’ve had a rough morning,” Monk said. “You know how it is.”
“No, Monk, I don’t,” he said wearily. “I wish I did, but I don’t.”
“How do you know his wife did it?” Disher asked. “How do you even know Lemkin has a wife?”
“Because he wouldn’t need this love nest if he didn’t,” Monk said.
“Love nest?” Stottlemeyer said.
“It’s a place used only for having affairs with women who are not your wife.”
“I know what a love nest is, Monk. What I don’t know is how you figured out that’s what this is.”
I didn’t know, either.
“All the furniture is rented—that’s why they are matching sets—plus I saw the tags underneath the pieces.”
“You looked underneath the furniture?” Disher said.
“He does that everywhere he goes,” Stottlemeyer said.
I knew that was true. In fact, I’d even seen him do it at my house. There might be something under there and he can’t stand not knowing. What if there is lint building up? The thought was too much for Monk to bear.
“The big clues are the clothes and the toiletries,” Monk said. “Lemkin kept four matching pairs of pants and four shirts in the same color so he could change into fresh, clean clothes after each illicit rendezvous without his wife knowing he’d ever changed clothes. He stocked up on soap and cologne because he was careful to take every precaution to make sure that she’d never smell another woman on him.”
I should learn to trust my own instincts, or at least how to interpret them. From the moment I walked into the apartment, it felt like a hotel room to me. But I hadn’t bothered to think about what had given me that impression. Monk did. He was acutely aware of the things that we took for granted, that we saw without seeing. That was one of the differences between Monk and me. Here’s another: I don’t have to disinfect a water fountain before taking a drink and he does.
“Okay, so he was having affairs,” Stottlemeyer said to Monk. “How do you know it was his wife who shot him and not some outraged husband or spurned lover or a hired killer?”
“All you have to do is look at the body,” Monk said, and headed for the living room.
We all followed him. As soon as I saw the corpse, all my trepidation and discomfort came rushing back, hitting me with a wallop. That low hum of fear increased in volume.
But Monk, Stottlemeyer, and Disher crouched beside the corpse as if it were nothing more significant than another piece of furniture. Whatever I was feeling, they were immune to it.
“Lemkin was shot once in the heart,” Monk said. “Why not the face or the head? He was shot in the heart because of the heart he broke. You can’t ignore the symbolic implications.”
“This isn’t a high school English class,” Disher said. “This symbolism stuff is a stretch even for you.”
“Not when you notice the killer also took Lemkin’s wedding ring,” Monk said, pointing to the band of pale flesh around the victim’s ring finger. “It was obviously for the sentimental value.”
“Or the cash value,” Disher said.
“Then why didn’t the killer take the Rolex, too?” Monk said, motioning to the big gold watch on the victim’s wrist. “There’s more. The killer used a small-caliber gun, traditionally a ‘woman’s weapon.’ And look at what the killer used for a silencer—a crocheted pillow. Something she knitted during all those hours he left her alone to be with other women. The unintended symbolism is practically a confession.”
I was suddenly aware that I was crouching, too. All the awkwardness and discomfort I felt before was gone. In trying to understand Monk’s reasoning, I’d begun to see Lemkin’s corpse the same way that they did: not as a human being, but as a book to be read, a puzzle to be reassembled, a problem to be solved.
“My freshman English teacher was right: The C I got in his class did come back to haunt me.” Stottlemeyer stood up and looked at Disher. “Find Lemkin’s wife, Randy. Charge her with murder one and bring her in.”
“Yes, sir,” Disher said, and hurried out.
Stottlemeyer turned back to Monk and smiled. “So, Monk, what was it you wanted?”
We stepped outside, and Monk spent the next ten minutes explaining to Stottlemeyer how he figured out that we needed to find Lucas Breen’s overcoat and where he thought it might be now.
“You want to search thirty tons of trash for an overcoat that may have been tossed in one of the Excelsior garbage bins,” Stottlemeyer said.
“I’m sure that it was,” Monk said. “If we don’t recover it now, before more trash is added to the pile and it’s all hauled to the landfill, we never will.”
“A search like that is going to require a lot of people and a lot of man-hours. I don’t have the authority to approve that kind of expense. I’ve got to take the request directly to the deputy chief and make a case for it.”
“Can you do that now?” Monk said.
“Sure, it’s not like I’ve got anything on my plate at the moment,” Stottlemeyer said. “You took care of that in the apartment.”
“It was nothing,” Monk said.
“I know,” Stottlemeyer said. “I can’t tell you how inadequate that makes me feel. Sometimes I’m not sure whether to thank you or shoot you.”
“Did you know they don’t have a zone nine?” Stottlemeyer shot a quick glance at me, then looked at Monk and tried to appear genuinely surprised. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“I was shocked, too. All the trash just gets mixed together; can you believe it?”
“That’s difficult to imagine,” Stottlemeyer said.
“It’s a breach of the public trust,” Monk said. “There should be an investigation.”
“I’ll be sure to bring that up in my discussion with the deputy chief,” Stottlemeyer said. “Wait for me at the station. I’ll meet you there as soon as I’m done with him.”
16