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
“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
Mr. Monk Shakes His Groove Thing
We waited in Stottlemeyer’s office. I browsed through a well-thumbed old copy of the
I put on the 3-D glasses and opened the magazine. Dozens of supermodel breasts burst out of the pages at me like cannonballs. It was startling. I tried to imagine what my breasts would look like in 3-D instead of 1-D. I doubt anybody could tell the difference. There’s nothing remotely D about my bosom.
Disher came into the squad room escorting a handcuffed woman I assumed was Mrs. Lemkin, even though she didn’t look anything like I imagined she would. Since her husband was stepping out on her, and she was spending her time crocheting, I pictured her as a homely, pale woman in a plain dress with her hair pulled back tightly in a bun. But Mrs. Lemkin wasn’t like that at all. She must get out a lot for jogging and aerobics, and she knew how to wear makeup (a skill I’d never mastered). She was clearly proud of her trim body and showed it off in a sleeveless T-shirt and tight jeans, her long black hair tied back in a pony-tail that she looped through the back of a pink Von Dutch baseball cap.
Our eyes met for a moment, and what I saw in hers was pride, anger, and not a hint of remorse.
Disher handed her off to a uniformed officer for booking, then motioned for me to come out to talk with him.
“Was that Mrs. Lemkin?” I asked.
“Uh-huh,” Disher said. “We found her sitting at her kitchen table, in front of her laptop, going on an eBay buying binge.”
“What was she bidding on?”
“Porcelain dolls,” Disher said. “Nothing like shopping to ease the pain of gunning down your husband.”
“She didn’t look like she was in much pain to me.”
“Maybe it’s because of the glasses,” he said, motioning to my face.
I had forgotten I was still wearing them. I took them off and grinned to hide my embarrassment. “I was just reading some of the articles in
“Those glasses certainly help the words spring off the page, don’t they?”
“And a lot of other things too,” I said. “If these glasses worked on all magazines, I bet men would read a lot more.”
“I certainly would,” Disher said. “I meant to tell you back at the crime scene that I did that favor for you. Joe Cochran
I know this is a cliche, but it felt like my heart dropped down to the floor. I guess people use that expression a lot because that’s the only way to describe what bad news feels like. Tears started to well up in my eyes. Disher must have noticed, because he quickly spoke up again.
“He’s fine, he’s fine,” Disher said. “It was just a mild concussion and a few bruises. They sent him home this morning.”
I was relieved and wiped the unspilled tears from my eyes, but I still felt a tremor of worry. What would happen the next time he ran into a burning building? Would he be so lucky? That was his job, and if I kept seeing him, I would have to get used to it.
“Thank you,” I said. “I really appreciate it.”
“By the way,” Disher said, lowering his voice to a whisper and opening his notebook, “his record is clean, no
