“No,” Monk said.
“Then what’s so important about that bag?”
“It’s my trash,” Monk said.
Joe looked at me. I shook my head and silently mouthed,
He didn’t, and we got back to work.
Monk put his blue bag in the back of the electric cart, took a few minutes to recover, and then, much to my surprise, joined us again in the trash.
Over the next few hours Joe and his men recovered a couple more of Monk’s blue bags and thoughtfully placed them in the cart with the other one.
I stopped only for bathroom breaks. I’d lost my appetite for lunch. Monk felt the same way.
But the firemen must have been accustomed to ugly tasks like this, because they had no problem taking a break to eat. They enjoyed their fast-food meals, undeterred by the stench of garbage all around them, and plunged right back into the city’s rotting waste afterward without any trouble digesting.
Joe worked the hardest of all. He was doing it for me, and for Monk, but mostly for Sparky.
I was glad he was there. But as happy as I was to have Joe’s company, his presence brought back that twinge of anxiety in my chest. I tried to dismiss it as simply the fear of beginning a relationship, but I knew it was more than that. I tried to ignore the feeling the same way I was ignoring the uglier aspects of our search.
It wasn’t working. I wondered if that was how Monk felt when he tried to ignore all the things in a case, or in life, that didn’t fit.
It was late afternoon when Monk called out, “Over here! Over here!”
We scrambled over to see what he’d found.
He lifted up an Excelsior napkin, pinched between two fingers and held at arm’s length from his body.
It meant we’d finally reached the trash from the bins outside the hotel. We all began digging with renewed energy and hope.
We dug up a lot more items that clearly came from the hotel—billing statements, broken dishes, banquet menus, pounds of table scraps, damaged linens, tons of those tiny little liquor bottles, even some clothes, but by five o’clock we still hadn’t found an overcoat.
Monk decided to call it quits for the day, and I was thankful. I was tired and I wanted to clean up before my date with Joe. And, let’s face it, our morale was pretty low.
We thanked the firefighters again for their help. I told Joe that I’d meet him at my house in a couple of hours.
As Monk and I were on our way out, Chad Grimsley came down to the floor from his office and asked if he could have a word with the two of us.
We got into his cart, the one with Monk’s trash bags in the back, and Grimsley drove us to the other end of the transfer station. He stopped at a roped-off corner of the facility with a sign mounted above it that read, ZONE NINE. RESERVED FOR THE CLEANEST TRASH ONLY.
Grimsley turned to Monk. “I believe your trash belongs here, sir.”
Monk stared at the roped-off area for a long moment and then did something incredible. He took off his gloves and offered his hand to Grimsley.
“Thank you,” Monk said.
“You can come and check on it anytime you like.” Grimsley shook his hand.
Monk put his gloves back on and, with a happy smile on his face, began unloading his bags and placing them behind the ropes.
“That was a really nice thing to do,” I said to Grimsley.
He shook his head. “Mr. Monk is a very special man. I have an inkling of the kind of demons he had to overcome to spend the day in tons of garbage. That’s worth something, Ms. Teeger, and it demands acknowledgment and respect.”
Grimsley motioned to the blue bags in the center of the newly christened zone nine. “That’s the least I can do.”
When Monk climbed back into the car, I could see contentment on his face. We hadn’t found the piece of evidence we needed to convict Lucas Breen, but at least some small measure of order had been restored.
18
Mr. Monk Stays Home
Monk let me shower first, because he anticipated being in the bathroom for hours. In fact, he suggested that Julie might want to make arrangements with Mrs. Throphamner to use her facilities if the need arose.
When Monk went in to shower, I sat Julie down in the living room and gave her detailed instructions for the night. I wanted her to keep a close watch on Monk to make sure he didn’t remodel our house while I was gone and to call me if things got out of control.
“So you want me to babysit him,” she said.
“I wouldn’t put it like that,” I said. “I’m asking you to guard our house, our belongings, and our privacy.”
“In other words, you want me to perform babysitting
“What are you getting at?”
“I have better things to do than watch Mr. Monk all night while you hang out with Firefighter Joe,” Julie said. “If I’m going to babysit, I expect to be paid. Six dollars an hour, plus expenses.”
“What expenses?”
“Things could come up,” she said.
“If you’re doing your job, nothing is supposed to come up.”
“Okay, six dollars an hour plus you kick in for a chicken delivery from the take-out place,” she said. “Unless you’d rather have Mr. Monk cook a meal in our kitchen without you here to supervise. Who knows what he might discover, rearrange, or throw out?”
She had a good point. When did Julie become so observant? I wondered. And when did she learn how to negotiate like that? She was growing up way too fast.
“You’ve got a deal,” I said.
We shook on it, and then I pulled her into a hug. When I let her go, she looked at me with a furrowed brow.
“What was that for?” she asked.
“Growing up,” I said. “Being adorable. Surprising me. Being you. Do I need to go on?”
“No, you’re making me nauseous as it is.” There was a knock at the door. Julie leaped off the couch and opened it. Joe Cochran stood there with another bouquet of flowers.
“You didn’t have to bring me more flowers,” I said.
“I didn’t bring them for you. They’re mostly for me in case I didn’t do a good enough job showering after our day in the dump,” he said with a grin. “They’re very fragrant. Mind if I carry them the rest of the evening?”
“I’ll take my chances.”
I took the flowers from him and put them in the vase. I told Julie not to wait up, gave her a kiss, and we left.
Joe took me to dinner at Audiffred, a French bistro that was, appropriately enough, located on the street level of the historic Audiffred Building at One Market Street down at the waterfront. It was constructed in the late 1800s by a homesick Frenchman, so the building had such typical Parisian architectural motifs as a mansard roof, decorative brick battlements, and tall, round-topped windows.
Audiffred was a fancier place than I’d dressed for, but the San Francisco dining scene had adopted the L.A. philosophy that you can go anywhere in jeans and running shoes as long as you have the attitude to pull it off.
