Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse

“You have five seconds,” Stottlemeyer said in a tone full of violent intent.

Monk held out his hand to me and snapped his fingers. “Wipes.”

I gave him four. He used two to wipe down the pieces of the cyclone fence he intended to touch while stepping through. He used the others to protect his fingers as he touched the bits of the fence he’d just cleaned.

Monk took a deep breath and stepped through, then immediately jumped away from something on the ground with a yelp.

“What?” I asked.

“Bottle cap.”

He said it breathlessly, as if he’d narrowly avoided stepping on a land mine.

I climbed through the opening and Stottlemeyer followed, glaring at Monk.

“This way,” the captain said, and proceeded to lead us across the lot toward the freeway.

Monk yelped again. I looked at him.

“Candy wrapper,” he said.

“You spent the day in thirty tons of trash and you’re freaking out about a candy wrapper?”

“I’m unprotected,” Monk said. “And that’s a big, big candy wrapper.”

I turned my back on him and marched on through the weeds.

Monk stepped gingerly through the lot as if he were playing hopscotch on hot coals.

I don’t know what he was avoiding, and I didn’t really care. It could have been dog droppings or dandelions; to him they are both equally repulsive.

If I sounded irritable, it’s because I was. It was bad enough that I’d been yanked off a perfectly good date to go strolling through a urine-stenched homeless encampment to see some hideous corpse. Having to deal with Monk’s irrational anxieties on top of all that was asking way too much of me.

But if I’d been really honest with myself on that cold, windy night, I’d have known it wasn’t the lot, the murder, or Monk that was eating at me; it was the feeling I’d had when I kissed Joe and what it meant.

Stottlemeyer took us up the embankment on a well-worn path beneath the freeway to a cardboard lean-to wedged against the ground and the base of the overpass. There were two feet, clad in topsiders held together with duct tape, sticking out of the entrance of the lean-to. It reminded me of the Wicked Witch after Dorothy dropped the house on her in Oz.

“The victim is in there,” Stottlemeyer said.

“Yes, I see,” Monk said.

“Aren’t you going to go inside?”

“Not until my suit gets here.”

“Why don’t you just wear the damn suit all the time?” Stottlemeyer said. “Then you’ll never have to worry about breathing or touching anything ever again.”

“It would be awkward,” Monk said. “Socially.”

“Socially,” I said.

“I don’t like to draw attention to myself,” Monk said. “One of my great advantages as a detective is my natural ability to slip smoothly and unnoticed into almost any social situation.”

“But just think of all the money you’d save on wipes,” Stottlemeyer said.

Monk took out his key chain and aimed his pen-light into the shelter. The tiny beam revealed a man lying inside on his back. He was wearing at least a half dozen shirts and had a scraggly beard. Beyond that he was unrecognizable. His head was bashed in with a brick, presumably the bloody one left beside the body.

I turned away.

Before I met Monk I had managed to go through my life without ever seeing a dead body, without seeing people who’d been shot, stabbed, strangled, beaten, poisoned, dismembered, run over, or clobbered with a brick. Now I was seeing as many as two or three murder victims a week. I wondered when, or if, I’d finally get used to it, and whether I would be a better person if I never did.

“Is he a friend of yours?” Stottlemeyer asked Monk.

“Does he look like a friend of mine? Weren’t you here for the outbreak-suit discussion?”

“I won’t ever forget it,” Stottlemeyer said. “Still, I thought you might know him. That’s why I called you down here.”

“I’ve bathed more today than he has in the past ten years,” Monk said. “What made you think that we could possibly know each other?”

Stottlemeyer motioned to the edge of the embankment. Monk peered over the side and saw a few dozen sealed Wet One packets scattered among the weeds.

“You’re the only person I know who carries around that many Wet Ones.”

Monk looked at me and we came to the same realization at the same instant. I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the cold wind.

“You do know him,” Stottlemeyer said, reading our faces.

“We saw him panhandling on the street near the Excelsior,” I said. “He wanted money; Mr. Monk gave him wipes.”

“Figures,” Stottlemeyer said.

“It’s not easy to recognize him,” I said. “He doesn’t look the same now with the blood all over his face, and . . .”

I couldn’t go on. Stottlemeyer nodded. “I understand. It’s okay.”

“That’s not the only reason we didn’t recognize him,” Monk said.

He turned back to the shelter and crouched at the entrance, letting his flashlight beam sweep over the body and the interior of the lean-to. He sneezed.

Monk sat up, rolled his shoulders, and when he looked at us again, there was a glint of excitement in his watery eyes.

“I know who killed him,” he said, and sneezed.

“You do?” Stottlemeyer was astonished. “Who?”

“Lucas Breen.”

“Breen?” Stottlemeyer sighed wearily. “C’mon, Monk, are you sure about this? You’ve got him killing old ladies, dogs, and bums. What is he, some kind of a serial killer?”

Monk shook his head and sniffled. “He’s just a man who wants to get away with murder. The sad thing is, he has to keep killing to do it.”

“Why do you think Breen did this?” Stottlemeyer said.

“Look at you, Captain. You’ve got your jacket buttoned up to your nose.” Monk turned and shined his flashlight on the dead man. “But he’s not wearing one.”

“Maybe he doesn’t have one,” Stottlemeyer said.

“He had one when we saw him before,” Monk said. “A big, dirty, tattered overcoat.”

Only it wasn’t dirty and tattered. It was charred and burned. And we missed it. If we’d only known then what we were looking for, and what we were looking at, we could have solved the case right there and probably saved this man’s life.

I wondered if Monk felt as guilty and stupid as I did at that moment.

“Lucas Breen killed him for his coat and threw out the wipes that were in the pockets.” Monk sneezed again. “Which just goes to show Breen’s utter disregard for human life.”

I wasn’t sure what Monk meant. Was it murdering a man for his coat or throwing away disinfectant wipes that revealed the depth of Breen’s inhumanity? I didn’t dare ask.

Stottlemeyer pointed to the corpse. “You’re telling me this guy was wearing Lucas Breen’s overcoat?”

Monk nodded and blew his nose. “He must have rooted around in the Dumpster the night of the murder. He was a man with a death wish, and it came true.”

“It wasn’t going Dumpster diving that killed him,” Stottlemeyer said.

Monk took a Ziploc bag from his pocket and stuffed the Kleenex into it. “If the coat hadn’t been the agent of his demise, it would have been a hideous flesh-eating Dumpster disease and a horrible, drooling death.”

“Agent of his demise?” Stottlemeyer said.