“I didn’t give Julie a manual.”
Monk looked at me in horror. “What kind of mother are you? You’d better get one before child protective services finds out.”
His mother gave him a manual for dressing? She must have written it herself. I thought it would be fascinating and more than a little horrifying to read.
“Maybe I could borrow your family’s copy,” I said.
“I wish you could,” Monk said, “but it’s long gone.”
“What happened to it?”
“Trudy asked to read it once,” Monk said. “I haven’t seen it since. It’s a mystery.”
It wasn’t to me.
If I’d been Monk’s wife, and loved him as much as she did, I know what I’d have done with that manual. I’d have burned it. I wondered if it was really such a mystery to Monk, who had solved much more complicated riddles than that.
“So if you don’t ever completely undress,” I said, “how do you shower?”
Monk blushed. “Don’t you think you’re getting a little personal? I’m your boss, after all. You shouldn’t be thinking about me in the shower.”
“I’m not,” I said.
“I don’t even want to think about me in the shower,” he said.
Monk stopped at the fifth floor, took a deep breath for courage, and dashed out. For him, being on an odd-numbered floor was like walking on a rope bridge over a deep gorge, so he must have had a good reason for doing it.
I followed after him to Lorber’s office.
“What are we doing here?” I asked.
“Conducting an important test,” Monk said.
He took a piece of blank paper from Lorber’s desk and fed it into the shredder.
“If you’re trying to figure out which machine the shredded document came from, you can forget it,” I said. “The shredder in here is identical to the one in Cahill’s office.”
“No two shredders are identical,” he said.
“It’s the same brand, the same model, and the same blades.”
“That’s where you’re wrong.” Monk picked up two shreds and held them up to the light. “They get dull and chipped in different places. All it takes is one document with a staple in it to put an almost imperceptible groove in the edge of a blade.”
“Almost imperceptible?” I said. “You’d need a microscope to see it.”
“I can see it,” Monk said.
“You can?”
Monk dropped the shreds back in the trash. “The shredded document came from Cahill’s office. I just wanted to double-check.”
“So he knew exactly what was going on and instead of going straight to the authorities, he shredded the evidence,” I said. “He’s a liar.”
“Most murderers usually are,” Monk said.
“Is he one?”
“I don’t know,” Monk said. “Yet.”
I admired the unshakable confidence behind the way Monk said “yet.” In every case he investigated, there was never any doubt in his mind that he would find the killer.
There was just one exception, and it was the case that mattered the most to him.
Trudy’s murder.
I looked forward to the day that changed.
22
Mr. Monk and the House of Horrors
I’m not sure why people draw a distinction between so-called old money and new money. Money is money. Either you have it or you don’t. It’s how you spend it that counts.
I know from personal experience what it’s like to be rich and poor. I came from a very wealthy family that made their fortune in the toothpaste business.
“Everybody has teeth and they don’t want to lose them,” my grandfather used to say. “It’s the most secure business on earth.”
It was a business my grandfather almost lost after it was revealed that he’d laced the original formula for his toothpaste with sugar to appeal to his customers’ “sweet tooth,” thus hastening their dental decay. The business miraculously recovered from the scandal, diversified, and thrived, becoming the global conglomerate that it is today.
I had whatever I wanted when I was growing up exceptmaybe a little insecurity. My life was too safe, too pampered, too restricted.
I know what you’re thinking: oh, boo-hoo for the rich girl. Believe it or not, money isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. Not only does money not buy you happiness, but it doesn’t necessarily give you freedom either. Sure, you have freedom from the fear of starvation or homelessness. But when everything comes easy, and you live in a rarefied world, it doesn’t really feel like you’re living.
So I rebelled. I disavowed my family’s money and I eloped with a man who was rich in character but cash poor. It was the happiest time of my life, and I have Julie to always remind me of it.
I’ve been struggling financially ever since. It’s no treat being a single mother. It would be easier to just give in and take my father’s money, but then I wouldn’t be surviving on my own, and what lesson would my daughter take from that? And I wouldn’t have met Monk, and my life would be considerably less unpredictable and exciting.
Knowing what it is to be rich and poor means that I’m not impressed by wealth or the people who have it. Monk isn’t either, but for entirely different reasons. He’s socially illiterate. He’s unaware of the deference, envy, and feelings of inferiority that are expected of you by those who have more money than you do.
In fact, Monk didn’t know the appropriate behavior in any situation. He made his own rules and was surprised when nature and humankind didn’t follow them.
So neither Monk nor I was intimidated by Brandon Lorber’s Victorian mansion in Pacific Heights and its commanding, IMAX view of the Golden Gate, Marin County, and Alcatraz Island.
Pacific Heights has been the Mount Olympus of San Francisco’s elite since the 1800s. Merchants and robber barons flush with their gold, sugar, and railroad riches needed a high place where
