Monk wasn’t there when I returned to the bungalow. I took another shower, slathered some lotion on my red skin, and dressed in a sleeveless blouse and shorts.
When I emerged from my room, it was raining hard outside. The sliding walls to the patio were still wide-open, letting the moist, warm air into the otherwise dry house. It was nice, though my clothes began to stick to my skin, making me itch.
Monk sat at the kitchen table, his back to me, with a big pile of peanut shells in front of him. I walked to his side and saw that he’d shelled almost the entire bag of peanuts. He must have walked up to the grocery store while I was at the beach. Knowing Monk, I figured that errand must have kept him, and the clerks at the grocery store, occupied for some time. I was tempted to visit the store just to see how he’d reorganized the fruits, vegetables, meats, and everything else.
“What are you up to?” I asked.
“I thought you might enjoy a friendly game of peanuts,” Monk said.
I pulled out a chair and sat down. “You read my mind. What are the rules?”
“You’ve never played?”
“I’ve led a sheltered life.”
“It’s a deceptively simple game. Just match the peanuts to the shells they came in. The person who puts together the most nuts wins.”
“How do you resist eating them?”
“It’s that temptation that gives the game its edgy quality.”
Monk shelled the last nut. “Would you like to shuffle the shells and nuts?”
“I trust you.”
He pushed the two separate piles of shells and nuts into the center of the table.
“Ready. Set. Go.”
His hands moved so fast that, at first, all I could do was watch him try different combinations of nut and shell. It was amazing how fast he sorted through them. After a moment I began. I picked up a nut and then I picked up a shell. They didn’t fit. I picked up another shell. It didn’t fit either.
I glanced over at him. He’d already rejoined several peanuts with their shells.
Monk smiled at me. “Isn’t this fun?”
“It’s almost too much excitement.”
How did he do it? I wondered if it was more a matter of memory than matching the shapes. I ate my peanut and picked another one from the pile to try my luck with.
“There’s a personal question I’d like to ask you,” I said, “but if it’s out of line, it’s okay for you to tell me that. I won’t mind.”
“You can ask me anything you want.” Monk busily married nuts to shells, happily occupied with his task.
“All I know about Trudy’s death is that she was killed by a car bomb. I’d like to help you find out the rest. But I’m kind of lost.”
“So am I.”
I knew Trudy was a reporter and that she was meeting someone in a parking garage when she was killed, but that was it.
“I’d like to know what you know,” I said. “I want to be prepared so that if something new comes up, I can understand what it means and how it might lead to the person who planted the bomb.”
“I know who did it,” Monk said.
“You do?” I popped the nut in my mouth and picked out another one. Monk’s pile of reshelled peanuts was getting higher by the second.
“Warwick Tennyson. I found him in New York. He built the bomb with a cell-phone detonator and put it in her car.”
“Why did he do it?”
“For two thousand dollars in cash. That’s all Trudy’s life was worth to him. Tennyson didn’t know who hired him; he’d met him only once, in that same parking garage. It was dark. He never saw his face. But he saw his hands. Whoever wanted Trudy dead had six fingers on his right hand.”
“Six fingers?” I said. “He’s got to be lying.”
“I believe him,” Monk said.
“There can’t be that many people out there with six fingers on one hand.”
“You’d be surprised,” Monk said. “Most have them amputated so they don’t look like freaks.”
“This guy may enjoy being a freak.”
“Or he’s a jokester and the finger was a fake, something he wore that day for fun, knowing it would draw Tennyson’s attention and be misleading.”
“What happened to Warwick Tennyson?”
“He died of cancer,” Monk said.
“In prison?”
Monk shook his head no. “A free man. He died two days after I talked to him in the hospital. You could say he gave me a deathbed confession.”
“At least her murderer is dead and his last days were spent in pain and misery.”
“Tennyson built the bomb, but he didn’t make the phone call that detonated it,” Monk said. “Whoever hired him did. That’s her killer.”
“Is there anything Trudy could tell you that would help you find him?”
Monk stopped the reshelling and looked at me. “Spirits don’t speak from beyond. Dylan Swift is a con man.”
“But for the sake of argument, let’s say that he could talk to Trudy,” I said. “What guidance would you seek from her?”
“How to go on with my life without her.”
“I mean, about who killed her.”
Monk shrugged his shoulders and tilted his head from side to side. “She could tell me why she was in the parking garage, who she was there to meet, and what story she was working on.”
“Could it hurt to ask Swift?”
“You tell me,” Monk said. “Does it hurt?”
“It’s feeling the loss again. It’s an old pain,” I said. “But I actually feel better now.”
“Nothing has changed,” Monk said.
“Maybe I have.”
“All he did was tell you what you already wanted to believe is true.”
“So what if he did?” I said. “That might be what I needed to hear. Just because the navy says Mitch was a coward doesn’t mean it’s true. I know the kind of man he was better than anybody. Swift described what really happened to Mitch in Kosovo.”
“You don’t know
