Lee Goldberg: Mr. Monk and the Dirty Cop

Monk is oblivious to that, of course. But I’m not.

It’s been going on like that day after day, year after year, and it’s got to be hard on the captain’s self-esteem.

I know it’s hard on mine, and I don’t even want to be a detective.

Witnessing Monk’s natural ability and affinity for his work over and over again only reminds me that I’ve yet to demonstrate anything like that in my own life.

It’s got to be much worse for Stottlemeyer, who is not only in the same profession, but in a leadership position.

All those conflicts were on my mind the morning we walked into the lecture hall in one of the newer buildings at the University of California, San Francisco ’s law school.

We were supposed to meet Stottlemeyer at headquarters to pick up Monk’s paycheck and, by extension, my own, but the captain and Disher got called away to investigate a shooting at the university. Since we were desperate for the money, and Monk couldn’t resist visiting a crime scene, we went out there, too.

It was a big lecture hall with dry-erase boards and flat-screen monitors behind the lectern. Pretty soon, chalkboards and erasers will be as extinct as typewriters, vinyl records, and carbon paper.

All the seats in the room had power plugs and tables for laptop computers. I imagined that being a student here was like listening to lectures in the business-class section of a British Airways jet. The only thing missing was someone pushing a cart down the aisles serving beverages and snacks.

I did a rough head count of the students in the room. There were about a hundred of them and they were still in their seats, fidgeting nervously as a handful of detectives questioned them one by one.

The questions probably had to do with the dead guy.

The victim looked to me like one of the students, except that unlike the others he had a gunshot wound in his chest and he was dead.

His body was sprawled at the bottom of the aisle that ran down the left side of the room. There were streaks of blood on the floor that indicated he’d rolled halfway down the aisle before his foot snagged one of those fancy seats.

I could see a gun lying in the blood. A numbered yellow evidence cone marked the spot in case nobody had noticed the weapon, the blood, or the body.

Lieutenant Disher was in front of the lecture hall, pencil poised over his notebook, interviewing a jowly man who had gray hair and wore a suit and tie.

The jowly man had a short beard that I figured he grew to give his first chin more definition and distract attention from his second one.

He held his chins high, his back straight, and stared down his long nose at Disher as if regarding a misbehaving child. I wondered if he had that posture before he became a professor, if it came with the job, or if it was a vain attempt to stretch his flabby neck taut.

Lieutenant Disher was in his midthirties, eager to please, and surprisingly friendly for a homicide detective, which put most people at ease and got them to open up to him, revealing far more than they would to anybody else with a badge. But from what I could see I didn’t think the man Disher was talking to then was one of those people.

There were a couple of crime scene technicians taking pictures and gathering forensic evidence and trying very hard to look as cool as David Caruso and Marg Helgenberger while they worked. They weren’t succeeding. They were too self-conscious about striking poses, and they didn’t have the wardrobe, the stylists, or the buff bodies to pull it off.

Stottlemeyer wasn’t trying to impress anyone. In fact, he looked wearier and more haggard than usual. His jacket and slacks were wrinkled and his bushy mustache needed trimming. He was standing with his hands on his hips, staring down at the body as we approached.

He acknowledged us with a quick glance and a nod.

“You didn’t have to come all the way down here,” Stottlemeyer said.

“We came for Mr. Monk’s check,” I said.

“It’s back at the office,” he said. “Stop by later this afternoon and I’ll have it for you.”

Monk crouched down to examine the body, holding his hands out in front of him like a movie director framing a shot with his thumbs.

“Mr. Monk thought if he helped you out here, we wouldn’t have to wait until this afternoon.”

He eyed me suspiciously. “It was Monk’s idea.”

“I might have given him some advice on the matter,” I said. “The check is a week late as it is.”

“The department keeps slashing my budget and I have to prioritize my spending,” Stottlemeyer said. “I’m afraid consultants are at the bottom of the list.”

“Then you can forget about getting any help from Mr. Monk today,” I said. “He doesn’t work for free.”

“I don’t need his help right now,” Stottlemeyer said. “There’s no mystery about what happened here.”

“The guy on the floor burst into the room in the middle of class and pointed a gun at the professor,” Monk said, standing up. “The gunman was about to shoot but the professor shot him first.”

“That’s exactly what happened,” Stottlemeyer said. “It was a clear case of self-defense and we’ve got a lecture hall full of eyewitnesses to back it up.”

“What was the professor doing with a gun?” Monk asked.

“He’s a former federal prosecutor who put a lot of scary people away in his day,” Stottlemeyer said. “He’s licensed to carry a concealed weapon.”

Monk looked to the front of the room. “Is that Professor Jeremiah Cowan?”

“Yeah, you know him?” Stottlemeyer said.

“I took his Introduction to Criminal Law class when I was at Berkeley.”

“That’s the class he was teaching today,” Stottlemeyer said. “But I don’t think the lesson the students got was on the syllabus.”

Monk rolled his head as if trying to work out a kink in his neck. But I knew it wasn’t his neck that was bothering him. The kink was in his mind. There was some detail that wasn’t fitting where it should and that worried me.

“You’re not working today, Mr. Monk,” I said. “You haven’t been paid.”

“I’m not working,” he said.

“Then what was this?” I rolled my head the way he did.

“It was nothing,” he said.

“Of course it was nothing,” Stottlemeyer said. “This case was closed before you got here. There’s nothing left to do now but the paperwork.”

“Good, then there’s no reason you can’t hurry back to the office to sign Mr. Monk’s check.”

Monk headed straight for Professor Cowan, who seemed to recoil at the sight of him approaching.

Stottlemeyer and I followed Monk, neither one of us too happy that he was getting himself involved in this.

“Oh my God,” Cowan said. “It’s Adrian Monk.”

“You still remember me after all these years?” Monk said.

“Before each class, you drew lines on the chalkboard for me to write on,” Cowan said. “You insisted that I use a fresh box of chalk. And you’d never let me erase the board; you had to do it yourself. It took you hours.”

Monk looked at Stottlemeyer and me and shrugged with false modesty. “I was kind of a teacher’s pet. The entire faculty loved me.”

“You’re fortunate I wasn’t carrying a gun in those days,” Cowan said.

“Why were you carrying a gun today?” Monk asked.

“I always carry it,” Cowan said. “But I had it within easy reach today because I’ve been getting these crazy, threatening e-mails lately from a student who believes I destroyed his life by giving him bad grades. He said that I would die for it.”

Disher tipped his head towards the victim. “Was it him?”

“I presume so,” Cowan said.

Disher narrowed his eyes. “Why?”