Lee Goldberg: Mr. Monk and the Dirty Cop

“Because he screamed, ‘You ruined my life,’ and then aimed his gun at me.”

“Maybe there is more than one student who hates you,” Disher said.

“There could be,” Cowan said tightly.

“We don’t make assumptions,” Disher said. “We deal in facts.”

“Of course,” Cowan said. “How reckless of me.”

“The guy who sent you the e-mails could be hiding behind a bush outside right now, waiting to leap out and gar rote you as you leave the building.”

“You should go check, Randy,” Stottlemeyer said.

Disher stood there for a moment. “Really?”

Stottlemeyer glared at him.

“I’m going to go check the bushes.” Disher pocketed his notebook and hurried away.

Stottlemeyer sighed and turned to Cowan. “Did you report the threats?”

“I informed the campus police and showed them the threatening e-mails,” Cowan said. “But there wasn’t much they could do. They traced the e-mails to the public computers at the campus coffeehouse. Anybody could have sent them.”

Stottlemeyer gestured to the victim. “Do you recognize him? His name is Ford Oldman.”

“He looks vaguely familiar but I have nearly a hundred students in this class alone, not counting the others that I teach,” Cowan said. “I can’t be expected to remember them all, semester after semester, year after year. There must be thousands.”

“You remembered me,” Monk said.

“You stood out,” Cowan said. “Besides, this is only the second week of the class. I’m just getting to know the faces.”

Monk rolled his shoulders. Another kink. Not a good sign. Stottlemeyer caught it, too.

“Yes, that makes perfect sense,” Monk said in a robotic, completely unnatural way. “I couldn’t be more convinced that what you are saying is true. There are no doubts in my mind. Captain, could I please speak to you for a moment about something that has nothing whatsoever to do with the murder of this student?”

“It wasn’t murder,” Cowan said. “It was self-defense. That’s an important legal and moral distinction.”

“You’re right,” Monk said in that same stilted voice. “I should have said self-defense murder.”

“It wasn’t murder at all,” Cowan said, raising his voice an octave in exasperation.

Stottlemeyer took Monk by the arm and dragged him out of earshot of the professor. I tagged along because that’s what I do. It’s in my job description.

“What has gotten into you, Monk?” the captain asked.

“He’s the guy,” Monk said. “He’s the killer.”

“Yes, Monk, we know that,” Stottlemeyer said. “That’s not in dispute.”

“It was murder, Captain.”

“It was self-defense,” Stottlemeyer said. “We’ve got a hundred eyewitnesses and they all tell the same story.”

“That proves it,” Monk said.

“That I’m right,” Stottlemeyer said.

“That this was premeditated murder,” Monk said.

I had no idea why Monk believed this shooting wasn’t what it appeared to be but I’d long since learned he was always right when it came to murder.

“Mr. Monk doesn’t work for nothing,” I said. “If you want to hear more, you’ll have to sign his check.”

“But I don’t want to hear more,” Stottlemeyer said.

“When I took Introduction to Criminal Law, someone ran in, fired a shot at Professor Cowan, and ran out again,” Monk said. “It scared everyone and was over in about ten seconds. He then questioned the students about what they saw and got all kinds of contradictory information. The shooting was just a dramatic stunt to demonstrate the unreliability of eyewitness testimony. But I got it right, of course.”

“That was twenty years ago, Monk,” Stottlemeyer said. “It’s a coincidence.”

“The shooting happened during the second week of my class, too. I can pull my lecture notes out and show you if you want.”

“You still have them?” I asked.

“Of course I do,” he said. “I’ve kept all my schoolwork, from nursery school through college.”

“Why?”

“In case I need to refer back to it in situations like this.”

“Do lots of your former teachers shoot people?” I asked.

“It happens,” Monk said.

“I’m surprised none of them shot you,” Stottlemeyer said.

“I’m also keeping them so I can donate my papers to the university when I die.”

“I didn’t know you had papers,” I said.

“Everybody has papers,” Monk said. “Mine have the advantage of already being indexed and cataloged according to the Dewey decimal system, which is why I could find my lecture notes for this class very easily if the captain wants them.”

Stottlemeyer rubbed his temples. He was getting a Monkache.

“But this shooter wasn’t firing blanks, Monk,” Stottlemeyer said. “There were real bullets in his gun. Maybe the shooter picked this week on purpose as some kind of sick joke.”

“Here’s what happened-” Monk began, but I interrupted him.

“He doesn’t get to hear what happened, because he hasn’t paid you for last month’s consulting,” I said. “If you give him the benefit of your skills for free, he has no incentive to pay you in a timely fashion.”

“You’re right,” Monk said, bit his lip, and then gave in to temptation anyway. It wasn’t much of a battle. “Professor Cowan asked the student, Ford Oldman, to take part in his usual eyewitness stunt. But what Ford didn’t know was that his gun was loaded and that he was being set up for his own murder. It was a nearly perfect and very risky plan, because if Professor Cowan hadn’t shot first, he might have gotten himself killed.”

“What was Professor Cowan’s motive for murdering Oldman?” Stottlemeyer asked.

I spun Monk around and gave him a shove towards the door.

“That’s all you get for free, Captain,” I said. “You’re on your own.”

Before Monk could turn back, I grabbed him by the arm and practically dragged him out of the lecture hall.

“Do you want to get evicted from your apartment?” I asked. “Do you want to lose your assistant? You don’t give away your expertise for free. You’re running a business, Mr. Monk.”

“But I don’t know what the professor’s motive is yet,” Monk said.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Let the police do some detective work for a change. They could use the practice.”

When Monk doesn’t have a case to investigate, he likes to clean his apartment and straighten up his belongings. The problem is that there is no cleaner, straighter place on earth than the twelve hundred square feet of San Francisco that he occupies. You’re more likely to find microscopic signs of life on the surface of Mars than on his countertops. And you could use his apartment to calibrate every level-measuring device on earth.

So when he runs out of things to disinfect or balance at home, which happens within minutes, he’ll start pleading with me to let him clean my house instead.

I know what you’re thinking: You’re wondering why I bother fighting with him about it. You would immediately say yes if your boss volunteered to thoroughly clean your house and pay you to sit around while he scrubbed.

But we’re not talking about just anybody. We’re talking about Adrian Monk. When he cleans your place, he practically strips it down to the studs and then puts everything back according to his arcane rules of order.

That may not sound so bad to you unless you’ve actually experienced it.

For example, after he empties and polishes my refrigerator, he puts all the leftovers, meat, fruit, and vegetables into individual plastic containers and Ziploc bags, labels them, and arranges them on the shelves by food group, size, and expiration date. (Call me crazy, but I don’t see the point of putting an apple in a transparent bag and sticking a label on it that says, Apple.)