Lee Goldberg - Mr. Monk and the Dirty Cop

“You mean his murder,” Monk said.

“They’re just following procedure,” Stottlemeyer said. “They know as well as you and I do how futile it is.”

“It’s my fault the evidence is lost or ruined,” Monk said. “I saw all the things that were out of place yesterday and didn’t put it together. What was the matter with me?”

“You were tired,” I said, shooting a nasty glare at Slade, who didn’t seem to pick up on it.

“But it was all right in front of my face,” Monk said.

“And mine and theirs,” Stottlemeyer said, nodding towards the Mill Valley police. “At least I’m accustomed to missing the clues that you see. They’re not. They really feel like jerks.”

“Then it’s the perfect time to let them know that Monk’s consulting services are available through Intertect,” Slade said, and excused himself from us to try to snag himself a new client.

“Who could have wanted Bill Peschel dead?” Monk asked.

“Anyone who got sent to prison because of one of the tips that he gave the police,” I said.

“Why wait until now?” Stottlemeyer asked. “Peschel retired and moved to Florida ten years ago.”

“Maybe the killer just got released from prison,” I said. “Or maybe it took the killer this long to figure out that it was Peschel who ratted him out. Or maybe he only recently learned that Peschel had moved back to the Bay Area. Maybe it’s all of those things put together.”

“That’s a lot of maybes,” Stottlemeyer said.

“I thought maybes were your specialty,” I said.

“My specialty doesn’t matter,” Stottlemeyer said. “This is a Mill Valley homicide. I don’t have jurisdiction here.”

Slade came back over to us. “I was just told that the Mill Valley Police Department has a policy of not hiring people to do the job that they are paid to do. They don’t have money to burn like the San Francisco police do. That’s a direct quote.”

“Tough break for you,” Stottlemeyer said.

“They’ll come around after a few weeks of getting nowhere,” Slade said.

“After a few weeks, it will be too late,” Monk said. “The trail will be cold.”

“You’ve solved a bunch of cases for me already that were colder than a few weeks,” Slade said.

“This is different,” Monk said.

“Yeah, the Mill Valley police know that somebody would have gotten away with murder if it weren’t for you,” Slade said. “You’ve embarrassed them. They aren’t going to be able to stick this case in a drawer if they get nowhere with it. They’ll have to come back to us. The public will pressure them into it.”

“How’s the public going to know anything about it?” Stottlemeyer asked.

“There were a lot of people here today,” Slade said. “Word will get around. And I’ll be sending out a press release this afternoon. See you later.”

Slade walked away.

Stottlemeyer sighed and looked at us. “I’d better get back to the office, assuming that I still have one.”

“Why are you being so pessimistic? The murders of Judges Stanton and Carnegie were solved. It’s old news,” I said. “There will be other headlines today. Your bosses can’t be as angry with you as they were yesterday.”

“I just punched a cop at a wake,” Stottlemeyer said.

“He had it coming,” I said.

“True, but I don’t think the chief is going to see it that way.”

“Who says he’s ever going to know?”

“Braddock will make sure that he does,” Stottlemeyer said. “Every cop at the convention is going to ask him how his nose got busted and he’ll tell them, though he’ll frame the story so that he looks terrific and I come across as a raging psychopath.”

“With his charming personality, it’s probably not the first time someone has slugged him,” I said.

Stottlemeyer shook his head. “Braddock is used to giving beatings, not taking them. He’s always been protected by the authority of his badge. Most people are afraid to hit him back. He’s not used to a fight that isn’t rigged in his favor before he even throws a punch. He isn’t going to take this well.”

“It’s not Braddock that I’m concerned about,” Monk said. “What are we going to do about Bill Peschel’s murder?”

“Bill lived and worked in San Francisco most of his life. Odds are that whatever happened here began across the bay on my turf,” Stottlemeyer said. “The homicide case may be out of my jurisdiction but I’m going to do some asking around anyway.”

“Me too,” Monk said.

Stottlemeyer nodded and walked away. As soon as he was gone, I gave Monk a look.

“Who are you going to ask?”

“Danielle,” Monk said.

“But no one has hired you to investigate this murder,” I said.

“I’ve hired me,” Monk said.

As I drove us back to San Francisco, Monk called Danielle Hossack and asked her to dig up all the information that she could about Bill Peschel, his daughter, and her husband. She promised to get Monk a preliminary report tomorrow.

“I understand why you want background on Bill Peschel,” I said. “But why on the others?”

“You mentioned to me that Peschel made a lot of money from the sale of his bar and some stocks.”

“Carol said he was an early investor in InTouchSpace-dot-com, which is the biggest social networking site on earth.”

Monk looked at me blankly, so I explained what I was talking about.

“It’s an online community where millions of people share information about themselves, their interests, and their hobbies, make new friends, renew relationships with old ones, and play all kinds of games.”

Monk still looked at me blankly.

“Let me put it another way,” I said. “InTouchSpace allows you to socialize with others without ever leaving your house or actually meeting another human being in the flesh. You might actually like it. Julie and I use it. So does Ambrose. He’s very active on it.”

“My brother is talking to strangers with his computer?”

“He’s agoraphobic,” I said. “How else is he going to interact with people?”

“Why would he want to?”

“Because he’s a human being,” I said. “And human beings need relationships.”

“Not if they want to stay healthy,” Monk said. “Relationships aren’t sanitary.”

“They are on a computer,” I said.

“Haven’t you ever heard of computer viruses?”

I could see that this was yet another argument I wasn’t going to win. Besides, we were getting so far away from the subject of Bill Peschel’s murder that I’d almost forgotten the point I’d originally wanted to make.

“Do you really think that Carol Atwater murdered her father?”

Monk shrugged. “Maybe in addition to his stocks, Bill also had a hefty insurance policy. We only have her word about what happened that morning. What if it’s all a lie? It wouldn’t be the first time that greed led to murder.”

“I have a hard time believing that she cracked her father on the head, pushed him into the pool, and then staged the accident with her daughter in the house.”

“It’s easy enough to check out her story. But I have other reasons for learning more about her and her husband. The murder may have had nothing to do with Peschel’s past. It might have been related to something that Carol and Phil are or were involved with. It might have been a warning of some kind. Or maybe Peschel interrupted a burglary.”

“In other words, you have no idea what you are looking for.”

“I’m looking for a murderer,” he said.

Until Danielle got back to us, we had nothing to go on in the Peschel investigation. And since we’d worked through all the open cases at Intertect-well, at least as far as Monk knew-there was nothing else for us to do.