Lee Goldberg - Mr. Monk and the Dirty Cop

“I don’t know,” Monk said. “A lot of things happened ten years ago.”

His wife Trudy’s unsolved murder, for one thing. I could have kicked myself for not anticipating that my question would bring up those painful memories.

“Are you hoping for a little inspiration on the case from Jessica Fletcher?” I asked, trying to distract him from his dark thoughts.

“Who is she?”

“A mystery writer who solves murders,” I said, motioning to the Murder, She Wrote novel in his hand. “The heroine of the book you want to read.”

“I’m not going to read it,” Monk said.

“Then why are you buying it?”

“To even up the display. Now there are four books cover-out in each pocket shelf.”

“You’re buying a book you don’t want just so the stacks on the shelves are even?”

“It’s a small sacrifice to make so the world will be a better place.”

There was a file from Forensics waiting on Disher’s desk when he came in that morning. Disher waved hello to Stottlemeyer, who acknowledged him with a nod from inside his office, then sat down and opened the file, which was full of crime scene photos and lab reports.

Disher started to read through it all, starting with the autopsy report.

The medical examiner confirmed that Braddock was strangled to death. As Disher predicted, there were threads from the comforter in Braddock’s mouth and nose.

The forensic report was next.

The CSI boys were able to lift a strand of polyester from Braddock’s neck and, based on the colors and composition of the fabric, they were able to trace it back to a yellow-white-and-blue-striped tie made specifically for Wal-Mart called the Continental. The bad news was that the tie was sold by the thousands at their stores worldwide.

Disher glanced at the picture of the tie and felt a chill run right up his back.

He’d seen the tie before.

But that didn’t mean anything, he told himself. Lots of people wore that same tie. He was overreacting.

Disher shifted his attention to the fingerprint report.

There were hundreds of partial prints recovered, which was typical of hotel rooms. Most of the prints were too obscured by other prints to be readable. Even so, they were able to match up the prints to about thirty people, half of whom were hotel staff. One was Braddock himself.

But it was the prints that were recovered from the shards of the broken drinking glass that were the most telling and disturbing.

Another chill crept up Disher’s spine and raised goose bumps all over his body.

This time, he couldn’t explain away the connection.

He knew what he had to do. It made him feel nauseous and it had nothing to do with the egg-and-cheese croissant he’d scarfed down for breakfast.

Disher slid the photo of the tie from the file, wrote an address on the back, then got up slowly. Trying to appear totally at ease, he sauntered self-consciously over to Lansdale ’s desk and leaned down, his back to Stottlemeyer’s office.

“I want you to go to the address on the back of this photo with the crime scene techs and wait for me to call you with a search warrant,” Disher whispered to Lansdale. “Don’t mess the place up. Be thorough but subtle. Search inside and out.”

“What am I looking for?”

Disher tapped the photo. “This tie and anything else that you think might be related to Paul Braddock’s murder.”

“Who lives there?” Lansdale asked.

“Captain Stottlemeyer,” Disher said.

Lansdale involuntarily glanced towards the captain’s office but Disher had intentionally used his body to block his view.

“Just act natural,” Disher said. “I don’t want the captain to know about this until the deed is done.”

“You think the captain murdered Braddock? Are you out of your mind?”

“God, I hope so,” Disher said.

He didn’t see the need to tell Lansdale yet about how Braddock had thoroughly humiliated Stottlemeyer in front of his peers.

Or that Stottlemeyer had beaten the crap out of Braddock at somebody’s wake.

Or that Stottlemeyer was at the hotel at the time of the murder and was wearing a tie exactly like the one that was used to strangle Paul Braddock.

Or that Stottlemeyer’s fingerprints were on the broken glass in Braddock’s room.

Instead, Disher sent Lansdale off to search Captain Stottlemeyer’s apartment and then went to the men’s room to throw up before he called the deputy chief.

The mysterious fate of Silicon Valley entrepreneur and visionary Steve Wurzel was widely known in San Francisco and probably across the nation. But I couldn’t blame Monk for not knowing about it, since it happened around the time of Trudy’s murder and his own complete mental breakdown.

So on our way back over the Golden Gate Bridge, I told Monk the story.

Wurzel set off early one foggy morning on his motorcycle to travel the winding coastal highway from his home in San Francisco to his weekend getaway in Mendocino, a picturesque village on the cliffs above the pounding waves of the Pacific.

He never arrived.

Much of the coastal route is a dangerous, twisting, two-lane highway running along the edge of jagged cliffs with nothing but a few planks of rotted wood between you and a spiraling plunge to the rocky surf below.

And where the road deviates away from the cliff’s edge, it snakes into dense forests and across bridges over deep gorges.

It’s an exhilarating and very scary drive, a road that offers spectacular views and the potential for spectacular deaths.

The Highway Patrol, the Mendocino County Sheriff, and the U.S. Coast Guard mounted a massive search along the coast, on land and at sea, but no sign of Wurzel or his motorcycle was found. After a few days, the official search was suspended.

Wurzel’s wife, Linda, and their Silicon Valley friends weren’t ready to give up. They mounted an ambitious, expensive, and exhaustive search effort of their own, but also failed to find him.

All of this happened only a few weeks before InTouchSpace received a massive infusion of venture capital funds and exploded on the Internet, becoming a global social phenomenon and making all of the early investors, including many who helped finance the search for Wurzel, unbelievably rich.

After Wurzel was declared dead, several women came forward claiming a share of his billion-dollar estate on the grounds that they were his lovers and that he’d fathered children with them. But without DNA to confirm paternity, the cases were thrown out.

What, if anything, any of that had to do with the murder of a senile old bartender was beyond my powers of reasoning and deduction. And, apparently, it was beyond Monk’s as well. Because after I was finished telling him the story, he didn’t make any teasing statements hinting that he’d solved the murder. Instead, he asked me to take him home so he could get back to work on the remaining cases that Slade had given him.

“What about the Peschel case?” I asked.

“We’ll have to wait and see what the captain has turned up,” Monk said. “Perhaps someone was released from prison who had a grudge. But I wouldn’t rule out Carol or her husband yet.”

“Don’t you wonder why Wurzel bought Peschel’s tavern?”

“I suppose Wurzel was betting on the neighborhood becoming more desirable in the future and the property increasing significantly in value.”

“It just seems odd,” I said.

“The only connection between the two of them is that Wurzel bought Peschel’s business and Peschel invested in InTouchSpace at about the same time. What is odd about that?”

It was as if we’d switched roles.