Lee Goldberg: Mr. Monk and the Dirty Cop

I didn’t get it, so I gave him a look.

“Randy gives you a twenty and you give him the same amount back in smaller bills,” I said. “What’s immoral or unethical about that?”

“Because I would have to give him a ten, eight singles, and eight quarters, just to keep the things even. I don’t carry any five-dollar bills, of course.”

“Of course,” I said.

Monk once wrote a petition demanding that the U.S. Mint remove the five-dollar bill from circulation and replace it with a four- or six-dollar bill. He’d stood for a week outside of a Wells Fargo bank soliciting signatures and got only one: mine. And that was given under extreme duress, so it doesn’t count.

“Then Randy will use six of the quarters, or one of the dollar bills and two quarters, for the cup of coffee,” Monk said. “That will leave him with eighteen fifty, an uneven amount composed of an uneven mix of bills and coins. It’s anarchy.”

We both stared at him. After a long moment, I turned to Disher.

“I can give you a dollar fifty, Randy.”

Disher shook his head. “No, thanks. I think I need something stronger now than a cup of coffee.”

“You can’t,” Monk said. “You’re on duty.”

“Then maybe I’ll just shoot myself,” Disher said, as he shoved his wallet in his pocket, and walked back to his desk outside of Stottlemeyer’s office.

Monk looked after him with befuddlement. “What’s his problem?”

There was no point in trying to explain it to him, so I simply headed for Stottlemeyer’s glass-walled office, which gave the captain a commanding view of the squad room and no privacy whatsoever unless he closed the blinds.

Stottlemeyer was at his desk, doing some paperwork as we came in.

“That was quick,” Stottlemeyer said, looking up at us. “How many traffic laws did you break getting down here?”

“I refuse to answer on the grounds that it might incriminate me,” I said.

“Eight,” Monk said.

I turned to him. “Eight?”

“Actually, it was seven, but since that’s an uneven number, I included the red light you drove through yesterday on the way to the university.”

I leaned out the door of Stottlemeyer’s office and called out to Disher, “After you shoot yourself, do you mind if I borrow your gun?”

“Be my guest,” he said.

“Thanks.” I turned back to Stottlemeyer. “Are you going to ticket me now?”

“Did you run over anybody?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“Then it’s not my department.” Stottlemeyer reached for an envelope on his desk and handed it to Monk. “Here’s your paycheck, along with my personal apology for the delay.”

“You’ve included a written apology?” Monk asked.

“No, I didn’t,” Stottlemeyer said. “I’m offering it to you now, in person.”

“I’d prefer it in writing,” Monk said.

Stottlemeyer glanced at me. “Could I have that gun when you’re done with it?”

“You have your own,” I said. “Speaking of guns, what’s happening with that professor who shot a student?”

“We arrested him for murder this afternoon,” Stottlemeyer said. “Ford Oldman, the student that he killed, was working on his dissertation and stumbled across some obscure paper that a legal scholar wrote in the early nineteen hundreds. The student noticed some similarities between passages in the paper and a chapter in one of Cowan’s books, so he sent the professor a friendly e-mail asking him about it. There was no implied threat. All the kid was looking for was some additional insight.”

“Instead he got a bullet,” I said, pleased with myself for sounding so hard-boiled. Cops respected that. “Cowan didn’t want to be outed as a plagiarist.”

“It would have been especially embarrassing because Cowan wrote an opinion piece last year for the San Francisco Chronicle chastising politicians, students, and authors for passing off other people’s work as their own.” Stottlemeyer referred to a clipping on his desk. “Cowan called it ‘an unacceptable erosion of academic standards that’s led to the rampant intellectual dishonesty of public discourse.’ ”

“Hoist with his own petard,” I said.

“Shhhhhh.” Monk waved his hands frantically in front of my face. “How can you talk like that in front of an officer of the law! You should be ashamed of yourself. I hope you don’t use that kind of profanity around your daughter.”

“ Petard isn’t a profanity,” I said.

He shushed me again with more waving.

“We don’t use the ‘p’ word in civilized conversation,” Monk said. “In fact, we don’t use it all. It’s been banned.”

“A petard is an explosive charge,” I said. “It’s not part of a man’s anatomy.”

That led to more red-faced shushing and hand waving from Monk.

“This is what happens when you wear dirty clothes,” he said. “Pretty soon, you start talking dirty, too. Before you know it, you’re smoking hashish, drinking hooch, and selling your body to sailors.”

“I always wondered how women ended up that way,” Stottlemeyer said. “Now I know.”

“What about the threatening e-mails Cowan claimed that he got?” I asked.

“Cowan probably sent them to himself from the public terminals at the university’s Internet café. We found witnesses who say he was in there all the time.” Stottlemeyer turned to Monk. “The truth is, Cowan probably would have gotten away with the perfect murder if it weren’t for you.”

“You would have caught him,” Monk said.

“I don’t think so,” Stottlemeyer said. “We’re understaffed and underfunded, so when an open-and-shut case comes along, we don’t try to pry it open again; we just move along.”

“I haven’t seen you do that,” Monk said.

“You’re not here in the trenches every day, Monk. There’s a lot you don’t see.”

“I see more than most people do,” Monk said.

“That’s true and it’s that skill that brings up something else I need to talk to you about,” Stottlemeyer said. “The department would like a favor from you.”

“You’re not asking me to deliver a baby, are you?”

“No,” he said.

“Or shave the hair on somebody’s back?”

“No,” he said.

“Or milk a cow?”

“I have a suggestion, Monk. Instead of going through the endless list of things you don’t want to do, how about letting me tell you what the favor is?”

“It doesn’t involve chewing gum or spitting tobacco, does it?”

“The Conference of Metropolitan Homicide Detectives is being held in San Francisco this year and they want to interview you and me onstage tomorrow morning about our working relationship.”

“Why?” Monk asked.

“Because we end up solving a lot of murders together,” Stottlemeyer said.

“Would I have to be in front of an audience?”

Stottlemeyer nodded. “Just a couple hundred cops from around the country. But you won’t be alone. I’ll be up there with you.”

Monk squirmed. “I’m not comfortable with public speaking.”

“And I’m not comfortable rubbing other cops’ noses in our high case-closure rate,” Stottlemeyer said. “But this request comes directly from the chief. I think he wants to gloat.”

I spoke up. “Look at the bright side, Mr. Monk.”

“There’s never a bright side,” he said.

“This means the police chief knows about your achievements and respects your abilities. He’s proud of the work you are doing and wants to show you off,” I said. “Speaking at this conference could be a big step towards getting reinstated to the force.”

Monk looked at me and then at Stottlemeyer. “Do you think so?”

Stottlemeyer shrugged. “It never hurts to kiss up to the boss.”