Mr. Monk and the Two Assistants by Goldberg, Lee (ready player one ebook .TXT) 📗

image on the screen reminded me of Edvard Munch’s famous painting The Scream. Hands on her cheeks, eyes wide, mouth open in a wail from the depths of her soul.

I knew exactly how she felt.

Monk stepped up, stared at the screen and cocked his head one way and then the other.

He’d solved the murder.

I knew it and one glance at the smile on Sharona’s face told me that she knew it, too.

“I know where you can find the man who shot Mr. Davidoff, ” Monk said.

“You do?” Dozier said, incredulous.

“Follow me,” Monk said.

He walked out into the store and led us directly to Mrs. Davidoff, who was sitting on a couch, trying hard not to look at the desk where her husband was killed.

“Mrs. Davidoff, you have Styrofoam on your ankle,” Monk said.

She glanced at her ankle. “It’s the least of my problems.”

“You are so wrong,” Monk said. “It’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you.”

Mrs. Davidoff reared back as if reacting to a foul stench. “My husband was killed today. You honestly think that it’s of less importance to me than some piece of boxing material on my pants? What kind of lunatic are you?”

“He’s Adrian Monk, a homicide consultant for the San Francisco police,” Dozier said, then looked at Monk. “You’ve got Styrofoam on your pants.”

Monk let out a little shriek and started hopping around, wiggling his leg, trying to shake off the Styrofoam.

“He’s a little messed up,” Dozier said.

“So I see,” she said.

At that moment, I hated them both. Who were they to pass judgment on Adrian Monk? Dozier was grotesque and Mrs. Davidoff, despite her terrible loss, was a snooty bitch. They were hardly superior to him.

Then again, Monk was in a gas mask hopping around on one foot. It hardly put him in the best light.

“Arrest her,” Monk said as he hopped around. “She’s the man who shot her husband.”

It was a strange way of saying that she was the shooter, but he made his point. It made me feel justified in hating Mrs. Davidoff.

“That’s insane,” she said. “I was in the back room when he was killed.”

“You saw the surveillance video,” Dozier said. “He was shot by a broad-shouldered man who is at least a foot taller than she is.”

“That doesn’t mean a thing,” Monk said.

He accidentally kicked the coffee table in his hopping frenzy and knocked over a six-hundred-dollar vase. I caught the vase before it could hit the floor and he managed to shake the Styrofoam off his leg.

Monk straightened himself, tugged on his sleeves and faced us. I knew what was coming. He was going to deliver his account of how the murder had actually occurred.

It was a necessary ritual for him.

He didn’t do it to show off or to humiliate anyone. He did it for himself.

It was the one moment when he could feel that he’d set everything right and brought order to the universe. It was the only time he was truly free of his anxieties and his sorrows. It made him whole, at least for a moment or two.

But then he’d notice something out of place, or realize he was vulnerable to a germ, or remember that he hadn’t solved his wife’s murder, and all his anxieties would come back in full force. And once again, he’d be struggling to restore order in a world that defied it.

“Here’s what happened,” Monk said.

He explained that Mrs. Davidoff waited in the back room until the construction workers started using their jackhammers. Then she strapped down her breasts with Ace bandages, put on a set of shoulder pads and slipped her feet into shoes with lifts. This hid her femininity, gave her broad shoulders and added height. She covered her hair with a ski mask and wore a turtleneck sweater to cover her throat. Otherwise her Adam’s apple would have been a telltale giveaway of her sex. She left the store through the alley, pulled down the ski mask over her face when she came in the front door and shot her husband. She ran outside again, returned to the back room, removed her disguise and then came out to wail for the camera.

Dozier stared at Monk once he finished his summation. “That is the most preposterous story I’ve ever heard,” Dozier said.

“That was nothing,” Sharona said. “Adrian once accused a guy of murder who was in a coma at the time of the killing.”

“And people still take him seriously?” Dozier said.

“He was right,” Sharona said.

“He was?” Dozier said.

“It’s irrelevant,” Mrs. Davidoff said. “I find his accusations insensitive, outrageous and thoroughly despicable.”

“Murderers usually do,” I said.

“You’re out of line,” Dozier said to me and then turned to Monk. “And so are you. There isn’t a shred of evidence to back up what you said.”

“There’s that.” Monk pointed to the Styrofoam on Mrs. Davidoff’s leg.

“That?” Dozier said.

“This?” Mrs. Davidoff said.

“The Styrofoam is charged with static electricity. It’s sticking to everyone and everything that passes through the back room,” Monk said. “You should have watched the security camera video before the police got here.”

“I never want to see it,” Mrs. Davidoff said.

“That was your big mistake. If you’d watched it, you would have noticed a piece of Styrofoam sticking to the shooter’s sweater. That meant that the killer came from the back room. And you were the only one back there. So the video you thought would exonerate you as a suspect is practically a confession.”

“I’ve walked back and forth to the showroom all day,” she said. “I probably tracked the Styrofoam out with me before, just like I have now, and that’s how it stuck to the monster that shot my husband.”

“Makes sense to me,” Dozier said to Monk. “It’s what we in the