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

“It is?” she said.

“Is the alarm activated now?” Monk asked.

Dozier nodded.

“Open the door but don’t type in the code,” Monk said. “Let me do it.”

“Sure.” Dozier unlocked the door and opened it, immediately triggering the alarm.

The loud, electronic wail sounded like a red alert on the Starship Enterprise.

Yeah, I know that’s my second comparison to Star Trek, but so much of what was on that show is now part of our daily lives. Take a look at your flip phone or all the people walking around with those Bluetooth things in their ears like Lieutenant Uhura and tell me I’m wrong.

Monk stepped in and scrutinized the keypad. “The code is 1212333.”

I was stunned. “How did you know?”

“The one, two and three on the keypad are dirtier than the rest,” Monk said, stepping into the living room, holding his hands out in front of him like a director framing a shot.

The house was only about fourteen hundred square feet and very cozy, with lots of fluffy pillows on the furniture and plenty of paintings, mostly landscapes, on the walls.

“But how did you know the order of the numbers?” I said. “There must be thousands of possible combinations.”

“Monk figured it out the same way Trevor did,” Dozier said and punched in the code. The tones formed a familiar tune, “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” The alarm went off. “Trevor must have heard her deactivate the alarm one of the times when he was here gardening.”

“Over the sound of the mowers, the blowers and the ringing alarm?” Sharona said.

Monk seemed to be swaying to a rhythm only he was hearing as he moved through the living room. It was his observational dance, his method of picking up the details in the room and feeling the karmic traces of what had occurred.

“Maybe he wasn’t mowing or blowing,” Dozier said. “Maybe he was standing here, talking to her at the time.”

“That would make her awfully stupid,” Sharona said.

“That’s why she’s dead,” Dozier said.

I was still impressed that Monk figured out the security code thing and was surprised that nobody else was, especially Dozier.

“Aren’t you amazed that Monk guessed the security code?” I asked him.

“Not really,” Dozier said. “Ian Ludlow figured it out, too.”

“Ian Ludlow the author?” Sharona said, clearly surprised. “He was here?”

“Ludlow has helped me out on some tricky cases. He’s like our Adrian Monk,” Dozier said, then lowered his voice to a whisper. “Only sane.”

I knew who Ludlow was. It was impossible not to. You couldn’t step on an airplane without seeing one of his Detective Marshak novels in just about everybody’s hands. It made me wonder if there was some FAA regulation requiring airline passengers to read Ludlow’s books.

Ludlow must have had elves cranking out his books for him because there seemed to be a new title every month in the grocery store checkout line, in the place of honor and prestige, right next to the National Enquirer and the Star.

Lieutenant Disher, who took a UC Berkeley extension class from Ludlow, once referred to the author as the “Tolstoy of the Mean Streets.”

I glanced at Monk, who was still examining everything, pausing to align pillows by size, straighten crooked pictures or alphabetize a bookshelf. It was his process and I didn’t dare intrude.

“I’ve been Ludlow’s technical adviser on his last couple of books, which were inspired by some of my cases,” Dozier said. “He creates the excitement. I provide the gripping realism.”

“So I guess in Ludlow’s next book Detective Marshak’s fly will be open the whole time,” Sharona said. “And he’ll send the killer’s murder weapon to Wisconsin.”

“What was Ludlow doing here?” I asked quickly, hoping to distract Dozier from gunning Sharona down for that remark.

“He was intrigued by the case,” Dozier said. “All we had at the time was a UCLA professor of gender studies found dead in her home. We looked at her lover and her students but we didn’t have any suspects. Ludlow helped us develop the leads that led us to her husband.”

Although Dozier was answering my question, he deliveredthose last two words directly at Sharona as if they were physical blows.

And that was exactly how she took them, but she probably deserved it for her crack about his technical advice.

“Was this where you found the body?” Monk asked from afar.

I’d been so caught up in my conversation with Dozier that I’d completely lost track of Monk. He’d wandered down the hall into the master bedroom.

There was a big four-poster bed in the center of the room that was covered with pillows and a fluffy, frilly comforter. I wanted to climb into that bed with a good book and never get out.

There were matching nightstands on either side of the bed. One had a lamp on it; the other didn’t. Now I knew where the murder weapon came from.

Before I met Monk, I never noticed details like that. Then again, before I met Monk, I never imagined anybody ran their doorknobs through the dishwasher every week.

The bed faced a flat-screen TV mounted on the wall above a waist-high entertainment center.

On one side of the room was a set of French doors that opened out onto a backyard patio. On the other was a wall lined with a dresser and vanity.

Monk stood by Ellen Cole’s dresser, studying the blood-stained carpet at his feet.

“We found her laying right there,” Dozier said. “The back of her head was a bloody mess.”

“Could you show me exactly what her position was on the floor?” Monk said.

Dozier hiked up his pants and curled up on the floor, facing the dresser, careful not to actually lay his head on the bloodstain.

Monk crouched beside Dozier and studied the detective’s position. Then he got up. He held his hands out