Mr. Monk Goes to Hawaii by Goldberg, Lee (best large ebook reader .txt) 📗

officers at the crime scene. It didn’t take a psychic to presume a murder has taken place when you saw a morgue wagon and police cars parked on the street.

“There are things she wants me to share with Monk,” Swift said.

He was putting me in an awkward predicament, forcing me to weigh my own selfish desires against my ethical duties as Monk’s assistant.

It was bad enough that Monk had found a murder to solve, but he was so desperate to avoid enjoying Hawaii that he was ready to launch an investigation into how his minibar was stocked.

Now here was Dylan Swift, a guy who supposedly talked to dead people, saying he had a collect call from the other side from the victim of the murder Monk was investigating.

If I brought Swift to him now, Monk would dedicate whatever time we weren’t spending on the hoicide investigation to exposing the celebrity medium as a fraud. In fact, Monk was ready to do it when we stumbled on the filming of Swift’s TV show the day before, an incident I hoped he was too drugged-up at the time to remember.

But that would change if Swift showed up claiming to speak for Helen Gruber. And I could kiss goodbye any hope of enjoying one moment of my vacation.

So I rationalized that part of my job as Adrian Monk’s assistant was to be his gatekeeper and keep people from wasting his time. If Swift actually had something useful to contribute, I would bring him to Monk right away. But if he didn’t, I’d spare Monk an unnecessary distraction and, in doing so, buy myself a little vacation time in paradise. No harm done.

I managed to convince myself I wasn’t being selfish at all. I was being extraordinarily considerate and helpful.

“Share them with me,” I said. “And I will pass them along to Mr. Monk.”

He stared at me for a long moment, trying to come to a decision. That was fine with me; it gave me a chance to enjoy some more of my Lava Flow. Finally he sighed and began speaking.

“She doesn’t know who killed her,” Swift said. “But she’s flooded my mind with images and sensations. The smell of lilac. The light, sweet taste of liliko’i pie. I see Captain Ahab hiding in the shadows. I sense love taking flight. I feel barbed wire against flesh. I see a glimpse of a lumberjack standing by a pine tree holding a porcelain doll. You’re not writing any of this down.”

“I have a good memory,” I said. “Did she give you anything more concrete than that?”

“She’s not alone,” he said.

“You mean she’s not the first victim?”

“All I know is that there are other spirits who wanted to communicate with me about this. It didn’t make a lot of sense to me then and it doesn’t now. But I’m sure it will become clear as time goes on.”

“The spirits said they’d call back?”

He rose from his stool and gave me a smile, this one full of amusement. Swift had quite a repertoire of smiles.

“Spirits this disturbed never stay quiet. They’ll persist until their message is heard.”

I was right not to take Swift to see Monk. Not only was none of his gibberish the least bit helpful, but he was obviously an attention-seeking fraud, trying to horn in on whatever publicity might arise from the murder investigation.

Swift started to walk away, then he stopped and looked over his shoulder at me.

“Mitch still likes that bikini on you,” Swift said, nodding with approval. “I can see why.”

I felt a shiver, as if Mitch himself had brushed his lips against the back of my neck.

10

Mr. Monk Rents a Car

I got a towel, wrapped it around my waist, and went to the lobby, Dylan Swift and his messages from beyond still very much on my mind.

I was on my way to the elevators when I saw Monk at one of the kiosks in the wide shopping arcade. The stand was made to look like a beach hut and was devoted to island jewelry. Monk was methodically sorting through the display of shark-tooth necklaces, to the obvious displeasure of the middle-aged Hawaiian proprietress behind the counter.

“Shopping, Mr. Monk?” I said as I approached.

Monk turned around, saw me in my bikini top, and looked right over my head. “I don’t shop.”

“Then what are you doing?”

“Having fun. That’s what a vacation is for, isn’t it?”

“It’s okay if you look at me.”

“I don’t think so.” He shifted his gaze back to the necklaces, which he was rearranging on a little carousel necklace tree. Each necklace had a single white shark tooth dangling from it.

“We’re at the beach. All the women here are wearing swimsuits, tank tops, or halters,” I said. “Look around and you’ll see.”

“I’d rather not.”

“They’re breasts, Mr. Monk, not wild animals.”

“That’s how they behave.”

I sighed, giving up. “So if you’re not shopping, what are you doing?”

“I’m arranging the teeth by type of shark and where they belong in the jaw.”

“You call that fun?”

The proprietress groaned in misery.

Monk nodded enthusiastically, continuing to sort the necklaces. “It’s a blast. There are about thirty-three kinds of sharks in Hawaii, and some have as many as thirteen rows of teeth. An average shark sheds eighteen hundred teeth a year, fifty thousand in a lifetime. There are all kinds of shark teeth on the necklaces here, hundreds of them, in no order whatsoever.”

“So it’s like a giant, enormously complex jigsaw puzzle.”

“You can’t do this at home. Only in Hawaii,” Monk said. “I was lucky there wasn’t a line when I got here.”

“Or anybody since,” the proprietress muttered.

“You can actually tell the difference between one shark tooth and another?” I asked.

Monk snorted derisively. “Of course. Who can’t?”

“How long have you been here?”

“I’ve lost track of time in all the excitement.”

“Three hours,” the proprietress said. It was obvious by the stony expression on her unhappy face that she’d felt every single second of those hours pass by.

“I haven’t had this much fun since those summers when my brother