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

the mechanic to swap for my fixed-up Jeep Cherokee. On the way, Monk and I discussed the case.

Although Father Bowen didn’t know the name of the woman Ronald Webster hit with his car, I called Disher and told him what we knew. He said it wouldn’t take long for him to identify and locate the woman. Our tax dollars at work.

“Do you think she lured Webster out to the beach and fed him to her alligator?” I asked Monk after the call.

“She certainly has a strong motive,” Monk said.

“But why wait until now to kill him? And why take him to a nude beach? And why use an alligator as a murder weapon?”

“We’ll have to ask her,” Monk said.

“There are so many simpler ways to kill someone,” I said.

“That’s true,” Monk said. “She could have hit him over the head with a lamp. And then where would we be?”

“Don’t be too hard on yourself, Mr. Monk.”

The truth was, I was glad to hear him beating himself up over the Ellen Cole case. It meant he was still thinking about it. I was thinking about Ronald Webster.

“It must be a pretty big alligator,” I said.

“It must be,” he said.

“You’d think people would notice if she had a pet like that.”

“You’d think so,” he said.

“What do you feed a pet alligator?” I asked.

Monk shrugged. “Hit-and-run drivers, I suppose.”

We picked up my car from Ned, my mechanic. Monk made a point of standing far away from me when I went to the cashier to pay the bill for the repairs. I think Monk was afraid I might hit him up for a loan. He was a wise man. What I really needed were smelling salts.

I left the cashier wondering if I could get away with robbing a bank. I found Monk and the mechanic standing by my car.

“Did you take care of the tick?” Monk asked Ned.

“She didn’t say anything about a tick,” he said.

“You didn’t?” Monk said to me.

“I never heard a tick,” I said.

“Oh, there’s a tick,” Monk said. “A very persistent tick.”

“Now this is a man who knows cars,” Ned said. “Very few people realize that a tick can actually be the death rattle of the suspension bushings.”

“It’s not a rattle. It’s a tick,” Monk said. “Like this: tick, tick, tick.”

“I can’t afford to fix one tick,” I said, “much less three. We’re taking my car and going now.”

“What about the suspension bushings?” Ned asked.

“I’ll be sure to bring the car in right after I win the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes.”

“But it’s getting worse,” Monk said. “Before the trip to Los Angeles, the tick was occurring every three seconds. Now it’s every two and a half. I timed it with my stopwatch.”

“Maybe that’s what you heard ticking,” I said.

We got in the car and left. The steering was fixed and the car was running fine as far as I was concerned. Monk complained about the tick, which I couldn’t hear. I think it was only audible to Monk and dogs. But after a few minutes, he stopped whining about that so he could complain instead about my filthy car, specifically the grains of sand in the carpet, which, if you heard him describe it, made it seem like his feet were resting on a pile of gravel.

“Forgive me,” I said. “I haven’t had a chance to go to the car wash. Things have been a bit hectic lately.”

“Things aren’t hectic now,” Monk said.

A trip to the car wash with Monk was, at best, a three-hour event and I didn’t see how we could spare that much time in the middle of two homicide investigations.

“You’re investigating two murders,” I said.

“We’re in a lull,” Monk said.

“We don’t have to be in a lull,” I said. “You could think of something to ask somebody.”

“I did,” Monk said. “I thought of asking you to wash your car.”

My cell phone rang. It was Disher. He had the name and address of the woman Ronald Webster hit with his car. Her name was Paula Dalmas and we could find her in Walnut Creek.

“The lull is over,” I said.

“What a waste of a good lull,” he said.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Mr. Monk Goes to the Orthodontist

Walnut Creek was once a quaint little town on the banks of a tiny creek that wound through the walnut groves under the shadow of Mount Diablo. In the sixties and seventies, the groves were mowed down and the creek diverted to make room for thousands of tract-home communities with names like Walnut Acres, Walnut Grove and Walnut Walk.

By the new millennium, downtown Walnut Creek had been demolished and rebuilt so that it had become a Disneyesque shopping center designed to evoke memories of small-town America instead of actually being small-town America.

Dr. Paula Dalmas had an orthodontics practice in a medical complex downtown that perfectly reflected the ethos of the new Walnut Creek. Her practice was in a collection of offices that looked like a shopping center and had a tract-home-community name: Doctors’ Park. The only thing missing was a Panda Express, though the panda in the logo would have needed a stethoscope around its neck to fit in.

Dr. Dalmas was open one Saturday a month for patients, most of whom were children and teenagers, who couldn’t make a regular weekday appointment, probably because there wasn’t a parent around to drive them.

I could appreciate that. I wished my daughter’s orthodontist had weekend hours. I was thinking that it might even be worth schlepping Julie out to Walnut Creek to take advantage of Saturday appointments.

Given Monk’s fear of dentists, I thought I was going to have a hard time getting him into Dr. Dalmas’ office. But much to my surprise, he didn’t seem at all reluctant. He