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

The pillows on her couch were made from a floral fabric. She had fresh flowers in vases and pictures of her husband and young son. Her degrees were framed on the wall, along with more pictures of her family. It was a very welcoming, female space. She sat down at her desk, and we took the two matching guest chairs in front of her.

“You don’t look like IRS agents,” she said. “Are you detectives?”

“He is,” I said. “He’s Adrian Monk. I’m his assistant, Natalie Teeger.”

“Who are you working for?” she asked.

“I’m a consultant with the San Francisco police department, ” Monk said. “I’m helping them investigate Ronald Webster’s murder.”

She thought about that for a moment. “He was the hit-and-run driver.”

Monk nodded. “How did you know?”

“I always figured it was guilt money,” she said. “I could only think of one person in my life who might have that much guilt.”

“When did the money start coming?” I asked.

“I can’t remember exactly, maybe a year or two after he hit me,” she said. “I was in and out of the hospital a lot during that time. I’ve lost track of all the surgeries it took to put me back together. They did an okay job.”

“You look great,” Monk said.

I glanced at him. I couldn’t remember ever hearing him compliment a woman on her appearance. He’d certainly never complimented me.

“You can’t see my scars,” she said. “I hide them.”

“Everybody has scars and everybody hides them,” he said. “You do it better than most.”

“I’m not being metaphorical,” she said. “These scars are real.”

“So are the other ones,” he said.

“One day, when I was still living in Oakland, a fat envelope with my name handwritten on it arrived in the mail,” she said. “There was no return address, just a San Rafael postmark.”

“How much money was in it?” I asked.

“A couple hundred dollars,” she said. “Envelopes came every month or so after that, always with a different post-mark from somewhere in the Bay Area.”

“He didn’t want to be traced,” Monk said.

“A few years after I was hurt, I left Oakland to go to school in San Diego. Not a single envelope showed up at my old address after I left,” she said. “But there was one waiting for me in San Diego when I arrived. And the envelopes have continued to arrive everywhere that I’ve lived since then.”

“So he was watching you,” I said. “That must have creeped you out.”

“It did,” she said.

“But you never went to the police,” Monk said.

“I couldn’t be sure the money was from him,” she said.

“Besides,” I said, “you were spending it.”

Her eyes flashed with anger. “There’s no amount of money that could compensate me for what I lost. My face had to be reconstructed. My hips were shattered and he robbed me of my ability to have children. We had to adopt. So tell me, how could I spend a dime of his money? The thought of doing it made me sick.”

“Then what did you do with all the cash?” I asked.

“After a while, I didn’t even bother opening the envelopes anymore. I just tossed them all in a box as they came in,” she said. “I still have every single one of them.”

“What are you saving them for?” Monk asked.

She shrugged. “Today.”

“What happens today?” I asked.

She shrugged again. “Where did he live?”

“San Francisco,” I said. “He was a shoe salesman who went to mass every morning.”

“In a way, it’s good to know he was doing more than sending me cash to alleviate his guilty conscience,” Dr. Dalmas said. “Did he have a family?”

“From what we can tell, he lived an intentionally solitary and dull life,” Monk said. “He never stopped being afraid that he would be caught.”

“Then he suffered, too,” she said.

“I suppose he did,” Monk said. “But someone wanted him to suffer more. He was murdered in a particularly brutal way.”

“How?” she asked.

“He was attacked by an alligator,” Monk said.

She stared at Monk. “Are you sure?”

“I could tell from the bite,” Monk said.

“Uniform dentition,” Dr. Dalmas said.

“Uniform dentition,” Monk said. “It’s a thing of beauty.”

She cocked her head and regarded Monk in a new light. “Yes, I suppose it is.”

“Where were you Thursday night?” I asked.

“Was that when he was killed?” she replied.

“That’s the best guess,” I said.

“You think I fed him to an alligator?” she said.

“You have the best motive,” I said.

“I don’t have an alligator,” she said. “And even if I did, I didn’t know who he was or where he was. But I’ve seen him.”

“When?” Monk asked. “Where?”

“In a department store once, then a few years later, outside a movie theater,” she said. “Another time I saw him in the bleachers at an Oakland A’s game that my husband dragged me to.”

“And you still didn’t call the police?” I said.

“He was just a face staring at me in a crowd,” she said. “It wasn’t actually his face that I recognized. It was his eyes. I will never forget his eyes. It always happened so fast. I’d blink or turn away or someone would walk in front of me and then he’d be gone. Afterward, I could never be sure that I hadn’t hallucinated it.”

“But you knew that you hadn’t,” Monk said.

She nodded. “I knew.”

“You still haven’t told us where you were Thursday night,” I said.

“My husband took my son down to San Diego this week to visit his grandmother,” she said. “I enjoyed a nice long bath and a Nora Roberts novel.”

“So you don’t have an alibi,” I said.

“I suppose I don’t,” she said. “What was the church he went to?”

“Mission Dolores,” I said.

“Maybe I’ll give them the money,” she said. “Will that