Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse (17 page)

“According to the weather report, we know it didn’t stop raining until nine thirty, so he must have been wearing his overcoat when he slipped out of the hotel to see Esther,” Monk said. “She probably asked him to take it off and hang it up when he came in. Then they talked for a minute or two.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because of where her body was found. She was sitting on the far corner of the coach, facing the chair where he sat,” Monk said. “She said or did something that provoked him. He flew out of the chair and smothered her with the pillow. After that, all that was on Breen’s mind was covering up the crime, staging the fire, and getting out of that house as fast as possible. It wasn’t raining when he left, so he probably didn’t realize he’d forgotten his overcoat until he was halfway back to the hotel.”

Which would have put him right smack in front of the empty fire station.

“Breen couldn’t risk the possibility that any part of his coat might survive the fire,” Monk said. “If it was like the rest of his wardrobe, it was handmade and had monogrammed buttons. It would point right back to him. He had to go back and get it.”

I bet it was while Breen was standing in front of the fire station, staring in panic at the empty garage, that he came up with the bright idea of how to save himself. When he ran in to get the gear, I’m sure the last thing he expected was that some barking, snarling dog would come charging at him. Wasn’t it enough that he left his coat behind? Did fate have to add a dog to his misery, too?

But Breen survived unscathed, and things went much smoother after that. He slipped into the burning house in his firefighting gear unnoticed by the other firemen, snatched his overcoat, and got out again. He returned the firefighting gear to the station without being seen and without having to fight off any more ferocious animals.

He must have thought the worst was over. And then he got mugged.

Unbelievable. His luck was so bad, I might have felt sorry for him if he hadn’t killed a woman and a dog and if he weren’t such a pompous jerk. Despite all his incredible misfortune, he made it back to the party without being missed. I’m sure he went straight to the bar and knocked back a few. I would have.

It was hardly the perfect murder, but I doubt anybody would ever have known what he did if it weren’t for a twelve-year-old kid hiring a detective to find out who killed a dog.

But I was getting ahead of myself. Breen wasn’t caught yet. We didn’t have enough evidence. We didn’t have the coat.

“So assuming he got his overcoat back,” I said, “what did he do with it?”

“We have to assume the overcoat was burned or damaged by the smoke and that he ditched it somewhere between Esther’s house and the hotel.”

“What about Lizzie Draper’s house?”

Monk shook his head. “Too risky. What if she stumbled on the overcoat before he had a chance to get rid of it? He wouldn’t want her, or anybody else, to be able to connect him to the fire. He ditched it somewhere else, somewhere between the fire station and the hotel.”

Then I knew where we should start looking.

I had an ulterior motive for wanting to start at the fire station. For one thing, I didn’t want to pay for parking at the Excelsior. For another, I wanted an excuse to drop by and see if Joe was okay.

But when we got to the station, it was empty. They were out responding to a call.

“I’m sure he’s okay,” Monk said. We were standing outside the firehouse.

“Who?”

“Firefighter Joe. That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”

“No, we’re here to retrace Breen’s steps and look for places where he might have ditched the overcoat.”

“That would be the hard way,” Monk said. “I called Disher before we left the house and asked him to see if the mugger remembers whether Breen was carrying an overcoat or not.”

“Then we didn’t have to come all the way down here,” I said. “We could have waited at home to hear from Disher.”

Monk nodded. “But you wanted to check on Firefighter Joe ever since you read about the warehouse fire in the paper this morning.”

“How did you know?”

“You never read past that article,” Monk said. “And the whole time we were talking, you kept looking furtively at the phone, debating with yourself whether it was still too early to call.”

Sometimes I forget that Monk is a detective. I also forget that when he’s not being the single most irritating person on the planet, he can be a very sweet man.

“Thank you,” I said.

My cell phone rang. It was Disher.

“We had to make a deal with Marlon Tolliver to get Monk the information he wanted,” he said.

“Who is Marlon Tolliver?”

“Your mugger. He got himself a pretty good public defender. We had to agree to drop the assault-with-a-deadly-weapon charge against him in return for his testimony about his dealings with Lucas Breen.”

“So he gets away with putting a knife to my throat?”

“To get him to talk, we had to give him something, and that was all we had,” Disher said. “It was the best we could do without you here crushing his
cojones
.”

“I’ll be glad to come down and do it,” I said.

“The deal is done, and here’s what he told us,” Disher said. “Breen was holding his overcoat when Tolliver mugged him.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Could you do me a favor?”

“Of course; that’s why I’m here, to do all of Monk’s legwork for him.”

“This is a favor for me,” I said.

“You want me to knee Tolliver in the
cojones
for you?”

“There was a warehouse fire last night and some firefighters were hurt. Is there some way you could find out if one of them was Joe Cochran?”

“No problem,” Disher said. “I’ll call you back as soon as I know something.”

I thanked Disher and told Monk the news. “Breen still had the coat when he was in the alley outside the hotel.”

“Then that’s where he ditched it,” Monk said. “Somewhere in the alley.”

We walked to the hotel. It was faster than finding another parking spot and cheaper, too. We passed a few homeless people who, after seeing us the other day, knew better than to ask Monk for a handout. I was glad we didn’t run into the guy who had flipped me off.

The streets were crowded with people, but I still approached the alley cautiously, just in case there was another mugger hiding in the darkness. Monk was also being cautious, only for different reasons. He was trying very hard not to step in anything dirty, which isn’t easy in a filthy, smelly alley.

We walked slowly, looking for places where Breen might have disposed of the overcoat. It soon became obvious to both of us that there was really only one place he could have stashed it out of sight—in one of the trash bins near the hotel service exit.

Without saying anything to Monk first, I climbed up on one of the Dumpsters. Monk freaked out.

“Step away from the Dumpster,” Monk said. “Very slowly.”

I stayed where I was. “It’s a Dumpster, Mr. Monk. Not a bomb.”

“Don’t be a hero, Natalie. Leave it for the professionals.”

“I’m not an expert in police procedure, but I don’t think Captain Stottlemeyer is going to be able to get a forensics team down here to search this Dumpster based only on your hunch.”

“I’m not talking about the crime-scene investigators; they aren’t equipped to handle a situation like this,” Monk said. “This requires professionals who deal with garbage every day.”

“You want me to call a garbage man?”

“That’s a pejorative and sexist term. They really prefer ‘sanitation technician.’ ”

“How do you know?”

“I talk to them,” Monk said.

“You do? Why?”

“They’re people, too, you know.”

“Who hang around with garbage,” I said. “I’d think you’d want to be as far away from them as possible when they show up.”

“I take precautions,” Monk said. “Gloves, surgical mask, goggles. But I have to be there to supervise.”

“You supervise your trash collection? Why?”

“I have special needs.”

“Believe me, I know, but what does that have to do with your trash?”

“I have to make sure my trash isn’t being mixed with the other trash,” Monk said.

“Why? What terrible thing could possibly happen?”

“It could get dirty.”

“It’s trash, Mr. Monk. It’s all dirty, even yours.”

“No, mine is clean dirty,” Monk said.

“Clean dirty,” I said. “What is that?”

“For one thing, each of my discarded items is placed in an individual airtight bag before being put in the mother bag.”

“So it won’t get the other trash in the ‘mother bag’ dirty.”

“Not everyone is as conscientious as I am,” Monk said. “It’s the sad truth.”

“But your bags get tossed in the back of the truck with everybody else’s trash anyway.”

Monk shook his head. “My bags ride up front with the drivers.”

“It doesn’t make a lot of difference in the end,” I said. “It still goes to the dump.”

“My garbage goes in zone nine.”

“Your trash has its own zone?”

“All the really clean trash goes there.”

I groaned, handed him my purse, and climbed up the rest of the way onto the trash bin.

“Wait, wait,” Monk protested. “You’re exposing yourself.”

I stopped. “Are my pants riding down on my butt?”

“Hell, no,” Monk said.

“Then what am I exposing?”

“You’re exposing your body to deadly toxins,” Monk said. “You haven’t had your shots. You aren’t wearing gloves. You aren’t using a respirator. It’s suicidal.”

“Mr. Monk, I’m only going to lift the lid,” I said.

“And God only knows what you’ll release into the atmosphere,” Monk said. “If you’re not going to think about yourself, think of humanity, think of your daughter, but most of all, think of me.”

I lifted the lid. Monk screamed and leaped away as if he expected the Dumpster to explode, spraying its shrapnel of decaying food, broken glass, old shoes, and soiled diapers all over him. It didn’t.

I looked inside. The bin was nearly empty, with only a few bulging “mother bags” of trash at the bottom. I knew that couldn’t have been all the garbage the hotel had tossed since Friday. I slid along to the end of the bin and climbed over to the next one. I lifted the lid. It was empty. So was the next one.

If the overcoat had been in one of the bins, it was gone now, along with any hope we had of proving Lucas Breen was guilty of murder.

I looked over my shoulder for Monk, but he wasn’t behind me anymore. He was standing on the street twenty yards away, holding a handkerchief over his nose and mouth.

I had to yell the bad news to him.

“We’re too late,” I said.

 

 

 

 

It took me thirty minutes to convince Monk it wasn’t necessary for him to call a hazardous materials emergency response team to come and decontaminate me, the alley, and the rest of the block.

But to do that, I had to assure him I was clean, which meant I had to wipe my hands and face with Wet Ones about fifty times, and use the hotel restroom to brush my teeth, wash out my eyes with Visine, and clean my sinuses with nose spray.

Even then, as we drove to the city dump, Monk sat as far away from me in the car as he could without riding outside on the luggage rack.

All of the city’s nonrecyclable garbage is taken to the San Francisco Solid Waste Transfer Center, which is a fancy way of saying “a garbage dump with a roof over it.” The trash is collected there until it can be transported by bigger trucks to the Altamont Landfill in Livermore, about sixty miles east of San Francisco.

The transfer center is an enormous hangar-like building next door to Candlestick Park, which these days is called Monster Park, and not because it’s an amusement park full of dinosaurs. It’s also not named after the killer winds that swoop in off the bay—the winds that blew Giants pitcher Stu Miller off the mound during the 1961 All-star game and that tossed the entire batting cage into center field during a New York Mets practice. Nor is the stadium named for the fact that it’s upwind from an enclosed garbage dump.

It’s named for Monster Cable, some company that makes computer cables and paid the city millions of dollars for the right to plaster their name on the stadium. I think the city should have also let the cable company put their name on the transfer station at no charge. They could’ve called it “Monster Dump,” since that’s what it smelled like and since the name is a lot catchier than “San Francisco Solid Waste Transfer Center.”

It’s a testament to Monk’s determination to get Breen that we were there at all. You know what his reaction was when I merely lifted the lid of a trash bin, and now here he was at the heart of darkness itself—the city dump.