“You’re a smart lady,” he said. “And pretty, too. Are we still on for tomorrow night?”
“I am if you are,” I said, “And if you don’t mind being with someone who has spent the day in thirty tons of garbage.”
“Stop,” Joe said. “You’re getting me all excited.”
I laughed and so did he. It had been a long time since I’d met a man who made me laugh with him instead of at him. Even so, I felt a tickle of anxiety in my chest as I flashed on the image of him charging into a fire.
It’s just another day at the office.
We agreed to meet at my house the next night for our date, and then we said our good-byes.
I parked the Jeep in the driveway. Monk and I got out and saw Mrs. Throphamner on the other side of my low fence. She was in her backyard, kneeling on a rubber pad in the wet mud, toiling over her patch of vibrant roses. They were blooming, and the fragrance was overwhelming.
“Your roses are beautiful,” I told her.
“It’s hard work, but it’s worth it,” she said, holding a little shovel in her hand.
“They smell wonderful.”
“Those are the Bourbons,” she said and pointed her shovel at the large, raspberry-purple flowers. “The Madame Isaac Pereire variety. They’re the most fragrant rose there is.”
I opened up the trunk, we got out the groceries we bought on the way home, and we carried them into the house.
“Do roses bloom all year?” Monk asked me.
“They do in her yard,” I said. “Mrs. Throphamner constantly switches them out since she started her garden a few months ago. She likes lots of color all the time.”
While I unpacked the groceries, Monk got the water boiling and insisted on making dinner for the three of us. I didn’t argue. It’s not often I get a night off, and besides, I knew he wasn’t going to leave a mess for me to clean up.
When Julie got home, I helped her with her homework at the kitchen table while Monk prepared what he called his “famous” spaghetti and meatballs. Pretty soon, though, Julie and I were too captivated by Monk’s unusual preparations to pay any attention to textbooks.
The sauce was out of a jar from Chef Boyardee (“Why bother competing with the master?” Monk said), but he made his meatballs by hand (gloved, of course, as if performing surgery), carefully measuring and weighing them to ensure that they were perfectly round and identical.
He boiled the spaghetti noodles, poured them into a strainer, and then selected individual noodles, laying them out on our plates to make sure they were equal in length and that we had exactly forty-six noodles apiece.
When we sat down to dinner, Monk served us our spaghetti on three separate plates: one for the noodles, one for the sauce, and one for our four meatballs each. We barely had room on the table for all the plates.
“Aren’t the noodles, sauce, and meatballs supposed to be mixed all together?” Julie asked.
Monk laughed and shook his head at me. “Kids—aren’t they precious?”
And then he took a noodle on his fork, wound it around the prongs, stabbed a meatball, then dipped it all in the sauce and put it in his mouth.
“Mmmm,” Monk said. “That’s cooking.”
After dinner, we each relaxed in our own way. Julie went to the living room to watch TV. I sat at the kitchen table, sipping a glass of wine and leafing through an issue of
Vanity Fair
. And Monk did the dishes.
I like reading
Vanity Fair
, but I’m thinking of canceling my subscription anyway. There are fifty pages of ads before you even get to the table of contents, it sheds an endless number of subscription postcards all over the house, and the magazine smells like a cheap hooker. Not that I’ve ever smelled a hooker, cheap or otherwise, but I imagine they’re drenched in perfume.
“The night is young,” Monk said. “Let’s party.”
I was sure I’d misunderstood him, dazed as I was by the wine and perfume.
“Did you just say you wanted to party?”
“Call Mrs. Throphamner; ask her to come over and watch Julie.” Monk pulled off his apron and tossed it on the counter in a show of devil-may-care abandon. “We’re going clubbing. I mean that in the party sense, not the baby-seals sense.”
I set down my magazine. I couldn’t imagine why Monk would want to go somewhere filled with loud music and writhing people pressing their sweaty bodies against one another.
“You want to go dancing?”
“I want to go to Flaxx and talk to Lizzie Draper, Breen’s mistress,” Monk said.
“You sure you don’t just want another look at her enormous buttons?”
“I think I can turn her,” Monk said.
“You really believe Lizzie is going to help us get her super-rich lover?” I said.
“It’s worth a try,” Monk said.
I knew what was really going on, and I told him so. “You’re desperate to try anything that could help you avoid rummaging through mountains of trash tomorrow.”
Monk gave me a look. “Hell, yes.”
The interior of Flaxx was industrial chic—lots of exposed beams, air ducts, and water pipes against sheets of brushed aluminum, corrugated metal, and scored steel. The spinning, multicolored lights in the ceiling reflected wildly off the silver surfaces, creating a kind of retro psychedelic effect.
Lots of twentysomething men and women, trying their best to look disaffected and cool, lounged on deeply cushioned, brightly colored divans the size of king-size beds. They’d come here straight from their offices and cubicles, dressed for success but with their garments loosened to show off the cleavage, piercings, or tattoos that proved they were still bad boys and girls. They came to escape one grind by indulging in another; that much was clear by the way some of them danced and made energetic use of the divans.
Monk tried to avert his gaze from the grinders and the gropers, but it wasn’t easy. If he looked away from the dance floor, he saw the divans. If he looked away from the divans, he saw the flat-screen monitors on the walls, which showed music videos that featured a lot of coy, soft-core, girl-girl action. I didn’t find it very shocking. Lesbian sexuality has become a very stylish and hip marketing tool to sell everything from lingerie to underarm deodorant. In the process, it has lost its shock value and edgy eroticism. Well, at least to me. Certainly not to Monk.
The music was loud and percussive and pummeled my body and ears. I liked it and found myself swaying instinctively with the rhythm, but Monk winced as if each beat were a beating.
“This is a bad, bad place,” Monk said.
“It seems pretty tame to me,” I said.
“Oh, yeah? Take a look at that.” He motioned to a bowl in the middle of one of the tables.
“What?”
“Mixed nuts,” he said gravely, implying all manner of danger.
“So?”
“Cashews, walnuts, peanuts, almonds, all in one bowl. It’s a crime against nature.”
“We can call the Sierra Club on our way out.”
“That’s bad enough, but to put them out in a bowl for people to share . . .” He shivered. “Think how many hands have been in that bowl,
strange
hands that have been”—that’s when his gaze fell on one of the couples on a divan—“God knows where.”
Monk quickly looked away from that shocking sight and back to the bowl. He gasped and staggered back.
“What?” I said.
He couldn’t bring himself to gaze again at whatever had offended him. All he could do was jerk his head in the general direction of the table.
“The bowl,” he said, whispering as if it might hear him and take offense.
“I know, mixed nuts,” I said. “A crime against nature.”
He shook his head. “Look again. Tell me I didn’t see crackers and pretzels in that bowl,” he said, adding with dire significance, “
with
the mixed nuts.”
I glanced at the bowl, knowing even before I did that he was right. Nut and crackers cohabitating.
“It’s a trick of the light,” I said.
He started to look again but I stopped him. “Don’t torture yourself. Remember what we’re here for. Focus.”
Monk nodded. “Right. Focus. Wet Ones.”
I handed him several packets of wipes, and we made our way toward the bar, which snaked along the back of the room and looked more like a stripper’s catwalk than a place to elbow up for a brew. The gleaming poles at either end of the curving bar, and the men pressed up against it, tongues barely in their mouths, added to the effect.
We managed to find a space at the bar, though it meant we were shoulder-to-shoulder with the people beside us. Monk squirmed and crossed his hands in front of his chest so they didn’t touch anything or anyone.
I didn’t have his phobias, but I did the same thing. The way the guy beside me was bumping into me, his arm brushing against my breast, I was certain he was doing it on purpose to cop a quasi-feel. One more time, and he was going to feel my elbow in his kidney.
Three bartenders, all women, all enormously endowed, all wearing bikini tops and short skirts, danced to and fro as they prepared drinks. One of the bartenders was Lizzie. At least Monk wouldn’t have any buttons to fixate on this time. Name tags on the other two women identified them as LaTisha and Cindy.
Lizzie stopped in front of us, still swaying to the beat. “You again,” she said to Monk. “The button man.”
“I need to talk to you about Esther Stoval’s murder,” Monk said.
“I already told you,” she said. “I don’t know anything about it.”
“You know the murderer,” Monk said.
LaTisha rang a big bell on the wall, jacked up the volume on the music, and suddenly jumped up on the bar. The crowd of men roared with approval. All except for Monk.
“Does she have any idea how unsanitary that is?” Monk yelled into my ear. “People eat and drink on the bar.”
“They don’t seem to care,” I said, gesturing to the men around us, who were whooping and hollering.
“What do they know?” Monk said. “They eat mixed nuts.”
Lizzie jumped on the bar right in front of us and, along with LaTisha, began dancing, thrusting her pelvis into Monk’s face.
“It’s Lucas Breen,” Monk said to her feet.
“Can’t you see I’m working?” she said.
“I’m trying not to,” Monk said.
Cindy tossed a long-necked bottle of tequila up to Lizzie, who caught it and spun it around like a baton. LaTisha also caught a bottle and matched her move for move. This number was choreographed and was probably repeated a dozen times every night.
“We know you’re having an affair with him,” Monk said.
“If you want to talk to me, get up here,” Lizzie said.
“What?” Monk said.
“You heard me.” She gyrated in front of him a few more times, her huge breasts swaying. The men around us scrambled forward to shove dollars under the waistband of her skirt, jamming us against the bar.
“Do that again,” a guy yelled to her. He was on the other side of the man who kept brushing against me.
She put a foot on the yeller’s shoulder, leaned down, and poured tequila on his head. He lifted his face up to her and opened his mouth to receive the liquor like a chick in a nest eager to be fed.
Faced with the prospect of getting splashed with tequila, Monk quickly climbed up on the bar and then stood there stock-still, with Lizzie dancing in front of him and LaTisha dancing behind him.
“Shake your groove thing,” Lizzie said.
“I don’t have one,” Monk said.
“Everybody has a groove thing,” LaTisha said.
“Then I’m fairly certain mine was removed at birth,” Monk said. “Or when I had my tonsils taken out.”
The bartenders started flinging their bottles to each other on either side of Monk. He drew his arms in against himself and closed his eyes. I don’t know whether he was afraid of getting hit with a bottle or a drop of tequila.
“Dance or I won’t talk to you,” Lizzie said as she juggled the bottles back and forth to LaTisha. “Do you know how much any of those guys would pay to be up here instead of you with me?”
“I’d pay them.”
“Dance,” she said.
Monk tapped a foot and snapped his fingers and rolled his shoulders.
“That’s dancing?” Lizzie said.
“If it’s too hot for you, get out of the kitchen,” Monk said. “We know Esther Stoval was blackmailing Lucas Breen about your relationship. That’s why he killed her.”
“I didn’t say we had a relationship.” She tossed her bottle down to Cindy, who caught it and expertly flipped it back on the shelf.
“You were wearing his monogrammed shirt when we met.”
“I got it at Goodwill,” she said. “Maybe I have one of yours, too.”
“A man who has killed once to protect his secret could kill again,” Monk said. “You could be next.”
Lizzie grabbed the pole and began to slide up and down it lasciviously, her back to Monk. The crowd cheered and whistled with glee. Even the women seemed to be into it.
“You’re supposed to put money under my skirt,” she said.
Monk reached into his pocket, pulled out a Wet One packet, and, with his eyes squinted nearly shut, tried to put it in the waistband of her skirt. But she kept moving, wiggling her butt to tease the audience and make his task more difficult.
“What do you want from me?” she asked.
“To do the right thing and help bring a murderer to justice. Wear a wire,” Monk said, finally slipping the Wet One packet into her skirt and backing away. “Get him to incriminate himself.”
“Never,” she said. “I don’t wear wires.”
“You don’t wear much of anything,” Monk said.
She turned now and danced in front of Monk. The other bartender came up behind him, and the two women squeezed in close, sandwiching him between them as they danced.
“If I were sleeping with a man like Lucas Breen, I wouldn’t betray him,” she said. “I’d die to protect him.”
“Then your wish might come true,” Monk squeaked, doing some gyrating himself, but only to scrupulously avoid any physical contact with the women on either side of him.