Mr. Monk Helps Himself Read online

  The Monk Series

  Mr. Monk Helps Himself

  Mr. Monk Gets Even

  Mr. Monk Is a Mess

  Mr. Monk on Patrol

  Mr. Monk on the Couch

  Mr. Monk on the Road

  Mr. Monk Is Cleaned Out

  Mr. Monk in Trouble

  Mr. Monk and the Dirty Cop

  Mr. Monk Is Miserable

  Mr. Monk Goes to Germany

  Mr. Monk in Outer Space

  Mr. Monk and the Two Assistants

  Mr. Monk and the Blue Flu

  Mr. Monk Goes to Hawaii

  Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse

  MR. MONK HELPS HIMSELF

  A NOVEL BY

  HY CONRAD

  Based on the USA Network

  television series created by

  ANDY BRECKMAN

  OBSIDIAN

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com.

  First published by Obsidian, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © 2013 Monk © Universal Network Television LLC. Licensed by NBCUniversal Television Consumer Products Group 2013.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  OBSIDIAN and logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Conrad, Hy.

  Mr. Monk helps himself/Hy Conrad.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-101-62920-8

  1. Monk, Adrian (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Private investigators—Fiction. 3. Eccentrics and eccentricities—-Fiction. 4. Obsessive-compulsive disorder—Fiction. 5. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 6. San Francisco (Calif.)—Fiction. 7. Mystery fiction. 8. Radio and television novels. I. Breckman, Andy. II. Monk (Television program) III. Title.

  PS3553.O5166M7 2013

  813’.54—dc23 2013001049

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  Contents

  The Monk Series

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Author’s Note and Acknowledgments

  CHAPTER ONE: Mr. Monk Takes the Temperature

  CHAPTER TWO: Mr. Monk and the Cult

  CHAPTER THREE: Mr. Monk’s Kryptonite

  CHAPTER FOUR: Mr. Monk Goes Unanswered

  CHAPTER FIVE: Mr. Monk and Number 99

  CHAPTER SIX: Mr. Monk’s Virtual Tour

  CHAPTER SEVEN: Mr. Monk Cleans a Cup Holder

  CHAPTER EIGHT: Mr. Monk Stays Out

  CHAPTER NINE: Mr. Monk Counts His Peas

  CHAPTER TEN: Mr. Monk Gets Threatened

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: Mr. Monk and Adrian

  CHAPTER TWELVE: Mr. Monk Is On Board

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Mr. Monk Gets Mail

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Mr. Monk and the Headache

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Mr. Monk Shakes on It

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Mr. Monk Stays at Home

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Mr. Monk and the Massage

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Mr. Monk Goes Flush

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: Mr. Monk Gets Mail 2.0

  CHAPTER TWENTY: Mr. Monk Skips Lunch

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: Mr. Monk and the Test

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: Mr. Monk and the Breakup

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: Mr. Monk Loses It

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: Mr. Monk Phones It In

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: Mr. Monk Is Defriended

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: Mr. Monk Faces the Lair

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: Mr. Monk and the Cliff-hanger

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: Mr. Monk and the Bullies

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: Mr. Monk and His Germ Sister

  CHAPTER THIRTY: Mr. Monk and What Happened

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: Mr. Monk and What Happened Next

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO: Mr. Monk’s Last Package

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE: Mr. Monk Sends in the Clowns

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR: Mr. Monk’s Vanishing Act

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE: Mr. Monk Is Nowhere

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX: Mr. Monk and the Balloons

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN: Mr. Monk and the New Deal

  To Jeff, as always

  AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  When it was announced I was taking over these novels, Monk fans started contacting me in droves, all asking the same question. Was I going to reboot the series, like a Batman or Spider-Man franchise, or just pick up where Lee Goldberg left off?

  To be honest, I never thought of rebooting. To me, the Monk characters are real. On the TV show, the other writers and I took Monk and Natalie to a certain place in their lives. Meanwhile, in a parallel universe, Lee continued to expand them, smoothing out little bumps and creating new ones. I didn’t want to mess with that reality.

  In the new books, some things will naturally be different, because Lee and I are naturally different. For example, his Natalie knows a lot about architecture. Mine, not so much. His Monk is more obsessed with numbers and symmetry. Mine is a little more phobic.

  In many ways, Lee strengthened the Monk franchise. For one thing, he knows San Francisco and the wonderful character of the town. We wrote the show in Summit, New Jersey, and, while we did have a San Francisco map, it was pinned on the far wall and no one wandered over there very often. I’ll try to improve on our atmospheric quality; I promise.

  The same goes for forensic accuracy. Lee had called on a cadre of experts to make sure his details were right. Despite our own police consultant, the Monk writers tried not to burden ourselves with too many facts. At one point, the production team called to tell us our formula for bomb making was ridiculous. We replied, “Do you really want us broadcasting how to make a bomb?” That shut them up.

  The good news is that we were sticklers for logic. We may not have known bomb making, but we insisted that the logic of every story always worked.

  The other good news is that I was with the show from beginning to end, for all eight years. I was the mystery guy, while everyone else had come from the world of comedy. Along the way, I think I had some influence on the way Monk talked and interacted. In other words, he wound up a little bit like me, which makes writing for him a pleasure.

  When I first told Andy Breckman I was doing this, his response was “Great. You can use some of the Monk stories we never got to do.”

  Mr. Monk Helps Himself is one of those stories. I brought it into the writers’ room during season six. We played around with the idea until it morphed into something totally different—“Mr. Monk Joins a Cult,” guest starring Howie Mandel. That’s how it happens in a roomful of writers. There are dozens of great plots, half thought through, buzzing around in our collective memory.

  As for acknowledgments, first and foremost, there’s Andy Breckman, the founder
of the feast, the heart and soul of Monk.

  I also want to thank Lee Goldberg for creating this parallel universe and for taking such great care in preserving the characters and sending them off in new, unexpected directions.

  I know Monk doesn’t like change. But I hope you can put up with a little. It’s part of life, as Natalie keeps telling him.

  If you would like to say hello, I would love to hear from you, either on my Facebook fan page or at my Web site at hyconrad.com.

  Enjoy!

  CHAPTER ONE

  Mr. Monk Takes the Temperature

  My boss has gotten easier to handle since I realized he’s a magpie.

  I don’t mean that literally. Literally, he’s a consulting detective for the San Francisco PD, a man who has solved hundreds of impossible cases, usually with me at his side keeping him calm and handing him antiseptic wipes.

  I mean that he’s distracted by shiny objects—only in his case the objects are odd numbers and germs and dirt and a hundred major phobias. Exactly one hundred. There’s a list in a binder, centered on the coffee table. Whenever a new phobia pops up, he has to either eliminate one of the old ones or, more often, combine a couple.

  By the way, in case you’re thinking that’s not bad, he keeps an addendum in the back listing over three hundred secondary phobias that didn’t make the cut.

  Just last week, he was watching Animal Planet and discovered his horrific fear of aardvarks. I don’t know why this didn’t come up years ago, especially since it’s probably the first fear in the alphabet. But, in order to accommodate aardvarks, he had to lump together spiders and insects, even though spiders are not technically insects. He now labels it his creepy-crawly phobia and it’s number seven.

  As you probably already know, my boss is Adrian Monk—a man who has put away so many bad guys the state of California was thinking of naming a cell block after him.

  My name is Natalie Teeger, unlegendary, underpaid and overworked. I’m not saying overworked like a coal miner or a medieval peasant. But overworked like the assistant to a brilliant and very stubborn six-year-old.

  For years I’d been Monk’s sidekick, dealing with his quirks and phobias, but also helping him more and more on his cases. Then, through a long series of events—I won’t go into them here, but they included a fire bombing and a very weird murder—I was hired as a police officer across the country in the beautifully upscale town of Summit, New Jersey.

  I know that sounds odd. Who in her right mind would move away from her friends and family and start over as a rookie cop? Natalie Teeger, I guess. I just felt it was important, for my self-esteem, to prove that I could be a cop on my own.

  Well, I did it. I proved it. And now I’m back in San Francisco with Monk. With one big change. He won’t be my boss. We’ll be partners—once I pass the California Private Investigator Exam.

  Monk himself isn’t a licensed PI. For one thing, he’s horrible at tests. Not because of the questions, but because he has to sharpen and resharpen the pencil and then fill in every circle so that it’s completely black and within the borders. So it’s up to me to get the license and incorporate and make our business legit. Monk and Teeger, Consulting Detectives.

  Back to the shiny object.

  When I rolled out of bed that Friday morning, I knew I had to come up with a distraction, something that would keep Monk from figuring out the real reason I needed this upcoming weekend off.

  I’d been planning this getaway for a long time. I needed it. And I’d paid for it, nonrefundable. The last thing I wanted was Monk coming up with some excuse why I couldn’t go. Or, worse, coming with me. That would transform the weekend from “all about me” to “all about him,” and I would need another weekend, right away, just to get over it.

  Lucky for me the phone rang during my first cup of Peet’s French Roast, and half an hour later, Monk was busy focusing on two home invasions, two assaults and a murder. Very shiny.

  I know how callous that sounds, but the murder would have happened anyway. And the most distracting object you can put in front of Adrian Monk is a good old-fashioned crime scene.

  The first home invasion was on Vernon Street in Ingleside Heights. When Monk and I ducked under the crime scene tape, we found ourselves inside a lovingly restored Craftsman bungalow. Captain Leland Stottlemeyer was there to greet us and hand us disposable gloves and those blue booties to fit over our shoes. “Morning,” he said, with a bit of a growl. “Body in the kitchen.”

  Captain Stottlemeyer and Monk go way back. He had been watch commander when Monk joined the force. He’d also been the best man at Monk’s wedding and the first person to try to console him when his wife, Trudy, was killed by a car bomb. He was the man who had had to fire Monk when his fear of life became too disabling, and the man who had hired him four years later as a consultant on the city’s most puzzling cases.

  The body, in this case, belonged to Barry Ebersol, midforties, a little soft through the middle, an account manager at an advertising agency. Now he was just a pudgy corpse with stab wounds in the back and hands and a meat thermometer sticking out of his chest.

  He was lying on the beige granite tiles, a few feet from black marble countertops and a gorgeous fireclay farmhouse sink. It always makes me sad when people die right after remodeling. Seems such a waste. But I guess murder is always a waste.

  “Is that a meat thermometer?” Monk asked, and followed up with a little shiver. “That’s so wrong.”

  “Any murder weapon is wrong,” the captain suggested.

  “But that belongs in a rib roast, at worst a pork loin, not in a person. It’s sick.”

  Stottlemeyer shrugged. “A carving knife belongs in a rib roast, too. And you’ve seen dozens of those used for murder. What’s the difference?”

  “I don’t care what you say. It’s wrong and sick.” That was Adrian Monk for you. Anything out of his normal realm of experience made him uncomfortable, even if he couldn’t explain why.

  The CSIs had retreated into the dining room. The two of them stood in the doorway, gloved and bootied and with the smallest of smirks crinkling their mouths. “At least we know his body temperature,” the taller one said, pointing to the thermometer.

  Stottlemeyer brushed his bushy mustache, but I could tell he was smiling. “It was a breakin,” he informed us, and pointed to a broken glass panel in the kitchen door, right above the lock.

  “In broad daylight?” I asked, practicing for the day when I actually got my license. “That’s risky.”

  “Ebersol’s car is in the shop. The intruder must have seen the empty driveway and assumed he’d left for the day.”

  “So … ,” I went on. “Ebersol catches the guy in his house. One of them grabs a meat thermometer from”—I looked around until I saw it—“from the pot of utensils by the window. They fight. And Ebersol gets stabbed.”

  “He put up quite a fight,” Stottlemeyer agreed, glancing once more around the kitchen.

  It was a mess all right. I had to keep my eye on Monk’s hands. On more than one occasion, when his OCD was particularly bad, the captain and I had to forcibly keep him from straightening up. There had been one case where he came back after the CSIs left and scrubbed an entire crime scene apartment. The killer actually got her cleaning deposit back.

  This time his hands didn’t even twitch. “A home invasion gone bad,” Monk said with a dismissive shrug. “Why call us in?”

  “Because there’s a nearly identical one five blocks away.”

  • • •

  Soon we were standing in the kitchen of another bungalow. This one hadn’t been renovated. In fact, the whole house could have used some work. On the plus side, the victim was alive.

  Stottlemeyer had stayed behind at the first house. At this scene, our tour guide was Lieutenant Devlin. She’s been Stottlemeyer’s number two for a few years now, ever since Lieutenant Randy Disher decided to leave and become police chief in the aforementioned town of Summit. I’ll bet you could
live your whole life in Summit and never once see a meat thermometer used improperly.

  It had taken me a while to get used to Amy Devlin. Before coming here, she’d been an undercover officer, a breed that seems to live on macho bravado. It couldn’t have been easy for her to hold her own in that boys’ club. When she came here, Devlin brought a lot of that swagger with her. But we don’t swagger much in Captain Stottlemeyer’s world. We’re more like a family—a dysfunctional family that probably spends too much time together.

  “This was the second attack,” Devlin said, gnawing on a toothpick in the side of her mouth. She was slightly taller than me, with an incredible body and short black hair that looked like it had been coiffed by Edward Scissorhands.

  Monk wasn’t listening. He was staring down at an evidence bag in his hands. Inside was another bloody meat thermometer. “This is wronger than wrong. His voice was trembling. “Wronger than wronger than wrong.”

  “Maybe it’s a coincidence.” I’m glad Devlin said that, not me. But I was thinking it.

  “Coincidence?” Monk shot back. “Over two decades in police work and I’ve never seen a meat thermometer used to kill. Now we have two in one day? Less than a day. How far apart were these attacks?”

  Devlin checked her notes. “Twenty minutes. A neighbor heard the altercation at Ebersol’s house around eight a.m. It was an elderly woman and she called it in without coming over to check. At around eight twenty, Ms. Phister called nine one one and reported the second attack.”

  The victim this time was Angela Phister, a twentysomething bartender with a closetful of Tshirts and a Harley parked on the front weed patch. She had been luckier or stronger or just angrier than Barry Ebersol. When the paramedics arrived, she was lying in a pool of blood, left for dead, clutching a deep hole in her side.

  “She was being evacuated when I arrived,” Devlin said. “I’m going over to San Fran General after this to see if she’s strong enough to talk. All the evidence points to this being the same perp.”

  I know I’ve previously stated that Monk doesn’t use sarcasm. I stand corrected. The look he threw her was pure sarcasm. “Really? You think? Don’t jump to any conclusions.”

  He shook his head and put on a new pair of gloves. A second later and he was opening and closing drawers. He finally found what he was looking for. It was a bottom drawer filled with a few dozen cooking utensils. “This makes even less sense,” he said.