Mr. Monk and the Two Assistants by Goldberg, Lee (books for students to read .TXT) 📕

“So you’re telling me he gets caught by the lady as he’s stealing her jewelry, he kills her and, instead of getting the hell out of there, he sticks around to gather up the bling?” I asked. “Doesn’t that seem odd to you?”

“Not really,” Stottlemeyer said. “That’s why he was in the house to start with.”

“But then he leaves the incriminating evidence in his truck instead of ditching it the first chance he got?” I said. “How stupid is this guy?”

“The jewelry was too valuable to throw away,” Stottlemeyer said. “He couldn’t bring himself to do it, especially after what it cost him to get. He was only holding on to it until he could sell it on eBay.”

“Did Trevor have an alibi?” I asked.

“He claims he was parked in his truck on the side of a road somewhere, having burgers with a couple members of his crew at the time of the murder.”

“There you go,” I said. “He has witnesses who can prove he’s innocent.”

“His crew was usually day laborers he’d pick up on Sepulveda Boulevard and pay in cash. He didn’t know any of them. They were all Hector and Jésus to him, if you know what I mean.”

“They were illegal aliens,” I said.

Stottlemeyer nodded. “If these corroborating witnesses exist, which I sincerely doubt, they’re in another state or back over the border by now. The last thing they’d want to do is get involved in a murder investigation.”

“So that’s it?” I said.

“Until the trial and the likely conviction, yeah, that’s it,” he said. “What’s it to you?”

“I don’t know Sharona at all, but if she’s the woman you’ve all told me that she is, I have to believe that as bad as her taste in men might be, she wouldn’t marry a guy, have a child with him, divorce him, then remarry him if he was capable of murder.”

“I have to agree with Natalie on that, Captain,” Disher said.

“How can you agree with something that doesn’t make any sense at all?” Stottlemeyer said to him.

“I have faith in Sharona’s instincts,” Disher said, “even if she may not have it herself.”

Stottlemeyer looked at Disher as if he was seeing him for the first time. “I’ll be damned.”

“Could you arrange for me to see Trevor?” I asked.

Stottlemeyer shifted his gaze to me. “Why would you want to do that?”

“I want to hear his side of the story.”

He studied me for a long moment. “Okay, I suppose I can do that.”

“You mean that I can,” Disher said.

“I meant that I could,” Stottlemeyer said.

“So how am I supposed to know when you say, ‘I can do that,’ whether you really mean that I can do that, as in me not you?” Disher said.

“Have faith in your instincts,” Stottlemeyer said; then he turned to me. “I’ve never met Trevor, but judging by his rap sheet, he’s done a lot of stupid things. Sometimes you mix stupid and bad luck and you get murder. Do you really think that he’s innocent and that Monk can help him, or are you just afraid of losing your job?”

“I’m exercising my right to remain silent,” I said, “to avoid self-incrimination.”

“You haven’t been arrested,” Disher said, “or charged with a crime.”

“That’s true,” Stottlemeyer said, reaching for his phone. “But she’s guilty.”

He was right.

It only takes about an hour to fly down to LA and you can get cheap flights leaving out of Oakland Airport all day long. So I arranged for the mother of one of Julie’s friends to pick up her up after school and take care of her until I got back that night.

Julie was going to be upset that I was reneging on my promise to take her out to look for advertising clients, but I’d make it up to her.

I drove over the Bay Bridge to Oakland, stowed my car in short-term parking and took a Southwest Airlines flight to the Burbank airport, which was closer to downtown LA than LAX was.

On the plane, I thought about what I wanted to ask Trevor and couldn’t come up with anything. I was somewhere over San Jose when I realized that this was a pointless trip, but it was too late to turn back.

So I thought instead about the real reason I was going. About my relationship with Monk. And, for some reason, my mind kept wandering to the Cement Ship.

In the 1970s, my parents bought a painting of the Cement Ship at a gallery in Capitola, a quaint seaside village not far from where I grew up in Monterey. They hung the painting in the living room over the fireplace and I’ve spent countless hours just sitting and staring at it.

On those rare occasions when I visited my parents, I’d curl up in front of the painting with a hot cup of coffee and gaze at the ship like it was the view out of a window.

The Cement Ship was actually a shipwreck at the end of a fishing pier in Aptos, a beach town between Monterey and Capitola. The real name of the ship was the Palo Alto, one of two concrete tankers constructed in San Francisco during World War One.

I’ve often wondered whose brilliant idea it was to build a cement ship.

Why not one made of bricks, too?

How could they have been surprised when the thing didn’t float?

Okay, that’s not entirely true.

It floated. Once.

The Palo Alto made one short voyage before she was towed down to the Monterey Bay seventy-five years ago and deliberately beached to become a dance hall.

A couple years later, the ship was torn apart by a big storm, and the wreckage has been left there to rot ever since.

The Cement Ship on the canvas above my parents’ fireplace was a broken hulk, fading into