Mr. Monk Goes to Hawaii by Goldberg, Lee (librera reader .TXT) 📕

inside, each covered with a red-checked tablecloth. The ladder-backed chairs were faded red, and smooth from years of use.

The only other customers were two impossibly old Hawaiian men in aloha shirts that hung on their bony frames, their skin dark and wrinkled, as if all the moisture had been wrung from their bodies. They sat at a table for three, playing cards and nursing Cokes.

The menu was a chalkboard mounted on the wall beside the open doorway into the kitchen, where an old woman in a mu’umu’u and an apron, her gray hair tied back into a bun, supervised three other similarly dressed, but younger, women at the grill. There were only three items on the menu: PLATE LUNCH $5.

DRINK $1. SLICE PIE $2.

A zapper hung like a lantern in the far corner of the dining room, crackling every few seconds as another flying insect flew into the electric grid. Its wire grate was blackened with charred bugs and dismembered wings. Every time the zapper snapped, Monk winced with revulsion.

“Three plates, momma,” Kealoha yelled, then led us to a table with three chairs.

I took a seat. “Is that your mom?”

Kealoha shook his head and sat down. “She’s kama’aina. She’s been cooking so long, they say even the Menehune when eat da grines here.”

“Who are they?” I asked.

“Hawaiian elves,” Kealoha said. “They lived here for thousands of years, working only at night and building many great things, before they sailed away forever on their floating island. But some are still around, doing their mischievous magic and da kine in the night. They steal my car keys all the time.”

Monk stood over us.

“Please sit down, Mr. Monk,” Kealoha said.

“I can’t,” Monk said.

“Why not?” Kealoha asked.

“This table is wrong.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

I figured it out and stood up. “There are only three chairs.”

“And there are three of us,” Kealoha said. “We each have a place to sit.”

“But three is an odd number,” I said.

“So?” Kealoha said.

There was no point trying to explain it all to Kealoha, so I just got up and sat down at the next table, which had four chairs. After a moment so did Kealoha, a bewildered expression on his face. But Monk remained standing, staring at the table we’d left.

“We can’t just leave it that way,” he said.

Monk looked around. The other empty table had four chairs, too. If he took a chair from that table, it would also be uneven. He turned to the table where the two old men sat and motioned to their empty third chair.

“Do you mind?” He took hold of the chair with a wipe in his hand, dragged it over to the table we had abandoned, and organized the seating so everything was evenly spaced.

Kealoha looked at me and whispered, “Is he okay in the head?”

I deftly avoided the question. “He’s a brilliant detective.”

Monk came over to our table and was about to sit down when he gasped and staggered back in horror.

“What is it?” I asked.

He pointed at his chair, his finger shaking. Kealoha rose from his seat and peered over the table. I looked down at the seat.

A tiny green lizard was on the chair.

Kealoha grinned. “That is our friend the gecko.”

“He’s not my friend,” Monk said.

“They are good luck,” Kealoha said. “They eat the mosquitoes and the cockroaches.”

Monk shuddered. “There are cockroaches here?”

“Not when there are geckos,” Kealoha said. “That’s why we’re glad our friends are everywhere.”

I looked around, and so did Monk. I hadn’t noticed them before, but the geckos were everywhere: on the ceiling, crawling on the walls, and huddled on the ground beneath the bug zapper. The gecko scampered off Monk’s chair, but I knew there was no way he’d ever sit there, or anyplace else in this restaurant.

“Sweet mother of God,” Monk croaked.

As if on cue, the old woman shuffled out of the kitchen with a tray containing three Styrofoam boxes and three Cokes without ice in plastic glasses. She passed around our drinks, then set the boxes down in front of us and opened them with a flourish. The entrées were in their individual divided sections, like frozen dinners. She set one of the boxes down in front of Monk’s empty chair, gave him a cold look, and returned to the kitchen.

“Mahalo nui loa,” Kealoha called to her appreciatively, and dug into his food with gusto.

I regarded my meal. There was some kind of meat covered in a thick brown gravy, a ball of white rice, a square of purpleish pasty stuff, and a mound of what looked like relish.

Monk peered at the entrées as if studying a specimen in formaldehyde. “Is that rooster?”

“No, it’s pork ‘n’ gravy, a scoop of rice, and poi,” Kealoha said, while taking a piece of meat and running it through the rice and relish before putting it in his mouth. Mixing foods like that was a definite no-no in Monk’s book.

“It looks like rooster to me,” Monk said.

“How would you know?” I said.

“The chef doesn’t strike me as someone who would go far looking for the best cut of meat.”

“Have you ever eaten rooster?”

“Hell, no,” Monk said.

“It could be delicious,” I said. I cut some of the meat, stabbed it with my fork, and ate a bite.

It was very tasty, whatever it was.

“What’s poi?” I asked Kealoha, waving my fork over the pasty stuff.

“Fermented and mashed taro. You eat it like this.” Kealoha dipped two fingers into the poi, scooped up some of the paste, and stuck it in his mouth with delight.

While Monk was still gaping at him in disgust, I slopped some poi up with my fingers and sucked them clean.

Monk stared at me. “Have you lost your mind?”

The poi tasted like Elmer’s glue, but just to be cruel, I stuck my fingers into the poi for another helping and offered it to Monk.

“Want to try?” I asked, my fingers dripping poi.

“Have you been sneaking some of my drugs?”

“What kind of drugs do you have?” Kealoha asked casually.

“Mind-altering but strictly nonrecreational,” Monk said. “There’s nothing the least