Mr. Monk Goes to Germany by Lee Goldberg (general ebook reader .TXT) 📕

you about my job before and, until recently, that was all I could do to relieve my stress. But that changed a short time back when the San Francisco police walked off the job in a contract dispute and Monk was temporarily reinstated to the police force as captain of Homicide.

He was put in command of a trio of other detectives who’d also been discharged from the force for mental health reasons. One detective had a violent anger-management problem, one was a paranoid schizophrenic, and one was slipping into senility.

As different as their problems were, all three of them had one thing in common: They each had an assistant to help them.

It was a revelation and a relief for me.

Until then, if I wanted advice I had to search for wisdom and guidance in the exploits of fictional assistants like Sherlock Holmes’ Dr. Watson, Nero Wolfe’s Archie Goodwin, and Hercule Poirot’s Captain Hastings. Those days were over. I’d finally found real people who could understand and sympathize with my daily struggles.

I wasn’t alone anymore.

Now the three assistants and I get together about once a month at a coffee shop in the Marina District to vent about our troubles and give each other advice. I look at it as free psychological counseling, since two of the assistants are mental health professionals.

Occasionally we even have guests. A couple of months ago, we met a guy who works in Santa Barbara with a detective who pretends to be a psychic. Imagine that. His plight made us all feel a bit better about our own situations.

Jasper, a psychiatric nurse who assists the paranoid-schizophrenic detective, brought a guy to our last meeting who works with an Atlanta investigator who is a pathological liar. The assistant’s name was Gavin and the fibbing detective he works for was Steve Stone.

“At least I think that’s his name,” Gavin told us. “It could be a lie. He lies about everything. Most of my time and energy is spent trying to parse the truth from whatever he says and then tell it to the cops he consults with.”

“How do you do it?” I asked.

“I keep a running list of what he says and then at the end of the day, I strap him into a lie detector and question him about each comment,” Gavin said.

“He lets you do that?” Jasper asked.

“He knows I’ll quit if he doesn’t,” Gavin said. “But he’s become pretty good at fooling the machine. So sometimes I’ll slip him some Sodium Pentothal.”

“You drug your boss?” I asked, shocked.

“Who doesn’t?” said Sparrow, a young woman with so many piercings on her body she looked like a magnet dropped into a box of needles. She reluctantly assisted her grandfather Frank Porter, a retired SFPD detective who, despite his senility, was still a better investigator than most cops with perfect memory.

“I don’t,” I said.

“I’ve met Monk,” Sparrow said. “You should.”

There actually was an experimental drug Monk could take if he wanted to that would relieve most of his obsessive-compulsive tendencies. But it robbed him of his detecting skills. It also made him an insufferable jerk. Monk was already insufferable, but at least he wasn’t a jerk.

“The problem is that Stone has developed immunity to truth serum,” Gavin said. “So most of the time I’ve got no choice but to rely on my intuition and watch for his tells.”

“Tells?” Jasper asked, rapidly thumb-typing notes into his PDA. Everything we talked about was going into his thesis, the exact topic of which changed on a weekly basis.

“Body language, little tics, unconscious habits,” Gavin said, scratching his closely trimmed beard. “Like the way I’m scratching my beard, which I’m sure reveals something about my emotional state, though I’m not self-aware enough to know what it is.”

“You want me,” Sparrow said.

“No, I don’t,” Gavin said.

“Yes, you do,” Sparrow said. “That’s why you’re scratching your beard.”

“Maybe his beard just itches,” I said.

“When men want me,” Sparrow said, “they scratch.”

Gavin cleared his throat and continued. “What I’m saying is that there are some unconscious mannerisms Stone does whenever he’s telling a whopper. But even those mannerisms can be false. It’s a constant battle with him.”

“So why do you keep doing it?” asked Arnie, the balding anger-management counselor who worked with a notoriously violent ex-cop named Wyatt.

I thought that was a funny question coming from Arnie, considering that Wyatt had shot him three or four times and had thrown him out a window at least twice, and that was just since I’d met him.

Gavin thought about the question for a long moment, as if it was something he’d never considered before. But I was sure he’d thought about it many times. I figured he was probably just deciding how honest he wanted to be with himself and with us.

“Stone is funny, smart, caring, and a true genius. But his constant lies ruined his career as a cop and alienated everyone around him. Nobody can trust him. So now he doesn’t have anybody left in his life except me. It’s sad. And without me, I worry about what he might do.”

“You feel sorry for him,” I said.

“I admire him,” Gavin said.

“And you like to feel needed,” Jasper said, nodding sagely. He’s not sage, but he’s got the nod down. I think they teach it in shrink school.

Gavin shrugged. “I’m certainly not in it for the money.”

We all nodded in agreement like a row of bobbleheads.

Hearing Gavin’s story, I almost felt guilty about how well things were going lately with Monk. He still had all his obsessive-compulsive problems, but somehow they seemed more manageable