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

“You can see right into the living room of the other apartment, ” Geshir said. “I wonder if a really hot woman lives there and if she likes to walk around naked.”

Stoffmacher grimaced with pain, but it wasn’t physical. “That’s a bullet hole, Kommissar. Is there anybody home next door?”

“I don’t see anyone,” Geshir said.

Stoffmacher grabbed him by the collar and yanked him away from the wall. “I mean, did you knock on the door when we arrived and did anyone answer?”

“No,” Geshir said, sounding a bit flustered. “I mean, yes, I knocked, but no, no one answered.”

“Get the landlord to open it up,” Stoffmacher said.

“Why?”

“Because whoever fired the shot did it from the other apartment,” Stoffmacher said. “It’s an exit hole.”

Geshir went outside to find the landlord.

I decided that Friderike was right. Homes today aren’t nearly as well made as homes that were built centuries ago. A bullet certainly wouldn’t go through a wall at her house. It wouldn’t even scratch it.

I wondered whether it would make more sense to pack some mud and rocks around my windows rather than replace the weather-beaten wooden frames every few years.

Stoffmacher turned to Monk. “How did you know that bullet hole was going to be there?”

“All the clues pointed to it,” Monk said.

“What clues?” he asked.

“The bullet hole in the couch, the bleached wallpaper where the painting was, and the little nicks on the handle of the gun.”

“There are nicks on the gun handle?” Stoffmacher crouched beside the gun and squinted at it. So did I. We both saw the tiny nicks on the bottom and edge of the handle.

“The shooter used his gun to hammer the nail into the wall,” Monk said. “So he could hang the picture over the bullet hole that came from the other apartment.”

“How did you see those marks on the handle?” Stoffmacher asked.

“I always see the little things. It’s a gift,” Monk said. “And a curse.”

“I don’t get the curse part,” Stoffmacher said.

“You will,” I said.

“There’s also dried dirt on the couch cushions where the shooter had to stand to remove the painting,” Monk said.

Stoffmacher and I looked at the couch. Sure enough, there were bits of dirt as well as some fluff from the stuffing of the back cushion and a pillow feather. He mulled over this latest discovery.

“So the neighbor fired a bullet into his wall and accidentally killed this man,” Stoffmacher said, motioning to the corpse on the floor. “The neighbor came in, put a gun in Vigg’s hand to make it look like suicide, shot the couch, moved the painting to cover the bullet hole, and then locked the doorknob on his way out to delay the discovery of the body.”

He could lock the doorknob without the key, but not the dead bolt, which explained why the question of whether the dead bolt was locked or not was so significant to Monk. Everything seemed to fit, but there was one piece I didn’t get.

“Why did he shoot the couch?” I asked.

“To make sure the crime lab would find gunshot residue on Vigg’s hand so we would believe he shot himself,” Stoffmacher said. “Then the neighbor moved the painting to cover the bullet hole.”

“That’s one explanation of how things happened,” Monk said.

“There’s another?” Stoffmacher said.

“It’s possible that the man next door isn’t the one who fired the bullet that went through the wall and accidentally killed Axel Vigg.”

“Then who did it?” I asked.

“Whoever shot and killed the man next door,” Monk said.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Mr. Monk and the Deal

We went outside and found Geshir talking to the land-lord, a flustered little man with a mustache that looked like a bow tie. Monk examined a feather on the door-step and then looked up at a group of ducks and their ducklings crossing the roadway towards the creek on the other side. I wondered if he was going ask the police to cite them for littering.

Geshir took a set of keys from the landlord and met us in front of the neighbor’s door.

“The apartment is rented, furnished, on a month-to-month basis by a man named Bruno Leupolz,” Geshir said. “He’s only lived here a couple of weeks.”

“Where does he work?” Stoffmacher took some rubber gloves from his pocket, slipped a pair on, and handed us each a pair, but Monk didn’t put them on.

“The landlord doesn’t know much about him,” Geshir said, “except that he came from Berlin and pays in cash.”

Stoffmacher motioned to the door. Geshir put on a pair of rubber gloves, unlocked the door, and slowly pushed it open.

The first thing I noticed as we stepped inside was the smell. Or rather the lack of one. It meant that we weren’t going to find a decomposing corpse, which was a big relief for me. One was enough for one day.

The layout was like the other one, only in reverse. The place was clean and sparsely furnished and the walls were bare. There was a writing table pressed up against the wall, right below the bullet hole. There was no blood on the walls, the carpet, or the linoleum floor of the kitchenette.

We fanned out into the living room in silence, looking around for signs of I don’t know what.

Monk examined the ashes in the fireplace, the pencils and blank paper on the writing table, and the ink-jet printer on one of the chairs.

Nothing seemed unusual or out of place to me, but I don’t have Monk’s eye for