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

We followed the two cops upstairs, Monk nearly stumbling to avoid a tiny feather on one of the steps. The bedroom was small and had a view of the hotel up on the hill. There was a pair of men’s casual shoes, the laces still tied, in front of the half-open closet, the doors scuffed where other shoes the tenant had kicked off his feet had hit them.

I was pleased with myself for noticing that. The only reason I did was because my late husband, Mitch, used to kick off his shoes without untying them all the time. Not only did he scuff up the doors and walls, but he left the shoes all over the floor for me to trip over when I woke up at night to go to the bathroom.

There was a pair of pants and a shirt flung on top of the unmade double bed. Monk rolled his shoulders. I knew how much he hated anything that was unmade. He was probably fighting the urge to tuck in the sheets and fluff the pillow.

Geshir opened the bathroom door and we looked inside. There was nothing unusual in there either. Like a corpse, for instance. It appeared that Monk was wrong about a murder having occurred here.

Stoffmacher stroked his mustache. “It looks like Herr Leupolz accidentally shot his neighbor, tried to make it look like a suicide, and then fled.”

“But he didn’t take any of his clothes,” Monk said. “They are still hanging in his closet. His suitcase is still there, too.”

“He didn’t have time to pack,” Stoffmacher said.

Monk tipped his head from side to side, shifted his weight from foot to foot, and rolled his shoulders. Stoffmacher and Geshir stared at him.

“Is something wrong?” Geshir asked.

I could answer that for them. Monk’s body language wasn’t exactly subtle.

“Everything is wrong,” I said.

“Why did he change his clothes before leaving?” Monk asked.

“Maybe those are his clothes from the day before,” Stoffmacher said.

“But they are on top of his unmade bed,” Monk said, “which suggests to me that he changed his clothes after he awoke. If he slept in the bed with the clothes on top, they wouldn’t be lying flat. They would be tangled with the sheets or on the floor.”

“If he was fleeing, maybe he simply wanted to be wearing heavier clothes on his journey,” Stoffmacher said. “Or something with more pockets. I honestly don’t know.”

“Neither do I,” Monk said. “It’s a mystery.”

“Not a very interesting one,” Stoffmacher said.

“There’s more,” Monk said and went downstairs. We followed him to the writing table in the living room.

“He’s obviously a writer, but where is his writing?” Monk said. “There are pencils and papers on the table, and a printer, but nothing in the house that actually has writing on it. And why would he take his laptop but leave his charger behind?”

Monk motioned to a charger in the wall. I’d missed that when I looked at the room and I’m sure the two Kommissars had, too.

“It’s simple,” Stoffmacher said. “He was in a hurry. He just grabbed his laptop and his papers, and fled.”

“He might have taken his laptop, but he didn’t take his papers. They were burned.” Monk led us over to the fireplace and squatted in front of it. “There are paper clips, staples, and the spiral rings from notebooks in the ashes. Why would he burn his papers?”

“Maybe Leupolz was suicidal and his journals contained his suicidal rantings,” Geshir said. “He burned them because they were incriminating.”

“Why would they be incriminating?” Stoffmacher asked.

“Because maybe he was going to shoot himself in the head and, at the last second, had a change of heart,” Geshir replied. “His hand twitched and he fired into the wall, accidentally killing Vigg. So he made it look like Vigg killed himself instead. His notes would have tipped us off to what really happened. But I deduced it anyway.”

Stoffmacher gave Geshir a withering look. “That certainly explains why you’re the top detective in Lohr.”

Geshir beamed. “Thank you, sir.”

“And not Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Cologne, or any other major city,” Stoffmacher said.

“But it could have happened that way,” Geshir said.

“No, it couldn’t,” Stoffmacher said, then looked to Monk for support. “Could it?”

“I don’t think so,” Monk said while shaking another bit of fluff off his pant leg as if it was corrosive. “If Vigg’s death was an accident, why didn’t Leupolz just admit it? Why turn it into a crime by running?”

“He would have shot himself instead,” Stoffmacher said. “Who could live with the guilt and humiliation?”

“When he tried to kill himself the first time, he discovered the will to live,” Geshir said. “He ran because he realized that he loves life and didn’t want to spend it with the guilt and embarrassment of this accident hanging over him.”

It seemed to me that there was some logic to that argument, but I was sort of rooting for Geshir after Stoffmacher’s unnecessarily nasty remark, so maybe I was being overly charitable.

“I don’t think that’s what happened here,” Stoffmacher said.

“Do you have a better explanation?” Geshir asked.

“As a matter of fact, I do,” Stoffmacher said. “Maybe Leupolz has nothing to do with the bullet hole or Vigg’s death. Maybe he is at work, or his girlfriend’s apartment, or on a trip, blissfully unaware of the tragedy that has occurred here in his absence.”

“Then what happened?” I asked.

“A very nervous burglar with a gun broke into the house, was startled by a noise next door, and accidentally shot into the wall,” Stoffmacher said. “He made the killing look like a