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

“This.”

My cell phone rang. I dug around in my purse for it, hoping whoever was calling was patient. I finally found it and answered.

“You must be Adrian’s nubile assistant, Natalie Teeger.”

It was a man’s voice that I didn’t recognize. He spoke with an almost theatrical pomposity and yet also seemed to be struggling for each breath.

“I am not nubile,” I said, but when I realized the alternative, it was too late to take it back.

“That’s a pity. Sharona certainly was. In abundance, though I doubt Adrian appreciated it. I did.”

“You’re a pig,” I said.

“Guilty as charged,” he said. “That’s the first time I’ve pleaded guilty to anything and yet here I am in prison. Where is the justice in that?”

Once he said that, I knew who I was speaking to.

“You’re Dale the Whale,” I said.

“Do you really want to insult a man who is using his precious ration of phone time to return your request for a call?”

I wasn’t pleased to discover that the police were giving my personal cell phone number to convicted killers. What was Captain Stottlemeyer thinking? He was going to catch hell from me as soon as I got home.

I gave the phone to Monk and immediately wanted to clean my hands afterwards with one of his disinfectant wipes. I knew it was an irrational reaction, but I get that way when I get calls from killers.

Monk kindly put the phone on speaker and held it between us so I could hear both sides of the conversation.

“Hello, Dale,” Monk said.

“Adrian Monk, as I live and eat!”

“It’s ‘live and breathe,’ ” Monk said.

“I eat far more than I breathe,” Dale said. “What are you doing in the Fatherland?”

“I’ve solved Trudy’s murder.”

“Oh goodie,” Dale said. “I can finally sleep soundly at night again. How did you do it?”

“I found Dr. Rahner, the man you used to hire the bomber.”

“Martin Rahner? Now there’s a blast from the past,” Dale said. “Oops, that was a poor choice of words, wasn’t it? Forgive me.”

Insincerity dripped from Dale’s words like bacon grease.

“I know you conspired with him and Dr. Kroger to keep me off the force,” Monk said. “What I don’t know is what you had on the doctors to make them do your bidding.”

“Do you really expect me to tell you?” Dale asked.

“Why not?” Monk said. “You’re already doing life in prison. What have you got to lose?”

“What have I got to gain?”

“A clear conscience,” Monk said.

Dale laughed, his uproarious guffawing quickly turning into gagging and choking. I was afraid for a moment that he might die during the call and then I would have to throw the phone out.

Yes, I know that was another irrational reaction, but keeping the phone after Dale’s demise would have been like sleeping in a bed someone had died in. I couldn’t do it. Fortunately, Dale the Whale didn’t die and, more importantly, I didn’t have to toss out my phone.

Dale finally caught his breath. When he spoke again, though, he’d lost a little of his slimy frivolity.

“Sociopaths don’t have a conscience. Thanks to you, I am doubly imprisoned, more so than anyone else in this hell-hole. I am doomed to never leave my concrete cell, to never feel the sun on my skin, to always breathe fetid air.”

I’m sure that “fetid” was an understatement.

“You have no one to blame but yourself for being a prisonerof both your body and the California penal system,” Monk said.

“The prison I made, my magnificent corpulence, I can live with,” Dale said. “The one you put me in I cannot. What harm would it have done to leave me where I was, in my own home? I couldn’t have escaped, could I?”

“It wouldn’t have been punishment,” Monk said. “You are a murderer. You don’t deserve any pleasure or comfort in your life.”

“Neither do you, Adrian Monk,” he said. “As long as you don’t know the truth about your sweet wife’s fate, you will be as much a prisoner as I am.”

Dale started to laugh again. Monk hung up on him and handed me the phone. I still felt like I should disinfect it.

“You might want to change your phone number when we get home,” Monk said.

“Gee, do you think?” I asked.

One of the great things I discovered about Germany was that just about everyone there spoke English. It makes it ridiculously easy for us arrogant and lazy Americans not to acknowledge the existence of any other language but our own. Thank God for that. I was able to call Air Berlin and book our flight without any problem.

We arrived at the Frankfurt airport just in time to board our plane. Monk was so nervous, and shaking so much, that I thought he might scream and run back to the car. And that was before we even reached the terminal.

Somehow he managed to hold himself together at the ticket counter, through the security checkpoint, and even down the jetway to the Airbus plane.

There was a table at the end of the passageway covered with stacks of free German newspapers and magazines, including Im Fadenkreuz, which I gratefully snagged so we’d have the address of the office and the name of the editor.

I was surprised to see that one of the freebies on the table was Playboy. There weren’t any headlines or women on the cover, just a suggestive shot of a pair of snowy mountain peaks poking through a sea of clouds. I figured that it must be some kind of abridged