Mr. Monk on the Couch Read Free

send some uniforms over to repark the vehicles, okay? Will you come with us now, please?”
    “I could direct the operation,” Monk said.
    “I would prefer you investigated the murder,” Stottlemeyer said.
    “It won’t be easy to do with all of that going on,” Monk said, waving his hand toward the cars.
    “You’ll just draw on your vast reserve of inner strength and deal with it,” Stottlemeyer said, holding up the tape and waving Monk over. “Come on already, we got a body on the street here and the medical examiner is anxious to take it to the morgue.”
    “How about if we compromise?” Monk said. “I’ll oversee the parking of the cars and then investigate the murder.”
    “How about this,” Stottlemeyer said. “You get over here right now or I’ll spit on the sidewalk.”
    “You wouldn’t dare,” Monk said.
    “Try me,” Stottlemeyer said and looked him right in the eye.
    Monk squared his shoulders, took a deep breath, and stepped under the police tape.
    “I’m only doing this to save you from doing something you’d regret for the rest of your life,” Monk said.
    “Thanks,” Stottlemeyer said, and motioned over a young uniformed officer. “See to it that those vehicles over there are parked in an orderly manner.”
    “Right away, sir,” the officer said with a grin.
    “He means it,” Monk said.
    The officer looked at Stottlemeyer, who nodded in agreement. “I do. Make sure they are parked in nice rows.”
    “And by size,” Monk said. “And model.”
    “Don’t push it, Monk,” Stottlemeyer said as he led us to a house midway down the street.
    The victim was a Caucasian man sprawled on the driveway beside a black Audi with slashed tires and broken headlights. The man looked to me to be about forty, six feet tall, and a little pudgy, wearing a blue bathrobe and long pajama bottoms covered with the Ralph Lauren logo. His head was in a pool of blood.
    I tried to focus my awesome powers of deduction, but I kept thinking about my extra tonnage. It was true that ever since my daughter Julie went off to college, I’d been hitting the Oreos pretty hard at night. Now I was paying the price.
    I forced the Oreos out of my mind and tried to concentrate on the scene in front of me. Dead man in a bathrobe. Trashed car. Nice house, nice car, designer jammies. What did all of that tell me?
    The guy was probably a professional of some kind, like a doctor, lawyer, or banker, and made someone angry enough to trash his car and kill him.
    Lieutenant Amy Devlin squatted beside the body, arms resting on her knees, head down in thought. She was a former undercover cop who’d recently transferred into the homicide division to fill the vacancy left by Randy Disher.
    Devlin was thin and wiry, her dark hair cut raggedly short, as if she’d done it herself in a fit of anger with a pair of desk scissors. With the exception of her leather jacket, we were dressed exactly the same: T-shirt, V-neck sweater, jeans.
    She looked up as we approached but directed her gaze at Stottlemeyer.
    “I thought you only called Monk in on the murders we can’t figure out,” she said. “We just got here, but this one strikes me as pretty routine and not particularly complex.”
    “That’s because you’re looking at it as a cop,” Stottlemeyer said, “not as a politician.”
    “Because that’s what I am,” Devlin said. “Aren’t you?”
    “If you want to reach my lofty heights in the department, you have to be both. The dead man is Garson Dach, a deputy district attorney. So we needed to solve this case an hour ago.”
    My guess was that Dach ran outside to confront whoever was trashing his car and got beat up. The only questions left to answer were who the killer was and why he did it.
    “Dead is dead,” Devlin said. “What makes his murder a higher priority than any other?”
    Stottlemeyer sighed. “Not knowing the answer to that question is what will keep you at the same pay grade for the rest of your