Mr. Monk on the Couch Read Free Page A

career.”
    “Fine by me,” she said. “I didn’t become a cop to kiss asses.”
    “Then you are succeeding brilliantly,” Stottlemeyer said, then looked around. “Where’s Monk?”
    I turned, expecting to find him back among the parked cars, but he was standing in front of the neighbor’s juniper hedge, staring at the Sunday edition of the San Francisco Chronicle that was lying on top of it.
    “What are you doing?” Stottlemeyer asked.
    “Securing the crime scene,” Monk said.
    “The murder is over here.” The captain gestured to the body on the driveway.
    “I’m talking about this,” Monk said, pointing at the newspaper.
    “That’s not a crime, Monk.”
    “Look at where the paperboy has tossed his newspapers,” Monk continued. “It’s on the hedge here, the sidewalk there, the lawn over there, the driveway there, on the hood of a car over there—it’s criminal.”
    “He’s tossing newspapers out of a car,” Stottlemeyer said. “It’s not an exact science.”
    “If he can’t toss accurately, then he should get out of the car, walk up to the house, and place the newspaper on the front porch. The fact that he doesn’t care where the paper lands suggests that he has sociopathic tendencies.”
    “I’d shoot the bastard on sight,” Devlin said, but her sarcasm was completely lost on Monk.
    “I know how you feel, Lieutenant,” Monk said. “But I think apprehending him and giving him a strong warning would be enough at this stage. Maybe we can scare him straight.”
    “Let’s deal with the murder first, shall we?” Stottlemeyer said.
    “That paperboy could still be out there, throwing newspapers willy-nilly,” Monk said. “There’s a chance we can stop him before he causes more harm.”
    “There’s also a murderer out there, Monk, who could start killing willy-nilly if we don’t stop him. That’s the willy-nilly I’m worried about.”
    “There’s too much willy-nilly going on,” Monk said. “It’s a scourge.”
    “It certainly is, and this guy was trying to stop it,” Stottlemeyer said, turning to the corpse. “Garson Dach put a lot of very bad people in prison, many of them engaged in the most heinous of willy-nilly behavior. It looks like one of those people got him back for it this morning. Are you going to do something about that?”
    I admired Stottlemeyer’s not-very-subtle effort to manipulate Monk and get him invested in the case. And it appeared to work.
    Monk turned his back on the juniper hedge and walked slowly around the car, his hands out in front of him, framing the scene like a director.
    “This is an easy one,” Devlin said. “All we have to do is get a list of guys Dach put away, see which ones got out lately, and track their movements this morning. Give me a day, maybe two, and I’ll have the killer locked up.”
    “So what do you think happened here?” I asked.
    “It’s obvious,” she replied, sighing impatiently. “Dach saw a guy trashing his car, stupidly ran out to confront him, and got himself smacked in the head with a baseball bat or some other blunt object for his trouble.”
    We had essentially the same theory about what happened, but hearing her tell it, I realized that it didn’t quite add up.
    “I take it Dach was a smart guy,” I said, “so why didn’t he call the police? Or at least come outside with a weapon of some kind to defend himself with?”
    “I didn’t say he was a smart guy,” Devlin said.
    “You don’t become an ADA if you’re an imbecile,” I said.
    “Being smart in the courtroom and smart on the street are two different things. Maybe he didn’t see the distinction and thought he was as tough out here as he was in there,” she said. “I think the bad guy only wanted to trash the car, but when Dach marched outside with a baseball bat, things got out of hand. The bad guy took the bat away from the smug bastard and beat him with it.”
    “Did you know Dach?” Stottlemeyer asked Devlin.
    “This is the