"What are we doing here?" Adrian asked Natalie tentatively the next morning as they pulled up in front of what had a mere twenty-four hours ago been Arthur Schmidt's residence. The entire mansion was swathed in construction scaffolds, and workmen's equipment littered the yard.
"We promised the captain we would check out Schmidt's wife to see if she might have done it, remember?" Natalie pointed out to him, gently tugging him out of the car, "Now what is there to worry about here, seriously?"
"Need you even ask?" Adrian gestured around at the mansion, "This whole place is uneven and chaotic; it's sort of like Hell on earth. Couldn't we just invite her nicely down to the station and ask her the questions there?"
Before his assistant could answer, he weaved his way through the maze of equipment on the lawn until he was directly underneath one of the scaffolds. "You guys," he called up to the construction workers drilling away at the mansion's latticework, "You missed a spot over there."
The foreman shut off his drill. "What?" he called down to the detective.
"On the corner of the roof, there, one of the columns you drilled in the avenging angel frieze is a quarter inch thicker than the others," Adrian pointed toward the exact spot, "Could you drop what you're doing now and go fix it?"
"Listen bud, we're on a tight schedule as it is!" the foreman yelled down, "If we do finish what we're doing now, we won't get paid by Mrs. Schmidt in full. What's s o bad about one column being thicker than the others?"
"Well think what Mrs. Schmidt's guests are going to say when they walk in and see that mistake in the frieze," Adrian yelled back, "They're all going to blame you for shoddy workmanship, I can tell you right now. You'll never get a moment's…"
"Are you with the police?" came a new voice. A middle-aged but still somewhat unattractive woman was staring at him strangely on the porch, apparently having listened in on his conversation.
"I'm Adrian Monk, are you Marilyn Schmidt?" he asked her.
"I'm now Marilyn Thomason again, and not a moment too soon," she said with great relish at being single again in her voice. She reached over the railing and shook Adrian's hand. "Won't you come inside so I can get this all over and with and move on with my life," she inquired as he waved for Natalie to give him a wipe.
"Uh, here's the thing, I can see you kind of busy inside," Adrian had noticed the inside of the mansion was rather torn up as well. "Why don't we step into Natalie's car there and discuss…."
"Of course we'll come on in," Natalie took his sleeve and led him toward the front door. "Not without my hand vacuum!" he protested, "We've got to go back to my place first and get it; just look at all the dust in here!"
Indeed the den was covered with heavy amounts of dust from the construction. Natalie paid no attention to him. "Mrs. Schmidt, we'd like…" she began.
"I said call me Thomason now," Schmidt's widow reprimanded her, "I refuse to be connected any further with Arthur now that he's gone."
"So I take it the two of you weren't on the best of terms before he was killed then?" Adrian strode over to a coffee table covered in shrink-wrap plastic and began fiddling absentmindedly with the plastic's edges.
"Would you want to show respect for a man who ignores you for hours on end, sleeps around with every two-bit prostitute out there, steals from your own savings account, forges your name on his checks, and overrules your every decision?" Marilyn snorted, "I was finally going to drag him into divorce court next week, but thankfully whoever killed him saved me time and money."
"When was the last time you saw him?" Natalie inquired.
"We had just sat down for our first dinner together in almost two weeks last night, it had to have been not long after five," Marilyn informed her, "We're seated two minutes and the phone rings. Arthur immediately dropped everything to pick up and ran out the door without a word. And after he'd sworn he was going to forget work this once…"
"Excuse me, where's your broom closet?" Adrian inquired, staring almost psychotically at several large lumps of dust in the corners, "This really needs to be swept up S.P.C.A."
The women stared in him in amazement. "Did you hear anything unusual when Arthur received that call?" Natalie continued the questioning.
"Nothing out of the ordinary," the dead man's ex told her, "Just his usual business nonsense, which I don't pay attention to anyway. I did hear him mention some name I never heard before, though, and I thought I knew everyone he made his crooked dealings with."
"Was his name by any chance Harold Krenshaw?" Adrian asked, flicking at a stray piece of wallpaper that was coming loose on the far wall.
"Mr. Monk, please!" Natalie scolded him, presumably both for messing with the paper and for inserting Harold into the conversation.
"No it wasn't Harold Krenshaw he mentioned, whoever he is," Marilyn informed him, "I just heard the basic syllables; not enough to match a proper name."
"I see," the detective was now sweating profusely from all the dust and the general haphazardness of the room, "I need to know, Mrs. Schm—Thomason, were you then here for the rest of the night afterwards?"
"Yes I was," she told him, "I waited all night for him to come back—I don't know why I didn't just walk out of here the moment he did. It wasn't until that Lieutenant Disher called me that I knew he'd gone too far for once."
"So you're saying he was definitely alive and well when he left here?" Adrian trudged over to the chimney and stared intently up it.
"If you're insinuating that I might have killed him, you've got another thing coming, Mr. Monk," Marilyn told him defensively, "I loathed Arthur for treating me like dirt, but the last thing I would have done is plunged a knife into his chest. If anyone would have killed it him, I think it would have been John."
"John?" Natalie asked.
"Our son," the widow said, "He hasn't even bothered coming around since Arthur started interfering in his online trading business. In fact the last time they were together they got into a huge fight and John screamed he would do something terrible if Arthur didn't back away and leave him alone. But if he did do it, please don't go hard on him; whoever killed Arthur did this town a great benefit. Now do have any more questions?"
"Yes, I do," Adrian raised his hand, "When was the last time you had this chimney cleaned out? There's soot buildup everywhere in here."
"Any more RELEVANT questions?" irritation was growing in Marilyn's voice.
"Yes, me again, if you don't mind I could come over and clean it out myself," Adrian informed her, "I've got enough cleaning poles to handle it. In fact I could make this house more…"
"Thank you for your help, Mrs. Thomason," Natalie once again seized her employer's hand and dragged him away from the chimney, "We'll let you know what we get on this."
"Mr. Monk, let the Schmidt's house go," she was pleading with him a half hour later back at the precinct. Adrian was seated at Stottlemeyer's desk—vacant at the moment given that the captain was currently in court—writing a down a short list of cleaning utensils on a notepad under the heading SCHMIDT EMERGENCY GEAR.
"How can I?" he protested, "You saw the inside of that place too; it's on the borderline of beyond help. It's up to me to fix that mess, get rid of the dust and soot, and make that house safe for everything again."
"Don't you trust the workers?" Natalie had to know, "I sure they're professionals who know how to clean up when they're done remodeling?"
"You saw as much as I did that they made the one column in the frieze thicker; how can you call them professionals when they make a mistake like that?" Adrian stated adamantly. Natalie rolled her eyes. "So, did you find anything out while we were there?" she asked him as he underlined his list and put the pen he'd written it with down.
"In a nutshell more or less nothing; the dust had me too wound up," he admitted, prompting more eye rolling on her part, "But she's telling the truth that he was alive and in good shape when he left the mansion."
"And how do we know that?" Natalie asked him, but before Adrian could answer, Disher came running into the office. "Monk, um, I think we need to talk in private," he told him, a very worried look on his face, "Could you step into a closet with…" he trailed off as he realized that a closet probably wasn't the best of ideas when it came to telling secrets to Adrian Monk. "On second thought," he added, "Maybe we should go into the bathroom and…no, that won't…why don't we go up on the roof for…no, that's not…how about we go for a drive?"
"Uh, sure," the detective nodded. Disher led them downstairs and out the front door to the precinct's parking garage. Once they were all inside, he pulled out into traffic at an unusually high rate of speed and swerved with equally unusual high speed between lanes. "Careful, watch that motorcycle!" Natalie pointed at it directly ahead of them in time for Disher to swerve to its left, "So what's so important that has you all riled up like this?"
Disher turned off the radio and turned the car's heater on full blast, even though it wasn't that cold outside. "OK," he said slowly, "I've got good news and bad news. Which do you think you want to hear first?"
"Um, better get the bad news out of the way first," Adrian told him. Just as the lieutenant was about to speak, though, he blurted out, "No, wait, give me the good news first; it would too depressing with the bad. No, bad first. No, the good. No, the bad. No, the…."
"Um," Disher cut him off, "the good news is I got the results back from the fingerprint scan the captain ordered on the rifle they found in Schmidt's car. We've got a positive match."
"What could be bad about that?" Natalie inquired.
Disher glanced around the car as if some hidden spy was still listening in despite the roar of the heater. He took several nervous breaths. "They were Karen's prints," he said quickly.
"What?" Adrian's jaw dropped in complete shock, "You mean….?"
"Yeah," Disher nodded slowly, "It's definitely hers; they confirmed it. No one else's prints were on the rifle except Schmidt's, and his were only on it indirectly. Hers were all over it."
An uneasy silence permeated the car. Adrian gulped audibly, knowing that the case had suddenly veered into tedious territory. "Well," he said slowly, "I guess there's only one thing we can do right now."