"You've been really quiet since we started to come here," Natalie pointed out to her boss as they pulled into a parking space on the outskirts of Golden Gate Park near the Japanese Tea Garden, "You also flinched at the mention of John Schmidt's name earlier."
"I didn't flinch," Adrian said in protest, but there was a rather dark look on his face as they got out of the car.
"You most certainly did," she told him, "I know a strong flinch when I see one. Do you know John Schmidt?"
Adrian sighed deeply, heavy pain on his face. "I never met him," he said slowly, "But Trudy knew him very well. She dated him her first few months at Berkeley. Then one day he just broke it off on her. It broke her heart for months."
An expression of rage contorted his face at the mere thought of anyone causing Trudy any pain. His gaze fell out the window. "And that's him right there," he said, pointing forcefully at a clean-cut man in a gray sweatshirt jogging along with a huge Newfoundland—they'd called John Schmidt's office earlier and learned that he would be in Golden Gate Park for the afternoon; Disher had gone to see if he could locate the exact location where Arthur Schmidt had been murdered. "But let's come back later, when he doesn't have the dog," he said quickly upon taking note of it.
"We may not have a later," Natalie remind him, dragging him out of the car, "But how do you know it's him when you said you never…?"
"I never met him up front, but early on after I met Trudy, I noticed his photo in her purse, before she let go of him for good," Adrian explained, "When I learned Arthur Schmidt's name, I wondered if there was a relation, and now I know." He approached their newest suspect as he leaned against a chestnut to take a breath from the jogging. "John Schmidt, I'm Adrian Monk, this is…" he started to say.
"Adrian Monk, I'm so glad to finally meet you," Schmidt took his hand and shook it despite the dark look that lingered on Adrian's face, "I just want to tell you how sorry I am about what happened to Trudy. If you'd called me, I would have helped any way I could have."
"That wouldn't have been necessary, John," Adrian told him with thinly veiled contempt, "You already helped things enough when…easy, sit boy."
Schmidt's Newfoundland was sniffing away at the detective's shoes, causing him to take several large steps backwards. "Cosmo, sit!" Schmidt ordered it. "Strange, he never gets like this around other people," he mused.
"Well, John," Adrian backed up against a tree with a look of great distaste now crossing his face—almost certainly since Cosmo was now leaping up on his hind legs and scratching at the detective's tuxedo buttons, "Anyway, we tracked you down because, well, your father dropped dead in my living room, as you probably heard."
"I didn't kill him, if that's what you're asking—Cosmo, down, leave him alone!" Schmidt barked at his pet, but the dog refused to back down. It started licking Adrian's palms, prompting him to frantically wave at Natalie for wipes. "Hairbrush too!" he pleaded.
"I didn't bring one," Natalie told him. Ignoring his frustrated howl at the prospect of being covered in dog hair, she turned to Schmidt and asked, "Where were you last night between seven and nine?"
"At the Hong Yong Kitchen in Chinatown," Schmidt snapped his fingers, which finally prompted his dog to trot over to him, "I was dining with my father's partner Mr. Hallett. Have a seat over here and I'll tell you the whole story."
He started walking toward a nearby bench. "Hold on, hold on," Adrian rushed over to it before he could sit down and scrubbed away at a series of bird droppings on the seat with his wipes. "Thanks," Schmidt told him.
"Only out of common courtesy," Adrian gave him a steely look, "Between you, Dale the Whale, and whoever detonated that bomb, Trudy was put through more grief than she deserved."
"Will you just drop it, Monk, it was almost twenty-five years ago!" Schmidt protested to him, "And you want to know the real truth? My father made me break up with her. He didn't think Trudy was high-class enough for me. At the time I was too spineless to stand up to him. Seeing that hurt look on her face was the worst experience I ever had."
"Too bad she had to…" Adrian yelped in discomfort as Cosmo leaped up and pawed at him again. "Has he been fed lately?" the detective whimpered, trying to push the Newfoundland away.
"So you were going to tell us more?" Natalie inquired, sitting down with the suspect.
Schmidt looked at the ground. "I'd be lying if I told you I got along fine with my father," he said slowly, "And not just for what he made me do to Trudy. He wanted me to do exactly as he did, to micromanage my life. I could never live with that. And then I learned from Mr. Hallett he was planning on buying out my own company so he could force me into the fold as his successor. That's why I was meeting with him last night; he said he was going to protect me and expose the shady dealings my father had made."
"So in other words you have no qualms about letting him go to jail?" Adrian picked up a stick with his tweezers and tossed it as hard as he could toward the nearest pond. Cosmo eagerly ran after it. The detective ran behind a nearby tree and crouched low.
"I worked had to established that trading firm," Schmidt told him firmly, "He was going to ruin it all for his own greed if Mr. Hallett didn't step in. But again, I was there at the restaurant until long after his body was found. And I would not have killed him no matter how mad I was at him."
"Can you verify you were at the rest—EEEAAAAIIIIIIIICCCKKKKK!" Adrian was abruptly jumped from behind by Cosmo, who pinned the detective down and licked his face in delight. Schmidt laughed at the sight. "You know, I think he really likes you," he remarked.
"HEELLLLLLLPPP!" Adrian screamed for all of San Francisco to hear, "Someone call the Humane Society! On second thought, get the Marines!"
"I don't have the receipt, but Mr. Hallett can probably vouch for the both of us," Schmidt glanced at his watch, "If you hurry, you might be able to catch him before he leaves for the day. Speaking of which, I'd better get going myself; my break ends in ten minutes. Cosmo, come!"
The dog abandoned Adrian and followed his master toward the park's exit. Adrian leapt to his feet and started gyrating around as if fire ants were attacking him. His suit was now covered from collar to pant legs in dog hair. "Just look at this!" he complained to Natalie as she came over with an amused smile on her face and picked a few pieces of hair off him, "I really hope he did do it; anyone with a dog like that is a menace to society! Now I'm going to need a body transplant!"
"A body transplant?" Natalie gave him a completely befuddled look.
"Something like cloning, except it's your same body, or something like that," Adrian swiped clumps of hair off his sleeves, "Anyway, let's call his friend Hallett and get him down here; I need to know the timeline of when exactly they were in that restaurant."
"Well the Schmidt and Hallett building's only five minutes from here," his assistant pointed out, "We can easily walk there and meet him."
"Oh no, no, no, no," Adrian shook his head, "Not that big building with forty floors. You know he has to put his office the top floor when it's that high, and I'm not going all the way up there to the top. You can't make me go up there, no way, shape or how. Either he comes to us or bust, that's that."
"OK, you're almost there, Mr. Monk, just five more steps to go," Natalie told him with a mixture of frustration and genuine concern. Adrian was on his hands and knees on the stairs inside the Schmidt and Hallett building, whimpering as he slowly worked his way up one step at a time. The staircase had unfortunately had large windows at every other landing, offering what many people would have considered a beautiful vista of all of San Francisco. To Adrian however, it only reinforced the notion that they were going to be forty stories up, and he'd made the mistake of glancing out one of the windows on the twenty-ninth floor. He'd been too paralyzed to do anything other than crawl up the remaining steps, despite the strange looks people passing by him had given him.
Taking deep, almost psychotic breaths, he forced his way up the remaining stairs to the topmost landing. He barged through the door into the waiting room and breathed a huge sigh of relief. "There," Natalie patted him on the pat, sounding only half sincere, "That wasn't so hard, now was it?"
"Yeah, it really was," the detective said, waving for a wipe, "This really makes Lucas Breen's building look like a two-story job in comparison."
Natalie decided not tot say anything. They approached the front desk. "We're here to see Nicolas Hallett," she told the receptionist.
"Where have you been?" the receptionist demanded, "He's been waiting over an hour for you. He was just about to get ready to leave for the day."
She waved the two of them into Hallett's office. Adrian abruptly stopped in the doorframe and stared around the room in wonder. "What?" Natalie asked him.
"It's immaculate!" the detective said in awe. Indeed, everything in the office seemed to be set up at perfect right angles. "It's absolutely perfect!" he continued, craning his neck into every possible angle of the room, "I could actually work here."
"I glad you could, because it's gotten harder for me lately," said the gray-haired man behind the large oak desk that was positioned exactly in the center of the room, "Adrian Monk, I'm Nicolas Hallett, what took you so long?"
"We would have been here sooner, but this is on the top floor and all," Adrian told him, waving for another wipe once Hallett had shaken his hand, "I, I really have to commend you, Mr. Hallett, this is really a fabulous office."
"You can thank my executive assistant James Marshall for it," Hallett told him, "He has, how do I say this, a passion for making sure things are evened out. Now I guess this is all about Arthur, why you called me?"
"Hold it, hold it a minute," Adrian leaned forward and buttoned a button on Hallett's shirt that he'd apparently failed to notice, "There, that's perfect now," the detective nodded, "Mr. Hallett, when was the last time you saw Arthur Schmidt alive?"
"About four hours before they found him dead," Hallett told him, "They say he died in your place, the papers said?"
Adrian nodded, a discomforted look on his face at the thought of the dead man's blood all over his rug again. "Well, he came by my place completed uninvited and accused me of destroying his company. HIS company, mind you," Hallett shook his head and started pacing around behind his desk, "Never mind that we built it together from scratch; by now Arthur was convinced that the whole thing had been HIS idea, that I was just along for the ride. Anyway, we yelled at each other for about five minutes before he stormed off, threatening to leave me in the gutter with the deal he was brokering to sell the company out."
"I remember reading something about that in the paper a couple of months ago," Natalie remarked, "To some big foreign company, wasn't it?"
"Togoshaki Limited," Hallett shook his head in disgust, "Without the board's approval and without any of us in the deal; he was going to take the money and run. The entire board vetoed the deal, but reliable sources told me he was going ahead with it behind our backs." He sat back down and put his head on the desk. "Promise you won't say anything yet, but the fact is I was going to go to federal authorities and tell them all the dirty things Arthur's done since this power corrupted him," he admitted, "Including his tapping into customers' personal accounts for private information he could use if he needed to blackmail anyone. The only way to save all of us was going to be to bring him down."
"Schmidt's son said you were going to protect him," Adrian sat back in a large armchair, almost at home in the perfectly aligned office.
Hallett shook his head again. "I feel so sorry for Marilyn and John," he said slowly, "Over the years Arthur abused them in every possible way apart from with his fists. Yes, I was going to get Arthur to back off his son's business. In fact we were supposed to meet up with him at the restaurant and confront him on the matter face to face, but Arthur never showed, and now at least I know he had a legitimate excuse this time, being dead and all."
"Can you think of anyone else who might have wanted to kill him?" Adrian closed his eyes, more or less completely relaxed for once in his life.
"Oh just ask the entire board; they would have given anything to get rid of him once they found out he was stabbing them in the back," Hallett said, chewing on a piece of gum he'd pulled from his desk drawer.
"How about with Karen Stottlemeyer and the film shoot on Russian Hill?" Natalie asked him, "We were told you were helping to finance it."
"Oh don't even get me started on that," Hallett put his face in his hands, "That's just been a whole debacle from the start, and we can't back out of it now, we've invested too much. Arthur wanted to move into the film business for whatever reason, probably just to put his name on a big film. He wants everything his way, Karen Stottlemeyer wants everything her way, and I'm the poor guy stuck in between. I've fielded numerous calls from her personally since the shoot began threatening to do terrible things to Arthur unless he backed off her film."
"So she has made threats to him?" Adrian's eyes snapped wide open, "How serious?"
"Serious enough that she was going to sue the entire company for his actions," Hallett admitted, "Over a hundred million dollars. And just last weekend I fielded a call where she called him, and I quote, 'A dead man.' I made a last ditch effort to maintain the peace by sending James to oversee the production; people tend to listen to him more. But like I said, getting into this film was a mistake."
The grandfather clock in the corner struck five o'clock. "Well, I'd love to continue this conversation, but I promised my daughter I'd take her to see the Bangles tonight," Hallett rose again and reached for his coat on the back of his chair, "Did you ever see them, Detective Monk?"
"Of course," Adrian told him, "They had a pretty good team last year. Wasn't it just amazing when What's His Name threw the big score to What's His Name in the big game?"
Hallett stared at the detective incredulously. "Anyway," he said slowly, "Perhaps we could continue this conversation at a later time. You two probably know the way out."
"Oh believe me we do, we really do," Adrian rose up from the chair, "One more thing before you go, Mr. Hallett: roughly when did you get to the restaurant with John Schmidt last night?"
"Oh, somewhere between six and six thirty," Hallett said as he walked toward the office door, "I didn't have the exact time. Anyway, have a nice night, you two."
"Same to you," Natalie waved goodbye to him, "Come on Mr. Monk, they're closing up for the night."
"Not just yet," Adrian retreated back to the chair, "This is so good being in here…if he's guilty and he goes to jail, I want to rent this place out."
"Maybe later," repeating what was becoming an increasingly common occurrence, Natalie dragged him out of the office towards the stairs. "So how about him, could he have done it?" she asked him.
"Of course he could have, it seems like everyone could have," Adrian turned his body toward the wall of the stairwell so he wouldn't have to look out the windows, "Particularly telling is that A, in all the pictures of his family in that office, he's wearing a large gold ring with the initials N.H., which he wasn't wearing just now. And B, in another picture he has a .38 caliber pistol in his den. The exact type that was used to shoot Arthur Schmidt. We need to verify that his time for being in the restaurant is right. But first, we've got to check out the board, just in case one of them might have done it."
"Well, we don't have all night to go around and ask the entire board where they were," Natalie protested, "I have to make sure Julie's in bed by nine; there is school tomorrow you know."
"This won't take too long," Adrian inched his way along a landing that happened to be near another window, "I hope. Since you said the deal with the foreign company was in the paper a while back, we'll need to get it from someone who has it, and I know
who would have it." His expression became muddied. "I'm going to hate myself for involving him in this," he added, "But he is our best bet at the moment. Anyway, we're going to Tewkesbury once we get down to the ground floor, which will probably be in about, oh, a year or so."