Read Online Mr. Monk Gets Even by Lee Goldberg - Free Book Online Page B

and showed it to him.
    Julie, you may have noticed, didn’t contribute anything to the discussion. While Monk and Devlin were talking, Julie plopped herself down on the couch in Stottlemeyer’s office and got busy playing Words with Friends, a Scrabble-type game app, on her iPhone with her boyfriend. He beat her about nine times out of ten. She won only when she had Monk play on her behalf.
    “So where does that leave us?” Monk asked.
    “Us?” Devlin said. “I don’t know what you’re doing, but I’m searching for any enemies Zuzelo might have had.”
    “Who opens his door and invites his enemy into his apartment?”
    “You know what they say—keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”
    “That’s idiotic,” Monk said. “Who says that?”
    “Sun Tzu in The Art of War .”
    “He should retitle it The Art of Losing a War .”
    “He’s been dead for thousands of years.”
    “Killed, no doubt, by an enemy that he let get up close to him. Everybody knows you keep your enemies as far away as you possibly can. If you can’t do that, the very least you should do is close your door. That’s what doors were designed for—to keep your enemies out. And wild animals, of course.”
    “Of course,” Devlin said. “In any case, I can’t find anybody with a grudge against Zuzelo. He was a retired high school math teacher, for God’s sake. He led a pretty quiet life.”
    “He’s a lot quieter now,” Monk said. “Have you had better luck on the Bruce Grossman case?”
    “Now there’s a guy with lots of enemies. One of the ways that he saved the companies that he took over was by closing stores or factories and slashing jobs. The challenge will be narrowing the list of people who wanted him dead down to just a few names.”
    “What company was he running at the time of his murder?”
    “None. He hasn’t been in a corporate suite in three years. He’d lost his mojo. On his last few gigs, he performed worse than the guys he replaced. He’s the genius who pushed out Cleve Dobbs at Peach and then released the Pit.”
    Of course, Monk didn’t know anything about the Personal Internet Telephone, derisively known as the Pit, the lame and disastrous follow-up to Dobbs’ revolutionary and adorable Peach multimedia recording device. That’s because Monk didn’t participate in, or follow, American popular culture or the devices that shape it. He was unaware that the pocket-size Peach, and the company that Dobbs founded of the same name, had changed the way we record and share home movies and all but rendered the camcorder extinct overnight.
    Monk was still only slightly familiar with a mouse, mostly because he refused to use any device named after a rodent.
    “You don’t know who Cleve Dobbs is, do you?” she asked.
    “No idea,” Monk said.
    “His memoir is the number-one bestselling book in the country and he created Peach, a company rivaled only by Apple for technological innovation.”
    “I am familiar with peaches and apples,” Monk said. “But not the electronic versions.”
    “How can you possibly expect to be an effective investigator if you don’t keep up on modern technology?”
    “Murder is as old as man. Look no further than Sun Tzu. It is also disorder. All I’ve got to do is look for the things that don’t belong, are out of place, unbalanced, uneven, or missing, and if I try to restore the order, and clean up the mess, the truth will reveal itself.”
    “And what if that thing that is not where it’s supposed to be has something to do with a Peach, or an iPad, or some other piece of technology that everybody, including toddlers who can’t even talk yet, and perhaps even some domesticated animals, are familiar with and you are not?”
    Devlin’s phone rang before Monk could reply, which is a shame, because I would have been curious about his answer to that question.
    While she was on the phone, Monk took the opportunity to start organizing her desk, an activity he abruptly