侦探小说：Mr. Monk Is Cleaned Out 节选 (1)

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侦探小说：Mr. Monk Is Cleaned Out 简介 （ZT）

OBSESSIVE. COMPULSIVE. DETECTIVE.

Welcome to the all-new series of original mysteries
starring Adrian Monk, the brilliant investigator who
always knows when something's out of place....

The state of California is broke, plunging the city of San
Francisco into a deep financial crisis. The SFPD is forced
to fire Adrian Monk--yet again--as a consultant. Monk
figures he can live off his savings until things take a
turn for the better. Then Natalie learns that Monk
invested his money some time ago with Bob Sebes, the
charismatic leader of Reinier Investments, who has just
been arrested on charges of orchestrating a massive two
billion-dollar fraud. All of Sebes' clients' accounts--
including Monk's--are completely wiped out.

When the key witness in the government's case against
Sebes is killed, Monk is convinced that Sebes did it, even
though the man has been under house arrest with a horde of
paparazzi in front of his building 24-7.

But there is one advantage to being broke and jobless:
Monk can devote all his obsessive energy to solving this
latest mystery. Even though Monk may have been swindled
out of his savings, it's payback time.
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侦探小说：Mr. Monk Is Cleaned Out 节选 (1) ZT

MR. MONK IS CLEANED OUT by Lee Goldberg
Published by Obsidian an imprint of New American Library
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
ISBN: 9780451230096

CHAPTER ONE
MR. MONK AND THE ECONOMY

Some guys showed up the other day at the house next door, mowed the
dead lawn, and spray-painted it green. The banks were doing that to
a lot of the foreclosed homes in my neighborhood. I was current with
my mortgage payments and my grass wasn't dead, but I was tempted to
ask the guys to paint my lawn just so it would look as good from a
distance as everybody else's.

The great detective Adrian Monk, my obsessive-compulsive employer,
also liked the idea of spray-painting my lawn, but that was because
he loves uniformity. It didn't matter to Monk that there was
something inherently absurd about painting dead plants and that it
might be a symptom of a much bigger problem than dying lawns.

For instance, Monk has an amazing eye for detail, but I'm sure he
didn't notice that the gourmet cheese shop on Twenty-fourth Street
had closed. The delightfully snooty "maitre fromager affineur" told
me that his business had plummeted because--with the exception of
those individually wrapped, perfectly square slices of processed
blandness that Monk liked so much--cheese had become a luxury in a
world where people were having trouble affording the necessities.

It was a world that I, as a single mother raising a teenage
daughter, had been living in for years. I'd never been able to
afford gourmet cheese. But suddenly it seemed like everybody else
was joining me. The state of California itself was now just like
me--a free-spirited liberal with a mostly sunny disposition
teetering on the edge of financial ruin.

But while everybody around me was losing their jobs and their homes,
I took guilty comfort in the fact that as long as people kept
killing one another, Monk would continue as a consultant to the San
Francisco Police Department and I would remain gainfully employed as
his assistant.

Monk was oblivious to the suffering, economic or otherwise, of those
around him because he was totally preoccupied with his own. For him,
suffering was a way of life, a vocation and an art form, something
to wallow in with misery and, as odd as this may sound, a certain
amount of comfort. Suffering was as familiar and pleasurable to him
as happiness is to the rest of us.

Even so, it was my job to ease his suffering as much as possible so
that he could function in society and concentrate on solving
murders.

It was up to me to make sure that the people around him, and the
places he visited, met his incredibly arcane rules of order and
cleanliness.

There was nothing scarier to Monk than change. For example, every
day he wore the same thing: a brown sports coat over an off-white,
one hundred percent cotton shirt buttoned up to the collar. The
shirts all had eight buttons, of course. His tailored slacks had
eight belt loops around the waist.

Monk aspired to a rigidly structured, symmetrical, and antiseptic
life. I did my best to help him achieve that impossible and
unappealing goal.

But as hard as Monk tried to exert absolute control over his
environment, he still couldn't isolate himself from the global
financial crisis, which he discovered for himself early one weekday
morning at his neighborhood Safeway supermarket.

We went to replenish his supply of Summit Creek bottled water, the
only beverage that he would drink. I'm not exaggerating--that's all
he drank. No other liquid ever passed his lips. He even brushed his
teeth with it.

So he was very unsettled to discover that there weren't any bottles
of Summit Creek on the shelves. The space it usually held was
occupied by bottles of Arrowhead and Evian.

He looked at me. "Where's my water?"

"I guess they sold out."

Monk c ocked his head from side to side, studying the shelf the way
he would a crime scene.

"No, that's not it. They've removed the product tag from the shelf."

"Maybe they aren't stocking it at this store anymore."

"Don't be ridiculous, Natalie. Summit Creek bottled water is a basic
human necessity."

"For you, Mr. Monk."

"For all of mankind," he said. "Nobody can live without water."

I motioned to the dozens of other brands of bottled water. "There's
plenty of other water for sale here."

"That swill is not water."

"It sure looks like water to me."

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• 侦探小说：Mr. Monk Is Cleaned Out 节选 (2) -斓婷- ♀ (3730 bytes) () 05/03/2011 postreply 06:24:36

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