Mr. Monk in Trouble by Lee Goldberg Read Free Book Online Page B

said, motioning to me frantically. I reached into my purse, pulled one out, and handed it to him. He pointed at Chief Kelton. “Not for me, for him. Hurry!”
    I held the wipe out to Kelton.
    “Thanks,” he said. “But it’s not necessary.”
    Monk gasped. “Do you have some kind of death wish?”
    “No,” Kelton said.
    “Are you drunk?”
    “Not presently,” Kelton said.
    “Then what is your excuse for not cleaning your hands after an animal drenched them with rabid drool and you ran your fingers through its unwashed, flea-ridden fur?”
    Kelton sighed, took the wipe from me, and cleaned his hands with it.
    “You’ll thank me later,” Monk said, walking ahead of us, cautiously choosing his path as if he were crossing a minefield.
    I took a Baggie from my purse and held it open for Kelton to drop the wipe into. He did. I closed the Baggie and stuffed it into my purse.
    “How many of those wipes do you carry around?” Kelton asked.
    “Hundreds,” I said.
    “How long will that supply last?”
    “A day or two,” I said.
    He shook his head. “How long have you been working for him?”
    “Years and years,” I said.
    “And you aren’t an alcoholic?”
    “Nope,” I said.
    “Or a drug addict?”
    “Nope,” I said.
    “Have you attempted suicide since you started working for him?”
    “Nope,” I said.
    “How about murder?”
    “Nope,” I said.
    “It’s a miracle,” he said.
    I nodded.

CHAPTER FIVE
    Mr. Monk and the Golden Rail Express

    T he Gold Rush Museum occupied the town’s former train station. It was stuffed with artifacts from the period, like scales and measuring instruments to weigh the gold, and all kinds of prospecting paraphernalia, from shovels and picks to a wide assortment of pans, rockers, and sluices used to separate gold from the dirt.
    The museum’s walls were covered with dozens of original daguerreotypes, photographs, sketches, paintings, and documents that illustrated the grubby, hardscrabble frontier life of the forty-niners.
    There were a wagon, a carriage, a stagecoach, and a full-sized cross section of a miner’s cabin.
    And there were several hokey dioramas with mannequins adorned in Western garb and posed in the midst of building a cabin, panning for gold, and digging in the mines.
    The only items of any obvious monetary value were the gold-laced quartz rocks, the gold nuggets, and the glittering pile of gold dust in one of the display cases.
    The centerpiece of the museum, however, was the engine of an enormous steam locomotive and one of its passenger cars. It was, according to the information placard in front of the display, the “famous” Golden Rail Express.
    “This is where Manny was killed,” Kelton said. “The assailant was hiding behind the train and hit him from behind with a pick.”
    “Did you recover the weapon?” Monk asked.
    “It was taken from the prospecting diorama over there.” Kelton gestured to the diorama on the far side of the museum.
    The diorama depicted a bearded, chubby prospector crouching beside a rock formation, examining the rocks while his recalcitrant donkey tugged at a loose strap on his overalls.
    I wasn’t an expert in California history, but the diorama didn’t strike me as historically accurate. It felt more like history Disney-fied, turning the miner into a lovable cartoon character and anthropomorphizing the donkey to create a humorous vignette out of an isolated moment of dull prospecting.
    “We don’t have a forensics unit, so I called in the state police crime lab to process the crime scene for me,” Kelton said. “The pick was wiped clean, of course, and since this is a museum that thousands of people have walked through, fingerprints and fibers are dead ends.”
    “Did Manny have a patrol routine?” Monk asked.
    Kelton nodded. “He walked the perimeter of the building every hour. Along the way, he had to swipe his security ID into a special reader that logged the time of his patrol. This way the museum