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moderator,” I said. “What was Braddock’s problem?”
    “He was only asking what most of the cops in the room were already thinking.”
    “It was personal, Captain,” I said.
    “I didn’t take it that way,” Stottlemeyer said.
    He was lying, of course. But there was nothing to be gained by challenging him on it and I didn’t have the time. We were running later than I’d anticipated and I’d already have to break a few traffic laws if Monk was going to make it on time to his appointment with his shrink. So we went our separate ways.
    Ever since Dr. Kroger passed away, Monk had been seeing Dr. Neven Bell. They weren’t quite as close as Monk and Dr. Kroger had been but I saw that as a good thing. It seemed to me that the less dependent Monk was on his shrink, the closer he was to being a rational, independent person.
    While Monk unloaded his troubles on Dr. Bell, I took a walk up the street, which was so steep that steps were cut into the sidewalk. I liked the walk; it got my blood pumping and I was rewarded with a nice view of the city when I got to the top.
    Monk hated the street, and all the others like it in San Francisco, because the Victorian houses were staggered against the incline. But at least he no longer insisted on being blindfolded to avoid the sight. I guess that was progress.
    I thought about the flaying that Stottlemeyer endured at the conference and felt bad that we hadn’t done a better job of defending him (though I knew Monk would have argued that he’d done his share by maintaining the water level of the glasses).
    Braddock didn’t say anything that was untrue but he could have made the same points without turning it into an attack on Stottlemeyer’s character and competence.
    Monk wouldn’t have been working for the SFPD at all if not for Stottlemeyer. The captain didn’t bring Monk in to boost his case-closure rate, or to make himself look good. He did it because he was the one person in San Francisco who cared about Monk, regardless of his psychological problems.
    Stottlemeyer hired him as a consultant to save Monk from a life of isolation and misery. It was a wonderful act of friendship and kindness, and probably cost the captain whatever political capital he’d saved up during his career. So it infuriated me to see what he did for Monk used as a weapon against him.
    I couldn’t undo the damage that was done to Stottlemeyer at the conference but at least I could offer him some friendly consolation. So on the way back to Dr. Bell’s office, I called the captain and invited him for coffee after we both got off work.
    Neither one of us had a significant other waiting at home, so I knew he didn’t have any real excuses to decline my invitation. Call me immodest, but I was pretty sure that spending time with me had to be better than going home to an empty apartment and leftovers in the fridge.
    Besides, after what he’d endured today, he probably needed someone to talk to, whether he admitted it or not.
    Stottlemeyer met me at a Starbucks near my house in Noe Valley, a quirky neighborhood that had upscaled around me since I bought my fixer-upper that I never got around to fixing up. I kept waiting for the Neighborhood Watch Committee to march on my house with torches to drive me away because I don’t have breast implants, a German car, or an iPhone. What saved me was that I was a thin, natural blonde with a perky smile, but I knew that wouldn’t hold them off for much longer.
    The captain and I forked over an inordinate sum of money to the barista for two cups of coffee and settled into two lumpy, mismatched, wing-backed chairs.
    He’d taken off his tie and opened the top two buttons of his shirt, exposing the collar of his V-neck undershirt. He looked terrible.
    “So what’s the occasion?” Stottlemeyer asked.
    “I thought you might want to talk after what happened today,” I said.
    “There isn’t really anything to talk about.”
    “We could talk about the lie you told