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eighty-two-year-old relative if you hadn’t so instantly pointed him out? Admit it, Adrian, you were showing off.”
    â€œI do things at my own speed,” Monk said, still arranging his jacket on the peg. “Not because I might get paid more.”
    â€œWell, something had better change, because if the department starts paying us by the hour, we’re going to be out of business.”
    â€œYou should talk to the captain.” The jacket was finally perfectly centered. If only he spent this much time on the details of solving each case.
    â€œI will talk to him,” I promised. “But consulting expenses are under the control of the lieutenant.”
    â€œThen we need to get rid of the lieutenant.”
    â€œI’ll talk to the captain,” I promised again. “Meanwhile, we need new cases, ones that you can’t solve in an hour. I realize the money is my part of the business, but you need to start being more flexible.”
    â€œI am not working on a divorce, so you can tell her no thanks.”
    â€œTell who?”
    â€œThe woman who was just here. It’s not your perfume. It’snot Daniela’s. There’s a second coffee cup on the shelf, uncentered, meaning she was here long enough to discuss something over coffee. And since you didn’t mention the possibility of a new case, you must have turned it down, meaning a divorce. I don’t do divorces.”
    â€œGreat. Then I guess we’ll just starve.”
    Monk laughed. “We won’t starve. I have enough canned goods in my kitchen for a month.”
    I managed to stay civil and calm—one might say unnaturally calm. I let Monk settle in behind his desk, then said good-bye and left him in charge for the rest of the day.
    I was barely behind the wheel of my old Subaru when I pulled out Sue O’Brien’s card and dialed the number.

CHAPTER FIVE
    Mr. Monk and the Fingernails
    T he next time I got a chance to talk to Captain Stottlemeyer was at a funeral in a side chapel of a small Episcopal church in my neighborhood of Noe Valley.
    Judge Nathaniel Oberlin served for decades on the California State Superior Court. Monk and I had both testified in front of him, and from what I’d seen, he’d been a by-the-book jurist, but a fair one, with a slightly wicked sense of humor. He and Captain Stottlemeyer had been friends from way back, which was the main reason Monk and I had been invited to the viewing and the ceremony directly following, to lend the captain some moral support.
    According to what I could piece together, the judge, a widower, had recently been in Thailand visiting his daughter, Bethany. She worked as a teacher at an American-sponsored school in some jungle province, an adventurous girl barely out of college.
    The judge had been careful to get all the appropriate vaccinations before leaving, but that didn’t stop him from returning to San Francisco two weeks later with what looked like a classic bout of gastroenteritis, otherwise known as travelers’ diarrhea.
    Like most returning travelers, Oberlin didn’t seek medical attention. His symptoms seemed to be responding to a few days of self-imposed rest. But then, on a blustery, rainy morning, after too much time alone in an empty house, the judge felt well enough to join the living and walk his usual fifteen minutes into work. He collapsed on the courthouse steps, his umbrella tumbling down the street in a gust of wind.
    The doctors at San Francisco General immediately tested him for every tropical disease known to man. A blood test determined that Oberlin had contracted dengue fever, a viral disease that can be painful but is usually not fatal. In this case, it had been. His Honor Judge Nathaniel Oberlin’s condition had continued to worsen and he’d died two weeks later in the hospital from cardiac arrest.
    Young Bethany, an only child, flew in for the funeral. She was now in a straight-backed chair in a