Mr. Monk Goes To The Firehouse - Plot Synopsis

Plot Synopsis

Adrian Monk, the obsessive-compulsive modern-day Sherlock Holmes, is forced to move in with his assistant Natalie Teeger, who is the narrator of the novel, while his apartment is being fumigated. After laying down certain laws (namely, turning away the moving men bringing Monk’s refrigerator and bed into her house) Natalie finds her daughter Julie crying in her room. Julie tells her that Sparky, a firehouse dalmatian who visited her school during Fire Safety Week, was found murdered the previous night. Monk can’t bear to see Julie cry, and promises to check into the matter.

Monk and Natalie head down to Fire Station #28 in North Beach, Sparky's firehouse, to speak with Captain Mantooth, the brigade commander of the engine company in question. Monk has a boyish fascination with firefighting – that is, with the rules requiring everything in the firehouse to be spotlessly clean and in perfect order. While he is lovingly polishing the already shining ladder truck, Natalie questions Mantooth, who tells her that Sparky belonged to one of their best men, Joseph 'Joe' Cochran, and always slept in the firehouse while Joe was on duty.

Mantooth tells them about the circumstances of the previous night. They were called away to a multiple alarm house fire about four blocks away. In the fire, a 64 year old woman named Esther Stoval was killed - she'd fallen asleep while smoking a cigarette in front of her television set. When they came back, they found Sparky on the floor. He'd been bludgeoned to death with a pick axe. Monk examines the crime scene, and he explains what he believe happened – the intruder came into the firehouse, probably looking for something to steal (although oddly, for a burglary, nothing seems to be missing), and grabbed a pickaxe off the rack when Sparky ran at him. Since the killer didn’t bring the weapon, Monk guesses that the attack was probably spur-of-the-moment. The only question is who, or why would someone kill a firehouse dog, and what was it the killer might have been looking for. When Monk asks Mantooth if anything was missing or disturbed when they got back, Mantooth says the only thing he noticed were two towels missing; he doesn’t think it’s important, but Monk is impressed to meet someone else who would notice that kind of detail.

Monk and Natalie walk from the firehouse the five blocks to the scene of the previous night's fire, intending to look for Joe Cochran. However, they instead have a chance run-in with Captain Stottlemeyer. He explains to them that he is here because the police have to treat the house as a crime scene until the arson investigator makes a decision. Stottlemeyer and the arson investigator believe that the death was an accident: Esther Stoval, the victim, was a chain smoker. They believe that she was smoking a cigarette, which fell onto a pile of newspapers, igniting them. The fire spread from the newspapers to the rest of the room, and then to the rest of the house. However, Monk finds some clues that seem to suggest otherwise: from the victim's position on the couch, she couldn't see the TV, and was looking at an empty chair, making it obvious that she was talking to someone else. And if Esther was watching TV when she died, then why is the remote on the other end of the coffee table from where her head was? The conclusion is that someone killed Esther, then set her house on fire to destroy the evidence.

Later that day, Monk and Natalie find Joe Cochran feeding the neighborhood’s stray cats while the investigations wrap up. Monk refuses to approach the cats (due to allergies), so Natalie goes to talk with Joe, and sparks immediately fly – Joe is not only ruggedly handsome, but big-hearted and courteous. When Natalie explains why they are there, Joe, a little choked up, says that everyone loved Sparky, and the only person with a motive he can think of would be Gregorio Dumas, a stuck-up dog breeder who lives across the street from the firehouse. Recently, Gregorio Dumas threatened the fire company with a lawsuit after Sparky impregnated his prize show poodle Letitia.

Monk and Natalie talk to Dumas, who cuts a ludicrous figure with his palatial accommodations for his poodle, and his descriptions of Sparky as a common mutt. When Monk asks where he was the previous night, Dumas says he was at home on Friday night, watching the firehouse to make sure Sparky didn’t try anything again. While watching, he saw a lone firefighter come out of the firehouse. When Natalie brings this up on a date with Joe later, Joe says that this is impossible - all of the on-duty firemen were at Esther Stoval's house that night and they never sent anyone back. Monk figures that perhaps Dumas saw the killer. In questioning Dumas, Monk also notices a strange detail: Dumas is so overprotective of his poodle that he keeps her in a locked kennel surrounded by barbed wire – so how could Sparky have impregnated her?

Before Monk can delve further on the firehouse dog case, he and Natalie are called back to the police station, where Stottlemeyer and Lieutenant Disher have received the autopsy report from the medical examiner on Esther Stoval. Disher notes that the coroner found no traces of smoke or soot particles in Esther's lungs or nasal passages, confirming Monk's suspicion that she was dead before the fire was started. He also notes that the coroner found fabric in the victim's windpipe, and petichial hemorrhaging in the conjuntivae of her eyes. In short, the victim was asphyxiated with a pillow. They have what Stottlemeyer calls a perfect murder: by staging the fire, the killer was able to destroy all forensic evidence that would have otherwise existed, including usable fingerprints and DNA. On top of all that, there is not a single witness to the crime.

Monk and Natalie ask around the neighborhood and they are dismayed to find that all of Esther’s neighbors despised her: she was a stereotypical “mean old lady,” who spied on the neighbors, complained loudly about their habits, and kept everyone up all night with the mewling of her innumerable cats. Worse, she was the lone holdout against a development plan by Lucas Breen, a local real estate tycoon, to demolish the houses on Esther's side of the street, and build an upscale condominium block. Now that she’s dead, the other residents are delighted to take their buyout from Breen and vacate the neighborhood. Neighbors on both sides of Esther's street show similar stories - one of her next-door neighbors, who works at a local think tank, claims he had to research every new cat that Esther bought, and also mentions that Esther bought a type of cat known as a Turkish Van a few days before she was killed. He also notes that her house was like an enormous litterbox (as the dander would blow when it was windy out). When Monk and Natalie talk to a neighbor who lived across the street from Esther, the neighbor mentions an incident where Esther ratted him out to the cable company for hijacking their signal with an illegal converter box to watch a baseball game. He notes that he also sells antique cars to make some money (as he is unemployed), and when Esther saw people buying restored antique vehicles from him, she filed a complaint with the city clerk, who fined him for operating a business out of his house without first getting a license.

Joe asks Natalie out on a date, and she accepts gladly; while picking her up, Joe also wins over Julie by giving her Sparky’s firehouse badge and thanking her for caring enough about his dog to hire Monk.

The next day, Monk, Natalie, and Stottlemeyer go to interview Lucas Breen, who is both rich and influential (he holds a seat on the police commission), and CEO of the Breen Development Corporation. Breen admits he didn’t have a motive to kill Esther Stoval. In fact, for the record, if push ever came to shove, he could've always rewritten the zoning regulations on the block to evict her, or, if the worst came to happen, he could build his condo project around her house (Breen notes that it was only thanks to creativity that he was able to advance to the position he is currently at in the real estate industry). When Monk asks Breen to supply an alibi for the murder, Breen claims he was at a fundraiser at the Excelsior Tower Hote downtownl with his wife, the mayor, the Governor and the governor's wife, and at least 500 other people. Leaving Breen's office, Monk takes the stairs while Natalie and Stottlemeyer take the elevator.

When Monk arrives down in the lobby, he tells Natalie and Stottlemeyer that without a doubt Breen is "the guy" who killed Esther: the flower shop in Breen's building sells a distinctive, handmade bouquet identical to one that Monk saw in the house of Lizzie Draper, one of the neighbors who lived across the street from Esther Stoval. Monk has learned that Breen bought a flower bouquet from the shop for Lizzie just a few days before Esther was killed. He's figured that Lizzie is Breen’s mistress. Remembering what Esther's other neighbors said about Esther's spying habits, Monk figures that Esther had incriminating photos of Breen with Lizzie Draper, and she must have been blackmailing Breen, threatening to tell his wife, and he killed her to keep her quiet.

Back at the police station, Disher confirms that Breen's alibi for that night is rock solid. When Stottlemeyer asks about the alibi, Monk dismisses it: the fundraiser was crowded enough that Breen could have slipped out, killed Esther, and reappeared several hours later without anyone noticing he had gone. Moreover, Breen's company happens to have designed and built the Excelsior, so he would know how to slip out without being seen by the security cameras. However, the flowers aren't enough evidence at all to make an arrest, and with no witnesses who can confirm that Breen was in the house that night, plus the fact that Breen burned down the house to get rid of all traces of himself, they also won't be able to get an indictment.

Monk and Natalie park at the Excelsior Hotel and try to recreate Breen's timetable for that night. As they are passing one office building, a homeless man asks for spare change, and Monk gives him several packages of wipes instead. The man is not pleased. They happen to pass by Joe's firehouse while doing so, and stop by. They reason that Breen would have had to stop here to rest his legs for a few minutes while on his way to Esther Stoval's house, and note that if it took them close to 40 minutes to get from the hotel to the firehouse, that would be the approximate amount of time that Breen would have taken to get to Esther's house, given that the house is only four blocks further.

Natalie asks Joe some more questions about Sparky's habits, and Joe says that Sparky was allowed to run loose around the neighborhood when they were out responding to 911 calls. He doesn’t know where Sparky went while they were gone, but in the last few weeks, he always smelled like crap. Monk solves a piece of the case, and he and Natalie head across the street to confront Gregorio Dumas: it seems that Dumas has been tunneling into the basement of the firehouse, using the sewer line. He deliberately used his poodle to distract Sparky so he wouldn’t bark, while Dumas searched the basement, which historical records show is where a famous 19th-century train robber stashed his hidden treasure. That’s why Sparky always came back smelly.

Dumas admits that he was in the firehouse on the night of the murder – and that he used the two missing towels to wipe the sewage off his shoes – but swears he didn’t kill Sparky, as it would have broken his poodle’s heart. He still mentions having seen the lone fireman leaving the garage, and in a way witnessed the crime. Monk believes him, and tells Natalie that Dumas saw Breen, who was posing as a fireman.