Free Mr. Monk in Trouble by Lee Goldberg Page B

what tasks I was willing to do or what I would put up with.
    After a long day with Monk, I admit I could get a bit surly and disagreeable. But I figured after all of our years together, he ought to be used to it and make the necessary adjustments in his behavior to lessen the risks for him, which he didn’t, either out of ignorance, stubbornness, or spite.
    So I settled into one of the chairs and read aloud to Monk, my captive audience, from Abigail Guthrie’s book. It was the one way I could be sure that he’d at least give some attention to the story of Artemis Monk.
    The Extraordinary Mr. Monk
    The Case of Piss-Poor Gold
    (From the journal of Abigail Guthrie)

    TROUBLE, CALIFORNIA, 1855

    T he commerce in Trouble relied almost exclusively on gold dust, which people carried around in leather pokes tied to their belts. A pinch was worth about a dollar and just about everybody, from the clerk at the general store to the sporting women, had a set of scales.
    It was usually the seller who did the pinching and it was common for them to engage in some trickery to gain a few extra grains of gold in the transaction.
    Most of the bartenders, shopkeepers, barbers, and sporting women in town kept their nails long, the better to capture dust in a pinch, and in their spare time, rolled rough pebbles between their thumbs and index fingers to create indentations in their skin to trap more dust.
    The shopkeeper at the general store went a step further. He was known for his abundant, and slickly greased, head of hair, which he smoothed before every transaction and then raked his fingers through afterwards as the customer was leaving. According to Monk, that was because the gold stuck to his greased fingers during the pinch and was wiped off in his hair afterwards. Each night the shopkeeper washed his hair into a gold pan and made more than most prospectors did squatting beside a river.
    But I suppose it all evened out in the end, since many prospectors and miners were known to salt their gold with pyrite and brass filings to give their poke a little more volume.
    Monk didn’t bother himself with those petty crimes but he did catch plenty of more ingenious thieves.
    I remember one situation in particular, because it happened in the first few weeks that I was working for him and because it also happened to be the first murder I’d seen him solve.
    It was a warm morning in September and I was indexing samples and updating his assay ledgers in the front office of his large, perfectly square cabin.
    Monk kept a representative sample of the rocks that were brought in for him to test. He placed the sample in a jar and labeled it with the date it was tested and index numbers that corresponded to entries in a ledger that he kept of the various claims, their locations, and the owners. The ledger also contained the results of his assays. It was part of my job to maintain those records.
    The shelves in the front office were neatly organized with sample jars, reference books, maps, and various rock specimens. His prospecting tools were carefully organized according to size, shape, and function. The tools rested on pegs in the wall specifically fitted for the individual implements.
    The cabin was divided into four equal sections—the front office, which doubled as our kitchen and communal living area, the laboratory, Monk’s room, and my room.
    Monk spent most of his time in the laboratory, where he worked at an enormous desk that he somehow managed to keep dust free, even though he regularly worked with rocks and dirt. The shelves were filled with the specialized tools, chemicals, crucibles, microscopes, and balances required for his trade.
    The rear of his laboratory was reserved for the crushing of rock samples into dust, which he would then fire in the two-deck, clay furnace in the back as part of some complicated process I don’t pretend to understand. All I know is that when it was done, and the pulverized rocks had been melted, poured into