Directed by Andrei Belgrader
Written by Peter Wolk
Three homeless men enjoy drinking booze and singing Christmas songs one night when their merrymaking is interrupted by a paranoid friend of theirs who turns up dead the next day.
The homeless men show up at Monk's apartment with a few dollars' worth of empty cans and bottles ($14.00 in bottle deposit refunds), hoping to hire Monk, who is predictably horrified by the presence of dirty men in his house. Monk is unwilling to take the case, until he realizes that the easiest way to get the homeless men out is to agree to look at the crime scene.
Of course, Monk is unwilling to step out of the car; he views the crime scene through binoculars. Even so, he's able to determine that the bums' friend was already dead when he was stuffed into a broken refrigerator. Monk goes to the police station and easily convinces Disher to have the medical examiner review the case.
Monk takes the empty cans and bottles to a store to get the deposit refunds, but the amount falls 15¢ short of $14, on account of three Canadian bottles. Monk is very annoyed, even though $14 is presumably still far short of what Monk would normally charge. However, Monk realizes that the three rejected bottles are a clue in the case.
Meanwhile, Stottlemeyer has come in to work even though he's very ill, suffering terrible back pain. Then he goes to a pharmacist, Owen McCloskey (Michael Badalucco). Stottlemeyer inquires about a crucifix on the wall. McCloskey says it was installed by his former partner, a churchgoing man who then embezzled thousands of dollars from the pharmacy and vanished.
No medicine seems to soothe his pained back, so Stottlemeyer's willing to try anything. There is a fountain at a monastery that has gotten a reputation for miracle healing. Stottlemeyer's skeptical, but eventually he's convinced to take the drastic step of joining the monastery to go on a 2-year mission to Spain.
The pharmacist and his girlfriend are running a scheme in which they give out placebos instead of actual medicine. If the pharmacy clients visit the miraculous fountain, McCloskey will replace the placebo with the appropriate medicine. McCloskey wants the fountain to be thought of as miraculous so that the church doesn't replace it with classrooms or anything else. The construction crew would find the body of McCloskey's former partner, leading the police to determine that the man was murdered.
Examining artifacts left behind by the supposedly miraculous fountain (including Stottlemeyer's cane), Monk realizes that more than half of the medicine bottles come from the same pharmacy. Disguising themselves as monks, Monk and Natalie find Stottlemeyer and explain what they've figured out using a Gregorian chant melody.
The next day McCloskey is arrested, and Stottlemeyer is back on the force, with his badge on his belt. Stottlemeyer gives Disher a razor as a Christmas gift.
The episode ends with an epilogue of Monk approaching the fountain, intent on testing Natalie's advice about belief. But as he is about to try the water, he gives pause. The story ends ambiguously, never showing if Monk drank the water or not.
This episode contains examples of the following tropes:
- Absence of Evidence: Monk determines Willie T.'s death was murder when he sees there are no scratch marks on the inside of the fridge, as there would be from a man panicking while trying to get out of one he was trapped in.
- Bait-and-Switch: When the Guilt-Ridden Accomplice tells the killer (her fianceé) that she wants out, he tells her "Nobody's going anywhere." This feels very much like it's setting another murder. Instead, the killer merely tells her that they're both in too deep to stop and that they'll be in the clear soon.
- Body in a Breadbox: Willie T. is found dead in an old refrigerator.
- Cassandra Truth: The trigger of the plot. When Willie T. runs off saying someone was going to kill him, his friends laughed it off, believing he was paranoid, only to find out he was telling the truth when his body is discovered the next day. The three hobos are so guilt-ridden for not believing him that they go to Monk and hire him.
- Christmas Episode: Monk puts up a cardboard cutout of a Christmas tree, rather than an actual Christmas tree. Weirder than aluminum Christmas trees.
- Disposable Vagrant: The homeless men tell Monk that they talked to the police, but they just concluded Willie get trapped in a freezer after crawling into it for warmth. One of the men explicitly says that they're invisible to the cops.
- Disposing of a Body: The killer buried his partner’s corpse ten years ago. At some point after that a monastery was constructed there, with a fountain being put right on top of the grave. Eventually the monastery decided to build classrooms there, and their construction would doubtless result in them finding the corpse; the killer couldn’t dig it up from under the fountain, so his only option was to stop the monastery from building there.
- Domestic Abuse: When his fiancée's conscience starts getting to her about the fountain and she tries to back out of the plan, Owen slaps her across the face. It's probably a good thing for her that he was arrested.
- Gaslighting: The whole plot is a mass example, as the culprit made it look like a church's fountain has healing properties, convincing enough people to prevent the monastery and its surroundings from being torn down, and anyone discovering the guy's victim.
- GPS Evidence: Monk starts to figure out Owen is involved in the murder when he sees that more than half of discarded bottles of medicine from the people being "cured" came from his pharmacy.
- Leave No Witnesses: Owen killed Willie T. because Willie saw him paint the "drink" message on a door (Stottlemeyer's, incidentally) and didn't want someone potentially revealing the fountain does not heal people.
- Make It Look Like an Accident: Owen suffocated Willie T. to death, then placed his body in a junkyard refrigerator, making it look like Willie got stuck inside the freezer and suffocated in there.
- Medication Tampering: Part of Owen McCloskey's scheme. He would swap out the medicines of his clients with placebos that did not help them with their problems, or even exacerbated them. He then painted an image of the fountain on people's doors. Once he learned a client had drunk from the fountain, he would give them actual medicine, thus "curing" them.
- Paste Eater: The Professor, one of Monk's homeless clients, eats books.
- Pursued Protagonist: In the opening scene, Willie T, the homeless man with a case of He Knows Too Much, interrupts his friends' drunken caroling to say that someone is chasing him across town. He then sees his pursuer in the distance and races away, later being found dead in a junkyard.
- Revealing Cover Up: Owen kills Willie T. because he witnessed him painting a "miraculous sign" on Stottlemeyer's door and Owen didn't want him to potentially disprove the "miracle" of the fountain. Willie's friends come to hire Monk after he first screams that someone is after him and then turns up dead the next morning.
- Shout-Out: According to Andy Breckman, the plot point of trying to keep a dead body hidden under a fountain comes from the Columbo episode "Requiem for a Falling Star".
- Stealing from the Till: This whole saga began because Owen McCloskey's business partner embezzled $18,000 from their pharmacy, driving Owen to murder him and bury his body.
- The Summation: Natalie and Monk have to explain the case this time in Gregorian chant.
- Twisted Christmas: Willie T. was murdered at Christmas.
- Unprocessed Resignation: Averted, Stottlemeyer tries to convey his resignation through Monk. Stottlemeyer actually writes a letter of resignation with a fountain pen on fancy paper at the monastery, and also gives up his badge. But once Monk and Natalie tell Stottlemeyer that the miraculous fountain is a hoax perpetrated to cover up a murder, Stottlemeyer returns to the police department like nothing happened. Presumably Monk never relayed Stottlemeyer's resignation to the police chief.
