Then we were woken up at seven in the morning by the door buzzer going off and off and off again and she got out of bed and the abrupt voice sqwaked and garbled, “Your cars been broken into… They stole your air bags!”
“Thank you,” she said, still asleep, but always polite …. “I mean… Who is this?”
“What difference does it make!?” the voice snapped back. “Your air bags are gone and there’s glass all over the place.”
“Oh… well…thanks for telling us,” she was confused, but waking to the cloudy morning and thinking, “well you don’t have to be so rude about it… I’m just wondering how you found out where we live and who we are and what apartment… I mean really.”
She came back to the bed and I was bleary eyed and abstract and suddenly I had the feeling that it was an elaborate con… we would go out to check the air bag, and someone would bonk us on the head and rob the apartment. Paranoia and exhaustian ran deep, but we threw some clothes on and went down to find this abstraction… or was it neo realism?:
No it was a busted fucking rear window and the thief had unlocked Zorg and (albeit carefully) made off with the steering wheel and side passenger airbags. The abrupt voice of the Nasty Good Samaritan rang out: “You’d think this was a safe street, huh?” He was carrying a rag with which he abstractedly polished a silver Mercedes. I was thinking, “Sure you wrap a rag around your hand and punch out the window… I’ve never seen you before… are you the messanger, or the perp hiding in the open? What difference does it make, in deed.”
We called the cops and moved the car to see if it would drive and it was opposite side of the street day and I could just see one cop writng a ticket while the other wrote a report… beaurocracy is a many headed beast after all. The men in blue arrived and asked a few questions and wrote like Bartleby and I was struck that most of police work must be red tape and desk work broken up by encounters with assholes and the occasional bit of action. It’s the thing you don’t see in the movies and t.v. The boring day to dayness of it all… how many airbag reports do you suppose these guys write in a year? I’d bet it’s too fucking many…They were as emotionless and detached as the guy who gives you your Big Mac and fries. You had the sense that they’d rather be doing something else… anything else… than filling out this report. “Some guys will be around to take fingerprints,” he said. “So if you see some guys nosing around the car, it’s them.”
Now I’d been impressed by the promptness of their appearence (I knew why later)… but I wasn’t holding my breath for detectives… or CSI, or whatever. We went upstairs and had coffee and walked the dog and got drycleaning and laughed at how the only thing we’d found upsetting so far was the neighbor who gave us the news. We were laughing about it… but he’d creeped us out.
The Evidence men showed up and they were a whole different ball of wax. For one thing, it was the first Prius this guy had dusted, so he was curious and questioning and funny: “I’m gonna dust this baby and take it for a test drive at the same time…. how many miles to the gallon does it get?”
Someone once said: “A conservative is a liberal who has been robbed.”
Someone else said: “A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.”
I’m still smarting at some of the things that went down during the Republican Convention protests, but I’ve known a lot of cops and sons of cops and a good, professional cop is a reassuring and pride inspiring thing. It’s not a job most of us would want (paper work alone and jerkoff encounters alone…and… well people shoot at you and stuff)…. anyways these guys seemed first rate to me.
One of the things I noticed was his Nike golf gloves. I wondered how many different gloves he’d tried untill he’d hit on these and he said a lot. She asked if he played golf and he said no an then he told us that he was real strict about wearing gloves, because sometimes it happens that you pull your own prints if you don’t and the boys at the lab come back saying, “We’ve got a match” and you get excited and they say, “And it’s you you idiot.”
I said, “I bet they give you a hard time for that.”
“For about two weeks,” he said quietly…. like mabe it had happened to him… and well it sure as shit wasn’t going to happen again… not today anyways….
So for the point of procedure: They dust the surface with this feathery brush.
Then they take a piece of clear tape and lay it over the revealed print (which they spot with a maglite that they hold in their teeth like a plummer as they do the other things).
Then they stick this tape to a piece of black film (it looks like the back of a Polaroid film…and the environmentalist in me sort of hopes that they take the cast offs from the Mug Shot Department and use that… This is fed into a computer and, the limits of technology were pointed out to me: the computer culls down the number of matches, but finger print reading is partially art… and so a human is needed to go throught the twenty or so matches (out of millions) that the computer identifies. You can see why fingerprints are becoming controversial in the era of DNA… Art is always suspect over science (unless your talking about Darwin and monkeys)
So we were off to Bay Ridge Toyota and she was making me laugh by saying: “I know there’s a problem with the air bag” to the read out and it looked to me like Orson Welles chewing bubble gum as we cruiesed at risk (Geico wanted to tow us because suddenly after a hundred years of automotive history, it is unsafe to drive a car WITHOUT an airbag… what the fuck was GM fighting for or against with Nader?)
So, long story short, we get there and see the clone of our Zorg: turns out a block away the same dude hit another green Prius and the cops came by and iterrupted his little play date. Would that they had caught him and brought us our air bags in a bag… but the thief fled into prospect park where the cops are loath to go….the twin only had a window broke and no finger prints taken. Me, Well… I liked the cops with the machines… so if they broke the window at least we got the smart cops…who even got my blog address… Maybe they’ll bust this ring…anyone who wants the blog address must be smart right?
