by One of my jobs as a cop was to dust for fingerprints at the scene of a burglary. It was called the SP-11 car. I worked solo, and I carried a kit full of fine-haired brushes, adhesive-tape, and black, white, & metallic dusting powder.
One night I went to this home to investigate a burglary. It was a townhouse with broken and loose cement steps, an unkempt garden with five-feet high stalks of weeds & grass, and no porch light. The man who answered the door was middle-aged & wearing a torn and dirty T-shirt and shorts. He let me into his home, but he wouldn’t turn on any lights. The house was dark and I had to use my flashlight to see where I was going. The first thing my flashlight lit up was a maze of newspapers stacked in columns, 7 to 8 feet high in the front room. Pillars of The New York Times pressed to the ceiling. A hoarder! The man led me through the narrow path between his paper-towers of old news to the one room that had a light on—the kitchen in the back of the house. On the kitchen table was evidence of the burglary: opened tin cans of post-WW2 rations. The man explained that the cans of food had been sitting in the cardboard since the 1950s (why? don’t ask). “Look at this!” the man shouted as he stuck a half-eaten can of sardines under my nose. It was revolting. The tiny fish bodies had conglomerated into a white slime of putrid snot. I gagged, and imagined the burglar writhing in agonizing abdominal pain of botulism.
Next, he asked me to follow him upstairs to take a look at the ransacked bedroom. As I’m walking up the darkened staircase, I hear crunching under my feet. I pointed my flashlight down to see what I had been stepping on and I saw scattered all over the stairs the tiny skeletons of long-time dead mice. Yikes! That was it for me. I’m thinking I don’t wanna see the rest of this filthy house! “OK. I’ve seen enough,” I said, and turned around to leave. “Wait,” the man said. “I wanna show you the basement.”
Ah, yes, “the basement”. The bowels of the earth. The dungeon. The Pit. The torture chamber. Spider-webs. The place where monsters hide in shadows. This should be interesting, and I couldn’t resist to look at “the basement.”
The basement was the second room with a light. What I saw was a dentist office, fully equipped with the reclining chair, the drills, the spittoon, the x-ray machine, and dozens of little metal dental tools laid out neatly on trays as though waiting for the next patient.
“My dad used to be a dentist,” he said. “But he’s dead now.” Well, that might explain why the equipment and tools looked old and rusty.
Remember the film Marathon Man when the villain Lawrence Olivier tortures Dustin Hoffman with a dental drill? Well, I remembered. And that was my cue to say goodbye. “Aren’t you gonna dust for prints?” asked the man.
“No!”
Nice!