Detecting 101

In my position as a personal representative I'm having to deal with a deadbeat individual who owes the estate money. He was loaned said money in what I consider an illegal way, but since that ship has sailed I'm left with getting the money. In the course of doing just that I was told to hire a private investigator. What?

In my teenage years I was a private investigator. My neighbor, Robby, and I ran M&M Private Investigation. I made ID badges that we never flashed. We worked out of my garage with my fingerprint kit that I had gotten for Christmas one year. We made flyers and distributed them around the neighborhood, and we spent a lot of time sitting in the garage waiting for clients. 

Our first job was the Case of the Broken Coffee Cup. My mother hired us. She wanted to know who had broken the handle on her coffee cup. She probably thought it was me and that hiring me to solve this would make me confess. But I didn't break the handle. Robby and I dusted the cup for prints and transferred the prints on to the kit paper and discovered tire tracks. In interviewing my mother we found that she had found the broken coffee cup on the floor of the garage. Being the great detectives that we were, Robby and I deduced that she herself had broken the coffee cup.

Case #1 - Client remembers seeing the coffee cup intact for the last time when she used it to drink her morning coffee. Client does not remember the date. Client discovered the broken cup on the floor of the garage this week. Printing on the cup shows tire tracks that match client's vehicle tires. In reconstruction we found that the highest probability was that client herself had exited the home with coffee cup in hand on her way out. Upon entering the garage, she got sidetracked, laid the coffee cup down on the side arm of the grill that sat in front of her car. She then left the garage in her car. When she returned she bumped the grill with her car, causing the cup to fall to the ground where she then backed over the handle. When questioned, the client agreed that she had bumped the grill and that she was quite certain our deduction was correct. Pieces of the handle were found on the garage floor and under the grill. Client paid us. Case closed.

With that successful case under our belt, we were inundated with cases, of course. The biggest case we had came from two of my classmates, neighbors in the hood. Their brother, a policeman, had parked his police car in front of their house and it had been broken into the previous night and tons of radio stuff had been stolen. The twins, our clients, suspected the teenagers that lived down the street from them. They apparently didn't have faith in the police department to solve the case and hired us. Robby and I investigated, going over the car in fine detail. We got fingerprints off the door handle, but with no database to compare them to we were stuck. We decided that the best way to catch the thief was to use bait. 

The family had a camper parked in their driveway and the twins got permission for us to spend the night in it. To set up the bait the four of us rode our bikes up and down the street past the teenagers house where they were playing basketball. We carried on a conversation about the car robbery, with one of the twins discussing how great it was that they hadn't broken into the camper as it was full of camera equipment and electronics. (Apparently, that was a hot commodity back then.) To add to the bait we also discussed how the lock on the camper door was busted. Robby and I wrote the script and we practiced it in the twins' garage before we rode up and down the street sucking in the criminals. That night the twins and I slept in the camper. Since Robby was a boy he was not invited, and I was on my own with our clients. We all had places inside the camper. One twin, Lisa, slept in the bed above the driver. The other twin, Linda, slept on the padded bench that went with the dining table. I slept in the back bedroom. (I wasn't stupid)

We left the camper unlocked. We took rope and made a lasso by the entryway. The other end of the rope was attached to the bed Lisa was sleeping in. The plan was that the intruder would enter the camper, step into the lasso which Lisa would pull, causing the intruder to fall to the floor. Linda would jump up from her position and tackle them. I would run from the back bedroom and clobber them over the head with a broom. We practiced it several times. The biggest worry was me beating Linda over the head by accident.

We had fun that night in the camper. We ate and watched movies. We told ghost stories. We talked about how we would be on the news once we solved this case. Finally around two o'clock the teenagers down the street came calling. They came on their bikes with friends. They rode around and around the camper talking in loud voices. We were sure that they said things about robbing it and robbing the police car. Lisa got scared. She hopped down out of her bed and locked the camper door. Not long after that someone tried the door of the camper. We peeked out of windows and could make out the teenagers in the light that was in the twins' yard. Someone yelled that it was locked. Then the porch light came on, the twins' parent came out, thinking we were out in the camper partying, and the teens hightailed it out of there.

The next morning Robby and I fingerprinted the door knob to the camper. It matched the one we had taken off of the police car door handle. We turned it all over to the twins' brother. The way I remember the story going is that a few weeks later they arrested the eldest teen that lived down the street, but that could just be something we all made up to make the story a better one. Either way, Robby and I considered the case solved and closed. We waived our fee.

So when the lawyer told me that the best way to handle this deadbeat that owed money to the estate was to hire a private investigator I scoffed. I was a P.I. I would take the case. I would solve the mystery. I would make this guy put up or shut up. I was on this guy's trail...