Sunday 17 November 2019

HUMAN WRECKAGE

Police Procedure

Out and about in the city I sometimes encounter odd things lying in its streets. A lost cap, a mitten or glove or a shrugged off and discarded hoodie. What always intrigues me is a lone shoe because it fits the logical conjecture that some soul is or was hobbling around wearing the other one. And so I wonder what happened.

Bigger things get lost or abandoned in the big city. And they make me wonder too; they are evidence of a story with too many missing parts. On or about 4 November somebody parked a white Volkswagen in front of the Crooked 9. A white sedan with tinted windows, a black gas cap lid and black iron winter rims. I thought nothing of it because we’re proximate to a light rail station, the cancer centre and the university, and more convenient neighbourhood streets bristle with posted parking restrictions.

The following day, a Tuesday, the street was blanketed by autumn’s first major snowfall. While clearing the public sidewalk I noticed the Volkswagen’s front passenger tire, partially hidden by the height of the curb, was flat. “Bad luck,” I muttered. But that would explain why the car was still there.

Come Thursday the presence of the snowy Das Auto lump had become irksome. The Crooked 9’s spare rooms were occupied by out of town guests. We were all expecting more local visitors over the course of the Remembrance Day long weekend. Fed up, I called the City of Edmonton’s three-digit snitch line to report an abandoned vehicle. Exactly one week later a bylaw officer called me from her car. She was parked across the street and so I went out onto the front porch to wave at her as we spoke. “Oh, you’re in the house with the red shovel by the door?” She said the Parking Authority would turn up with a tow truck, maybe today, maybe tomorrow; they were busy, what with the weather. I thanked her.

Ten minutes later the police turned up. The bylaw officer must have entered the Volkswagen’s license plate number into a different City computer network because I’d supplied it ten days earlier when I made my complaint. “Well,” I thought, “that’s interesting.” No point in twitching the blinds, I camped outside with a package of cigarettes and a can of beer.

The constables were both female, very tall. One spoke with a British Broadcasting Corporation presenter’s accent. They popped open the driver side door and shone their flashlights inside. They opened the other three doors. BBC made a remark about the peculiar smell. I thought, “There’s a body in the trunk.” One went around to the Volkswagen’s rear and waited for her partner to pull the lever on the floor under the steering wheel.

God help me, I desperately wanted the police to find a body in the trunk of that VW. I wanted that in the way I ached for a new Rolling Stones album to be released when I was in high school. I’d feel remorse for the corpse of course but in an abstract way, much like I’ve pondered the fate of a closing time drunk staggering about on just one shoe in wintertime. What a way to go: found murdered in the trunk of a stolen car; sure beats cancer and cardiac arrest as far as obituaries go. Alas, the big reveal revealed nothing at all, no body, no limbs, not even a finger or a toe although some of the car’s actual contents were carefully bagged. The ditched Volkswagen has since been towed, and it was towed in a hurry once the police turned up, and now I’m left to wonder why.

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