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.
No comments:
Post a Comment