My car blew up.
Well, not literally, but it overheated to the point where the engine could have blown out. This is a recurrent problem. The last time my car overheated in this fashion, I was on my way to Dallas to visit friends. Leila and I ended up in Dew, Texas at a greasy spoon called The Dinner Bell, where we waited for 2 1/2 hours for a tow truck.
Wheel of Fortune played on a television set perched perilously on a rickety wall-shelf. Alex Trebek's voice was barely audible through the static and over the banal conversation of the three backwood retirees who managed to not know the name of the street we were on when I mustered up the courage to ask. Apparently NOBODY in Dew, Texas knows the address to The Dinner Bell, not even the employees.
But I digress.
This week, the car had to be taken to the shop. Without a car, I had to rely on my bf to shuttle me back and forth. I came home each day to feed and water the cat, change clothes, etc. On Tuesday, I made sure to lock up carefully before leaving. Wednesday, while feeding the cat, I noticed that the front door was unlocked.
"Huh, I coulda sworn I locked that door. Maybe not"
I locked the door and left.
Thursday, my bf picked up Leila from school (I had open house at my school that evening). When he arrived at my house, the garage door was wide open and the front door was unlocked. He checked out the house, but there was no sign of theft. Everything was exactly as I had left it (in moderate disarray).
Everything was locked and checked, the automatic garage door unhooked from the motor and locked from the inside.
Friday, Leila and I came home (in our car!) for a chillout evening on the couch. I went to the door first, pushed the handle, and the door swung open!
I called for the cat, scooped her up and backed out the door.
Episodes of
CSI-Miami flashed through my mind. There was most certainly a crime scene in my home. I just hadn't seen it. Not wanting to compromise the scene, I sat in the car and waited for Horatio Cane (my bf) to investigate. He did, but found nothing. We both scratched our heads and waited for the police.
I called them at 7:35 pm. They arrived at 12:35 am.
"Ma'am, it doesn't make sense that someone would come into your house and not take anything. There's nothin' much we can do about it. S'not really a crime 'less we have evidence of theft, or we have a person."
What???
So there's nothing wrong with someone unlocking your home, coming in and then leaving it unlocked as long as nothing is taken? So the criminal doesn't
exist if they're not still in the house?
Add this to the absence of yellow tape, flashing lights or white-gloved specialists dusting my house for prints. No ultraviolet lights were used to identify blood-spatter. Nothing more than a flashlight waved across the door jam and, occasionally, in my face.
According to the police, this did not qualify as criminal mischief, because nothing was damaged or stolen.
But it's trespassing, isn't it? What about that?
I went back in my house, which was determined NOT to be a crime scene, and tried to go to sleep.
Not a crime, huh. It ought to be a crime for the police to take so long to come to investigate. It ought to be a crime for them to be so nonchalant about a citizen's concerns.
I imagined that they rode off sipping on their free coffee, brushing donut crumbs off their laps, grumbling about having to come out "for nothing".
I feel neither served nor protected.
PS. The locks have been changed.
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