C.S.I.

Today Jeannie and I were supposed to meet George and Rachel to go see "Doubt". When I drove over to pick Jeannie up, her husband was outside taking pictures of something by the dumpster, so I asked her what was going on.

"Last night I heard this screaming in the parking lot! It was this couple, and they were yelling at each other, and one of them was hitting the other, and then there was glass breaking!"

"Did you call the cops?"

"No, because the woman was hitting the man."

I glared, and was about to launch into a lecture on how equality for women means that they can be domestic abusers, too, and also on how this kind of thing never happens at my end of the apartment complex, but Jeannie cut me off.

"OK, I know, I should have called anyway. We're taking pictures so we can complain to the office."

I shrugged and we went to see the movie, which was good, but odd. The four of us couldn't agree on whether or not we thought the actual crime took place. Anyway, I drove home and we were sitting in the parking lot chatting, but completely not gossiping about anyone we work with or anything they might have done in the past three days, when I remembered the bloody glass and towels.

"Let's go look!"

"Yeah!"



There was a lot more glass, and a beer can, but I was trying to get the tissue and the blood spots all over the sidewalk in the same frame. Jeannie filled me in on the part she witnessed.

"The car was parked here, and they were yelling and then someone broke the window. It went for a couple minutes."

"Probably one of them punched out the window. That's a lot of blood."



We looked at the tissue and glass for a minute, and then noticed a bunch of bloody paper towels on the stairs leading from the parking lot to the sidewalk.



This intrigued me.

"They had tissue, and then switched to paper towels. People don't keep paper towels in their car, so they must have gone back to an apartment. Probably because they were bleeding everywhere."

"If we knew who it was, we tell the office when we go complain!"

"We could follow the blood spots."



There were a lot, so we spent a couple minutes slowly walking down the sidewalk, pointing at spatters.

"There!" "There!" "Over there!" "There!"

"Why are they so far apart?"

"They were running."

"That makes sense."

Of course it does. Those decades of TV viewing had to pay off some time.

"We're like Nancy Drew and her gay boyfriend."

"Shopping buddy. I'm not your boyfriend."

After we figured out which apartment it was, we walked back to the parking lot, and I reconstructed the crime.

"They were fighting here. She was hitting him, so he got in the car to get away from her, and girls are crazy so she punched out the window. They had tissues in the car, so she grabbed one or he gave her one, then they realized she was gushing blood so they ran to the apartment to get paper towels. Then they ran back to the car to drive to the emergency room, and that's when they threw the beer out."



"Why would they stop to throw the beer out?"

"In case they got pulled over? If your window is smashed out and you're bleeding you don't want the cops to know you're drunk, too. Anyway, she cut her right hand, because she dropped the paper towel going up the stairs and the stair railing is on the left. Since she was drunk and staggering, she would have let go of the bandage to grab the railing and steady herself. There's no blood on the railing, so she grabbed it with her good hand. Then they got in the car and drove away."

"Cool. We should be detectives."

"Totally."

We might need a few more seasons of "Bones" and "C.S.I." first. And handguns.