A Strange Encounter

      “Professor Nano!” you say, handshake first, eyebrows high with hope.  “Allow me to introduce myself.”

       “Don’t say a word!” Nano snaps, “let me tell you who you are.”

       Nano is floating like cigar smoke above his projection box but thanks to the science of artificial touch, he easily handshakes you into submission.  Releasing your hand, Nano gives you a long overview from head to toe with squinty virtual eyes.

       “We have never met before this very moment...is that correct?”

       “Yes,” you answer, feeling rather uneasy under his piercing probe.

       “And yet by simple deduction, I can tell that you had eggs for breakfast this morning, that your initials are HN, that you came here in great haste to discuss a matter of the utmost gravity.  And that you are new to this city and left-handed!”

       You are amazed.  Astounded.  Nano has not gotten a single thing right!

       “Am I correct?” he asks with a wily smirk.

       “Sort of.  I mean, I did eat breakfast this morning but it wasn’t eggs.”

       “No eggs?  Then how do you explain the yellowish stain on your blouse?”

       “That’s not a stain.  It’s part of the design.  See?  There’s a matching one on the other side.  I guess your programmers are still having trouble with pattern recognition.”

       “Well then Hilbert...” he says, taking a bold stab at your first name.

       But you quickly correct his mistake and tell him your real name.

       “Then why in heaven’s name do your shoes carry the initials HN on the front?” he asks.

       “Oh!  I’m afraid you’re reading them upside down.  The letters are NH.  It’s the monogram of the famous shoe designer... Nemian Hands.”

       “I see,” Nano says, somberly.   There’s a slight shimmy in his image but that, you figure, could be due to a random gust of air.

       “But I did just move into the upstairs apartment!” you say kindly.  “Only it wasn’t from another city.”

       “And this matter of utmost urgency that impelled you to summon me like a genie?” Nano asks.

       “Sorry, I was just tinkering with the box.  I didn’t realize I would

activate the program.  I mean summon you,” you say, pointing to the black case with your left hand.

       “Left-handed?” Nano asks sadly, already knowing the answer.

       “Nope,” you say.

       A glum silence prevails as Nano stands stiffly and translucently in the center of the room, waiting for you to continue.  

       “It says in the instructions that you are a kind of detective,” you offer.

       “Virtual detective...the world’s first,” Nano announces proudly.

       “So that’s why you were trying to guess who I was.”

       “Bah!  That was just a silly game to test your mettle,” he says. “Luckily, mettle isn’t my quarry.”

       “That’s very lucky indeed.”

       “A silly game for mere sherlocks.  I find logic and reason intensely boring.  If you need that kind of deduction, I believe the company makes a Poirot-to-Go.  Check the catalog.”

       “Well then how do you detect?”

       “With a far more interesting instrument...the flash of understanding, the creative hoopdedoo.”

       “The hoop-de-huh?”

       “Intuition!” he says, tapping his skull and releasing tiny specks of digital bits into the image.

       But he can see from your squashed eyes and buck teeth that you still don’t get it.

       “I am an expert in the obvious.”

       “Aha!”

       “Precisely.  I am summoned on cases when reason has fallen flat as a pancake.  They call me in when the police are stymied because they are at the end of their rational ropes.”

       “What kind of cases?”

       “Murder, codebreaking, theft, all sorts of things.  Anything that doesn’t rely on rigid logic or seasoned reason.”

       “What then?”

       “A shot of lunacy, a quirk in the old noodle, the revelation of the obvious!”

       Another tap on the head, more virtual dandruff.

       “I call them braintwiddlers,” Nano continues.  “They’re puzzles all right.  But not of the `if three men drank three beers in three days’ variety.  These are tests of how sharp you are, not how smart.”

       “I see,” you say.  “Can you tell me about them?”

       “Certainly, my young friend.  Let’s make a game of it and see if you can outwit the old professor.   How about this...I’ll describe the case and you try to solve it.”

       “I’m not too good at puzzles.”

       “Even better!  Try to use your imagination instead.  Trust your wits.”

       “I’m not sure my wits are up to snuff.”

       “Rubbish.  Even a halfwit has half a wit.  Let’s start with an easy one first,” Nano says and gives the appearance of rummaging his brain for a sample.  

       Being only a computer projection, there is, of course, no rummaging and no brain.  But the programmers have thought of everything to give Nano the impression of reality.  Right down to the curl at the ends of the lips which even you can see is the kind of sly smirk designed to fool an innocent dolt like yourself.

A Cold Case

      Determined as I am to prove that a brain is more than a lump of beef that can make lists, I offer you the following little challenge.  This episode took place in a ski lodge where my technician and I were on vacation.  Well, he was the one vacating...skiing and bathing in the hot springs.  I was there gathering data for my studies of dumb behavior.

      It was pure luck on my part that a murder broke the serenity.

      It seems that Nils Dortmun, an alpiner loved and respected by everyone, was found dead in one of the ski shacks.  It was an empty shack with nothing in it at all.  Just Dortmun’s body lying there on the ground with a puncture wound and blood all over.  There was nothing else there but a small puddle of water.

      No weapon, no clues, no marks.  And no motive on the part of anyone.  On top of all that, the shack had been locked from the inside.

      The local police had no idea who had killed him or the method of his murder.  Naturally I was able to help out because in studying the scene I immediately knew the weapon, the method, and the whodunnit.

      Do you know how he was killed?

Nano Solution_____________________________________________

      You take a deep breath, straighten your shoulders, and plunge into your theory, with all the hope of one who might very well drown in the pool of stupidity.  “Did he kill himself by stabbing himself with an icicle which later melted into the pool of water near the body?” you say with all the gumption you can muster.

      “Well I’ll be,” Nano says softly.  “We might turn you into a master of the obvious yet!”

The Old Switcheroo

      Only Dumbrow could have gotten himself into this kind of fix.  And only I could have gotten him out of it.

      Like anyone with no horse sense at all, Dumbrow was a bettor and loved to go to the track.  He made the usual bets based on tips, names, track conditions...all the things that keep racetracks in the black.  But he also made side bets all the time with his circle of fellow gamblers.

      This one time a strange bet came about because those fellows will bet on anything.  In this case, two of the owners were arguing about the relative skills of their jockeys and decided to settle their disagreement with a bet of course.

      But leave it to Dumbrow to come up with this idiotic idea for a race...that the winner would be the one whose horse lost!  I guess he thought this would be more fun.

      But you see the problem? 

      How can you have a race when you want your horse to lose?  No one would leave the starting gate.

      Luckily Dumbrow contacted me and I was able to come up with a way to actually run such a race.

      What did I suggest?

Nano Solution_____________________________________________

      “That they leave the track and settle for a nice game of bridge?”

      “No, the answer was right there at the track.  I told them run the race but to have their jockeys switch horses.  That way you tell your own jockey to do what he always does...try to win the race.  And if he does, on the other horse, then you win the bet!”

The A/B Murder

      As a virtual person, I would not get invited to many dinner parties because I am not a very good eater.  In fact, I don’t eat at all unless you call the electricity that runs me a form of nourishment.

      But as you can imagine with my background, I am a very good dinner guest with many entertaining stories to tell.  And so when Lord and Lady Briskett had me to dinner, I was not at all surprised.  They positioned me at the table where I was able to mimic dinner party behavior rather well and be rather charming.

      But when one of the guests dropped dead it proved to be quite lucky that I was invited.

      The victim in question was poisoned and fell head first into the stew.  The reaction was so clear that I knew the stew had to be poisoned but here’s the problem.  All the other guests ate the exact same stew and none of them dropped. 

      I thought about it for a moment and soon realized what must have happened and who was implicated.

      Do you know?

Nano Solution_____________________________________________

      “The victim was allergic to stew and the murderer – his allergist – knew it!” you say.

       “Nice stab but, as usual, wrong.  What I realized was that the murderer must have used a two-part poison that only killed when mixed.  The victim had been given part one in another serving and only died when it mixed with part two in the stew.  The chef had a bit of explaining to do.”

The Fireplace Case

      Well this one really wasn’t a case at all, but I was so proud of my insight that I keep it with my finest solutions.             

      You see, a friend of mine who installs fireplaces came to me once with a problem.  Now you might not associate fireplaces with the art of the obvious but that is the beauty of this field of endeavor...everything applies.

      The problem in question was that he had a series of bad business ventures in which he installed the fireplaces for customers who then

refused to pay for all his work.  And when they did, all his effort went up in smoke, so to say.  What my friend wanted was some method for making the fireplaces unusable until the checks cleared. 

      That sounds like a simple enough request but of course you cannot exactly lock up a fireplace.

      Nonetheless, I was able to devise a very simple method by which he could complete his work but render the fireplace totally unusable until he decided to “unlock it.” 

      I’ll give you a hint...the method I came up with involved the use of a single brick.

      What did I suggest to him?

Nano Solution_____________________________________________

      “This one’s easy,” you say with the confidence of the befuddled.  “He threatens to beat his customer with a brick until he coughs up the dough.”

      “That might have worked but I found a much safer solution.  I simply told him to install a sheet of glass halfway up the flue, which would block the air and prevent an updraft.  No updraft, no fire.  When the check cleared, he could simply drop a brick down the chimney...and open the fireplace up!”

A Remote Possibility

      Here’s a case that didn’t involve any crime at all.  Well...except for the common misdemeanor known as stupidity. 

      I was at the mall directing my technician to buy some virtual exclamation points when I noticed a set of keys that someone had lost.  This was a standard key case with a bunch of keys for house, office, mailbox, and a car key with one of those automatic car door openers on it.  There was there was no identification tag nor any other way to locate the owner of the keys.  Even I with instant data access could not tell what kind of car they went with. 

      Now I could have simply told the technician to take the keys to the lost and found and be done with it.

      But you know me...when I hit upon a brilliantly obvious solution, I cannot resist. 

      So I found my own unique way to return the lost keys. 

      What did I do?

Nano Solution_____________________________________________

      “You stood at the top of the stairs and shouted at the top of your lungs...”

      “The obvious is never about shouting, my young friend.  It is a quiet pursuit.  No, I simply had my technician walk around the parking lot trying the automatic door opener in all directions until he heard a car door unlock.  Then he waited for the owner to show up and shower me with gratitude.”

The Bookie's Book

      Reggie the Rat was a real rat.

      What they call a squealer, a snitch, or a buzzboy in the colorful language of the streets.  In other words, he gave information on people he knew.  And this time Dumbrow knew that Reggie knew something about a recent jewelry store robbery. 

      Thinking he could get the little rodent to talk, Dumbrow had cornered him at his job at the local library on the other side of town and took him down to the precinct for questioning.

      But time was running out and they both knew that Dumbrow could only hold Reggie for another hour.  Then he would have to let him go.  At the end of his dim wits, Dumbrow threatened to pin an unrelated theft on Reggie if he didn’t cooperate.  The Rat finally broke down and confessed that he had hidden the names of the thieves in a book in the library.             

      “Where exactly?” Dumbrow demanded.

      “Right between pages 123 and 124 of a copy of Murder My Sweet by Raymond Chandler.

      “Which shelf?”

      “Dunno.  The librarian put it away.”

      Dumbrow had his jacket on and was almost out the door when he saw me shaking my head sadly.  I instantly knew that Dumbrow was off on a wild goose chase and I told him so.            

      What exactly did I tell Dumbrow?

Nano Solution_____________________________________________

      “That Murder My Sweet was only 122 pages long?”

      “Nice try!  But the real answer is far more obvious, which is the way I like them.  You can’t hide anything at all between pages 123 and 124 of any book since they are on two sides of the same sheet of paper!”

The Smoking Gun

      I am sure that you have heard of the proverbial smoking gun, no?  It means proof that someone is guilty.  Well here is a case where there actually was a smoking gun.  Except that in actual fact, it was a knife. 

      It happened to be a very fancy knife with a carved ivory handle and it was found lying right next to the victim in the kitchen in a pool of blood.  Sounds rather like a game of Clue but this was no game.  The victim was a food critic and he was found lying on the floor of the kitchen that belonged to Chef Shiff at his restaurant Chez Chef Shiff. 

      This happened after the restaurant had closed for the night and the Chef himself claimed to have been out at the time of the murder.  He said that he returned to find the body.  It was clear that the knife belonged to the chef, the chef to the restaurant, and the victim to the coroner...but Shiff adamantly denied any wrongdoing.

      Dumbrow was there of course and as usual put two and two together to get four...he slapped the cuffs on the chef.  If I hadn’t been there to save the day, Shiff would have been prepping his next meal in the joint.

      Lucky for him I was immediately able to see that Chef Shiff was innocent. 

      How did I know?

Nano Solution_____________________________________________

      “Chef Shiff,” you shout, “was right-handed and the knife was for lefties!”

      “Once again I see that your rationality is getting the better of you,” Nano says.  “But no, it was much simpler than that.  I could see from the bullet hole in the head that the victim was shot not stabbed.”

Shafted

      A thief broke into the Museum of Ancient Artifacts and stole a priceless figurine from the Trobriand Islands.  It was carved in cork 600 years ago, a beautiful sculpture of a bird.  He skipped all the masks from ancient Africa, the canoes from the far north, and grabbed this statuette simply because it was so small. 

      Unknown to him, of course, he set off a laser alarm and the guards soon chased him.  Somehow he managed to outrace them to the front doors and get outside, but they continued to pursue him. 

      A block away, seeing that he was on the verge of getting caught, he dropped the little statue into a hole and got away.  But that presented the problem, the kind that only a master of the obvious like myself could solve. 

      You see, the hole was actually the top of a pipe stuck in the ground for a drainage system that was never built.  It was thirty feet deep and only a foot in diameter but just wide enough to drop the cork statue into.  No doubt the statue was sitting at the bottom of the shaft but any attempt to drop some devise down to retrieve it would possibly have damaged it.                          

      The statue was stuck, the guards were stuck.  I was not.

      I saw the solution immediately and was able to solve the problem by making one simple call. 

      Who do you think I called?

Nano Solution_____________________________________________

      “Er...a troupe of trained mice?” you say witlessly, but even you know that you are stalling.

      “No, I called the fire department of course.”

      “Did they have teensy little ladders?”

      “They had a hose,” Nano says, ignoring your failure at humor, “which allowed them to gently pour water into the pipe, thus raising the cork statue, which rose as the water did.”

A Breath of Air

      It never fails to amaze me how the moment I become known as an expert problem-solver, solvable problems seem to present themselves all the time.  Wherever I am, such riddles just pop up.  Like the time I was at a rather posh spa here in the city, trying desperately to escape all pressures and impingements.  Even virtual persons like myself need a break.  But naturally, this was not to be. 

      Just as I was floating poolside and relaxing, I heard a splash and there was a great commotion in the water.  By the time I redirected my attention, I could see that one of the guests was in the process of rescuing another man from the pool.  He quickly pulled this limp fellow from the water, threw him down onto the tiled floor, and immediately began frantic CPR. 

      In the scuttlebutt that emerged among the onlookers, it became clear the heroic effort being performed was all the more dramatic since the two men were business rivals.  I watched along with the others as the one man pinched the other’s nose, pressed his mouth against the victim’s lips, and pushed repeatedly on his chest for almost ten minutes.  Alas it was all to no avail.                                     

      By the time he stopped, gazing serenely and sadly at his late associate, he knew as we all did that it was too late. 

      But not too late for me to have my final word on the matter.

      What do you think I said?

Nano Solution_____________________________________________

      “Anyone for a swim?”

      “I said arrest that man for murder.  Far from performing CPR to save his rival, he had suffocated him by pinching his nose closed and only pretending to breathe into his chest.  The two actions look the same, except that after such heavy breathing, our hero ought to have been out of breath himself!”

A General Question

      Naturally I don’t always take on every challenge that presents itself to me.  Some are questions of hindsight not insight.  And others are questions that are really better left unanswered.  Nonetheless, I save them all for a time just like this to demonstrate the art of the obvious.

      Take for instance, this email I received from a general who was the dictator of a country that shall remain nameless for our purposes.  This general wanted to prevent any possible future coup by the sons of the officers in the army.  That the general’s own son was to remain safe was obvious.  Was there any way, the general asked, for me to apply my unique skills to solve the problem? 

      There was of course and it was a very simple way. 

      Naturally I never actually responded, but if I had I would simply have suggested that the general pass a law that any boy whose father was in the military was to be shot on the spot. 

      It was the perfect solution.

      But do you know why?

Nano Solution_____________________________________________

      “Because dictators can do whatever they want, like change the law to suit themselves,” you suggest.

      “Very wise, answer, my friend,” Nano says, “but my suggestion did not need to be changed.”

      “But any boy whose father was in the military would be shot.  And the general too was in the military.”

      “True...but the general was a woman!”

Bland Larceny

      Do you know the new skyscraper they just completed?  I actually had a hand – a mental hand that is – in its construction.  I didn’t build anything for it, of course, didn’t do a stitch of manual labor in fact.  What I did do was stop a crime in progress.

      I was contracted by the foreman of the building site when they had just started.  It seems that one of the workers there was engaged in some peculiar behavior and naturally they needed an expert in peculiarity, so they got me.  I only had to be down there once to see what was going on and to instantly solve the problem. 

      Each day at quitting time, the fellow in question would load up a wheelbarrow of discarded material from the site – pieces of wood, lengths of tubing, broken chips of concrete, scraps of paper, and so on – and carry it out past the man guarding the site.  He had been doing this for an entire week.  It was unusual behavior but since the material was nothing but useless junk with no value at all, the guard let him pass.  Still, the foreman felt that something was wrong.  Why would anyone do such a thing?

      He hadn’t a clue, needless to say, so I had to clue him in.

      What did I tell the foreman?

Nano Solution_____________________________________________

      “That the man was using the discards to build a clever but illegal copy of the building where he would...” but your voice trails off as even your own warped imagination begins to peter out.

      “But it’s so simple,” Nano says.  “The man was stealing wheelbarrows and selling them to other construction sites!”

The End of His Rope

      Now here is one that should not give you too much trouble; at least it did not give me any.  But then again, I am of course...me. 

      It involved an escape from a holding cell by a crook named Benny.  After he was arrested for another of his petty larcenies, they put him in a room in the detention center downtown and more or less forgot about him.  Now the windows in this particular room were not very well reinforced: this was not a cell really but only a hearing room.  No one gave this a second thought because Benny wasn’t too bright.  They never figured that he might even try to escape. 

      Sure enough, when they came in the next morning, the window was broken and Benny was gone.  Now I just so happened to be in the building solving another problem when and I overheard the commotion and asked to be relocated there.  After some simple analysis, I found out that the janitor had pushed his cleaning cart near the holding room that night and that a piece of rope was missing from it. 

      But here’s the problem...the rope in question was thick and short.  A hefty piece of cable, but only about fifteen feet long.  But the drop to the ground from the window was 35 feet!   Had Benny jumped the 20-foot gap?  I don’t think so.  He was stupid but not foolhardy.

       How do you think he actually pulled off the stunt?

Nano Solution_____________________________________________

      “It was all a ruse!  He hadn’t actually escaped but was hiding under the table...” you begin but Nano cuts you off with the speed of a barber. 

       “Sorry, “ he says, “but I’ve heard it all before.  So let me get to the point.  Cable is made of twisted strands of rope.  Benny uncoiled it so he wound up with two pieces that he tied together to make a 30-foot long piece.  Then he only had to jump 5 feet.”

Unusual Suspect

      As a student of the obvious, I am a great fan of the so-called “locked room” puzzle because all of the clues for solving it are right there under your nose.  Which reminds me of a classic example of one that involved yours truly.

      I spotted the body of Henry Dodd myself the moment I was summoned.  He was lying face down on the floor of his living room.  Dumbrow and I had both been invited over for an evening of chitchat, which for Dumbrow usually meant falling asleep on the couch.  This time, however, he kept his eyes open once he arrived but there was nothing to see.  The room had been locked – I shouted to Dumbrow to break in when I heard him at the door – and there were no clues of any kind anywhere to be seen.

       There were no marks on the body or disturbances or fingerprints anywhere.  No witnesses, nothing.  Dodd himself was a jovial fellow who was very unlikely to have committed suicide.  Dumbrow was stumped by all this but, of course, this was his typical state of mind.

      When I announced that I knew precisely who the murderer was, Dumbow was floored.

      What do you think I said?

Nano Solution_____________________________________________

      “That the man wasn’t dead,” you shout.  “He was just napping!”

      “A state of mind with which you are, no doubt, quite familiar.”

      “No clues, no marks, no evidence, yet you knew who did it?” you mutter, hoping for a drive-by insight.  “How can that be?’

      “Because I did it.  Obviously,” Nano says.

      “You?  But how?  You’re virtual.”

      “By talking the man to death,” Nano says but you can see by the glint in his eye and the tongue in his cheek that his only crime has been to tease you unmercifully.

Circus Murderous

      Most people think of circus folks as a happy family of misfits but they have their own passions too, you know.  I learned this once when I was called in to investigate the murder of the Tattooed Man.  His body had been found inside the big top in the early morning hours but since they didn’t trust the cops, they arranged for me to help them out.

      By the time my technician set me up, all the sideshow people were standing around the body: the Bearded Lady, the Fat Man, the Fish Boy, the World’s Tallest Human, the Sword Swallower, and the Strong Man.  All of them.

      It was quite a scene as you can imagine, surrounded by some of the most unusual suspects you could ever expect to see.  At first they weren’t even sure that the man had been murdered because there were no visible signs of violence.  But after I studied his tattoo-covered body, I realized that someone had stabbed him right in the head of John the Baptist and that real blood was flowing from the picture.  It was no leaky tattoo.

      One of them had obviously attacked him as the others set up for the show but no one had seen it.  And worse, none of them were seen to be carrying any kind of weapon nor was one found anywhere.

      Of course, to an expert like myself, the lack of evidence is merely an inspiration and I easily figured out which one of them committed the crime.

      Do you know who it was?

Nano Solution_____________________________________________

      “My guess is that the Fat Man stuck a knife in the ground, then sat on the victim, plunging him into it!” you shout with great confidence.

      “That’s quite a guess,” Nano says, “I would make you my assistant if I didn’t think it would end my career.”

      “You mean it was someone else?”

      “Very much so.  It was the sword swallower who had simply hidden the knife in his throat.”

Nice Ice

      When the famous Langhurst Diamond was stolen from a display in a store in Bucharest, suspicion immediately feel upon a well-known Romanian jewel thief named Janilek Ostrov.  Ostrov specialized in diamonds, better known in the thief trade as ice.  He had been seen at the exhibit the day before and so the cops kept him under surveillance for a day or so after that.  When he bought a ticket for the overnight train to Paris, where his fence was known to live, they figured he was taking the stone there.

      Luckily for them, I happened to have been shipped by FedEx to Bucharest to work for Interpol, so naturally the police arranged to take me along when they arrested Ostrov. 

      But when we burst into his compartment on the train, we found Ostrov sitting there calmly having a cigarette, leafing through a magazine, clinking the ice in his water glass.  His trademark beret was perched jauntily on his head and he smiled as we confronted him.  The police searched him and the compartment but found nothing at all except a small traveling kit in which he had his passport, toothbrush, address book, and a small snuffbox with a white powder in it.

      With nothing to show for their efforts, the police were about to leave, when it suddenly hit me where the diamond was.

      Do you know?

Nano Solution_____________________________________________

      “The beret!” you shout like a hooter at a football game.

      “No way!” Nano shouts back, mimicking your rhythm and rhyme.  Then, coming back to a more sober tone for the explanation: “The ice was in the ice.  He had dropped the diamond in his glass of ice water, where it was barely visible and hidden among the cubes.”

Nice Ice

      When the famous Langhurst Diamond was stolen from a display in a store in Bucharest, suspicion immediately feel upon a well-known Romanian jewel thief named Janilek Ostrov.  Ostrov specialized in diamonds, better known in the thief trade as ice.  He had been seen at the exhibit the day before and so the cops kept him under surveillance for a day or so after that.  When he bought a ticket for the overnight train to Paris, where his fence was known to live, they figured he was taking the stone there.

      Luckily for them, I happened to have been shipped by FedEx to

Bucharest to work for Interpol, so naturally the police arranged to take me along when they arrested Ostrov. 

      But when we burst into his compartment on the train, we found Ostrov sitting there calmly having a cigarette, leafing through a magazine, clinking the ice in his water glass.  His trademark beret was perched jauntily on his head and he smiled as we confronted him.  The police searched him and the compartment but found nothing at all except a small traveling kit in which he had his passport, toothbrush, address book, and a small snuffbox with a white powder in it.

      With nothing to show for their efforts, the police were about to leave, when it suddenly hit me where the diamond was.

      Do you know?

Nano Solution_____________________________________________

      “The beret!” you shout like a hooter at a football game.

      “No way!” Nano shouts back, mimicking your rhythm and rhyme.  Then, coming back to a more sober tone for the explanation: “The ice was in the ice.  He had dropped the diamond in his glass of ice water, where it was barely visible and hidden among the cubes.”

The Wrong Way

      I hate to admit this but over the many years of our association, I have actually come to rely on Dumbrow.  Not just on his summoning me like a genie but also on his uncanny ability to foul up.  Perhaps that explains the occasion on which I was even able to save Dumbrow his job. 

      You see, we were both part of a task force following the movements of a gang of thieves through the city.  From our surveillance we knew that they were about to move a big shipment and we were determined to stop them before they could do it.  The key figure was the guy who would be driving the truck.  We knew who he was and we decided to pick him up, but a good legal excuse to detain him didn’t present itself.

      The day of the shipment was therefore very tense because it meant that the task force would have to use force to confront the gang.  A very risky affair.  As Dumbrow and the other cops prepped for this, I was positioned in the office with the task force leader.  He was going over Dumbrow’s surveillance report, when one line in particular caught his

attention.  According to this entry, at 11:00am Dumbrow had “observed the truck driver going the wrong way down a one-way street.”

      “That fool,” the team leader said, “why didn’t he arrest him then and there and save us all this?  I’m going to have his head!”

      But I knew Dumbrow – knew him to be the literal boob that he was – and on that basis I explained to the team leader precisely why he had not arrested the driver, thus saving him his job.

      What did I explain to the leader?

Nano Solution______________________________________________

      “That Dumbrow didn’t have his ticket book with him,” you say, trying to squeeze a note of the obvious into your tone.

      “You don’t need a ticket book to arrest someone,” Nano says slowly, as though talking to a child. “No, I am afraid it is much simpler than that; another example of the bolt of the obvious.”

      “Meaning?”

      “Meaning, as only Dumbrow could, that the truck driver was on foot.”

Sign Struck

      It was a standard high-speed chase.  The usual series of hairpin turns and screeching brakes.  Not my cup of tea at all.  I prefer racing thoughts but in this business you have to be ready for all sorts of twists and turns.

      In this case, I happened to be on hand in the town of Highmount when Cal Pritt robbed one of the stores there.  As he leaped into his car and sped out of town, Dumbrow tossed me into his old Yugo and gave chase.  We knew he was heading to Lowmount but had to intercept him before he got there and was lost in the crowds.

      It was a fairly thrilling race across the sylvan hillside but we could never quite catch up with the dashing thief.  I thought we had him when he stopped his car for a moment, but by the time we got to that spot, he was gone again.  Thankfully, to break the monotony, Pritt had left me with a braintwiddler instead.

      The spot was a crossroads where six different roads came together.  In the middle of the intersection was a sign, one of those crowded posts with the names of ten different towns and arrows pointing you off in the right direction.

      But Pritt had cleverly pulled out the signpost and left it lying on the ground.  We had no map and didn’t know the area at all.  All we did know was that we had to get to Lowmount fast.

      Dumbrow was dumbfounded.

      Not me.

      How did I know which way to go?

Nano Solution_____________________________________________

      “You took a random guess!” you shout, eager to get one right for a change.  Eager but not successful.

      “A fine idea when there’s no alternative,” Nano says kindly,” but in this case there was.  I simply put the signpost back in the hole and turned it so that it faced the right direction.”

      “But how did you know which way to face it?”

      “I may not have known which direction the towns were, but I certainly knew the direction of Highmount, where I came from.  Once I lined the arrow for Highmount up correctly, I knew the rest would be right.”