Free Naked by David Sedaris Page B

the suspects snapped like toothpicks, buckling in less time than it took
     to soft-boil an egg. “You want to know who set fire to the retirement home? All right, it was ME, you satisfied now? That’s
     right, ME. I did it. ME.”
    It’s easy to solve a case when none of the suspects are capable of telling a decent lie. Television took the bite out of crime,
     leaving the detective as nothing more than a lifestyle. It seemed that anyone could solve a murder as long as he had a telephone,
     a few hours of spare time, and a wet bar. My mother had all three ingredients in spades. The more suspects she identified
     over the course of a season, the more confident she became. Together, she and my sister would comb the local newspaper, speculating
     on each reported crime.
    “We know that the girl was held at knifepoint on the second floor of her house,” Lisa said, tapping a pencil against her forehead.
     “So probably the person who robbed her was… not in a… wheelchair.”
    “I’d say that’s a pretty safe assumption,” my mother answered. “While you’re at it, I think we might as well eliminate anyone
     confined to an iron lung. Listen, Sherlock, you’re going at it all wrong. The guy broke in, held her at knife-point, and made
     off with three hundred dollars in cash, right?”
    “And a clock radio,” Lisa said. “Three hundred dollars and a clock radio.”
    “Forget the clock radio,” my mother said. “The important thing is that he used a knife. All right now, what kind of person
     uses a knife?”
    Lisa guessed that it might have been a chef. “Maybe she was at a restaurant and the cook noticed she had a lot of money in
     her pocketbook.”
    “Right,” my mother said, “because that’s what cooks
do,
isn’t it. They crawl around the dining-room floor looking through purses while the food sits in the kitchen cooking itself.
     Come on now,
think.
Who uses a knife to commit a crime? In a world of guns, what kind of person would use a knife? Give up? It’s just two little
     words: drug addict. It’s that simple. A professional thief would use a gun, but even secondhand, a gun costs money. Drug addicts
     can’t afford guns. They need all their money for their dope and smack — the hard stuff. These dopers have a habit to feed
     every minute of every day, which means they’re always on the lookout for their next mark. This was a heroin addict who followed
     the girl home from the bank, parked his car around the corner, broke into the house, and robbed her at knife-point.”
    “If he can’t afford a gun, what’s he doing with a car?” Lisa asked. “And what about the clock radio?”
    “Screw the damned clock radio,” my mother said. “And as for the car, it was stolen. He took it last Thursday from that couple
     on Pamlico. You saw the report in the paper. The brand-new Ford Mustang, remember? You thought it had been stolen by Gypsies,
     and I said we don’t even
have
Gypsies in this part of the country. I said the car had been taken by a dope addict who’d use it for a couple of burglaries
     before selling it to a chop shop. Bingo. And there you have it.” She crushed her cigarette and used the butt to trawl an X
     through the residue at the bottom of her blackened ashtray, her way of pronouncing that this particular case was closed. “What’s
     next on our roster?”
    Vandalism at 318 Poole Road, breaking and entering at the Five Points Pharmacy, a hit-and-run traffic accident in the parking
     lot of Swain’s Steak House — it was always the work of a drug addict or former police officer, a “renegade,” a “rogue.” To
     hear my mother talk, you’d think the sunny, manicured streets of suburban Raleigh were crawling with heroin addicts, the needles
     poking through the sleeves of their tattered police uniforms. It embarrassed me to hear her use phrases like “copping a fix”
     and “the pusher man.” “I have to go now,” she’d say to the grocery clerk. “My