Crime and Punishment and Bacon and Eggs

So this happened in the far-flung past of spring 1990, when I was living in a house with a bunch of bizknobs in Waterloo while attending Wilfrid LaurierUniversity.

At this point I had both a beard and a glorious, shoulder-length head of hair, thus resembling some modern-day Adonis in a London Fog trenchcoat as I stalked the city of Waterloo.

One day, I walked home from school, checked out the food situation (which is funny in retrospect because I did most of my eating either on-campus or at local bar Phil's Grandson's Place) and then strolled off to the Dutch Boy supermarket about a ten-minute walk away to do some grocery shopping.

At this point, I'm in my London Fog trench coat and thus look like a Bohemian hoodlum or possibly the Jesus of Luke-warm.

So as I line up at the ten items or less check-out about half-an-hour later, I notice four uniformed cops come striding through the door looking very grim and purposeful. Like any good Hitchcock hero, I immediately think, "With my luck, they're here to arrest me!"

Which they proceed to do. As I'm led off by one cop, I note the other three cops rummaging through my grocery cart.

So after reading me my rights in the car, the arresting officer (who has the typical cop/porn-star mustache) explains to me what I'm accused of. Apparently, one of the houses on my route home from WLU was robbed around the time I went by. The stolen items were jewelry, bacon and eggs.

In the Lynchian Hardy Boys universe I'm now operating in, a plucky eight-year-old boy from next door to the Bacon House saw me commit this robbery and bravely followed me home, waited around, and then followed me to the Dutch Boy, from whence he phoned the police and his parents.

Well, of course I deny it. I get driven to the station and stuck on a bench while Detective Chimp* and the crack team of detectives search my apartment (thus baffling my roommates who, to be fair, probably should have been arrested en masse on more than one occasion for rowdiness and throwing rocks and beer bottles at houses). Detective Chimp comes out for a moment and looks at the soles of my shoes, grunts and goes back into the back.

So after about a half-an-hour of cooling my heels, I again get visited by Detective Chimp, who informs me that the charges have been dropped and I'm free to go. My shoes don't match any prints they've got in either size or tread.

Their theory of the crime was that I'd stolen the jewelry, bacon and eggs, gone home, hidden the jewelry in my room, and then taken the bacon and eggs with me to the Dutch Boy so that I could disguise my crime by putting the stolen breakfast in my cart and then buying the bacon and eggs from the Dutch Boy.

I'm sure you're thinking at this point that if they'd just waited, I'd have gone to a jewelry store and bought the stolen jewels. But of course.

At this point, without getting angry, I say something like, "Well, old chap, that's the stupidest theory of a crime I've ever heard and besides, I didn't steal the stuff."

Detective Chimp replies, "No, we know you did it. We've got a witness. We just can't figure out how you hid the items from us."

Worried about the state of law enforcement in Waterloo, I wandered off into the gathering night.
And that's why, in my heart of hearts, I really don't trust the police.
　
　
* Not his real name. The desk sergeant also wasn't named Sergeant Gorilla.