1 post tagged “perfect crime”
What was the last thing you "got away with?"
It get away with shit all of the time, but the one that really stands out goes back about 15 years ago. I lived in the Marlenor Apartments in Detroit, on Seward, between Second and Third, smack in the no man's land between the city's New Center area and Highland Park. It was pretty much a dump.
Do not be fooled, the front and facade can appear marginal and unassuming, while whatever it is concealing most closely resembles the contents of a half-filled colostomy bag. Here is the "courtyard" and the alley behind the building.
A management company owned the building, and it employed a couple living onsite as, I don't know, managers of the place. The neighborhood was relatively safe and normal in the daylight, not so great when the sun went down. I had a rather sizeable studio apartment in this building. It was pretty big, actually. It held perfectly my shitty futon, my single chair, my wicker TV stand and the 13-inch TV that sat atop it, my desk and my boombox (come on, I was in college). But the day I moved in, whoever was in charge of cleaning the place half-assed that assignment. The apartment was disgustingly dirty. The shelves in the medicine cabinet had someone else's hair stuck to them, THAT'S how nasty it was. So, I cleaned, for about a day straight, which pissed me off.
Then, fall turned to winter. In the Midwest, that can mean some cold nights, even in early October. What I was told by the on-site couple was this: Your heater does not work because the furnace has not been activated. The management company will wait until the last possible day (when we are all fucking freezing) to turn it on because, apparently, they only like to turn it on, and then off, twice in a season. I would come home and people would actually be picketing in the hallways. Finally, they turned on the heat and everyone was happy.
After tiring of gunshots and sketchy motherfuckers at every other turn, I decided to relocate to the suburbs. I found a nice, clean place above a record store in Royal Oak and things seemed much, much better. I had a grocery store again, I was blocks away from my favorite bars, the cops came when you called. The management company returned to me my security deposit of $700, to which I handed over to my new landlord. Thirty days later, the same management company from Marlenor sent to me another $700 check, which, I assumed, was simply a bookkeeping oversight on their part. They basically returned my security deposit twice.
Let's see, freezing my ass off for about 3 weeks straight at night, nasty pubes and body hair still in the bathroom upon move-in, elevator always broken, ummm, yeah, I wasted about four seconds thinking of that before I converted that check to liquid.
I ate and drank like a champ, every night, for several weeks after that.
Take any number and multiply it by 0, and that is the amount of hours of sleep I lost over not sending the check back.
