Nailed by the Cops

If you were pitching it to Hollywood, it would be CSI meets Beauty Shop meets Cinderella. For the want of a fingernail, a criminal kingdom was lost.

The Spring police department got a call March 22 from a pair of aggrieved newlyweds whose home had been broken into. Jewelry, TV, a stereo and two rifles had been stolen.

After an initial investigation, Sergeant F. David Escobar was sent to follow up the next day.

"I get up there and start looking, trying to find any clues I can," Escobar says, "and there was a big old fingernail that was broken off. You know, women go and get their fingernails at these nail shops, and they're kind of gaudy, you know, so you can't really miss them."

The fuchsia-pink nail was lying by the broken window used to gain entry to the house. No suspicious cars had been seen the night before, and so, assuming the break-in was a local job, Escobar put the nail into a baggie and went knocking on doors.

Unlike Prince Charming and the glass slipper, he didn't have to go far. Next door his knock was answered by a woman with gaudy fuchsia-pink fingernails -- except she was missing one.

The woman claimed she had been burglarized also, but Escobar wasn't buying it. "I told her, 'Give me a second,' and I pulled out the clear evidence bag and looked down at it really good, because I said, 'This ain't happening, this is too good to be true.' You know, I look and I see…that it's from a thumbnail, and I look up and her thumbnail is busted. And she doesn't know what's going on -- she's still explaining and using her hands, which is helping me tremendously."

And then came the Magic Moment. "I asked her to stretch out her hand, and it fits right into her flipping nail!" Escobar says. Get the orchestra to strike up "Someday My Perp Will Come"!

Except the woman still denied any wrongdoing. She let Escobar search the place, where he found the stolen rifles and incriminating pawn-shop tickets.

Eventually she confessed at police headquarters. "She says, 'Man, you know, Sergeant Escobar, I should have picked that sucker up. You woulda never gotten me.' "

A lesson learned, indeed. "These were fancy, fancy nails; she was obviously proud of them," Escobar says. "But obviously they were not the equipment you use to burglarize a house."

Wet Dream

Six or seven years ago, when then-councilman Chris Bell was pushing hard for the city of Houston to bottle its municipal water and sell it in stores, people were underwhelmed.

Try as they might, they couldn't quite imagine a Houstonian standing by the sink, draining the last ounce of a bottle of Houston Pride water and then -- instead of turning on the tap and refilling the bottle -- saying, "Honey! I've got to head to the store to get more Houston tap water!"

Bell's idea never quite took off. But it apparently is not dead, even though Bell has long since left the council. Waving around a plastic bottle, Councilwoman Toni Lawrence announced at the April 19 council meeting that the city will begin selling its water. "I am holding the first bottle in my hand," she said, in words that one day will rank with "That's one small step for man…"

She called it the completion of "Chris Bell's dream."

But she wasn't very forthcoming with other details, and was unavailable for follow-up questions. So Houstonians will just have to wait, with bated breath, to see if finally -- finally -- they will have available to them an incredibly more inconvenient and expensive way of getting their tap water.

Next up: handy neighborhood centers where you can tote a six-foot stack of batteries in order to stock up on electricity -- great-tasting Houston electricity.

Beyond Alamodome

In the Mad Max movies, Mel Gibson took on all comers, bowing to no man. But he never had to face the San Antonio police.

Christopher Fenner did, and he spent 20 hours in jail learning to leave the Mad Max stuff to the professionals.

Fenner talked San Antonio's Alamo Drafthouse into hosting a marathon of the Gibson movies, and he and a couple dozen friends decided to drive to it in style.

Fenner, 41, manages a facility -- he'd prefer not to get more specific -- that provided him access to a fuel tanker. The group, which included two Eagle Scouts, then dressed some vehicles to look like the cannon-toting cars in the movies. The plan was to have a caravan for the 30 miles from Boerne to the movie house.

It wasn't the most high-tech thing in the world. The Eagle Scouts "had built a replica of the little four-barreled air-gun thing that they have in the back of one of the cars in the movie," Fenner says. "They built it out of cardboard and PVC pipe. It looked very fake."

Not fake enough, apparently. San Antonio police told Fenner they had received 20 to 30 calls about "terrorists trying to overtake a tanker."

Another blessing of the cell-phone world: Extremely gullible drivers can call 911 whenever they see a cardboard gun threatening a tanker.