RAY:Hi, we're back and listening to Car Talk with us Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers, and we're here to talk about cars, car repair, and the answer to another pre-season puzzler. Here it is, you ready?
TOM: Yeah. Am I ready! Of course I'm ready!
RAY: You don't remember?
TOM: I don't remember what it was.
RAY: No, I didn't think so. Here it is, I'll do it quickly.
TOM:OK.
RAY: I'll produce a Dougie Berman is walking home from work, late one afternoon. Like 2:15. As he approaches his house, he notices that there's a car parked out front with the engine running, and in the driver's seat is a man. Then he notices someone coming from the direction of his house carrying what looks like a huge pile of rags. The guy opens the back door, throws the rags in the back seat, jumps into the car, and the driver puts the car into gear, and they speed away. Got it?
TOM: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
RAY:Set the whole scene. You could just see it, right?
TOM:Yeah!
RAY:Dougie goes into the house, plays with the dogs, open the mail, takes a nap, and a few days later, he notices that all his clothes have been stolen. So, he calls the police to make a report. The inspector comes down, and Dougie's standing there in his underwear because that's all he's got.
TOM: It took him, how long did it take him to notice this? A couple of weeks?
RAY: No, about, what, five days I think.
TOM: Five days.
RAY:Yeah.
TOM: During which time he wasn't at work? He couldn't go to work in his shorts?
RAY: No, he sleeps in his clothes and just goes right to work.
TOM: Oh, OK.
RAY: Anyway, he explains what happened. The officer asks him if he noticed anything about the guys, and he says, no, they were average height, average weight, da-da-da-da. And the inspector says, thanks a lot pal, but what about the car? Dougie says, well, I happen to be a student of the automotive field, and a producer of NPR's Car Talk, etc., and I did notice that it was --
TOM: That it was red!
RAY: -- '89 Corolla, midnight blue, the engine was running, I noticed that it had Mass plates and there was a dent in the trunk.
TOM:Hmm.
RAY: The officer says, our people'll get back to you.
TOM: Yeah.
RAY: Weeks go by, Dougie, of course, doesn't come to work because he, what? And now he has no clothes. He really can't come to work. The police finally call him and say they have the car and two suspects. He goes down to headquarters, he looks at the two guys, but he doesn't recognize them because he doesn't pay attention to those kinds of things. Moreover, he was really looking at the back of their heads. But there's the car. The '89 Corolla, dent in the trunk, midnight blue, and he remembers there's one thing he forgot to tell the police about the car. He walks over to it, looks into the car for just an instant, and he tells the police, that's not the car.
TOM: Oh!
RAY: These ain't the guys.
TOM: Yeah.
RAY: What's happening, what's going on here?
TOM: What could he possible have seen with a glance?
RAY: Now you noticed when I stated the puzzler, he was behind the car. He saw the car pull away from him. Obviously, he wouldn't have noticed a dent in the trunk.
TOM: Oh.
RAY: He wouldn't have noticed it had Mass plates.
TOM:Yeah.
RAY: But there was something that he did notice when the car pulled away.
TOM:Yeah.
RAY: That he forgot to tell the police, and when he walked over to the car to look at it at headquarters --
TOM:Yeah.
RAY: -- he had to actually go and look inside the car. And when he did that, he noticed the car had a manual shift.
TOM: Shift?
RAY:Because what he had seen when they pulled away was the momentary flash of the reverse lights --
TOM: Ah!
RAY: -- as the shifter passed from park, through reverse --
TOM: Oh!
RAY: -- and neutral into drive.
TOM:Oh!
RAY: And with the engine running, if the guy had been sitting there in neutral, he merely would have shifted into first gear, and taken off.
TOM:Of course.
RAY: If he were sitting there with the engine running in reverse, the reverse lights would have been --
TOM:On!
RAY: -- on all the time.
TOM: All the time!
RAY: If the reverse lights didn't work, then he wouldn't have noticed them blinking. He could only have noticed them blinking if they were working, and if the car were in park, and that made, forced it to be an automatic which it wasn't.
TOM: Wow!
RAY: Do we have a winner this week?
TOM: Wow, that is good! It just goes to show you how you have to be very careful before you accuse someone.
RAY: Exactly right!
TOM: Wow!
RAY: Well, that was, there was a moral in the story. I didn't mention that.
TOM: Yes.
RAY:But that was the moral of the story.
TOM: The moral is be careful.
RAY: Be careful.
TOM: Because those two guys laid a beating on Douggie that he's not going to forget for such a long time, and yeah, we do have a winner. It's Florence De Lucia.
[ Car Talk Puzzler ]