Lady in Red

"That was no lady. That was some down-on-her-luck woman who happened to knock on my door second."

She knocked on Pinocchio's door first, and for some unusual reason, he was home. (He's almost never there, let alone during a weekday afternoon when he's normally at work.) I saw she had dark hair, and she took a seat on my porch chair. I figured she was the woman who started renting one of the downstairs apartments this summer and had locked herself out and was waiting for her husband to come with the spare key.

About ten minutes later, she knocked on my door. It was a woman who appeared to have had a hard life -- and it just got harder. She asked me to call the police and see if an officer was on his way because she had been raped and robbed and was tired of waiting. "Tell them it's the woman in the red dress."

I called the non-emergency number, and the dispatcher took my information. When I said there was a woman on my front porch who claimed to have been raped and robbed, it was business as usual. When I said, "She said she had called before and said to tell you it's the woman in the red dress," the dispatcher said, "Oh!" (How many other women had called in claiming to have been raped and robbed yesterday afternoon?)

This sounds like a bad standup routine, but... How many police officers does it take to respond to a phone call? Three, and each one has to drive his own car.

I didn't see any cameras, so you're not likely to see the front of my apartment on Cops some day -- especially since she didn't freak out or hit one of the officers or anything. After about 20 minutes, they drove off with her.