THE AMAZING PURPLE STUFF

When Jack Bliss taught me to be a detective, one of grand things he showed me was what he called purple stuff. Like gentian violet, the granular treatment for fungal infections, it had a persistent stain and, when diluted, a little bit went a long way.

We'd use it to catch sneak thieves, pilferers, and such. Rub on a little of the powder, and just wait for normal sweat or any moisture to do its work. Pretty soon everything was purple and it wouldn't come off. I loved the stuff. Not everyone did.

Chester Keene remembers the irate mother whose toddler had gotten too close to a newspaper rack's coin box we'd doctored. Some jerk had been stealing the money from the ones on the street so we'd doctored a few. Poor little Junior had turned into a Purple Paper Eater.

Long after Jack had left, I was still using the amazing purple stuff, once to catch a desk officer who was stripping turned in "lost and found" wallets of the cash. I doctored some of the money in one with purple stuff dust, and when the dispatcher turned up at the end of his shift with violet hands, he also left our employ.

Later on we came up with state of the art purple stuff. We were trying to find out who was stealing gas from the pump both the NPD and the Fire Department used. It was located behind the old station and we filled police and fire vehicles using the honor system. Pump 'er full and write on a clipboard log how many gallons, vehicle number, and initials.

Trouble was, the honor system only works if you're honorable and some cops or smoke breathers weren't.

If surveillance video cameras had been in use at the time, we could've sure used them. But they weren't. Blacks lights, however, that were really purple, were in limited use after the cops found out they would fluoresce (glow) on body fluids. We stole the idea from Hippies who used them to make Grateful Dead posters look really groovy. But what we needed now was a powder that would glow when diluted in gasoline.

Jack first suggested we save our urine and pour it in. Didn't work, too diluted in the hundreds of gallons tank. Neither of us were willing to donate blood or other bodily fluids--although the thought did cross our minds. I was kinda glad it didn't. Would've been hard to explain in court, pouring pee in a storage tank. Finally we found the new purple stuff, and a teaspoon full made a 1000 gallons of gas glow like a lightenin' bug in a coal miner's shorts. Dave Dampier remembers the name of the chemical I'd long forgotten. Anthracene. We poured it in and waited.

The next night we made a round of the parking lot with a portable black light. Two cars glowed around the gas cap. One car belonged to a fireman, the other to one of our civilian employees. Both fessed up to the thefts and the shortages stopped.

Mike Grimm remembers using it on a baited purse we put in the nurse's locker room at the hospital. One of the nurses had sticky fingers. Probably the one that emptied bedpans. Anyway, when Mike checked with the black light, the whole bathroom was glowing and so was she.

Great stuff, that purple.