The Deodorant Bandit

He picked the stuff up to smell the Spanish Rose because if you know anything about K-Man, you know that he smells everything and anything. After opening my deodorant, he quickly ran over to me to show me that another man hair was in my deodorant. We were both 1) grossed out and, 2) puzzled. I looked closer at the deodorant. It looked as though whoever was putting the stuff on did so aggressively. There was deodorant stuck to the outside of the bottle like it had been left in a hot car, melted and ran down the sides. Then I remembered on Friday morning when I put my deodorant on, I had to click a few times to push the stuff up because I prefer a nice rounded head on my deodorant for an even application. If the stuff isn’t pushed up, you end up just scraping away at your armpit. The fact that I had taken the time to make sure it was rounded and even checked after applying to make sure it was still rounded and then finding the stuff all “roughed up”, marked with someone’s DNA in the form of a course piece of hair, I knew we had an intruder on our hands.

As thoughts were racing through my mind about who was using my deodorant, I remembered a recent episode of Oprah that I watched. A younger woman had a feeling that someone had been in her home when she wasn’t there. She put a shirt behind her door when she left to work that morning and sure enough when she returned, the shirt had been moved. Then she set up a camera. After viewing the film, it revealed that a man came into her apartment, smelled her lingerie, tried on her lingerie and did other very unpleasant things in her home with her things.

At this point I’ve convinced myself that someone broke in through our balcony on the second floor. Our neighborhood is having its roofs redone and we are also undergoing a decking project. Which means at anytime a worker could be climbing on a roof or deck. I think if I saw a man climbing a ladder to check out someone’s deck, I wouldn’t bat an eyelash because I know that the neighborhood is having work done.

I checked out my balcony for clues and didn’t find any. I noticed the hand rail around the balcony was covered in dusty dirt from the latest rain storm. Only a few paw prints from the neighbor’s cat were evident. And it’s near impossible to unlock our French doors from the outside.

There is also a balcony off Sister B and Dummy’s rooms. Ironically, it was Dummy’s moving day. I’ll have to share more about him later. Then it occurred to me that Dummy never locked his slider door. I tried it out and it was unlocked and ready to be opened. My theory about a worker climbing up a ladder could be what happened! I checked around the balcony and the clues I thought were clues were not really clues, but I was still convinced someone from the outside was coming into our house.

While mulling through ideas of how this stranger got in, we realized that our front door gets left unlocked from time to time (thanks a lot DUMMY!). So, any old stranger could have knocked on the door, received no answer, could have walked right in, up the stairs, fumbled through my chaotic drawer of toiletries in the bathroom, bypassed the 5 other men’s deodorants in there and proceeded to mess up my meticulously rounded head of Spanish Rose.

Also thrown into the mix was Dummy has lost his keys before, has given friends and now enemies his keys, and he gave his entire set of keys to the car repair shop who had his keys overnight. Dummy lacks the most discernible logic. His Frontal Lobe is non-existent and I’m not a brain surgeon, but I think that even if a person has to have a frontal lobe to be alive, well then Dummy’s resembles a raisin.

Today, the house is minus one occupant. The deadbolt was changed last night and all the doors are locked, including the slider that just as well could have displayed a neon “open” sign.

I have a sneaking suspicion that we can leave the neon sign on because I think the deodorant bandit was on the inside. This opens a whole other can of worms. To be continued…