Sure, you’d had two or three beers, but that wasn’t what caused it.
The big, arrogant white Cadillac cut the corner sharp, forcing you to
smack into a parked car. The Caddy keeps going, and when the radio
cruiser shows up, there you are all alone, with a broken grille on your
car.
Excitedly you tell the policemen what happened. Being angry, you talk
a little too loud, and perhaps you wave your arms. One of the officers
wrinkles his nose. “You been drinking, Mac?”
“Two or three beers,” you say belligerently. “What the hell has that
got to do with being cut off!”
The cops exchange glances. Never, in police history, has it been four
or five beers. Never, never more than two or three beers.
“Think I’m drunk,” you say. “Look!”
You touch your finger to your nose. One of the officers has gone back
to make a radio call, and, drawing an imaginary line to the police car,
you walk it straight toward him. Or almost straight, anyhow.
“Take it easy, Mac,” says his partner. “AID will be right here.”
In no time, an Accident Investigation car swings up beside the
cruiser. There’s a little talk among the policemen, and then the AID
man comes over to you, carrying a narrow, ten-inch-long cardboard
cylinder.
He takes out a balloon and a couple of glass tubes which have some
kind of chemicals inside. He hands you the balloon and says, “Go ahead,
blow into it.”
“What’s this!”
“Go ahead, blow. We’re taking a sample of your breath.”
You hesitate suspiciously. It’s a trap.
“What are you afraid of? You only had two or three beers, didn’t
you?”
So you exhale into the balloon. He quickly turns a mouth valve to
trap the breath inside, and then he runs the breath into one of the
glass tubes. “This is for the lab,” he says. “Now blow again.”
The second time, he runs the breath into the other tube. It mixes
with some chemicals, and there seems to be a faint discoloration.
“We’ll have to check downtown, Mac,” he says.
Now you begin to sweat. You did have only two or three beers. The big
Caddy did cut you off, but nobody saw it. Your whole case rests in two
little glass tubes.
You go along with the officers, and you really sweat it out, waiting
for the lab report. Finally, one of the radio men comes out of a back
room at Headquarters.
“Take it easy, Mac,” he says. “Like you said, it was only two or
three beers. Now, are you sure you didn’t get even part of the Caddy’s
license number?”
For the exoneration, which probably saved you from a “502” conviction
as a drunken driver, you can thank a pretty young policewoman.
Chestnut-haired, brown-eyed Geraldine Lambert, wife of an LAPD
lieutenant, is one of the few policewoman forensic analysts in the
country.
A graduate of the University of California at Los Angeles, Geraldine
began her career as an analytical chemist with the Eastman Kodak
Processing Laboratory. When she became a policewoman, she broke in the
usual way with juvenile and jail assignments and a hitch in DAPs, or
Deputy Auxiliary Police, the departmental youth group.
For almost a decade now, she has been in the Crime Lab, learning the
fascinating intricacies of blood analysis under LAPD’s chief chemist,
Ray Pinker. She has been one of the two women chosen to serve on the
Chemical Test Committee of the National Safety Council, and has been
voted “Policewoman of the Year” by the Exchange Club of Los Angeles.
At a cost of more than $12,000 for ingredients alone, Geraldine packs
4,000 chemical “Intoximeter” kits a year. Not all return. Of the drunks
that annually fill the balloons with telltale whiskied breaths, some
3,200 plead guilty and obviate the need of Intoximeter analysis.
But 800 a year dispute the drunk charge. Then the fine eye of science
draws a bead on the facts. The Intoximeter tells the story.
Sometimes the accused is right. Sometimes he loses. The Intoximeter
cost to the city, LAPD knows, is more than worth it, not only in
nailing down some “502” convictions, but in clearing the innocent.
Often drivers in ill health like diabetics fail the field sobriety
tests. Geraldine clears them. And sometimes defendants on other charges
try to act drunk to mitigate their offenses. Geraldine’s chemistry
exposes the subterfuge. Whatever she finds, her testimony is almost
always accepted by the courts.
The breath sample turned over to the Crime Lab is measured for the
proportion of alcohol in the bloodstream. Magnesium perchlorate
crystals in the Intoximeter tube have trapped the alcohol which is
first steam-distilled and measured for quantity. By relating the
quantity to the volume of breath taken as a sample, the proportion of
alcohol in the bloodstream is ascertained. In turn, this can be
translated into degrees of drunkenness.
Thus, your two or three beers might leave a trace of alcohol in the
bloodstream. But so long as you run under .05 per cent on the test, you
are chemically sober, and the courts will so agree.
From .05 to .10 per cent indicates that the subject has been
drinking; .10 to .15 you are possibly under the influence of alcohol.
From .15 to .25, you are under the influence of liquor and should not
be driving. At .25 per cent you are obviously intoxicated; at .35 per
cent you are a common drunk and probably unable to take care of
yourself; and at .40 per cent, whether you are aware of it or not, you
have passed out.
Beyond that, the percentages begin to indicate a grim prognosis. At
.50 per cent, you have imbibed a lethal amount of good fellowship.
Sometimes, Geraldine’s beakers and burners avert an improper booking.
There was, for example, the known San Pedro alcoholic, found one night
slumped behind the wheel of his parked car. He was out cold.
It would have been the most obvious thing in the world to book him as
a drunk. Instead, the officers awakened him and made him take the
Intoximeter test.
Geraldine’s report was an eye-opener. His blood alcohol level was
only .02 per cent! Further investigation disclosed the alcoholic had
gulped a vial of paraldehyde in an effort to avoid the DTs.
On another occasion, a husband beat his wife to death in their home
in San Fernando Valley and then fled over the hill into Hollywood.
Furnished with his description, detectives easily picked him up. Too
easily, it seemed to them. He was found staggering through the streets,
a half-empty wine bottle in his pocket, and, even if he hadn’t been
wanted for murder, he would have been bagged as a drunk.
The detectives promptly called for an AID car to give him the
Intoximeter test. He proved out at .07 per cent, just possible
tipsiness.
Later at his trial, the man tried to plead that he had been drunk and
didn’t know what he was doing when he killed his wife. The State then
introduced the Intoximeter finding, and he was convicted.
More and more, police throughout the nation are using scientific
chemical tests for intoxication, but LAPD is already testing another
device which may prove to be both simpler and cheaper. While it uses
chemicals, as does the Intoximeter, refills are only sixty cents
against $2.50. The instrument can be used at the booking desk or even
plugged into the cigarette fighter of a police car, and you don’t need
a chemist to read the results. The device feeds the breath past a
photoelectric cell and snaps a picture of the breath content, which can
be used in court.
In a way, there is an appropriate irony in the new, quiet kind of
detective work that Geraldine Lambert and Ray Pinker pursue far from
the scene of a crime or drunken-driver accident. These offenders have
not hesitated to spill blood, and by blood they are betrayed.
A .25 per cent reading in the bloodstream cannot be concealed; the
blood-soaked handkerchief of a killer can be washed white, and yet,
under Pinker’s benzidine test, there will be a damning, blue-green
chemical reaction. The guilty can dilute blood 300,000 times, and still
Pinker will find it.
So far as science knows, blood is practically indestructible through
age. It has been found in the marrow of Egyptian mummies several
thousand years old. It is almost always there to point to a criminal.
Out, out, damned spot. But it will not out.