Puzzler of the week

[Scott MacLean]

This week's puzzler:

There�d been an accident on the upper Canyon Road.  A middle-aged driver in a European sports car evidently lost control in the early morning hours and plunged a hundred feet to his death.

Even though he wore a seatbelt and the airbag had obviously deployed, neither could have prevented the broken neck that ended his life.  The police detective called to the scene began to study the evidence.  He slowly removed the dead man�s sunglasses, admiring them and thinking to himself how nice it would be to own a fancy pair of designer glasses like these.

He put them on and looked at himself in the driver�s side view mirror. "Nice, but not my prescription," he thought.  He removed them and carefully placed them on the dashboard.  He stared at the dead man�s face. He obviously hadn�t shaved that morning.  He noticed the deep impression those sunglasses had made on the bridge of his nose, the obvious result of the tremendous force created by the exploding airbag.  He stared intently into the dead man�s blue green eyes and thought how peaceful he looked and how his relaxed countenance belied the obvious terror of his last few moments on Earth.  He slowly rose from his uncomfortable crouching position.  He summoned one of the officers to the scene dust for prints.

This was a homicide.

The question is, how did he know it was a homicide?

Last week's puzzler:

Jerry had worked lots of summers and he finally accumulated enough money to buy himself a brand-new 1968 Volkswagen Beetle.

It was a dark and stormy September night when Jerry and his college roommate pulled the brand-new Beetle out of the dealership parking lot in Chicago, on their way to college at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison.

Since the Beetle was brand-new and hadn't been broken in, they decided to drive the shiny bug on the back roads of Wisconsin, so as not to exceed the break-in speed.

The roads they chose were muddy and rutted, and it was really quite an adventure. They ran out of gas and they had a blowout -- as you might expect.

Searching for the spare, they found it under the hood where the engine should have been.  Without reading the instruction manual they carefully replaced the bad tire with the spare and then put the blown tire where the spare had been.

They continued on their muddy route looking for a service station where they could get the flat tire repaired.  Low and behold, a few miles down the road, they come across "Helmut's German Car Repair."  An oasis of European automotive expertise in rural Wisconsin.

No sooner had they pulled into the station, carefully navigating through the mud-splattered windshield, than out popped Helmut who immediately said to the driver, "You�re here to get ze tire fixed, eh?"

How did Helmut know they had a flat tire?

Last week's puzzler answer:

Don't forget, in those days there was no such thing as this undersized little spare tire that many cars have today. All the tires were exactly the same.

In fact the spare was exactly the same make and size and everything, and Helmut had never seen them before. And he probably would admit he was taking a guess.

He made the guess based on the fact that the windshield washer in the Volkswagen of that era operated on the tire pressure of the spare tire.

If the tire pressure dropped down enough, then the washer would stop working, and saving enough air in the spare so you could use it as such. But if you had a flat and you had no air whatsoever, you would have no windshield washer...and thus a mud splattered windshield.