Food, drink, room, movie – and change to spare

Tuesday night was so drizzly dead that even the muggers weren’t loitering outside Spokane’s downtown bus plaza. The few people milling around inside looked like they were there to actually catch a ride.

Lucky stiffs. They were headed home.

All I had was an empty, low-budget motel room and a $3.19 bottle of Boone’s Farm sangria with my name on it.

My lovely wife, Sherry, considered coming down to keep me company.

Then she mulled it over and changed her mind. She told me she still loves me. She just didn’t want to see her name in newsprint along with the words “conjugal visit.”

But the results of my experiment are in, and I have great news for taxpayers.

I have survived downtown Spokane on a Geiger inmate budget without being sold for a carton of Camels to the Aryan Brotherhood.

To recap Tuesday’s column: Spokane now must pay the county $66.85 for each inmate we check into the Geiger Hoosegow Hotel west of town.

I set out to prove that we’d be money ahead by renting our Geiger-bound malefactors motel rooms, paying for their meals and maybe a movie.

“Through the process of release (or the more usual escapes) all Geiger inmates wind up downtown eventually,” I wrote.

DIRTBAG ALERT!

As I write this, authorities are engaged in a downtown Spokane manhunt for an escapee who left the corrections center between midnight and 6 a.m. Wednesday.

“You could have had a roommate,” Sherry said when I told her the news.

I thought I felt something.

Inmate Jeffery A. Heatwole’s great escape reportedly involved:

1. Removing a window screen.

2. Leaping onto a foyer shelf.

3. Jumping over the prison fence.

Why would Jeffery go to so much trouble?

Most cons just ask a guard for a bus schedule.

But getting back to today’s topic: My final tally for lodging, grub and rotgut hooch is – ta-dah! – $64.76.

This is $2.09 below our new rate. And I managed to buy a ticket for that new biopic about Avista executives.

You’ve gotta see it. It’s called “Slither.”

Here’s the bungling that launched my quest.

We used to cough up $41 a day for every city inmate shipped off to Geiger.

Then county officials threatened to round up our jailbirds and dump them off at Manito Park unless the city upped its daily inmate ransom to $60. (I’m paraphrasing a bit here.)

City boneheads balked but then agreed to let a consultant come up with a figure. That’s how we got slapped with the $66.85 rate, which is 300 grand more a year than the county’s original proposal.

On Monday, I searched the city’s core for a motel affordable enough to prove my point.

I thought I’d found the answer at the frayed Downtowner Motel, 165 S. Washington. The place offered a room for $40.13.

Everything changed at the corner of 1st and Lincoln.

A Rodeway Inn manager gave me a meal deal I couldn’t refuse. For six bucks more, she said, I’d get breakfast with “bake-your- own waffles.”

Sold. I took a second-floor room. It was not only clean but also smelled fine. Plus the Rodeway put me within a short walk from the newspaper and my desk – where I do most of my sleeping.

The Rodeway’s waffle maker is in the lobby. During breakfast, guests can pour pre-measured amounts of batter into the hot iron.

This is not just tasty food. This is a valuable skill every inmate could use.

Pardon me for sounding judgmental. But had Mr. Heatwole learned the art of waffle making, he might be working at an IHOP instead of trying to stay one hop ahead of the cops.