The driver pretended not to see the red light nor hear the honking black and white which followed him for a block until Calvin angrily blasted him to the curb with the siren. “Watch him say ‘who me?’” said Calvin as he got out of the car and approached from the driver’s side while Francis advanced on the passenger side, shining his light, distracting the driver to protect his vulnerable partner on the street.— “The Choirboys,” by Joseph Wambaugh

How many of you laughed out loud when Jan Ullrich’s lawyer said we shouldn’t leap to any conclusions just because his client has been inextricably linked by DNA testing to nine bags of blood seized during a search of the Island of Doctor Fuentes?

“If all that is evoked is confirmed, then all that has been found is the blood of our client in Spain, but that does not in itself mean that doping took place,” says mouthpiece Peter-Michael Diestel, alleged to be a specialist in this sort of thing.

Yeah, right. And I keep quarts of tequila stashed all over the Southwest just in case the Mexicans decide to reclaim Aztlan and I find myself compelled by threat of deportation to host the welcome-home fiesta.

I had believed that Richard Pryor held the copyright on hysterical reality avoidance until Diestel opened his strudel-hole. In “Live on the Sunset Strip," while doing a bit about a man whose wife catches him doing the mattress mambo with another woman, Rich’ went straight to the well of implausible deniability: “No, I was not (bleep)ing her. I don’t care what you think you saw, I was not (bleep)ing her. Now who you gonna believe — me, or your lyin’ eyes?”

A defense strategy like that calls for a pair of brass ’nads, the kind that clang when a guy walks. Alas, while arguing on Ullrich’s behalf, Diestel sounds distinctly tinny: “My blood is also all over the place: I have a doctor in Rostock, another in Berlin and another I don’t know where yet.” Okay, fine, he has a better medical plan than I do — so much so that he has two docs on the line and a free safety roving the backfield — but I’ll bet none of them has nine bags of Diestel’s sangre de shyster cluttering up his office fridge.

Why exactly does Jan Ullrich need nine bags of his own blood? Run out of room in his own body, did he? There were times, usually in the off-season, when it looked a little crowded in there, like a magenta Volkswagen Beetle full of clowns.

Maybe he lost a bet with Count Dracula during the 2006 Tour? “Nein, Landis will never come back from such a deficit. Nine bags, you say? You’re on, bat boy. And quit licking your lips when you look at me.”

Had he planned to make a bunch of blutwurst using his own blut? I always thought Eddy Merckx was cycling’s sole cannibal, and that the sobriquet had more to do with his approach to racing than to his dietary choices. It’s weird enough to be plausible — but if Jan’s tapping his own veins for sausage fixin’s, I hate to think about where he’s getting his beer.

And what about the 191 other jugs of red that turned up in Fuentes’ office? The ProTour teams and the International Association of Professional Cycling Groups have asked that cycling authorities use the DNA of other implicated cyclists to see whether their blood was found in the laboratory, but that eminently sensible request drew the kind of applause one might expect for Rosie O’Donnell singing “Titties and Beer” at a Focus on the Family prayer breakfast.

Meanwhile, the real cops aren’t moving much faster than the velo-narcs. Investigating prosecutor Friedrich Apostel of the Bonn district attorney's office, which is investigating Ullrich on fraud charges stemming from the blood-doping allegations, recently told The Associated Press that he has “great hopes of completing the investigation by the end of this year.” Similar cases have taken as long as two years to prosecute, he added.

Two years? Two more years of various wheeled wizards imploring us to pay no attention to the hematologist behind the curtain? Two more years of not knowing whether the guy who won the Tour was running on regular or premium? Two more years of, “Who, me?”

Not exactly out for blood, are they?

Did O'Grady's little hypothesis hit the mainline or did he miss the vein again? Give us the needle at webletters@insideinc.com. Please include your full name, your hometown and state or nation. — Editor