(Names have been changed or omitted to protect the guilty.)
Carlotta acted as if she was caught with her hand in the cookie jar. She explained that she sometimes let her brother use the car. They were his tickets. I told her that she had better get him to take care of them. Carlotta seemed reluctant to confront him, so I offered to talk to him. At this, she balked. She said she would do it.
To put it simply, this relationship was already unraveling. In retrospect, it was only a matter of time before we parted.
Carlotta called me one day. She was worried. She had received a letter from the police Violations department. They were after her for unpaid tickets. I met with her later and we talked. I offered to go with her to the Violations department to help her clear up the tickets.
We went to Violations, which was in an old police stations. The woman was upset. I was not, but then, I was not the one in Dutch with the cops. We went to the counter. The woman behind the counter was polite. When Carlotta gave her name, the woman checked a list. She then excused herself and went to a back room. A moment later, she came back. She was followed by two plainclothes policemen.
One of the officers looked at me and asked, what I was doing there. Both officers knew me from non-police matters. I replied that I was there with Carlotta.
Both officers looked at each other and smiled like the Cheshire cat.
“Miss, can you wait here? We have to show him something,” one said to Carlotta. They invited me to come in back.
I followed them into the back office. A sergeant was sitting at another desk. He knew me, too. One of the officers told him,” He’s here with Carlotta ----.”
The sergeant nodded and smiled.
They asked me to sit at a desk. One placed a thick pile of printed-out pages. I saw Carlotta’s name on them.
“Look, I can help her out with the tickets. I have some extra money saved....”I said.
“Okay, but look at the list,” said the officer.
I looked. Carlotta’s name was listed at least ten times on the first page. I flipped to the second, and there she was again, from top to bottom of the page. And so on with the third and fourth. Looking up I asked,
“Just how many pages are hers?”
The officers and sergeant could hardly contain themselves.
“All of them,” was the reply.
“I can’t help with all this, “I said. They burst out laughing.
The sergeant agreed to let Carlotta pay off her tickets on a payment plan. The stipulation was that if she did not pay, she would go to jail. I thanked them for giving her a break. They said it was worth it just to see the look on my face when they told me the entire stack of print-outs were Carlotta’s. Indeed, she owed well over $3,000 simoleons.
As it turns out, the police were running a program to catch up with scoff-laws. Carlotta was the #2 scoff-law in the city. A relative of hers, (I forget if it was a cousin or in-law), was #1 at twice that amount!
I stressed to Carlotta the importance of making payments. She sounded sincere when she agreed and promised to pay.
The relationship ended a couple of weeks later.
A few weeks after the break-up, one of the officers called me. He asked if I had seen Carlotta. I told him we broke up. He explained that she had not made payments. He wanted to give me a “heads-up” that they would be coming to arrest her. The man also said that in all the years he knew me, he never saw a look of surprise like the one on my face that day at the Violations office. Apparently, my reaction had been a source of humor at the station for a couple of weeks.
Carlotta did get arrested. A that point, I found the whole thing amusing.
Just another case of “Stupid is what stupid does.” The relationship was already on the down slope, pretty much for the same kind of thinking that amassed $3,000 worth of parking tickets. As an old mentor said, “Don’t be stupid.”
It is amazing how careless people can be sometimes.
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