The Wheels Were Turning

Chapter Six:

The Wheels of Justice

Reversed: Obstacles, adversity, calamity.

Mickey was able to visit Adriane at her house when she was sent home. Her bedroom was upstairs and it was hard for her to get to the kitchen to help herself, so he used the couch on his time off and helped her change the dressing on the hole left by the abscess and faithfully brought chicken soup up to her. His feelings for her were stronger now than ever but he was able to control them. While in jail Mickey had done some thorough soul searching. He’d been able to sort out his emotions concerning Adriane and put them second to his own sanity.

During that time, Nick had been serving her and she confessed to Mickey that she delighted in making Nick go up and down the stairs to get this and that for her: “bring me a book… go to the garden shack and fetch my drawing board. I want a cup of coffee …something from the freezer.” Guilt motivated Nick to become her slave and she took out her spite on him in this manner. Mickey thought it was way too soft a punishment for the asshole and her lawyer agreed, but, what was anybody to do? She was the only one who could have had the bastard prosecuted.

“Do your folks know about any of this?” Mickey asked, thinking surely her family would want to do something about it.

“No, I do not want a scandal, they would go nuts and God knows what Gotson would want to do.”

“Who is this Gotson again?”

“Gotson, a dear friend of our family, was a Basque Maquis… a separatist… called a terrorist by the USA after the war… you know, Hitler and shit…when Franco ran Spain,” she spoke so proudly of him that Mickey was almost jealous of her obvious affection.

“Hmm, he must be old now… Franco has been gone a while,” he assuaged his envy.

“He is still very healthy and capable of doing some damage to Nick and his connections I think. I don’t want him to get in trouble over me.”

He thought, Shit, this could be an answer. Naw, he wanted vengeance but not so badly that he or anyone else could end up in prison for it. He wondered, could this Gotson character have some interesting covert suggestions? He shoveled that thought way to the back of his head.

“Yes, but Adriane, what Nick did to you... How can you live with this?”

“Yes, sure… He tells them that I am a slut and a junkie, that he is only trying to help me and that he gets frustrated at my relapses,” she sighed.

“Yes, but can’t you see that he is dangerous and he might kill you the next time?’

The wheels were turning…

Mickey left her house. A patrol car was parked down the street. Was it Richards?  He suspected so with a cascading series of rational… "What was that guy up to and why was he watching me?" It isn’t like Mickey had the potential of being anything like a dangerous criminal. "Perhaps it wasn’t  me he was watching…could it  be Adriane?" Whoever it was it didn’t seem to be official police business. "Something stinks of this whole thing and I have no idea how I am going to deal with it."

Homer greeted him on the driveway of his place, leading him to the porch, looking back to make sure he was being followed as Mickey dismounted from the bike. What was inside the door that was left ajar was not a pretty sight. It was… well… everything was on the floor…. The Remington… and the monitor screen as well as all his papers. He approached the desk to see that the side of the case to the computer was open and the hard-drive was missing. Damn, who? What? Why?

His neighbor, Jack, came down from his apartment upstairs and stood at the door surveying the mess, “Some guy was here… what the hell, I didn’t know he was doing this?”

“What did he look like?”

“I never seen him before… he was tall… a big guy.”

“Did he walk up or did he come in a car?”

“I didn’t see a car; he could have been parked around the side. I didn’t really look… I didn’t know he’d done…” his tone was a little too apologetic. I knew Jack would have stayed low and wouldn’t have done anything to stop it.

“How many were there?”

“Just one… I think maybe I saw him before… tall, like that inspector… you know?”

That was better. He is at least giving up some useful information. Jack went back up to his apartment. Mickey picked the phone off the floor and set it on the desk. Should he call the police and report it? Sure, why not? He called, thinking, there were some obvious prints on the door, that they could dust the place. If it was Ryan, why would he leave prints? Was he sending Mickey a message? The place was trashed… that got his attention. He wondered, “So, what was I doing that would deserve this much attention and what is on my hard drive that he would want?” At that time most of what he wrote was on “A” disks but he was beginning to put it all on CD’s. Where are they? The “A” disks were all there but with screwdriver punctures in the cases. The CD’s were scattered from where he kept them in the desk drawer and gouged with X’s on the surface. All the other drawers were pulled out and dumped… What the f…? “My novels… thank God I have the manuscripts.” He had his two latest on CD’s in his cab anyway. The cab was parked on the street… He checked it. The doors were still locked. The visor still had his CDs there. He went back into the apartment to wait.

There was a knock at the screen door on the porch. My god, he thought, they’re here already? He looked out to see two Hispanic young men in suits with brief-cases. It was not the right time for this shit! Not sure what he expected of them but he opened the door.

“Hello,” the older of the two greeted him, “We would like to share some information from the Bible.”

“Oh, thank you very much but I’m good with it.” Mickey cut him short, trying not to be rude, he shut the door.

Other times he would have invited them in and offered them some tea. It is always good to be polite when someone has a Bible and the burden of hauling a vision of the dead prophet around. Mickey admired them because they didn’t even know him and yet they were at his door, personally, and trying to save his soul. He wished them well but he had business to attend... clean up this mess and think…. “Maybe I should wait ‘til the cops get here?”

The police arrived a mere minute or two after the Jehovah Witnesses left. He thought, “… like they had to be waiting around the corner: or am I getting paranoid? The cops took the information and did the usual report. Mickey had only the computer and disks damaged and nothing but the hard drive was missing… TV, VCR, tapes … all went untouched. It was just a matter of the place being trashed. The cops turned to leave.

“Wait a minute,” Mickey demanded, “Aren’t you going to dust for prints or anything?”

“So,” the #1 cop smirked, “you want us to get unit with a print-kit over here for this?”

“Sure I do… I want to prosecute the fuckers that did this.” Frustrated, he pointed to the smears that were so obvious on the window of the front door. “Here’s some, right in front of you.”

“Okay, okay… we’ll dust ‘em.” The cop humored him.

He didn’t realize it at the time but it didn’t take a wild conspiracy to explain the reticence of the police to dust for prints. As in all small, affluent cities like Santa Barbara, the police have their hands full going to calls for burglaries where real items with serial numbers are taken off to Oxnard to be hawked for a fix. A trashed room, a wrecked computer, and a few damaged disks, don’t amount to much as far as the case load goes. Still, he was peeved and saw the workings of Nick, Ryan or Richards in the shadows behind all this. He made his annoyance clear by glowering at the cop as he did his job.

“When you find out who these guys are will you let me know tomorrow?” he pouted.

“Hey, will you back off a bit?” The print-kit officer pulled a piece of clear tape off the spot he’d dusted, “I don’t know what you expect to come of this but by this time tomorrow your report will be at the bottom of a pile of seventy-five on some corner desk in the assistant D.A.’s office.”

“Won’t you like… run the prints through some list or something?”

“Naw, it ain’t like that,” he ripped another piece of tape off of the door and pressed it onto a card, “this ain’t exactly a murder, you know?”

“Really, if this was a house in Montecito you’d run ‘em, huh?”

“You know that stack of reports I told you about? They’re mostly from folks who actually lost something… jewelry, silverware… you know, from houses in Hope Ranch and Montecito.” He closed up his print kit, handed me a carbon copy of his report but stopped before going out onto the porch and said, “You can replace that hard drive for less than a hundred bucks, you know?”

“No, I don’t know…you know?” His annoyance went unappreciated as the duster was already halfway to his car.

It was hard to read his name on the carbon paper copy but he made it out to be, through the feint ink and scrawl, Schmidt or maybe Schultz…. some sort of Schitz. He threw it in a corner and went to work putting things back in order. A mess like this was incentive to clean house so he did that and felt pretty good about it around midnight when he finished.  Mickey called the dispatcher to let him know he wouldn’t be coming in that night and stayed home with his tidy desk and trusty Remington. He held the phone back from his ear as the dispatch, Stella, cussed him out, typed out the events of the past few days on paper and finally hit the sack by three a.m.

A week or two later Adriane called. “I have a package from my father… it has journals… all in French but it has an ‘A’ disk with it. It came, Fed-Xed, today. I opened it up but I don’t want to read the damned thing… too hard right now. It has a lot in it about the Resistance and Gotson and Mama. Do you want the disk?”

““Yes, I’ll check it out.” He was connecting the dots and didn’t bother to say anything about his trashed apartment, “I’ll drop by tomorrow.”

“Are you okay?” as he hadn’t seen her in a couple of weeks maybe she’s done with him for awhile, “Are you off the oxy… er… oh, what is it, cotton something?”

“Oxycotin… no, I have a few left. But my crater is pretty well healed up. Can you come over? I miss you.”

 “I’m a little busy today.” He had nothing to do at all but he was beginning to hear from her medicated speech that doing nothing was more productive that wasting another day with her.

“Sure, okay… the postman hasn’t come yet; I’ll send the package to you,” she moaned, “You can sort it out if you want. It could be interesting, eh? Oh, I gotta go now, Billy is….” She stopped herself, “…uh, someone is at the gate. I have to see who it is.”

“Okay, I’m good with that…” He said that but didn’t believe she didn’t know exactly who it was. He thought, “One lie deserves another. Seems that Billy is back in the picture and it won’t be long… if not already.”