Lilly's Law

“That’s why I’m here, isn’t it? For crossing your line?”

“You crossed over my line years ago, Mike. Problem was I couldn’t do anything about it back then.” She grinned wickedly. “Times sure have changed, haven’t they?”

“And you’re really liking the feel of all that power, aren’t you?” He gave her a lazy grin. “Didn’t expect it from you, Lilly. But all that power sure makes you hot and sexy.”

“What?” she sputtered, caught off guard until she realized the voice was back. Like she really needed that and Mike Collier at the same time—those disobedient little innuendos, naughty little suggestions, popping in and out in all the wrong places. Another one of those Mike Collier consequences.

“I said I didn’t expect it from you.”

Shutting her eyes, taking in a deep breath, she opened them again slowly, then said, “You may not have expected it from me, Mike, but that’s the way I am now. Older and a whole lot wiser.”

“With perky breasts.”

She gulped. “Huh?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

Drawing in another deep breath, she continued. “The thing with you, Mike, is that you take advantage because you can. Just look at this place—the desk, Bambi the boy secretary—”

“Fritz,” he corrected.

“Fritz and blueberry muffins. You always get away with it. Always have and you expect that you always will. Well, it’s my turf this time, and no more getting away with it.”

“So what you’re giving me here is the this-town-ain’t-big-enough-for-the-both-of-us speech?” Mike crossed one leg over the other and cupped his hands behind his head. “Get outta town or else.…”

“Indianapolis has three-quarters of a million people and it’s not big enough for the both of us,” she quipped. “I’ve got a good start here and you’re already messing it up. I own a nice little house, have a good job, and I’m trying to find some roots.”

“At least you have a house. I’m sleeping underneath my printing press. And I have a boy secretary named Bambi—”

“Fritz.”

“Think they’ll mind if I take some of these pillows home with me?”

“See how you are?” She huffed out an impatient sigh. “Always trying to avoid the subject.”

“You were talking about your house…I just asked about pillows. Thought it sort of fit into the flow of conversation.…”

A challenge flickered into his eyes and she saw it. Didn’t want to see it, but it was there, glimmering right at her, beckoning her, like a manly Siren, to come crash on the rocks…one more time. “Shut up, Mike! Just shut up. I came here to have a serious talk with you, but if you don’t want to talk—”

“Want to talk? I called you, Lilly. Told you I wanted to talk, after, I might add, you threw me in jail over a couple of lousy parking tickets. And you know that was overreacting. Admit it. You blew a gasket and threw me in the dungeon. Payback, right? And you’ve just been waiting for your chance.”

Lowering her voice so that Juanita, at the other end of the hall struggling to hear, couldn’t, Lilly whispered, “And it feels so good to be on the giving end for a change. Better than I could have ever imagined.”

“I knew it!” Mike exclaimed, jumping up. Moving closer to the cell bars, just inches away from Lilly, he smiled down at her—an irascibly patient smile, an imperious smile. “So Lilly’s got some fangs now.”

Standing to meet him eye-to-eye, but still a respectful distance from the bars, Lilly gave him that same smile right back. “No, not fangs. Just the law on my side.” She wrinkled her nose at him. “And the knowledge of how to use it.”

“And you really do intend to keep me here until Monday, don’t you?”

She nodded. “But I did leave instructions that if you pay the fine in full they can let you out.”

“So want to loan me a couple of grand?” he asked.

“Sell the Porsche.”

“Did that.”

“And the stock portfolio.”

“Ditto.”

She shrugged. “Well, I suppose it looks like we’ll be keeping you here for a while longer, doesn’t it? And I should think that a man with your, shall we say, paltry pecuniary resources would appreciate a few days of free upkeep.”

“Cruel, Lilly. Really cruel.” He laughed, then lowered his voice as Juanita scooted her chair even closer so she could hear more. “But on you cruel is good. So do you ever let your hair down, figuratively speaking, or are you all judge, all the time now?”

Instinctively, Lilly reached to her hair and finger-brushed the wild strands around her face. “All judge, Mr. Collier. A judge who came to give you fair warning that she won’t be messed with. You mess with me or my court again, you go to jail again. And that’s the way it’s going to be. And no, this town ain’t big enough for the two of us, but unless you intend to get out, seems like we’re going to have to coexist.”

“It’s my town, Lilly. Born and raised here and the people know me.”

She smiled. “If they know you, that makes it all the easier for me.”

“You really do hate me, don’t you?”

Stepping aside for the maintenance man to take away the chair, Lilly walked over to the bars, raised her hands and took hold, then pressed her face to the cold metal. “Hate is such a strong word, Mike. The first time I hated you, then I forgave you. Stupid move, I know. But I did forgive you. Then the second time I hated you again, but that time I didn’t forgive you. And now…it’s not hate, really. Just a need to see you in your proper place.”

Moving to the bars also, Mike pressed himself to them so their faces were almost touching. She could feel his breath, his heat—smell the scent of him mingling with the oxygen she took into her lungs. And for a moment she lost everything—her senses, her bearings—and the only thing that occupied the scant space between them was the memory of how good they’d been together back then. God, they’d been so good…so perfect…their fit, their touch, their rhythm…his hands…his lips…his lips on her breasts…

Pheromones, Lilly! Look out it’s the pheromones.

“What?” Lilly yelped, jumping back from the bars as if they’d taken a bite out of her.

“I said I need a phone…to call my office. Let them know I won’t be getting out, since you intend to keep me in my proper place until Monday, and I used my one call yesterday to call you.”

Flushed, a bit shaken by the encounter, and looking over her shoulder to see who had shouted pheromones—or was that the pheromones themselves shouting a warning?—Lilly breathed in a deep breath, reached into her purse and handed him her cell phone. Easier to do that than argue with him, since her knees were shaking, which meant her voice was probably shaking, too, and no way was she going to let him hear that.

“Hi, Jimmy…” Mike looked at Lilly, then said, “Jimmy’s my lawyer.” He spoke into the phone again. “I’ve been thinking it over and I’ve decided to go with Chinese for lunch.”

Chinese? Lilly heard the word, but she wasn’t recovered enough from her close encounter—thank heaven for the bars—to let it sink in all the way.

“Wong’s—a number three, with two egg rolls, spicy mustard, and have him throw in an order of fried rice, too. Shrimp fried.” To Lilly he added, “Want anything? The chow mein’s great. So’s the sweet and sour pork.”

That snapped her out of it—lifted her right up and out of his spell and dropped her back down into the jailhouse. “Hang up,” she demanded, holding out her hand for her phone.

“Would you rather have Italian?” he asked, backing far enough away from her that she couldn’t reach through the bars and snatch it away from him. “Or Mexican? Jimmy can go anyplace you want. You’ll pay for your own, won’t you? ’Cause lately I’ve been of paltry pecuniary resources.”

“Hand me the phone, Mike.”

“I guess she doesn’t want anything, Jimmy. So get me an almond cookie with that and tell Wong we’ll do a make good—another ad.” To Lilly he quipped, “I’m the guy you see on the street corner with the cardboard sign—Will Trade Ad Space for Food.”

“The phone, right now!” It wasn’t funny. Not him, not her reaction to him, and geez, she knew he’d felt it. How could he not, with the heat they were giving off together—a real blast furnace of lust or pheromones or whatever it was called.

Want to go to bed with me, Lilly?

“What?” she shrieked.

“I said what happens Monday morning when I’m back in court?” He handed the phone through the bars and she took it being careful not to come into contact with his skin.

She was sweating now. No hiding, no denying. “I, uh…” She didn’t know. Didn’t know the question, didn’t know the answer. “I’ve got to go,” she whispered, her voice infused with the hoarseness that comes in the aftermath of good sex. Oh no! Not that voice. He knew that voice.

“And was it good for you, Lilly?”

She didn’t hear that! He didn’t say it; she didn’t hear it.

“Lilly? Don’t you want to know?”

“Know what?” she choked out.

“What I just asked.”

“No,” she panted, having no clue what that was.

“You don’t want to know why I called you last night?”

She ventured a look into the cell to see if he was smoking a cigarette—the relaxing smoke that capped off awesome sex—but he was finishing the last of his blueberry muffin. “So tell me and make it fast,” she snapped.

He shrugged. “In the last couple of weeks I’ve been involved in this little investigation and…”

That she heard loud and clear, and it was all she wanted to hear. “Another investigation? Fool me three times, Mike? Is that it? Well, not a chance.” And she spun around and left.

Then just before she reached the guard desk…“Hey, Lilly. Are you wearing underwear?”

4

Empty shopping bags; a Saturday afternoon horror story

WHO WOULD HAVE BELIEVED there wasn’t a simple black dress in her size in town? Lilly didn’t after the first store, and even after the second. But at store number three and counting, the trend was becoming pretty clear. No dress for the judge who’d done that terrible thing to poor Mike Collier. No shoes either, unless the size fives Mrs. Milhouse tried to force onto Lilly’s size sevens counted. “Wasn’t that a bit harsh, throwing Mikey in jail?” Mrs. Milhouse asked, practically bending back Lilly’s big toe to wedge a pair of black pumps on her foot. “Oh dear, did I pinch your toes?”

Then there was the ice cream cone, plain vanilla, something that should have been a nice treat in the middle of a futile shopping spree. The scoops right before hers were generous, overflowing the cone. Her scoops, though, were so dinky she thought about asking for a magnifying glass to find them in the cracked cone, one that dripped out the bottom.

In spite of the clogs in her shopping expedition and the ice cream stains down the front of her shirt, Lilly did find her dress and shoes—thank you, Big Bob’s Discount Mart. It was a clearance special, where everything must go: heaps and heaps of clothes on tables, more heaps of shoes in piles of boxes. After some elbow-to-elbow excavating among a bunch of frantic shoppers who were whipped into a dress-tugging, shoe-flying frenzy, Lilly managed to escape without bruises, carrying a dress that was a little too slinky and short for Ezra’s party, and a pair of shoes way too platform and clunky for anything other than a high school dance. But they were black, and that’s all that mattered.

On her way home from Big Bob’s, Lilly detoured over to the jail. It was only a couple of blocks out of the way, and she’d overhead some Big Bob’s chitchat about the protestors at the jail. Professional curiosity, she told herself, regretting her decision the instant she turned the corner. The first sign she saw read Loony Judge Lilly. People were actually marching in a circle with them. And along with Loony Judge Lilly, there was an abundance of Free Mike Collier signs. The group was shouting at cars passing by, telling them to honk if they were in favor of freeing Mike Collier. Naturally, everybody was honking…everybody, that is, except Lilly, who, stalled in a Mike Collier traffic jam, couldn’t take her eyes off a steadily growing line of compassionate and, most likely, husband-hunting women lining up at the jailhouse door, armed with home-baked cakes probably concealing metal files for sawing through iron bars, and notes of hopeful marriage proposals. Something about a man behind bars that got the ol’ hormones flowing, she guessed, putting on a pair of sunglasses as though people wouldn’t recognize her in them.

And they did recognize her. Halfway through the traffic snarl, and just when she thought she just might make it all the way past, one fervent Mike fan recognized her and shouted the war cry to the rest of the protestors. “It’s the judge,” he yelled, and everybody ran to the curb. Lilly expected rotten tomatoes or something similar to the riot she’d survived in Big Bob’s, but the group of people merely frowned at her. One old lady did shake a mean index finger at her, and one brave vigilante held his Loony Judge Lilly sign a little higher than the rest of them.

It took Lilly five whole minutes to inch her way through the gauntlet, one scowl at a time. And by the time she turned off the block, she’d decided she’d take a good wrestling match at Big Bob’s over this any day. At least at Big Bob’s she’d walked away with a battle trophy. Here at the jail, she was the battle trophy.

Saturday night and the perfect potted palm

LILLY MANAGED TO GET out of town, though not looking quite as polished as she would have preferred, and an hour later than she wanted. Consequentially, when she arrived at Ezra’s she was frazzled, her hair frizzled, and overall she wasn’t in tip-top form. Then she discovered that Ezra’s “few people” turned out to be a veritable jackpot of notoriety in the judicial world—her first time invited into such hallowed ranks and she was looking like a dowdy interloper in her Big Bob’s special, while they were looking austere and accomplished in their distinguished, well-cut grays and charcoals. A federal judge, several superior court judges, a supreme court judge, dean of the law school…Lilly almost turned around and ran before she was all the way inside. “Don’t you think I’m a bit out of my league here?” she whispered at Ezra as she exchanged her Big Bob’s five-dollar mark-down shawl for a manhattan, the ingredients of which probably cost more than her entire outfit.

Ezra, now retired from teaching at the law school, hobnobbed with all the big judicial names. He could have been one of those names, and probably should have been, but his love was in the classroom, where he could teach the pure elegance of the law. Over the years he’d had offers from prestigious firms and yes, even a judgeship. But he was a permanent fixture in the classroom, and now, after his retirement, he still taught from time to time, just not as much. “You’re out of your league only if you want to be, my dear,” he replied. “And if you don’t dazzle them with your legal repartee tonight, that dress will go a long ways.” Soft and round, with abundant white hair not a whole lot less wild than her own, and sagacious thick eyebrows over bright brown eyes, Ezra Kessler was her mentor, her friend, her substitute grandfather. So many important roles in her life all wrapped up in one person, and she loved him dearly, in spite of the fact that since he’d retired from teaching, he’d been spending a little of that free time meddling. Like tonight, tossing her in the mix with all the heavy hitters—for her own good, he’d tell her. It was and he was right. That was Ezra, who, no matter what, had always been in her corner. “And your little exploits down in Whittier made the paper here, by the way, so I’m guessing a few of my friends will be eager to hear the particulars. It’s not every day a judge gets to send a member of the press to jail, you know. Even though I think that’s every judge’s secret fantasy.” He chuckled. “And for parking tickets. I’ve got to hand it to you, Lilly, what you did takes courage. Makes an old teacher proud.”

“It made the paper here in Indy?” she choked out. “No way.”

Ezra nodded. “On television, too. Good picture of you, I might add. The robe looks a little big though, but it suits you.”

“A judicial hand-me-down. The guy before me was a line-backer in college or something, and a robe in my size isn’t in the city budget until next year. Tight money or something. The mayor’s always harping on city funds.” Shaking her head, she tossed back the manhattan in a couple of gulps to brace herself for the onslaught, ridicule…whatever her esteemed colleagues might throw at her. “You might have had the decency to warn me about this, Ezra,” she said, sidestepping her way over to his hulking potted palm in the corner. Sanctuary in any form…an evening communing behind nature. Better than an evening communing with critics. “And I didn’t throw him in jail because he’s a member of the press. He broke the law.”

Ezra nodded. “Parking tickets,” he chuckled. “The pretty judge packs a pretty big punch. I always knew you would be good.” Snagging a shrimp puff off a passing tray, Ezra handed it to her. “And I’m assuming you had legal ground to do what you did.…” He frowned, then lowered his voice. “You did, didn’t you? I mean, it was Mike Collier, after all. With the history between you two…”

Lilly choked on her shrimp. Ezra knew about the plagiarism incident, and he was the one who’d championed her back into law school. He was also the one who came to her rescue when she was arrested, but he didn’t know that she and Mike…that they had…No, he didn’t, couldn’t, know that. That was a little piece of history she wished even she didn’t know about.

“Are you okay, dear?” Ezra asked, handing her a napkin.

She arched her eyebrows as she grabbed a glass of sparkling water from a passing waiter to wash down the rest of the puff, which seemed to be sticking in the back of her throat, sticking there like Mike Collier seemed to be sticking in her life. “Fine,” she finally sputtered, picking up her pace to the palm. “Just fine.

“Well, as I was saying, with the history between you two I certainly hope you’re on good legal footing with this.” He followed her, stopping just short of his plant. “Especially since it’s drawing some attention now.”

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