Lilly's Law

Them’s the breaks, he thought, resigning himself to his short-term fate. Mike shut his eyes once again and tried to tackle that mental to-do list, but thoughts of Lilly crowded it out. Lilly in her robe, out of her robe, hair up, hair down, with glasses, without glasses, with clothes, without clothes…without clothes…without clothes.…

Dear God, what was he going to do about Lilly, anyway?

What a miserable way to end a perfectly bad Friday!

“NO, I DIDN’T KNOW he owned the newspaper here. Do you think I would have accepted the job if I’d known there was a chance I’d run into him?” Lilly paced barefooted across the black-and-white-checkered linoleum floor in the circa 1935 kitchen, scrunching her cell phone to her ear and shaking a bottle of apple juice. “Sure, I saw the name on my docket, but it’s a pretty common name, you’ll have to admit, so I didn’t think much about it. I mean, who would have ever guessed that Mike Collier—the Mike Collier…my Mike Collier—would end up at a newspaper here in Whittier? The town’s what? Fifty thousand people, tops? The Mike I’ve known and despised would have never settled in a place like this. Not enough people here to railroad, not enough action or sensationalism, which is what he thrives on.”

“So are you gonna stay?” Rachel Perkins asked. “Even with Mike there?” Rachel was Lilly’s best friend, the one she’d met on the first day of first grade and spent some part of almost every day with, in one way or another, ever since. “And if you do stay, am I gonna have to come to Whittier to make sure you don’t you-know-what again with Mike? Because you know how you are about him.” She laughed. “And I know how you are about him even if you won’t admit it, which you won’t. And I’m betting doing you-know-what with you-know-who has been on your mind a time or two already. Hasn’t it?”

“No,” Lilly snapped. She opened the fridge and pulled out a bowl of last night’s leftover tuna noodle casserole and sniffed it just to be sure. “How I used to be isn’t how I am now. The first time between Mike and me was, well…” She popped the casserole in the microwave oven and set the timer for a minute. “Lust,” she admitted. “I was twenty-two and stupid, and he was twenty-four and convincing.”

“Convincing, Lil? You mean drop-dead, don’t you? ’Cause he was, and you almost did drop dead every time he looked at you. Remember? And I’m betting he still is drop-dead, maybe even more than he used to be. Is he?”

“Well, he was pretty cute, and I suppose you could say he still is, in an older sort of way,” Lilly admitted grudgingly. Pretty cute, pretty sexy—actually the sexiest thing she’d ever met in her life. Then and now. And back then all he’d had to do was crook his finger and she’d gone running. Good thing she’d taken off those track shoes the second time they’d…Yeah, yeah. Another big mistake, second time around. But the shoes were off now for sure.

“Pretty cute?” Rachel asked. “It’s pheromones, Lil. He emits them and you can’t control yourself. You just sniff them right in, you know that. And if you ask me, you always liked sniffing them in,” she said. “And yeah, I know it wasn’t love, at least that’s what you told me a billion times. But if it wasn’t love, it was certainly something like it, and I voted for love back then. Still do.”

The microwave dinged and Lilly popped open the door. Her leftovers were steamy, so she let them sit while she trudged over to the fridge for…She opened the door, looked for and found the rest of a salad left over from the night before. If it wasn’t wilted beyond recognition, it would suffice as the remainder of her dinner. If it was wilted, she’d eat crackers. “It was a mistake, okay? A mistake and I learned my lesson, especially the second time. I mean, we had a couple of drinks and yes, I suppose I was still attracted to him—then, not now. But that was a long time ago.”

“And you’ve gone out with how many men since a long time ago?”

Lilly plunked the salad down on the kitchen table and returned to the microwave for her tuna noodle. “Dozens,” she lied. “I just forgot to tell you.”

“Well, girlfriend, you don’t lie about that any better than you lie to yourself about Mike. And I’m betting you’re already getting that same old tingly thing for him like you used to.”

“Am not.”

“Sweetie, tell yourself anything you want. But I know the truth and I say go for it. Most people don’t get a third chance.”

“The only thing I’m going for is my tuna casserole, which is getting cold.”

Rachel issued a deliberate huff of futility into the phone, one meant to be heard across the fifty miles between them, and one Lilly knew well. Then she did it a second time for effect.

“Knock it off, Rach,” Lilly grumbled. “I’m fine, dandy. Impervious.”

“School doesn’t start for a couple weeks, Lil. I’ve got all my lesson plans together for the first semester, so I’m free to come chaperon you two, or nag or keep you out of the line of his pheromones, if that’s what you intend on doing.”

“I don’t need you to chaperon, or nag,” Lilly stated flatly. “I’m fine.”

“I’d give you my opinion of what you really are, but you’d hang up. So I’m going to shut up and let you go eat. Just watch out for the pheromones, if that’s what you really want, and those are my last words on the subject of Mike Collier. Now I’m going to sit in a dark corner and wonder why I don’t have somebody in my life who’s as crazy about me as he is about you.” Before Lilly had a chance at a comeback, Rachel had clicked off.

Lilly’s casserole was barely warm by the time she got around to it, and as she speared a chunk of celery, she punched into her voice mail. “This is your mother—” as if she didn’t recognize her mother’s voice “—calling to remind you not to forget to send something for Aunt Mary’s birthday next week. Kisses, sweetie.” Beep. “If you’re in the market for replacement windows, call—” Beep. “Lilly, how about stopping by Saturday evening for drinks and hors d’oeuvres. I’m having a few people over around seven.” That from Ezra Kessler, her former law school professor and the person who’d recommended her for the pro tem job. Beep. Then a message from…no, not Mike! “Look, Lilly. I need to see you…need to see you…need to see you.…” She listened to it, then listened again. And the third time she listened her appetite quit, so she sat the bowl of casserole down on the floor for Sherlock, her basset hound.

In spite of the doughy lump of dread shaping in her stomach, Lilly’s heart skipped a beat. Headache time…need an aspirin and…She hit the redial button on her phone. “Rach, help!

3

Just when she was finally dozing off from Friday night—Saturday morning!

IT WAS BRIGHT AND EARLY Saturday morning, just a little after seven, when Lilly, still bleary-eyed and fuzzy-brained, stumbled to the front door and threw it open, only to be greeted by Mayor Lowell Tannenbaum waving a newspaper at her. He was tapping his left size-thirteen frantically on the concrete, holding the headlines straight out in front of him so she couldn’t see his face. But she knew it was him from the overall testy disposition circling around him like a swarm of hungry mosquitoes. “I think we could have a real problem here, Judge Malloy,” he screeched from behind the newspaper.

He could have started off with a friendly little hello, Lilly thought, or “Excuse me for barging in at this ungodly hour.” Or “I’ve brought you a cup of Starbucks to drink as we go over a serious problem.” That one would have been her choice. But no. He was straight to the point, snarling and snapping like a churlish Chihuahua. On the bright side, that did clear the fuzz right out of her brain.

“Just look at the headlines about—” his whole body shook in rumbling fury “—about what you’ve done.”

Lilly did look, not surprised about what she saw. Journalist Jailed For Illegal Parking. “So I made the headlines.” She yawned. She’d expected to. She was dealing with Mike Collier, after all. This was his norm. Not making headlines would have been the unexpected. “What’s the problem?” Other than the fact that she wasn’t ardently engaged in her every Saturday morning Starbucks fix.

“Read on,” the mayor snapped, shaking the paper.

Lilly snatched it out of his hand, pushed her hair out of her eyes and glanced at the first paragraph.

In a turn of events that shocked the entire city to its very core, Journal owner and investigative reporter, Mike Collier, was jailed Friday for failure to pay the fine for several parking tickets.

“Several?” she exclaimed. “Hello…try nineteen.”

“Just read,” Mayor Tannenbaum hissed.

“‘It’s a travesty of justice all the way around,’ Collier stated in an exclusive interview.”

Lilly shook her head. “The only travesty here is that it took nineteen tickets to get him into court. He should have been hauled in at five or six.”

“Keep reading.”

“According to Collier, ‘It’s a political move. I was robbed of my rightful parking space, then jailed because I had the courage to stand up for my convictions as well as my place to park.”’

“Poor baby,” Lilly laughed. “The courage to stand up for his convictions? I threw him in jail because he and his convictions were in contempt of court.” He’d refused to pay and he’d stepped over her yellow line.

“Keep going.”

In pair of green Grinch boxers and a gray T-shirt, covered up by a decade-old pink chenille bathrobe her mother had fashioned from an old bedspread, Lilly wasn’t in the attire, or the mood, for the mayor, or anything else this early. And she didn’t want to keep going. “Couldn’t this wait until later?” she asked. “Say, till I’m up and dressed? After I’ve had my coffee?” Caramel macchiato—drink of the gods.

“You threw him in jail for parking tickets,” he shrieked. “Parking tickets! And all hell’s going to break loose over this, mark my words!”

All hell? Not hardly. Just a ninny mayor going over the top. “Contempt, Mayor Tannenbaum, not tickets,” she corrected, keeping her eyes glued to the ground—not to the size thirteens that were way bigger than a man of his meager stature needed—but to the cement, because if she looked him in the face, her eyes automatically went to the oversize, way-off-color cap he sported on his front tooth…the cap he’d gotten from the local dentist who proudly boasted the slogan More Teeth, Less Money. And the mayor’s front one was a bright and shiny testimony to that! “Had he paid his fine he wouldn’t be in jail, but he refused. That’s contempt and I didn’t have a choice. And what I do in my courtroom isn’t any of your business, by the way.”

Tannenbaum yanked the newspaper out of her hand and waved it in her face again. “Just read it.”

“According to witnesses, Collier breached the yellow line separating Judge Lillianne Malloy from spectators in her courtroom, a move that cost Collier an additional two hundred dollars plus three nights in jail. This is the first time in the history of Whittier that anyone has been jailed for a failure to pay parking tickets.”

“Which is exactly what happened,” she said. “Actually, that’s pretty good reporting. Bet Mike Collier didn’t write it.”

The mayor merely sniffed at the comment, then took over the reading.

“When asked why he believes such a sentence was handed to him, Collier declined to comment other than to say he believes it’s a conspiracy. ‘First my parking place, then jail. What else could it be?”’

“Maybe just his disagreeable personality,” Lilly retorted. “That, and…oh, let’s see…nineteen unpaid tickets, tickets he has no intention of paying even after this publicity.”

Tannenbaum continued.

“Asked if Collier has any details on the conspiracy he claims to be the center of, he says the matter bears further investigation, which he vows to do. But he did warn, ‘Judge Malloy may have been within her legal right to sentence me to jail, but all I can say to the good citizens of Whittier is, better not cross over her line or you may end up here, too.”’

“Traffic court doesn’t make headlines, Miss Malloy,” Mayor Tannenbaum barked. “It’s there to make money and keep quiet. No controversies, no attention.”

“Make money and keep quiet,” she repeated. “Nothing about upholding the law? Funny, I always thought that part was incumbent upon a judge. Silly me.”

The mayor folded the paper and tucked it under his arm. “You’ve got to go down to the jail right now and spring him before he says something else, and I don’t care how you do it. Just get him out of there no matter what it takes.”

“Spring him?” Lilly finally let her fiery greens make contact with Lowell’s watery hazels, but not before they paused ever-so-briefly on the tooth. “I’m going to do you a favor here, Mayor, and shut the door and pretend we never had this conversation. Okay? Because if we did have it, and if you happened to tell me to release Mr. Collier in the course of that conversation, to get him out of there no matter what it takes, I might be forced to lock you up with him for trying to influence a judge, because as the town mayor, you don’t have the right to interfere with my court, which is what you’d be doing if you were here. Which you aren’t.”

Mayor Lowell Tannenbaum, a twitchy man, average height, mostly bald on top with a few mousy-brown strands arranged in a sparse comb-over, always concealed a sneer in his smile, if not in actuality, then in implication. And as soon as Lilly quit speaking, the smile, and the sneer, appeared. “I wasn’t trying to interfere with your court, Miss Malloy…just looking out for the best interests of Whittier, since Mike Collier can be pretty mean in print. And if you thought I was doing anything other than that, I’d suppose you were mistaken.”

“Maybe I am.” Not a chance! “But in any case he stays until Monday unless he pays up,” she said firmly. “And if you don’t want to provoke his wrath in print any further, I’d suggest giving him back his parking space and telling your cousin to find another way to advertise her flower shop.” That way Mike won’t be back in my court with another pile of tickets. “A few feet of pavement in exchange for the Journal’s goodwill. That seems like a fair trade-off to me, especially with the election coming up.” Before Lowell Tannenbaum could sputter out an answer or excuse, Lilly shut the door on him. He was way out of line, and apart from that, she never conducted judicial business in the remains of her childhood bedspread.

With the mayor gone now, and the house to herself once again, going back to bed for another couple hours was an option, but not one Lilly took seriously because in her normal day, when she was up she was up. No going back to bed, back to sleep. That wasn’t the way her body worked. So thank you very much, Lowell Tannenbaum, for robbing me of two more hours of sleep, two hours she needed and deserved. And she groused about it all the way through her morning rituals. Tame the hair, brush the teeth so she didn’t end up with a More Teeth, Less Money special, then head down to Star-bucks and grab that caramel macchiato, the only thing that would set the rest of her day straight.

Once there, the impulse to buy Mike a regular coffee, black—he wouldn’t try anything else—overcame her and she did it, regretting the impetuous deed before she was even out of the shop. Was she getting soft? Absolutely no way. Not about Mike, anyhow. Making nice with him was the last thing she wanted to do. So the plain black coffee went down the plain chrome drain in the ladies’ room, and minutes later, when Lilly entered city hall carrying her caramel ambrosia—something that good really couldn’t be called coffee—she was signed in by the guard, who was drinking his coffee in a white cup, poured from a plain red-and-silver thermos.

“What brings you in on a weekend, Your Honor?” he asked, taking Lilly’s purse and coffee as she walked through the metal detector. “Don’t recall you coming in here on Saturday too often, especially this early in the day.” He chuckled. “I read the paper this morning. I’m betting things are shook up around here pretty good and your being here has something to do with sending Mike Collier to jail.”

“Understatement,” she muttered. “Big time.”

“Well, good for you anyway, Your Honor, for doing what you had to do regardless of who you had to do it to. Folks may talk for a while—they always do around here when something different happens—but I admire a person who takes her job seriously.” He scanned the contents of her purse and paper cup, then handed them back to her, laughing. “Tossing someone in jail for parking tickets…glad I’m taking the bus these days.” Howard McCray shook his head in friendly disbelief. “Well, we do what we gotta do, don’t we?”

Lilly nodded, smiling. At least he wasn’t a critic.

“You go on and have a good day now,” Howard said, signaling her through.

Heading to the basement, to her office, Lilly told herself her only purpose for being there was to shuffle through the top layer of her ever-growing mountain of paperwork. At least that’s what she kept telling herself on her way down the escalator and through the usually dim hall, which was even dimmer—almost to the point of dark—on the weekend. Tannenbaum pinching a few pennies, she guessed. But as she passed by the connecting tunnel that veered off from her dank hole in the ground and ran under the street straight to the jail—the jail where she had no intention of looking in on Mike Collier—she veered off, too, following the enamel gray walls until they emerged into a dull green room with a decades-old black-and-white sign directing her up to the first floor…that is, if her intention was to visit the jail. Which it was not! She was merely…merely…Nope, nothing came to mind. No explanation, no excuse. So she simply wandered onto an elevator, sang along with Barry Manilow on the Muzak and eventually came to the jail entrance, then the cell block. Flashing her credentials to the guard on duty, one who wasn’t as friendly as Howard McCray, she found the wave of police blue parting for her as she entered, still with no intention of actually hunting down anyone in particular, and still with no particular reason for being there, either. Which was what she kept telling herself while she followed a cop named Roger, who, of all things, actually led her straight to Mike’s cell without even asking her where she wanted to go or who she wanted to see.

When she got there, pretty much the whole cell block was empty except for a couple of Friday night overindulgers up at the front. And Mike, of course, who was all the way in the back, isolated from everything and everyone…everyone except a delicate looking, well made-up, bleached-white-blond man with tight, black leather pants and a white silk shirt opened halfway down to his belly button revealing…well, nothing particularly interesting. He was endeavoring some painfully slow, click by click typing on a laptop computer and humming a tune from Cats. The bronze nameplate on his desk read Fritz.

She envied Fritz his fashion flair if not his actual outfit. “Excuse me,” Lilly said. “I’d like to speak to Mr. Collier…alone.”

“Do you have an appointment, sweetie?” he asked, barely looking up at her.

“An appointment?” Glancing sideways into the cell, Lilly noticed that Mike had his Starbucks, all right, plus a plate of steamy hot breakfast muffins—blueberry, she guessed. He always liked blueberry the best.

“Yep, sweetie. An appointment. Mike’s a pretty busy boy right now, and he’s not seeing anybody today unless they have an appointment.” His attention was sidetracked when Roger Jackson walked down the hall, his eyes taking in Roger’s every movement and flex until Roger was out of sight. Then his attention snapped back to Lilly. “So do you?” he asked.

“Mike…” Lilly grumbled.

“Should I have someone kick her out, Mikey?” Fritz asked.

“She’s okay,” Mike said, grinning at Lilly through the bars.

“Well, okeydokey, then.” With no further interest in Mike’s guest, Fritz, the pseudosecretary, went back to work, switching his repertoire to Phantom of the Opera.

“Why am I not surprised?” Lilly snapped, stepping up to the bars. “Why am I not surprised that even in jail you find a way to take advantage of the system?”

“I’m not taking advantage,” he protested. “Just trying to get by the best I can.”

“When I went to jail I sure wasn’t offered anything like this just to get by.” Lilly said.

Fritz gasped. “Oh my God! Did they make you wear orange with your red hair?”

Ignoring Fritz, Lilly continued, “Remember that jail cell, Mike—the one I shared with a prostitute, a shoplifter and an ax murderer? One toilet, one sink, two bunk beds and no blueberry muffins.”

Mike grinned, holding out a muffin through the bars. “She was a husband beater, not an ax murderer. And if I recall, you were there…what? Two hours?”

“Three. Three hours longer than I should have been. And get that muffin out of my face before I add the charge of bribing a judge.”

Pulling it back, Mike took a bite, then strolled casually over to his cot and sat. “So what brings you to my neck of the cell block, Lilly? Feeling guilty about something…like throwing an innocent man in jail?”

“Yeah,” Fritz said. “You bully!”

She glanced over at Fritz and gave him her best bully frown, which browbeat him back to his work. “Shouldn’t that be your department, Mike? Feeling guilty? Especially after what you did to me?”

“You too, sweetie?” Fritz chimed in again. “Want to know what he did to me? He dragged me out of the middle of the best date I’ve had since 1997, and just when we were…” He stopped in the nick of time, biting his quivering lower lip.

Trying to force a little bit of sweetness into her smile, Lilly gestured to Juanita Lane, who was stationed down the hall at a desk, her feet propped up on a plastic step. She was reading the morning paper, drinking a Starbucks, munching on a fresh blueberry muffin. “Could you get someone to remove this stuff from the hallway, please?” she asked, pointing first to the desk, then Fritz.

“And you would be who?” Juanita asked in a blasé tone, in between bites.

“I would be the judge who put Mr. Collier here, and I would be the judge who prefers to see my prisoners treated like prisoners, not houseguests.”

Juanita gave her a lackadaisical once-over. “Most of the judges who come in here are dressed like judges,” she said. “Guess I didn’t take you to be one, not in…” She didn’t finish the sentence. It was implied. Not in jeans, a T-shirt and all that untethered red hair. “Give me a couple of minutes, Your Honor. I’ll see what I can do.” Grumbling, Juanita picked up her coffee instead of the phone.

“You’re taking away my secretary, Lilly?” Mike said, shaking his head, sighing even though the sparkle in his eyes betrayed the tease. “You would rob me of my only tie to civilization? My only means of making a living?”

“Should I take a break, Mike?” Fritz asked, glaring at Lilly. “Come back later, when she’s gone?”

“You do that, sweetie,” Lilly said, spinning around to shut the lid of the laptop. “Take a break, but don’t come back. Mike’s office is closed for the weekend.”

“Is that okay, Mike? Can she do that?”

“She’s the law in these parts, Fritz. Guess she can do pretty much what she wants.”

“What I want?” Lilly sputtered, watching Mike fall back into a pile of pillows on his cot. One pillow was issued per jail cot, but he had at least ten. “Looks to me like you’re the one who’s getting to do pretty much what you want.”

“What I wanted was to spend today getting out the Sunday edition,” he commented, kicking off his shoes. “So far we have two stories—one about a trash fire over on Elm Street that spread to a pile of tires. Probably my lead, since the story about the scanner at Gilroy’s Market going wacky and charging Mrs. Patterson $790 for a can of cling peaches doesn’t have quite as much edge to it…unless you’re Mrs. Patterson.”

Waiting until Fritz had gathered his belongings—name-plate, picture of his poodle and a bud vase with a single rosebud—and trotted away, Lilly finally pulled Fritz’s office chair up to the bars and sat. “I’m not even going to ask what happened to you, Mike—why you ended up doing stories on cling peaches—because frankly, I don’t care. And I don’t care that you can’t park your car outside your office, or that your Sunday edition won’t get out. But what I do care about is the way you’re mocking not only me, but the whole judicial system here in Whittier. And that’s so like you… ‘Judge Malloy may have been within her legal right to sentence me to jail, but all I can say to the good citizens of Whittier is, better not cross over her line or you may end up here, too.”’