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“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.”’
“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.”
