LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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