Lilly's Law. Dianne Drake

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