Читать книгу Lilly's Law - Dianne Drake - Страница 11

No Friday afternoon get-out-of-jail-free cards allowed

MIKE DUMPED HIS wristwatch and car keys into the plastic box bearing his official prisoner number, then absently searched his empty pockets for change. “I don’t suppose you’ll let me keep my cell phone, will you?” he asked, pulling it off his belt, which he was also forced to surrender.

Juanita Lane, a humorless, sixty-something jail matron who had to look up to see a full five feet tall, didn’t even glance over from the property list she was dutifully recording when she boomed, “No cell phone, no personal property. Hand over your shoelaces, please.” Dripping wet she might have weighed ninety pounds, and with spiked, champagne-colored hair and big purple-rimmed glasses clashing with her khaki-colored uniform blouse, she wasn’t the typical image of cop that came to Mike’s mind. But when she glared at him through those glasses, patted the pistol on her hip and barked, “Do it now, please!” he knew that the weapon was there for more than show. So he promptly gave up the phone and bent to unlace his rip-off Nikes. When he’d complied with every item on Juanita’s official confiscation list, he automatically put his hands behind his back to be recuffed for the fifty-foot walk into the next room, where he would be uncuffed again, stripped, disinfected, showered and garbed in the very trendy, bright orange jail jumpsuit.

“So when do I get a phone call?” he asked, as Juanita handed him off to Cal Gekas, a Humpty-Dumpty-ish burly man with abundant hair growing in thick patches everywhere except on his head.

“You’re the one who’s here from traffic court, aren’t you?” Cal asked, handing Mike a plastic bag for his clothing. “That’s a new one. Parking tickets.” He chuckled. “And I thought I’d about seen it all. Just goes to show ya, doesn’t it?”

Mike was waiting to hear what it was that went to show him, but when Cal didn’t continue, he simply nodded. “Cal, old buddy. Think you could you do me a favor here and turn around while I undress?”

Cal shook his head. “Gotta watch. Department policy.”

“Then I’m hoping you’re a married man, Cal.”

“Twenty years, three kids.” He grinned. “And if you’re uncomfortable, you can turn around so you don’t have to watch me watching you.”

“Good idea.” Mike shook his head, spun around and dropped his khakis. “Can I keep the shorts?”

“After the shower.”

“This isn’t negotiable? I mean, it’s a damn parking ticket, Cal. I didn’t rob a convenience store or mug a little old lady for her social security check.”

Cal shrugged. “Hey, I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt on the cavity search, but that’s all I can do for you.” He paused, then chuckled again. “Damn. A parking ticket. Not even speeding. I heard that new judge was a tough one, but don’t this just beat all.”

Mike nodded. “It sure does.” And he stepped out of his briefs and into the footbath of disinfectant, then on into the shower. “You don’t happen to have any soap-on-a-rope handy, do you?”

Ten minutes later, showered and dressed, Mike was escorted through fingerprinting, then lined up in front of a camera to have that very stylish rendition of him captured for posterity—orange clothes, washed-out face, glazed eyes, black numbers on a strip of cardboard held up to midchest for proud display. “Think I could get a copy of that for my Christmas cards?” he asked, following Cal through a long gray hall filled, predominantly, with empty cells. At the end they met up with the jailer du jour, Roger Jackson, who, as it turned out, also worked as a crime-beat stringer on Mike’s very own Journal. He’d taken pity on Mike and assigned him to a cell for one, far, far away from the madding jail population, which today was poor old Bert Ford, who’d had one too many drinks the night before and selected Mrs. Clooney’s prize-winning rose garden as the place to relieve his bladder on his stagger home from the pub, and made the mistake of losing his balance in the process, pants down. Which was where Mrs. Clooney had found him this morning. The rest was a matter of public record, including a few thorny scratches in all the wrong places. And poor Bert was still sleeping it off, Mike noted as he walked by him. Sleeping, and probably oblivious to the fact that his brief encounter with the great red American Beauty would be his last dalliance with public intoxication, or Mrs. Clooney’s roses, for quite a while.

And so at two in the afternoon, on a hot, humid August Friday, Mike rolled the thin mattress issued to him onto the creaky metal coils of his cot, tossed his single pillow on top and plopped down in his cell for the weekend. “I still didn’t get to make my call,” he shouted to Roger, who was busy writing up the story of Mike’s arrest for the morning edition.

“Okay, as soon as I finish this. I’m on deadline.” His hearty laugh clanged through the empty jail. Roger was a friendly cop, always ready with a smile. With a great marriage, great family, Roger had stability, something Mike had never found a place for in his life, but something he was beginning to envy. And he could almost see himself having that with Lilly.…Well, almost, since Lilly would have a say in that and he knew exactly what her “say” would be—I’d rather be staked to an anthill.

“Got a tough boss,” Roger continued. “But fair. So fair, in fact, that after he reads this headliner he won’t demote me to obituaries. Might even give me a raise.” Half an hour later, after Roger hit the Send button and his first-ever front-page piece was winging its way through cyberspace to the newspaper office two blocks away, he finally took Mike down the hall to the public phone. “Use your call wisely. We’re pretty strict on jail regulations around here and you might not get another one.” He laughed, heading into the break room, leaving Mike uncuffed and unattended. “And don’t escape,” he called back. “Care for some coffee?”

The number Mike meant to call was burned into his brain, even though he’d never used it before. As he waited for the first ring, he wondered why he was even bothering. She’d hang up when she heard his voice. Or tack another couple of days on to his sentence for some kind of trumped-up harassment. But he owed her this one. Make the call, then be done with it, and her.

Yeah, like he could ever be done with Lilly Malloy.

“Hello,” a voice said from the other end.

“Lilly?” Mike asked.

“You’ve reached the voice mail of Judge Lillianne Malloy. Please leave your name, phone number and a brief message, and I’ll return the call as soon as I can. Have a nice day.” Beep.

“Have a nice day like hell.…Look, Lilly. I need to see you. I can’t go into it on the phone…you know where I am, where I’ll be until Monday morning. And it’s important. Hell, this was a stupid idea. I should have called my attorney instead of you. Lilly, I know that the situation between us isn’t the best, but—”

Beep.

“Hell.”

“Arms behind your back, Mike,” Roger said, setting the coffee on the desk, then taking his handcuffs off his belt. “Sorry, but it’s the rules. You like it black, no sugar, right?”

“You’re not going to make me strip again, are you?” Mike growled, turning around and gritting his teeth when the cuffs went on. They didn’t hurt, but he sure didn’t like the thought of what they signified. Tried, convicted, sentenced. Prisoner. As a journalist, going to jail on principle such as not revealing a source or being in the wrong place at the wrong time to get the right story, now, that was honorable. It made a statement about ethics and principles and high moral integrity. But being nabbed for parking in the wrong place? The only statement coming from that was dud, flop, washout, bomb, a big bust. “No sugar, but some whiskey would be good. In fact, skip the coffee. Just bring on the whiskey.”

“Sure wish I could Mike, but…”

“I know. You’ve got rules.” When he’d learned he was going to Lilly’s court, he’d hoped that after all this time she was over the bad history between them. Bad, bad history! Forgive and forget, or just forget. Yeah, and wasn’t that just being pointless and optimistic after what he’d done to her? Thank God parking tickets weren’t a hanging offense.

First time with Lilly he’d been canned over the mix-up, and sure, he’d deserved it. One slight error in judgment and his job was out the door along with his postgrad degree. But she did have that damned bought-and-paid-for paper sitting right out on her desk for anybody to see who cared to look.

Second time…well, he shook his head over that one. What were the odds she’d turn up on the receiving end of another of his investigations? She’d been innocent that time, too. In fact, he’d never even connected her to that story—probably because she wasn’t connected, not directly, anyway. But her law firm epitomized that notoriously fictitious Dewey, Cheatham and Howe. They’d done some book cooking, trust-fund skimming, creative billing, so on and so on. And even though Lilly was only a contract employee, not a real member of the firm—meaning she’d never gotten near the trusts, never did any billing, hardly ever got out of the research library—she’d been swept into the sting along with everybody else. Swept, cuffed and locked up tight.

And he’d never forget the look on her face that day when they shoved her, handcuffed and horrified, through the lobby, in front of friends and co-workers. On her way out of the building she still hadn’t known who was responsible for the bust, but as the police hustled her past him and their eyes met briefly, she’d realized who’d done that to her. That look of betrayal in her eyes had punched him in the gut, and the heart, because he knew she’d trusted him—she’d put everything else behind her and trusted him.

If ever there was a defining moment in a life, that was his.

Lilly had been released hours later, thanks to one of the partners, who’d mustered enough integrity to unimplicate her. Afterward, Mike had sent her flowers, written a dozen contrite e-apologies and printed the damned retraction she’d demanded in place of suing him. Granted, it ran on page seven, when the picture of her being arrested was a first-page classic. But apparently that make-good hadn’t done the trick. Problem was, he wasn’t sure even sending him up the river now, if only for a weekend, would be enough to satisfy her yet. Lilly was clearly holding on to some surplus rage after all this time. And she deserved to. But he’d sure been hoping it wouldn’t trickle into this little matter. “So should I drop my drawers again, Mike?” he asked, his voice on the verge of acceptance, since there was no other choice but to accept his fate for the next three days. If there was one thing he knew for sure about Lilly, she wouldn’t give in. Once she’d made up her mind, nothing changed it.

Smiling, Roger shook his head. “Nope, not another strip search, unless you insist. But if you want, I’ll call Jimmy and let him know where you are. Maybe he can figure out what to do—how to get you out of here or something.” Roger chuckled as he led Mike down the gray hall to his home-away-from-home for the next few days. “Or at least he can bring you a pizza for supper. He’s good for that much, I’ll bet.” Jimmy Farrell, the Journal’s lawyer on retainer, had finally passed his bar exam six months earlier, after four tries. And he was really cheap to hire, which was the cardinal circumstance surrounding Jimmy’s status at the newspaper. No one in Whittier particularly embraced Jimmy for their legal affairs, since he’d grown up there and had a reputation for off-centered intelligence and out-on-a-limb common sense. But he’d muddled through law school somehow, surprised everyone when he finally passed the bar exam, and optimistically hung out his shingle to practice. So far, his clients were only court-appointed, those who couldn’t afford their own attorney, and he represented them adequately. No one complained too much, because no one had great expectations of Jimmy.

The day he’d approached Mike to represent the Journal, the offer had been so ridiculous Mike didn’t have the heart to turn him down. “Fifty dollars a month, Mike, will keep me on retainer for the paper.” Mike knew it would also pay the electric bill in Jimmy’s office slash apartment. “Most reputable papers keep a lawyer on retainer, and this is your chance.”

More out of charity than anything else, Mike had agreed, and from that day on, three months now, the Journal had been duly, if not well, represented. And today’s pizza delivery would mark Jimmy’s first official appearance on the paper’s behalf. “Lilly’s not letting me out of here, Roger. No way in hell. So tell Jimmy I like pepperoni and sausage. Hold the onions.”

“Lilly?” Roger interrupted. “You mean Judge Malloy? That Lilly?”

Mike cringed. Her Honor Judge Lillianne Malloy wasn’t the image of the Lilly Malloy that was in his mind when he’d discovered she’d been hired for traffic court in Whittier. That Lilly was still the one he’d…well, suffice it to say there had been some nice dreams of her from time to time. Gorgeous, responsive, just a little unsure. Always eager. But when he’d sneaked into the back of the courtroom a couple of times to watch her work, the Lilly he observed was so much more than he ever expected from her. Still gorgeous beyond reason, tall, round in all the right places, soft—even though her sexier-than-hell hair was pulled severely back and half of her face was covered by ridiculously large glasses—she now possessed confidence—self-assurance like he’d never before seen in her. And it showed in her movements, in her voice, and especially in that tangy smile she’d used on him earlier—the one meant to castigate him, but which had the opposite effect. All in all, Lilly wore her judicial robe well, and in spite of everything, he was happy for her. But she should have done so much better than that moldering little traffic court in a dark basement corner, and Mike knew he owned a big part of the responsibility for that lesser destiny—lesser than she deserved. “Yeah, Judge Lillianne Malloy. We go back a ways and she’s not going to go easy on me for old times’ sake. Not in this lifetime, anyway.”

“Bad history, I’m guessing?”

Mike winced. “Defining it as bad is pretty damn optimistic. The list of how I’ve done that lady wrong…well, it fills up both sides of the page in small print, that’s how bad it is.”

Roger let out a low whistle while closing the cell door behind Mike. “Well, with your current run of parking tickets, I’d say you’re in for some real big trouble, my friend. And that judge—your friend Lilly—she has a tough reputation, if you know what I mean. She’s strictly by the book and nobody gets the soft end of her gavel. I understand she’s sentencing them right and left in her court.” He slipped a copy of his Mike Gets Busted story through the bars to his boss, then stepped back. “I really hate leaving you here like this, but, well…” He shrugged. “Anything I can get you before I go home?”

Mike shook his head, dropped down on his cot and resigned himself to the lumps and bumps. The only good thing that could be said for the long weekend ahead was that he’d be able to catch up on some much-needed sleep. Tight money at the Journal these days meant he had a staff too small to run the paper, which meant he wore lots of hats, which meant he worked lots of hours. And all that meant he never got away from his job, not even here, in jail. So maybe this imposed furlough was a good thing. Sleep, perchance to…to what? Dream of Lilly? Not a chance in hell.

Not a chance in hell on the sleep, either, he discovered almost immediately. Sure, he shut his eyes and tried to clear his head, but his to-do list replaced the mental void he’d hoped to achieve, with all the to-dos that wouldn’t be getting done for the next two days trying to pound their way to the forefront of his mind lest he might forget about them. Which he never did. Edit the piece about the new thrill ride inspection regulations at the county fair; cover the high school preseason football game and get a statement from the coach; interview Mayor Lowell Tannenbaum for whatever Mayor Tannentwit wanted to be interviewed about this week. Certainly not the type-A assignments Mike had gone after in Indianapolis, not even close. But he’d been a different kind of journalist back then. And not the kind he’d set out to be at the beginning. That realization had hit him the day he’d watched the cops handcuff Lilly and cart her off to jail.

Two weeks after that awful day he’d given up journalism as he’d come to know and practice it, and had bought his struggling hometown newspaper. And after that, life was good…poorer than dirt, but good. Sure, he missed some of the big-city excitement. Missed a lot of it, actually. There was no substitute for the adrenaline buzz that came when he broke a huge story or saw his byline tacked on to a red-letter article. But that was then, and now he owned a small daily paper where the biggest story this week would be about its owner sitting in jail over a few stupid unpaid parking tickets.

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!