Dianne Drake - Lilly's Law

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!

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.