Gotham Noir Part 5

[icarus_chained]

Finally, five chapters in, the two protagonists actually meet properly.

Gotham Noir: The Man with the Lonely Eyes
Rating: PG-13 this chpt
Chpt Summary: Clark lies in wait for Bruce at GCPD, but exactly who is waylaying who?
Warnings: they ain't exactly in the clean part of Gotham here, but you don't see anything much (or at all)

Chapter 5: Confrontations

Gordon and I drove down to GCPD head office in silence, the cop worrying steadily at his cigar the whole way. Up close, the air of perpetual exhaustion that shrouded him was even more pronounced, and the frown lines that pulled his eyebrows down to blanket the top rims of his glasses made him look like one of those men you see staring dully into their whiskey at closing time on a Monday night, kicked so low they can't get up again. But you'd be a fool to underestimate him for it. His eyes beneath those worried brows were sharp and assessing, and his hands were firm and calm on the wheel. Walking a straight line in a crooked city had worn him down, but not worn him out. He'd be a man to trust, if you hit a truth that might not sit well with the politically-minded of Gotham. Something worth keeping in mind, for when I'd had my little chat with Wayne.

Police HQ was like police stations everywhere, crowded and noisy and slightly dirty, full of the stink of stale coffee and cigarettes and that faint undertone of violence that is difficult to pin down but still pervasive. Gordon moved through the throng in a determined amble, set firmly on his destination but unhurried, and cops moved around him the way tugboats moved around steamers in Metropolis harbour. I followed in his wake, watching them give me that quick copper's once-over and classifying me as potentially interesting, but somebody else's business. There were other newshawks scattered here or there among the cops and the crooks, picking up stories for the Gotham papers, but not the one I was looking for.

Didn't take me too long to find her, though. Up on the second floor, heading down towards Gordon's office, I caught the sound of her voice, with that tone of hers that's as sweet as rotting flowers and deadly as poison. A man's voice came out of the same office, brash and wheedling and deeply condescending. Ahead of me, Gordon winced. "Bullock," he muttered, and deliberately steered away from the doorway so the occupants wouldn't see him as he passed. I hurried after him, pausing to peek in at the bulky detective leaning heavily on his desk and leering at a seated Lois, who was giving him a pleasant smile that was mostly teeth. I winced, and hoped he wasn't too attached to the idea of having kids in the future.

Gordon was waiting for me in the hallway beyond their door. He raised an eyebrow at me. "Not going in? Thought you were looking for the lady." I could swear he was smiling behind that mustache.

I shook my head adamantly. "Do I look that much of a sap? She's gearing up for murder in there!" I winced even as I said it. Under the circumstances, it wasn't exactly in good taste. But Gordon grinned sharply.

"Figured as much. I was waiting for Bullock to try it. Eventually, he goes for every skirt that comes by looking like they work for a living."

"And you didn't think to warn her?" I asked. He looked at me.

"Didn't want to spoil her fun," he answered wryly, then sobered. "Besides, I can't keep putting him down for it. He won't learn. Sooner or later some woman's going to have to teach him manners, and make the lesson stick. Montoya'd do it quick as a flash, but he can pull rank on her. I figured that little number in there could knock him down a couple of sizes and not break a sweat, and it'd keep her out of our hair for a while. Two birds, one stone." He shrugged, and turned to walk away again, tossing a look back over his shoulder. "Grab a chair out of some office, and watch the show. And don't wander off!"

I wasn't sure how happy I was about being treated like some stray dog that'd wandered in, but he had a point. Anything that could be got here, Lois would've taken care of already, so I'd nothing to do until Wayne arrived. And watching Lois put serious dents in some poor schmuck's ego was always entertaining. Provided you weren't the schmuck in question, of course. So I borrowed one of the hard wooden chairs from the dingy office across the hall from Bullock's, and settled in.

It took Wayne an easy twenty minutes to show, as befit his station as a man who could afford to make authority wait, and in that time Lois had reduced the beefy cop to incoherant splutters of outrage, and had begun the process of explaining certain facts to him in a cool, pleasant voice that had made more than her share of brave men want to scurry backwards from her presence. It was going to take a while longer, though, for this one to learn. He had that kind of self-righteous assurance that you'd have a hard time denting with a mortar shell, and even for Lois it was heavy going.

Their voices faded into so much background noise, though, as soon as Wayne turned the corner from the stairs. That night at the gala, he'd made an instant impression, cutting through the glittering throng like a hawk through so many parrots. Here, in grimer and dirtier surroundings, he made an even bigger one.

Dressed in sober black, accented by the quiet gleam of a red silk waistcoat and the crisp white of his shirt collar, he was a figure of power and wealth, the symbol of a completely different world. Against the brown and grey grime of the corridor, the stark richness of him stood out in a note of jarring dissonance, and the cool arrogance of his features showed how much he knew it. His face was folded into lines of composed grieving, showing pain clearly in a way that no man here could risk, but I could see something beneath that. Beneath the grief he flaunted so cavalierly, there was a hard gleam to his eyes.

He strode down the hall as if hurrying to get this task over with, but he checked his step for an instant as he passed where I sat, eyes cutting curiously towards me, and I nodded knowingly at him. And for the barest second, something flickered in his gaze, some hidden thing pressing against the underside of his vapid composure, and I knew I had been right. Wayne knew something. And he knew I knew it.

As he stepped into Gordon's office, I sat back with a certain degree of grim satisfaction, and when they came out again, Gordon leading him down to the evidence lock-up to view the jewel, I set my chair back where it belonged, and strolled outside.

A great gleaming beast of a limousine, a Pierce Arrow this time, sat in calm arrogance in front of the steps, where it garnered more than a few admiring whistles and contemptuous cackles from cop and criminal alike, but no-one had tried to go near it. I assumed that this was due to the polite and rather intimidating stare of the driver. Not wanting to run afoul of it myself, with the memory of the last time clear in my mind, I opted to settle against one of the pillars of the grand old facade of the building. And waited.

Wayne emerged half an hour later, with something tired about the set of his shoulders and grief in his face that might have been real, and paused deliberately to look for me. I straightened from my pillar, stepping out into clear view. He turned his head as he caught the movement, steel firming in his stance again, and all emotions fleeing behind a calm, unconcerned mask. He walked up to me, cool as you please, and offered his hand. I took it. It never hurts to get the measure of a man's hand. His was firm and dry, and oddly familiar.

"I think we need to have a talk, Mr Wayne," I said softly, and he nodded, something like sadness flitting briefly over his features.

"Please," he murmured, his voice a rich and wounded baritone, and gestured towards the car. I shook my head.

"No offense, Mr Wayne, but I don't think so. A car like that, it looks big enough to swallow me. I might never be seen again." There was enough of a genial note in my tone to fool an eavesdropper, but not him. "I thought we might take a walk. After all, you seemed so at ease when you took your little stroll yesterday evening." He shot me a quick, assessing look, and for a second I could have sworn there was a glimmer of pride in it. Then it disappeared as if it had never been, and his face hardened, his stance shifting to something vaguely defensive.

"And why, Mr Kent, would I want to take a walk with you?" His voice was soft, but as hard as the diamond that gleamed in his tie-pin. I shrugged.

"Because this is hardly the place to cause a scene, Mr Wayne. Not after last night." I let my own voice cool a bit, the black stain behind a coffee table in the front of my mind. He met my gaze for a long, tense moment, blue eyes cold and vibrantly alone as they met mine, and then he nodded, sharply, and turned to wave the car away. The white-haired old driver frowned heavily and gestured his disapproval, but Wayne shook his head, and turned to fall into step beside me. I met the old man's eyes as we started to walk away, and shivered for the sudden gleam of chill fury I found there. I looked away hurriedly.

We walked for a couple of blocks in silence, me and Wayne, his pace a measured, dangerous beat beside mine, until he slid a sideways glance my way, and smiled softly. I blinked at him. "Something wrong?" His smile widened, showing a gleam of perfect teeth.

"Did you have a specific destination in mind, or are we just going to walk around until you figure it out?"

I flushed. But he had a point. I'd been in Gotham a grand total of two days, and never to this part of it. I hadn't the slightest clue where we were going. But I didn't have to know street names to know what kind of place I needed. Somewhere private. Murder was not exactly a topic for a public conversation. Somewhere where people would mind their own business, and turn a blind eye to a rich boy slumming with a newshawk, so it wouldn't get back to Gordon straight away. I didn't want him to know just yet, and the man struck me as fairly sharp.

I knew what I needed. But getting to it was something else. Wayne, watching me, took my hesitation to mean he'd been right, and shook his head with an air of condescending amusement that had me gritting my teeth. "I must say," he murmured softly, "this is by far the most badly organised kidnapping attempt I've ever suffered." That startled me a bit.

"I'm not kidnapping you!" I said, too loudly, and ducked my head against the stares that swung our way. Not that we weren't attracting them anyway, the millionaire and me arguing on the sidewalk, but that certainly clinched it. Wayne gave them an airy wave over my shoulder, and smiled tolerantly at me until our audience began to move on again. Then his face hardened.

"No?" he asked quietly. "But you are attempting to blackmail me into ... what, exactly?"

"I just want to talk," I answered stiffly. "Somewhere quiet and out of the way. About last night. About Selina. About you, and how you happen to know her." About whether or not you murdered her. But I wasn't about to say that out loud.

He stared at me for a long moment, a strange half-smile lurking in one corner of his mouth, and then he turned sharply on his heel and strode out onto the edge of the road, one arm raised in an imperious hail. I leapt after him, seizing his arm and pulling him back around to face me. The muscles of that arm bunched smoothly beneath my hand, a warning shift, but he didn't pull away.

"What the hell are you doing?" I growled. Wayne smiled.

"Fearless, aren't you?" he murmured. "I'm hailing a cab, what does it look like? You don't honestly think I would discuss this here, do you? And since you refused my offer of a ride ..."

I released his arm. "Well, taking you up on it would hardly have been the smartest of moves for someone in my position, would it?" I probably sounded more annoyed than I would have liked, but the man was infuriating in so many ways. It would have been hard to remember why I wanted to talk to him at all, in fact, but a friend's body ain't something you forget in a hurry.

It wasn't long until a taxi appeared as if by magic by the kerb. Of course it did. For him. The cabbie stared at us as we got in the back, with me holding door for Wayne. Not because I felt any feudal obligation, of course, but so he wouldn't do a runner on me. Not that he acted as if the thought had ever even crossed his mind.

"Where to, sirs?"

I didn't recognise the name of the street Wayne gave him, but from his stunned reaction, I gathered it wasn't somewhere he would expect a man of the millionaire's standing to frequent. Wayne gave him a sunny smile. "We've decided to slum it for a few hours," he declared, with a vapid exuberance that grated. "This here's my bodyguard!" I tried to act like this wasn't news to me. I don't know that I succeeded, from the doubtful look the man gave me.

"He don't look like much, if you're heading down that neck of the woods, if you don't mind my saying, sir."

Wayne only grinned. "He's got hidden talents. Now if you don't mind ...?" And he flashed a twenty from some concealed pocket of his excellent suit, and our new friend accepted it with a shrug as if to say it was our funeral and none of his business. He'd done his best.

We pulled up after a silent ride in a part of town I didn't recognise, but it looked like an area of Old Gotham that for some reason I'd been lucky enough to miss the first time around, the drunken lean of rundown buildings casting a permanent shadow over life beneath them. I wondered exactly how much of an obsession Wayne had with this end of town, in between keeping an eye out for friends he might have in the area, and the inevitable slew of petty criminals his clothes and jewellry was bound to attract.

"Is anyone actually that vapid?" I muttered to him as the cab pulled away with eager haste. It wasn't exactly on topic, but after that little performance I simply had to know. He looked at me, and raised one hand to his temple as if something pained him.

"Sit through four Gotham society dinners a month, for six years, and then talk to me about vapid," he muttered back, and there was venom in it. "I've crafted every single nuance of my public persona strictly from the real examples flaunted at me during one event after another. You have no idea what vapid means." And he walked away towards a seedy looking building without a further word, leaving me to stare, then follow warily in his wake.

I realised what the place was as soon as I walked through the door, from the dingy lobby and battered registration desk. Not quite a motel, because that word implies a degree of class this place simply didn't have, but the theory was similar. One of those places where you could rent a closet masquerading as a room, for an hour or a night. Not longer. The kind of people who came here wouldn't be interested in staying in any one place for too long. And certainly not here. From the looks of the mouldering carpet clinging precariously to the bottom of the stairs, off to the right, cleaning wasn't a word the establishment put a lot of stock in.

Wayne, standing at ease beside the desk with a grubby key in his hand, looked about as right here as a fish would who'd accidentally landed in the desert. But the hard-faced woman behind the counter didn't give him a second glance, as if millionaires dropped by every other day.

He tipped a shoulder towards the stairs, and I sent him a wary look in response, not moving. I was beginning to feel like he was kidnapping me, and I didn't like it. It was hardly likely that he could have an ambush set up for me, not twenty minutes after we met for crying out loud, but I wasn't going a step further without knowing what the hell was going on. I planted my feet and glared at him.

He glared back, a silent battle of wills, but a glance to the side showed that the beginnings of a vague interest in her surroundings was starting to appear in the woman's dull eyes. Wayne sighed in exasperation, and strode over to stand at my shoulder.

"You wanted quiet, out of the way?" he said softly at my ear, staring out beyond me into the street behind the filthy glass of the door. "Does this not suit your tastes?" And there was a definite hint of mockery underneath that.

I snarled silently at him. "I said out of the way. Not isolated enough that nobody'd hear a scream, even if they'd the inclination to pay attention. And why the hell aren't you attracting more attention?"

He smirked. "And who, exactly, do you think is going to be screaming? I assure you, Mr Kent, that I am not so fainthearted as that." I stiffened, and shot a furious glance sideways at his composed profile, before what he'd said hit me. I cast a frantic thought back over our encounter so far, but I knew I'd been right the first time.

I'd never given Wayne my name. Not once.

And while there was any amount of ways he could have learned it since the gala two nights ago, until now I hadn't thought he'd any reason to look. There was no reason up to now that he would have to be interested in me. Unless there was far more going on here than I realised. And it was far more personal that I had dared to expect.

Quite suddenly, I was afraid.

He stood back, and smiled tiredly, holding out one hand to lead me up the stairs. Numbly, I took it, and for a second an incredible sadness flickered behind his chill blue gaze. He pulled me closer to him, turning to lay his other hand in the small of my back and pulling the hand he held across my stomach as he did so. And as he started to guide me up the stairs in that odd manner, he leaned in to whisper in my ear.

"And I am not attracting attention, Clark, because she thinks I'm nothing more than another of the social elite, come down to the slums to indulge my degenerate tastes." His voice was quiet and bitter, and he walked slightly behind me as if to shield me from view from below. "She thinks I'm here to enjoy your company. In a very ... intimate fashion."

That woke me up. Rather quickly, in fact, but his hand locked around mine before I could jerk away, the steady push in the small of my back as inexorable as the Gotham night. "Not here," he hissed in my ear. "Or we really will attract attention. And not the kind you would appreciate, believe me." I could feel the raw heat in my eyes as my glare threatened to bore into his skull, but he ignored it as casually as a man might ignore a fly buzzing beside him. The only thing keeping me from showing him how much stronger than him I could be was the bitter humour that he so obviously directed towards himself.

I remained mutinously silent until we reached the door that matched the number just visible under the greasy mass of grubby fingerprints on the key. Wayne unlocked the door, bowing me through with that bitter smile, and relocked the door with a dull click behind us.

He turned to face me, blue eyes wary and sad in features set determinedly, and I crossed my arms over my chest to glare at him in the dimness. There was no light in the room, the bulb long since blown out and never replaced, and the only illumination was the halflight of the distant sun through windows caked with grime, and the harsher, slightly brighter flashing of the red sign of the brothel across the street. Cast in that ugly glow, he looked like a Prince of Hell in his rich attire, come to walk among his subjects.

For a long time, he simply watched me, measuring me against some unknown blueprint in his mind, and I bristled under that stare, grinding my teeth against the blatant intimidation of it. Then he smiled sadly again, and walked slowly over to place the key to the room carefully on the nightstand, before retreating back towards the door. I unfolded my arms at the motion, balancing warily on the balls of my feet. Wayne set his feet and spread his arms wide.

"I carry no weapons," he said softly. "But you may check if you like."

I started forward harshly, with more in my mind than a simple search for weapons, but two feet from him I checked the motion and froze. After the implication on the stairs, I suddenly couldn't bear to touch him. Seeing that, he lowered his arms slowly.

"Is your disgust so strong that you're willing to take that risk?" he asked, gently, and I shook my head.

"I don't care about any risk! Let's just ... Let's just get this over with. Get it the hell over with." And there was resignation in my voice, tired disgust, but no anger. Not really. I stepped back again, feeling suddenly old, and in a burst of sudden humour raised my arms at my sides in imitation of him. "But you can check me, if you need to."

He stared at me, a flare of genuine, startled humour in his gaze, and the stark loneliness of his aristocratic features touched something old and forgotten in me. I let go of my disgust. He shook his head in wry appreciation, and smiled up at me.

"Fearless," he murmured softly, and stepped forward to touch me lightly on the shoulder, motioning for me to lower my arms again. "How could I refuse to match that?" His fingertip was warm against my collar, and I shivered slightly. Then he stepped away again, walking beyond me into the center of the room where I'd stood moments before. He stared blankly at the far wall, arms folded, back stiff and turned towards me. He stood still for a minute, while I watched him, then tipped his head back and closed his eyes in sudden exhaustion.

I took a step towards him, suddenly forgetting my wary dislike in concern, and he dropped his head back forward and span to face me. I stopped. His face was once again set in its determined mask, and his eyes were flat and cool as he raised a hand to forestall me.

"I believe," he said quietly, with a certain weariness to it, "that you wanted to ask me about Selina. I suspect you intended to ask me ... Well. I believe you meant to ask me if I had murdered her. Mr Kent?" He smiled at me bitterly.

And I had nothing to say. Because it was true. That was exactly what I had meant to ask him. And even if I wasn't so sure I wanted to any more, for Selina's sake, I still had to ask it.

I squared my shoulders, and looked him in the eye. It was only right to face him properly.

"Mr Wayne. Did you kill Selina Kyle?"

Chapter 6: Fatal Attraction