Batman and Catwoman in Cat-Tales by Chris DeeCat-Tales 40: Perennials

Perennials by Chris Dee

The Ladies Who Lunch


You know, every now and then, in their hopelessly deluded way, the Gotham Post nails one.

Look at Poison Ivy. Some of those lunatic Post writers have the idea that she is literally poisonous: that she can’t control it and any close contact, like a kiss, would release toxins into the other person’s system and kill them.

Well, it doesn’t work that way. Like her pheromones, her immunity to poisons, and her resistance to alcohol, Ivy can control her weird biochemistry most of the time—except when she gets very emotional, which is a story for another day. When she does get vicious, emitting toxins into some poor schnook that gets too close, the damage is usually a rash and an earache. It’s not fatal.

I can’t imagine how the Post got this idea about poison kisses—maybe somebody had a bad divorce—but if you dismiss the nonsense and look at the metaphor, it’s really not far off: Whenever something occurs that might make you feel sorry for her—it does happen, unlikely though it may seem—Pammy will do something to set you straight.

She asked me to lunch. Lunch with Leaf-Bitch—not my preferred way to spend a Friday afternoon, but I agreed. I told myself I went because it would head off another night at the Bristol. We had only gone so Bruce could pump Richard Flay for information on a likely Poison Ivy target. If I could get the same information direct from the horsetail’s mouth, we wouldn’t have to go back.

But as I drove into town, I couldn’t help wondering if that was the real reason.

I wondered as I parked the Jag in the garage under my old apartment, I wondered as I waved to Nick, my old doorman, and I wondered as I winked at Raoul’s coffee cart and crossed the street into the park.

I guess what I really wanted was some taste of my old life. If Ivy hadn’t rung up, it would have been the catsuit and the Iceberg, and then a more predatory prowl than I had been indulging in. No more flitting around the Christmas tree and breaking into the Wayne penthouse. I figured, even after this lunch, I would still stop in the museum after hours, maybe Spinoza’s, too, or Cartier, and Sotheby’s. Meow. But all that would have to wait for nightfall and the lunch invitation was right now.

What could it hurt; it was just lunch after all. And Pammy might be just the right touch of rogue life to remind me how much I don’t miss of those days.

There are a couple lakes inside Robinson Park, there’s the big one where you can go rowing and a cute little one where you can sail model boats. They rent them; it’s very popular on Sunday mornings in the springtime. This time of year, it’s too cold, only the hardcore hobbyists that build their own boats turn out. The rental booth is closed up and so is the restaurant next to it.

Pammy doesn’t care about little things like “Closed ‘til April 1” and no human staff. She had invited me to the Sailing Pond Restaurant, so I knocked despite that sign on the door. I knew going in it would be one of those Disney-gone-wrong scenes with the plantlife waiting on us like it was Upstairs Downstairs meets The Jungle Book—and I wondered again why I was going along with it.

The night at the Bristol wasn’t that bad, not compared to catastrophes past anyway. Maybe it was… just bad enough, somehow.

A big mass of flowery vines opened the door, just like a maitre’d, and led the way to a table.  I sat and waited, and after a minute, some kind of helleborous rosebush brought me a martini.

I thanked it.

It’s one of those moments that makes you stop and take stock.

I had just thanked a plant for bringing me a cocktail. That’s not something you can forget, much as you might want to. I had given Bruce some nasty looks for dipping into the Fop-act at the country club. He knows I hate it. He told me the Fop was dead and he was just going to be Bruce Wayne from now on, but there are these weird little throwbacks. He says it’s habit. He says he’s used to acting a certain way, particularly when Batman is fact-finding like we were last night. He says he does it without even thinking.

Pfffffffft.

I have a hard time believing Batman does anything “without thinking”—but then I just said “thank you” to a plant. That’s going to make it a bit harder to doubt the Bat-Fop.

I sipped my drink as I waited for Ivy to make her entrance.

When she did—well—remember when I said there are times you could feel sorry for her if she didn’t go all leaf bitch?

The last time I had seen Ivy socially, she’d come slouching into the morning room at Wayne Manor like she was applying for a loan. She came in now like some bad actress playing a socialite.

“Catty, darling!” was her entrance line. She stood there a moment, sort of posing in the doorway, arms outstretched.  I don’t know what I was supposed to think of it, but the image that came to mind was that the bad actress playing a socialite was in a musical and she was about to burst into song, the plant-waiters forming a kickline around her and god only knew what the martini-serving rosebush might do.

I banished the ridiculous image of The Upstairs Downstairs Jungle Book morphing into Hello Dolly meets Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom—it’s a mental discipline you develop after a few nights at the Iceberg. I smiled and said hi. Pammy came up to the table, subjected me to a stage kiss, and sat. The prospect of another night at the Bristol Country Club suddenly didn’t seem so bad.

“So,” she began with a strangely coy smile, “how is Bruce?”

“Fine,” I answered flatly.  It never once crossed my mind that there could be a catfight situation in the making and, if so, we were meeting next to a large, cold body of water. After that Kazaa disaster, Pammy couldn’t possibly have it in her head to…

“I was thinking we should double sometime, you and Bruce and me and Harvey,” she said sweetly—and this is where the feeling sorry for her comes in. “You and he are such friends, after all, and—well, a double date would mean so much to him. His theme and all—and we really can’t double anymore when the only other couple in our circle is Harley and Joker.”

“Yeah, I heard about that,” I mentioned casually, hoping to change the subject from Harvey’s theme. “You four went camping?  Pammy, how did you ever let him talk you into something like that? You and Joker in a forest with long pointy forks and fire.”

Instead of the expected railing against Joker, she sighed. “He could talk me into things, Catty,” she said wistfully.

It was creepy. Poison Ivy wistful over a man, it was Batman-smiling creepy.

“Pammy,” I said carefully, calculating the distance to the door (7 paces) and the possible delays from wisteria-waiters running blocker (9 seconds tops). “I got the idea that you and Harvey weren’t together anymore.”

“Yes, quite,” she declared, drawing herself up proudly. “Not that I couldn’t get him back, of course, with a whiff or two of my particular charms, but you know, Catty, that was the thing about Harvey. I never had to resort to those methods with him. It was almost as if…”

She trailed off and I probably should have left it at that. But I really did feel for her. I could see now why she’d asked me to lunch, and there was no way to get into it without getting into it.

“It was almost as if,” I continued her half-spoken thought, “he liked you just as you were.  Pamela, did you ask me to lunch and ask about Bruce so I would recip and talk about Harvey—and you could find out what’s happened to him?”

“Not at all,” she said grandly, “I asked you to lunch because I get tired eating alone and I can’t seem to locate Harley.”

“Ah.”

“I called Jervis first, of course, he always seems to know everything about everybody. But he is—indisposed. It seems he tried to –ooh– such incompetence, it really gets on my nerves.”

I chuckled. It was so perfectly Pamela: Mad Hatter had, for reasons surpassing understanding, hatted Killer Croc. Croc will usually go along with whatever you need for a couple Boston Chickens, but for some reason, Jervis used one of his mind-control chips instead.  Inevitably, the moment came when the hat had to come off, and Jervis is expected to be back on solid food by Hell Month… Only Ivy could look at a train wreck like that and see only the inconvenience to her personally.

It was just the dose of pure mainline Pammy that I needed to get past feeling bad and tell her the truth about Harvey.

“Alright then,” I began, waving over the rosebush. “Have this guy bring you a nice pitcher of cosmopolitans. I’ll fill you in on what you’ve missed.”

Bruce often seemed preoccupied at meetings with Lucius Fox. He felt it struck just the right note: it opened the door for all sorts of senseless comments without ever proving conclusively that Bruce Wayne was stupid. “He was only half-listening that day. Remember that meeting when he was so distracted? Why, that could happen to anybody.”

And so Bruce stared out the window while Lucius droned on about the new year projections for the latest divisions acquired from LexCorp. His mind did wander… back to the Bristol the night before.

The Bristol Country Club, like so much of the neighborhood, was built on land that had once been a part of “Wayne Manor” in the days when the term designated a land grant instead of a house. Before it became a manorship in a British colony called Gotham, the land was part of a Dutch settlement, the patroonship of Schuylerwyck in the colony of Nieuw Nederland. The last American descendent of the Van Schuylers was one Richard Flay, who could be found most evenings sipping a brandy in the club’s main lounge.

Many of the Flays and Van Schuylers patronized the arts, but Richard Flay was the only one who wanted to be an artist himself. For a homosexual of his generation and lineage, it was as “out” as he could ever hope to be.

It wasn’t meant to be. He lacked the talent and he had the aesthetic sensibility to see where his work was lacking. He had no interest in being a mediocrity that real artists would tolerate for his connections but would secretly despise. So he put down his brush and changed his focus: He became an art historian, then a tenured professor; Dick even had him for a few classes at Hudson U. Flay sat on boards, he consulted at museums, he became a prodigious fundraiser, and he amassed one of the finest personal collections in the United States. He became the man to know in Gotham art circles—and therefore, the man for Bruce Wayne to know. Over the years, Richard Flay had quietly provided all kinds of insider details on whatever art-happenings Bruce asked about.

Bruce had no reason to expect last night’s fact-finding mission to be any different. When would he ever learn? Anything that included Selina would be different. Selina was Catwoman: that meant Cat + (Impossible) woman.

“Pammy,” I asked cautiously after I finished, “Are you okay?” She had this dull-but-appalled look, like Robin the first time he saw the bullwhip.

“Harvey has his face back,” she breathed, “magically restored by that horrible man from the Highland Games, who turns out to be a friend of yours and such a good friend that you gave him that magnificent apartment overlooking my park. Harvey—your other dear, dear friend—is therefore going back to a ‘normal’ life, which I suppose means living with all of us was abnormal, and now that he is free of it, he won’t have anything more to do with any of us—except for you, evidently, Selina.  Because, I suppose, you’re so normal and ordinary, what with the cats and the purple and the meowing and that sorry fixation on Batman!”

Zero to animosity in 2.4 seconds. That’s why we love her.

I was about to cut her off right there and explain that even though I didn’t have my claws on at this second, I still could and would do her plenty of damage, up to and including another record-breaking appearance on Kazaa—when she remembered she was a goddess and made an effort to present herself as such.

“That was very rude of me, Catty, I apologize,” she resumed with renewed dignity, “It is certainly understandable why your good friend Harvey would stay with you, that is what friends do, after all. Just as Harley has stayed with me.” On the last word, her face seized into a frozen grin, and for a split-second, I thought Joker got her with some kind of time-delay SmileX dart.  “Just look, Catty, the way Harley came running back to me the moment she split up with that wretched clown.”  She gestured to the room at large—a deserted restaurant where we sat alone, except for the plants. “I don’t suppose you know where she is?” Ivy asked meekly, back in abashed loan-applicant mode.

“No, I don’t,” I told her frankly.

I was getting sick of the damn mood swings. I was sick of wanting to scratch her eyes out one second and feeling bad for her the next. And I was sick of cocktails mixed by a rosebush.

“Hey Pam,” I said impulsively, “What would you say to giving ‘normal’ a try for one afternoon. Let’s go shoe shopping, see what those civilian women get so worked up about.”

Bruce sat in his office staring blankly at the brilliant cityscape outside the window. He noted dimly that Lucius had finished with the LexCorp acquisitions and was moving on to WayneTech projections. That meant charts. So he turned from the window and directed his still-distant gaze to the PowerPoint slideshow.

The felinity began as soon as he and Selina had settled in at the Bristol. Richard Flay wasn’t there yet, so they sat in the main lounge in easy view of his regular chair. To pass the time inconspicuously, they ordered drinks…

Psychobat had watched Selina’s performance with stern disapproval. Raising his ire was the point after all; what other purpose could it serve?

Like most institutions of its kind, the Bristol had certain rules it enforced no matter who you were, just to make a point of its social preeminence: Whites on the tennis court, collared shirts on the golf course, no denim in the club house, ladies could not wear slacks in the dining room after five, no special orders from the bar. It didn’t matter if you were the president of the nominating committee or the President of the United States, those were the rules and that meant you; no matter how rich you were, no matter who your daddy was, the house rules of the Bristol Country Club were the law of the land.

The Bristol served only an onion garnish with a vodka martini; Selina preferred pickled ginger. She sat there with her legs crossed as Stan came over to take their order. As she spoke, the top calf tightened subtly and rubbed ever so gently against the bottom knee. Bruce watched in horror as she looked Stan in the eye and delivered the naughty grin—just as if she wanted to waltz out of Cartier’s vault with some diamond-sapphire trinket. And instead of pulling himself together and coldly informing her of the rule, Stan went to pieces saying they had some candied ginger in the kitchen that she might like even more.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Bruce graveled softly when the waiter had left them alone.

“What did it look like to you?” she asked playfully.

“Do you have to flout every rule, decree, and statute on the books just to show you can?”

“Meow.”

“Of course, your answer to everything.”

“Some questions answer themselves, Bruce. The answer to that one is meow. Besides I’m not flouting anything; I ordered a drink. If I’m going to survive another night in this genteel, gilded, manicured bastion of bad luck for kitty cat, I’d like a martini.”

“Your special martini, when you know they don’t take special orders.”

“Stan didn’t mind. Why do you have a problem with it?”

“Of course Stan didn’t mind when—you’re impossible—you’ve always got some rationalization for—of course Stan didn’t mind when you’re doing the leg-thing and the naughty grin and—Yes, that’s the grin, right there.”

“I think you need a vacation.”

“Because I object to you using your feminine wiles to—”

“I smiled at the waiter. What is your problem?”

“To get what you want, you smiled and did the leg thing.”

“Ah, I get it,” Selina smiled, crossing her legs the other way and repeated the rubbing maneuver, “I’m sorry, Handsome, I never did ‘the leg thing’ in Cartier’s vault because I was never sitting down.”

Bruce held his fingers to the bridge of his nose as if summoning infinite patience, then announced he was going for a walk on the verandah. When he returned, Richard Flay had arrived and was in his usual place before the large fireplace. Selina was seated next to him.

There is a way of looking at this where it’s all my fault, but no feline would let that statement stand without pointing out that it is just as valid to say it’s Jimmy Choo’s fault. He’s the one that opened a boutique on Fifth and 51st, after all, and he’s the one who decided it was the year of the hunter green alligator pump.

Taking Poison Ivy shoe shopping may not have been the best idea I’ve ever had in my life, but I didn’t think it was “hatting Killer Croc” bad. I figured anything that got her out of that empty restaurant and into the world where the people were would be an improvement.

The only thing I hadn’t figured on was that one of those people out in the world be Harley Quinn herself—and also that Jimmy Choo would come out with these high-heel fuck-me pumps in “the deepest, most divinely decadent shade of—ooooh, just look at them, Catty—green.”

So we went inside to try them on—and naturally Gaia’s Chosen can’t just ask the salesman to bring her the green shoe in a 7½ because it’s his job!—No. She has to enslave the guy, just because he’s a man—like it doesn’t occur to her that maybe the guy slinging shoes at Jimmy Choo doesn’t swing that way.

So I’m standing there while the second most-confused person in Gotham politely ignores the cloud of lemon pledge now enveloping the store and asks the most-confused Gothamite how wide her foot is. Pammy is so befuddled by the prospect of a non-drone waiting on her of his own free will, she won’t tell the poor ass if it’s A, B or C. He won’t leave, she keeps telling him to bring the shoe, he keeps asking her size—and I looked out the window.

And there was Harley—in the window of the bookstore across the street. She was seated at a miniature desk with a stack of books next to her, like she was part of the window display. And she was waving like mad.

Bruce turned his attention from the Power Point slides to the printed handouts: new programs to be funded from enhanced revenues resulting from LexCorp acquisitions… He had no intention of pursuing any of these, preferring the extra monies be directed into the Wayne Foundation… but he had to at least pretend to listen. His mind drifted back to the country club…

The segue into the Fop had been automatic once he saw Selina chatting with Richard Flay. It was his instinctive camouflage when Batman’s mind was racing as it raced then, cataloging observations and evaluating each possibility suggested by the new data. His mind raced in just that way when he saw Catwoman (for at that moment, she was Catwoman to him, reformed or not.  Her behavior with Stan made it impossible for him to think of her any other way) Catwoman sitting with the most famous art collector in Gotham.

She had robbed Flay’s collection twice, Bruce remembered: once successfully and once not. He had prevented her getting away with a Rembrandt etching, but after that night, she had never tried again. He never found out why… He briefly considered asking her. The way things were now, she would probably tell him. It would be one less unanswered question about her, but probably useless in understanding criminal psychology generally. Nothing about Catwoman was typical.

Like now. She had noticed his return, he could tell. Something about her posture or expression as she talked to Flay—he wasn’t even sure what it was, maybe it was their unspoken connection, but somehow he could tell—she was sitting there chatting with Richard Flay before, but now, a split second later, she was performing sitting and chatting with Flay, performing for his benefit.

“Richard!” Bruce exclaimed with a full bore blast of foppish cheer, “Good to see you, old man, it’s been ages! What’ve you been up to?”

Selina shot him a glare—her usual response to the Fop—so Bruce clumsily spilled his drink on her, making the angry stare more plausible. He expected her to excuse herself, make for the powder room and repair her skirt. Instead, she shot him the most pointed rooftop grin—without in any way diluting the hostility of her stare.

“Mr. Flay was just admiring my cat pins,” she said sweetly.

Bruce’s mind raced ahead, tracing out the implications: Richard Flay had long been Batman’s unwitting art expert. He provided information on any number of exhibits, auctions and happenings that might be of interest to Batman’s enemies and he did it—so Bruce imagined—without being aware what they were really talking about. That was the chief advantage of the Fop persona. Fop-Wayne was known to be a bit flighty, so he could ask seemingly unrelated questions on any number of topics in a given conversation: They might be talking about some new investment fund and Bruce would ask about a gallery opening. He’d tie it in later with a flippant comment about investing in the gallery, but the questions came out of nowhere and the informants were left with no solid sense of what they had talked about.

Naturally, Selina’s tastes being what they were, quite a number of those artworks discussed over the years were potential Catwoman targets—including, Bruce now remembered, a pair of Cartier cat pins fashioned for the Duchess of Windsor. It was Richard Flay who brought that auction to his attention, and when neither Catwoman nor Two-Face made a move for them, Bruce bought the pins himself.

Damnit.

Flay probably had no idea what he said to Bruce Wayne nine times out of ten, but actually seeing the cat pins on Selina’s lovely bosom… Damnit. It would have triggered a memory “Oh yes, I remember those, for the Duchess of Windsor. Why I mentioned those to Bruce way back when. Never realized he bought them.”

Damnit.

So that’s why she was pissed.

Selina knew he’d bought those pins at cat-bait, he told her so. It’s not like either of them could have known he might one day be in a position to give them to her as… Damnit.

He could imagine now how it played out—She knew they were there to pump Flay for information on an art happening. So as soon as she realized he had told Bruce about the cat pins: Aha, he’s the art expert and Batman uses him for insider info—and he has been for a long time—like back then—against me.

Damnit.

He looked at her with a quietly pained expression. What do you want from me, Kitten. I’m a crimefighter. You’re a thief… How many times did I say it? You’re a thief… were a thief… Our history is what it is. Absurd to be pissed about it now.

This was nonsense. This was crimefighting and Selina wasn’t here as his date; she was here as his partner, she was in Robin territory now and had no business making this personal.

As he always had, he shoved the personal aside and focused on the mission. They were gathering intelligence and… and… as she always had, she somehow shoved the crimefighting aside and forced his focus back on the personal whether he liked it or not.

“Yes, I remember that place in SoHo,” she was saying (and Bruce was sure she did, she hit it enough times), “Gallery Blu.  It was owned by a Russian or Hungarian, I think. They had the wildest openings and, just between us three, they had really crappy security. It’s like they wanted to get robbed.”

“They did,” Flay told her with a grin. “They were a front. They laundered money for Odessa or someone. They could lose thousands and thousands in inventory and still turn quite a profit on paper.”

“Meow,” Selina gleamed on hearing this news. “I always figured it was an insurance scam, but there has to be a limit to that.  I mean, at some point, any insurance company is going to cut you off, right?”  She winked happily at Bruce and chattered on. He sat there and quietly seethed.

“…Well, considering the death stares I’m getting from the head of the table,” Lucius remarked dryly, “I suppose we really should wrap this up. We have gone a little overtime, and there is nothing left that won’t wait until next week or fit into a memo. Good weekend, everybody.”

“Thank you, Lucius; that was very interesting,” Bruce lied. He felt a pang, hurrying the Chief Operating Officer out of his office that way. When he only pretended to be distracted but actually listened to every word Lucius said, he felt freer to dismiss the man like a paid flunky. But now… when his mind really was wandering throughout their whole meeting, it seemed rude.

He wouldn’t dwell on it, though. The damnable holidays would bring a hundred opportunities for some little gesture. Bruce swiveled his chair slowly back to face the city once again, but he was no longer looking at it. He had taken out his cel phone and hit a preprogrammed number.

“Kitten, secure the line.”

..:: Call me back, ::.. she spat at him, and hung up.

I tapped Pam on the shoulder. “I found Harley,” I said simply, and pointed.

She tore herself away from her frustrating tête-à-tête with the non-enslaved salesman and turned. It was the damnedest thing, in about five seconds, the lemon smell was completely blotted out by orange.  Pammy went charging across the street, and rather than follow her, I looked at scarves. When those two get together… I just didn’t want to get into it. I asked if the alligator fuck-me pumps came in black.

They did, they fit.  And that’s when the whole day went to hell.

I had just taken out my credit card when my phone rang, and at the same moment, Pammy came storming back into the store, dragging some poor woman by the wrist.  She held a book and a protest sign in the other hand and she knocked some shoes off their display as she waved them around.

“Just LOOK at this, Catty! Look at this, this OBSCENITY! TREES DIED FOR THIS!”

I juggled for my cel phone and heard ..:: Kitten, secure the line ::..

“Call me back,” I spat into the phone “And Pammy? Little discretion, please?” We had agreed to keep a low profile, which isn’t that easy for Ivy to do with that distinctive “alabaster” skin of hers. I was prepared to look the other way when she let loose with the pheromones, because it meant at least she was going along, in her way, with the shoe shopping. But calling me “Catty” and screeching about the trees—right in front of some woman she’d evidently kidnapped, that was time to draw the line.

“She wrote a book, Catty. Harley wrote a book! She wrote a— a— I can’t say it.  She wrote a ROMANCE NOVEL about her and Joker!  She murdered trees to publicly air her disgusting fantasies with that—”

She let go of the woman’s wrist and doubled over, retching. It was hard to criticize.  I have the same reaction sometimes.

Now, instead of leaving once her wrist was free, kidnapped woman started reaching for Pam’s other hand, demanding her sign back. The salesman handed me a pen and the credit slip and my phone rang yet again.

“AND YOU!” Ivy wheeled on kidnapped woman. “You’re no better. Catty, look at this, LOOK AT THIS SIGN!  That is a wooden handle. Gaia knows that book should be protested but these people—You’re getting those shoes? I saw them first.”

“That book promotes the psychotic lifestyle,” kidnapped woman broke in before I could explain that I was getting the pumps in black, “In selling it, that store promotes sick, anti-social behavior…”

..:: Kitten, can you talk now? ::.. I heard in one ear, while Pam railed in the other, “Anti-Joker, damn straight, but HEY, it’s not like ANYBODY who EVER put on a costume is a deranged nutjob, Lady!”

..:: Is that Ivy? ::.. I heard on the left and “We’ll be having a trunk sale on the new spring line next week if any of you ladies would like an invitation,” on the right.

This was followed by

“Paper is Murder!” “…that publisher has a responsibility to the community…” and ..:: From the woman who almost brought about the end of existence because she was shunned by her bifurcated lover… ::..

I started to wonder if the cat-hating Bristol Country Club gremlin might have followed me home last night.

“Oh, you don’t think TREES are a part of the community, you’d only all ASPHYXIATE without them!”

“Hey, Red! You ran off so fast, I din’t get a chance ta—OH! Hiya, Catty, why din’t you come over and say Hi?”

..:: You’re obviously busy, ::.. the phonevoice graveled in a new octave, ..:: I’ll want to hear all about it later ::..

I signed the slip, took my shoes, and walked out of the store without acknowledging any of them.

Bruce looked out at the Gotham skyline with the same dangerous glower he’d given Selina in the car driving home from the Bristol. He had left the office, taken the executive elevator down to the 40th floor, switched to an elevator that serviced the lower floors and pressed the LL for Lower Lobby. He had crossed to his private elevator and slipped his keycard into the access panel. It was a convoluted way to reach the penthouse on the 78th floor from the executive offices right below on the 77th. But the private elevator could access the satellite Batcave beneath the Wayne Tower as well as the penthouse on top, and Bruce naturally felt it was worth the inconvenience to keep it completely isolated. Any additional access points, no matter how private in theory, constituted an unnecessary risk.

The whole thing had taken long enough that Selina should have had ample time to free herself up by the time he called her back. But from the sounds of it, she was having some kind of party with Poison Ivy, Harley Quinn and someone from the Westchester PTA.

There was getting to be far too much he didn’t know, too much that she knew and he didn’t—and he wasn’t about to let some ridiculous feline logic about the cat pins prevent his finding out.

The elevator pinged discreetly and Bruce heard the alluring clip-clip of a high heeled pump on the marble floor of the foyer. In four more clips, she would be here, and then, at last, he would get some answers.

Clip-clip… Clip-clip… and then…

“Hello, Bruce,” a low, beguiling voice teased from the doorway, “we have some unfinished business, don’t we?”

To be continued…


 

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