CAT-TALES PPEARL CAT-TALES PPEARL By Chris Dee COPYRIGHT © 2018, CHRIS DEE ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. BATMAN, CATWOMAN, GOTHAM CITY, ET AL CREATED BY BOB KANE, PROPERTY OF DC ENTERTAINMENT, USED WITHOUT PERMISSION catwoman-cattales.com facebook.com/cattales.by.chris.dee ISBN: 978-1984988072 PEARL Batman’s lip twitched. He watched as Catwoman walked around a gaping hole cut through the wood and metal of the modest one-story roof. She bit her lip in either amusement or puzzlement, then glanced up at him in a clear attempt to read some clue in his face. Finally she walked to the edge of the roof, looked down, paced back and forth a few times, and returned to the hole. “Well?” he graveled. “When I got here, you said not to take the ladder up, ‘it’s evidence.’ It’s theirs. Metal painted black, about three days ago give or take. We’re obviously meant to think they came up the ladder and cut through the roof, dropped into the vault area of the bank, took the tellers’ cash and safe deposit boxes…” she gestured to the dozens of empty boxes stacked on the roof beside the hole. “Passed them up here to open and stacked the empties there to be out of the way.” “That’s not ‘what we’re meant to think;’ it’s what happened,” Batman said. “No,” she said, dismissing an m.o. that was too absurd to be taken seriously. “It’s the tenth of this kind in five years. All in the outer boroughs, small community branches with less than first rate security.” “A steel door and a wood ceiling I would describe as ‘less than first rate,’ yes,” Catwoman said with quietly emphatic scorn. “Last time they came in through a wall. Scored around three hundred thousand.” “Fine: steel door and a plaster wall. It’s still sad, I don’t care how much they took. I thought you asked me to come out here to, I don’t know, try to figure this out.” “No,” Batman said mildly. “I called because I thought you might find it funny.” “Ah,” she smiled and looked grudgingly back at the hole. “Another night I suppose I might have.” “Rough day?” “No, just… Scottish Fold, I’ll tell you later.” She squatted down and examined one of the safe deposit boxes, running a claw-tip over the edge of the number plate. “The tenth break-in like this?” she said in wonder. “I keep telling you, thieves are like gamblers,” Batman intoned. “They never know when to quit.” “And I keep telling you that’s the kind of thing cops say that you should not repeat because you are not a pinhead.” “Selina, I know it’s a generalization that doesn’t apply to you, but it’s based on expertise, drawing on the observation of hundreds or thousands—” “Of failures. Don’t play science with me, Sherlock. It’s a generalization based on a non-representative group: the failures who get caught. Same reason nobody but Hugo takes Freud seriously. You can’t just go drawing conclusions about all of mankind Cat-Tales based on a dozen people who were so screwed up they were seeing a psychiatrist when the idea was more radical than monkey glands. You can’t go drawing conclusions about everyone who can pick a lock—” “The point is—” “The point is you've got all these tenets about criminals and what they do based on the ones that are known. Look at this bunch. At the very least, you know what they did: hole, empty boxes, there’s a crime to investigate. You know nothing about the most successful specimens because they’re successful. Murders that pass as natural deaths, thefts that are never discovered. You want to pretend this is science? Your criminology buddies have created an incredible evolutionary force on the criminal side of the equation, because all these police mechanisms evolve to catch the injured fawns as if they’re the entire herd.” “Maybe we should agree to disagree on this one,” Batman graveled. “You know I’m right.” “Do you want a ride home?” “You don’t want to admit it, but you know I’m right.” “It’s not an original theory,” Batman said flatly. “Agatha Christie put it forward, so did Alfred Hitchcock and so did ‘Richard Castle.’ All entertainers, one of whom is fictional. Compared to actual police and criminolo—” “Hi,” Selina said, stepping into his personal space and extending her hand until the tips of his claws touched his sternum. “I don’t think we’ve met. Catwoman, cat burglar, theme rogue. I’ll be your criminal adversary this evening. Do I look like an entertainer, jackass?!” He grunted, but he didn’t concede the point. “Come on, I’ve already examined the scene inside. Quick pass through Bayside and I’ll give you that ride home. You can tell me about the Scottish Fold,” he said lightly. The code word for their once secret engagement now denoted the wedding plans, which were much simpler than the ones for Dick and Barbara’s nuptials. Bruce and Selina were significantly older, they’d been living as man and wife for years, and throwing an extravagant party for several hundred guests was not a once in a lifetime experience. So many mechanisms were in place for entertaining on that scale, Selina could hand over nearly all the traditional planning apart from picking the dress. That left her time to tackle the other arrangements a typical bride didn’t need to consider, such as ‘Fifth Dimension Blackout Dates’ when a malevolent trickster was most likely to appear and harass the best man. The subject of the bank heist didn’t come up again until the next day, when Selina found Bruce in his study. “I’ve reconsidered,” she announced. “Your crime scene on top of the bank, it’s funny now.” She spread a newspaper on his desk and, as she leaned over to point to the story… “Right there” …her hair fluttered in Bruce’s face. At first he thought it was the whiff of her shampoo, the first really personal detail he’d noticed about the elusive cat burglar, that flashed him back to early rooftops. Then he realized it was something more substantive: “’Sophisticated burglary, police say,’” she read. “Sophisticated. Do they not know what words mean, or do they think leaning a ladder against the side of a building and cutting a hole is a complex operation that requires a high level of expertise?” 2 Pearl “I—” Bruce began, but Selina rolled over him. “They are pros because they cut the video cameras, Detective Schmidt told GCN,’” she read indignantly. “Pros! Because they cut the video cameras.” “I—” Bruce tried again. “I’ve been nice,” she said emphatically. “Since we got together, for your sake, for Barbara’s, I’ve been polite about the GCPD in general and Gordon in particular. I practically apologized for the things I repeated in Cat-Tales, as if Luthor didn’t have a perfectly fair point about the state of law enforcement in this town sans you. These idiots aren’t meeting me halfway.” “Can I talk now?” Bruce asked mildly. “Go for it.” “If I concede your point that a portion of criminal science is flawed due to imperfect sampling, namely that we can only observe those criminals we know about, usually because they get caught, and that known burglars are not representative of burglars in general, will you agree not to judge the entire Gotham police force because this Detective Schmidt is, admittedly, not the brightest of men?” “Agreed,” she smiled. “Agreed,” he echoed. Bruce glanced at the picture of his parents while Selina folded up the newspaper. “Before you go, there’s something I wanted to talk about,” he said uneasily. “Hm?” Selina said, not noticing the uncharacteristic hesitancy. “It was late when we got back last night, and then I took a while with the logs and that’s a lie. I really just… We were in the cave and it just…wasn’t the right time.” Selina had stopped and was looking at him with concern. He continued stumbling. “I… should have said this when we decided to have the wedding here. I should have said it before then, probably.” “Do you want to change it? I mean, it’s your family home, I love the idea of having it here. And like you said, it gives us complete freedom picking the dates. Barbara knows there’s going to be a certain amount of comparison to her wedding, but she’s fine with that. She cares even less about socialite chatter than I do, I care less than you do. Alfred is the only one in the family who gives a damn, and even he said if we have the ceremony inside instead of the garden, it minimizes the point-for-point—” “It’s not that.” Selina took a step back. It was his roof-of-the-MoMA voice. The first time she ever heard him speak as Bruce inside the mask, it sounded just like that. “The first time I heard that voice, I didn’t even know your name,” she said gently. “Bruce, what is it?” “When Dick and Barbara decided to have their wedding here, I told Alfred that I wanted the planning of this one event to be a Bruce Wayne matter entirely and that absolutely no Batman considerations were to intrude. I didn’t want to give any thought to the public persona or having strangers in the house.