Wayne of Gotham (9 page)

Kane Estate / Bristol / 6:22 a.m. / October 5, 1957

Dawn was breaking as Thomas drove the Lincoln Futura across the Kane Memorial Bridge. The theater district of Gotham proper and Sheldon Point receded behind him quickly in the light traffic. The Futura was a concept car—the car of the future—and his father had financed a second version of it from the Ghia plant in Turin, Italy, when it was being built two years before. It had the opalescent pearl-white finish that could only really be appreciated in person; the long, flat back deck and the forward and rear fins were dramatic, but it was the clear Plexiglas double-teardrop top that always turned heads whenever he drove it. It was both an icon of the age and of its problems: the Plexiglas roof acted like a greenhouse under the sun. Worse, it was designed to seal the passenger compartment so tightly that a microphone actually had to be mounted in the center of its “futuristic” circular radio antenna on the back deck so the driver could hear sounds coming from outside the car through a speaker placed behind and between the bucket seats. A safety feature made it so the bubble top could not be opened unless the automatic transmission was in park, which meant there was practically no ventilation inside the car. The air conditioner was always faulty and never quite kept up with the ant-under-a-magnifying-glass interior. Worse, the stylish exterior restricted airflow around the engine, constantly causing it to overheat. Still, such practical matters hardly impacted the thinking of Patrick Wayne; anyone could purchase a production Lincoln, but to spend a quarter of a million dollars on one of only two hand-built cars of the future? It was not simply transportation to the senior Wayne; it was a demonstration of power and wealth that could not be ignored. Giving it to his son provided more than a photo opportunity for the press; it was Patrick's way of saddling his son with the responsibilities of being a Wayne and pushing his boy to acknowledge the superior and unquestioned authority of his father.

Thomas had responded to his father's most impractical gift by taking a screwdriver and a wrench to the unique concept car and removing the automated section of the roof. It improved the airflow considerably, he liked the convertible aspect it gave to the otherwise enormous car, and it simultaneously demonstrated, in Thomas's small way, an act of defiance.

This early morning, however, with the dawn just breaking over the ocean to the east, the long vehicle was a bit chill even for Thomas. He reached over to the left of the steering column—with its unique speedometer sitting inside the hub of the wheel—and pushed back the cover on the heat controls. They slid back into the console like a jet-aged rolltop desk. He adjusted the knobs to pour heat over the floorboard and glanced across the center console between the bucket seats to the form snoring softly on his right.

Thomas reached forward, turning up the volume on the radio dial. The close-harmony male duet sang louder about the troubled reputation of two teenagers falling asleep at a drive-in movie.

Thomas glanced once more at the voluptuous, makeup-smeared mess sprawled next to him that was Martha Kane.

Her dark hair was piled over her face. Her lipstick was smeared, and her mascara had made her eyes reminiscent of a raccoon. She lay as she had been put into the car, Thomas doing his best to put her form into some semblance of a passenger and failing utterly. She was a restless sleeper, and it had been all he could manage to keep her arm inside the car while he closed the door.

Thomas reached over casually, trying to push the hair out of her face as he drove. The wind whipping through the open top of the car, however, prevented any success in that either, and so he gave up. Martha would have to remain wild … as he had always known her.

From the bridge, he turned right at the northern exit and followed the coast highway a short distance around Breaker's Point before turning between the brick pillars that supported the gold-painted iron arch fixed with a single
K
in the center. He sped up the private road, a few rebellious leaves defiant of the wishes of the groundskeeper having fallen to the ground only to be spun into life as the car sped past. The canopy of trees would provide shade later in the day, but for now the low angle of the rising sun cast intermittent patches of light and dark across the car as it sped past the trunks and the orange hue of the morning.

He knew the house itself was nearly a mile further on. Thomas reached forward and switched off the radio, letting the engine fill the silence in the morning.

He had driven down this road many times before, and truth be told, he had brought Martha back down it in similar states before. They were so very different and yet bound together in strange ways. Both of them were wealthy and both of them carried that wealth on their backs like modern versions of Heracles, bound by fate. They both reacted to this burden with their own ways of rebellion: Thomas by turning his back on the business world of his father to become a doctor and Martha by spending as much of her parents' money as possible, either by burying herself in her charitable causes or by finding the bottom of a bottle with friends as willing to spend her money as she. She was notorious for being as likely to appear on the morning police report as she was on the social pages at some gala. She tended to be a loud drunk and had an uncanny knack for attracting trouble. He had always thought her beautiful, although not nearly so after a long drunk, and Thomas had found his mind wandering to what might be discovered beneath the suggestive lines of her cardigan sweater and tight blue jeans.

Thomas's attention jerked back to the road. The car had drifted off to the right, and one set of tires was thumping in the grass off the gravel drive. He gripped the wheel and with a firm hand eased the car back onto the road.

Martha might give him the time of day, Thomas thought, but she would never see him as anything but that gawking boy next door who was a good friend to have around when everyone else had deserted her like vampires with the rising of the sun, when she had thrown up the expensive dinner hitting both the alley wall as well as her shoes and she needed someone to drive her home. He was Tommy, the boy who would always be a chum and nothing more.

Thomas frowned, wondering why the hell that should bother him.

The tree tunnel ended at the edge of the manor's lawn. Kane House stood as a monument to excessive Georgian architecture, so opulent it might have made Carnegie blush. It had two enormous wings extending from the main house, reaching forward like an American Versailles. He followed the curve of the road toward the courtyard for a while, but turned off short of the house, following instead the service road that went around the back. He parked short of the grand ballroom, which jutted out from the house like a cathedral, its tall, dark windows reflecting the rising sun. The enormous lawn at the back was shrouded in a thin layer of fog.

Thomas switched off the car, hopped up to stand on the seat and, with both hands on the rims of the Plexiglas windows, front and back, swung his feet over the side and dropped to the ground. The gravel made a slight hissing sound as he landed his dismount.

“And a four from the Russian judge,” he muttered to himself as he straightened up, checked his bow tie, and quickly stepped down the servants' stairs to the door entering the basement. Thomas knocked emphatically with five quick taps and then waited. The distant sound of a meadowlark answered. A few quick additional knocks were answered by a shuffling sound beyond the door, the bang and squeal of a table followed by a muttered swearing. Thomas waited. The door opened slightly, stopping at the end of its lock chain.

“Yes?”

“Bertie, it's me … Thomas.” His voice sounded loud in the stillness of the morning.

“Master Wayne?” the voice seemed puzzled for a moment. “Again?”

“I'm afraid so, Bertie,” Thomas confessed. “Shall I bring her in?”

“Don't you always?” Bertie replied. The door closed quickly and Thomas heard the lock slide free of its plate. The door opened wide to reveal the gaunt face and disheveled white hair of the aging retainer standing in his bathrobe, striped pajamas, and slippers, which he had put on the wrong feet in his haste. “Take her up to Mary's room. She's off taking care of her mother and no one will bother her there.”

“Or see me,” Thomas added.

The old butler chuckled. “The staff knows to keep their silence, but if Mr. Kane sees you coming out of Miss Martha's bedroom, there's not so much as that we can do for you. I suspect there are grounds enough about the house to hide a dead Wayne just as easily as a dead pauper.”

“Cheerful as always,” Thomas said, shaking his head. He turned and dashed up the cement steps back to the car.

Thomas opened the passenger door and half expected Martha to pour out of it, but she obligingly remained in the seat. He straightened her upright as best he could and then, bending over, set his shoulder against her stomach and shifted her arms and head down his back. He carefully leaned back, gaining his balance and was at last, with some struggle and the help of the car's body for leverage, able to stand up with Martha draped in a fireman's carry over his shoulder.

He was keenly aware of her body touching his, the faint smell of perfume mixed with vomit coming from her sweater, and the placement of his arms across her thighs.

Thomas drew in a deep breath and moved quickly around the car. He knew the way well enough. Down the servants' entrance stairs, through the kitchen and servants' rooms to the back, and then up the servants' stairs to the fourth floor and the servants' bedrooms. It was an arduous climb up a narrow winding staircase, and twice he had to stop to catch his breath before reaching the upper hall. The servants had not yet arisen for the day, although Thomas suspected the cook would arrive shortly. Fortunately, Mary's room was nearest the staircase, and he quickly opened the door and, shifting Martha on his shoulder once more, entered the room.

The bed was simple in the sparsely furnished room. Thomas crouched at the bedside and carefully rolled Martha off his shoulder and onto the bed, which squeaked slightly under her. He arranged her legs and arms more comfortably as she groaned slightly. He knelt next to the bed frame and brushed her hair away from her face.

He considered undressing her.

He stood up in a rush.

“
You're a doctor, damn it,
” he muttered to himself. He had seen naked bodies before, alive or otherwise. Male or female they all tended to look remarkably the same when they were lying on a table in the laboratory. Her clothing reeked, and it would have been a kindness for him to take them down to Bertie and have them washed before she came around and had to face both the hangover and her own stench. All these good rationalizations were firing in his mind but he could not move to touch her.

He could not because he wanted so desperately to touch her, to experience the texture of her neck, the round firmness of her breast, the curve of her back, and the contour of her legs. He ached to gather her in his arms, clothed or otherwise, to feel her heart beating against his chest and know that neither of them rattling about in their enormous, empty lives was alone. He wanted her eyes to open—really open—and see him as though for the first time not as the awkward boy who fell silent and withdrawn before the senseless battering of an obsessed father but as a man who longed for an intimacy that had been denied him his entire life.

Thomas gazed down on Martha as she stretched out before him on the bed, oblivious to him as a man, as she had been all along. How could she know that more than anything he wanted to be seen, to have his existence recognized—to
matter
—and to be the focus of a pair of languid, large brown eyes.

He realized that here, in the silence of the morning, with the house asleep, he could touch her. She was barely an arm's length from where he stood. He could reach down with both his hands, slip them beneath the cardigan, and find the warmth of her skin. He had been a pal to her, the boy next door whom you might let look, but never, ever touch you
that
way. No one would ever know … Not even Martha would remember, given how passed out she was from the drunken binge of the night before.

A chill ran through Thomas.

Martha would not know … She would not even see him.

Thomas bolted from the room and down the stairs. He rushed past Bertie, who said something to him, but he could not hear the words for the ringing in his ears. He pushed out through the servants' entrance door and bound up the steps two at a time. The door was stubborn to open and he managed with some frustration to get into the driver's seat. He turned the car engine over with the ignition.

It churned twice and then died.

Thomas banged the wheel in a fury, pumped the accelerator twice to reset the choke and tried again.

The engine groaned once … and then caught, roaring to life. The tires kicked up gravel as he wheeled the car around, roaring back around the house and down the tree-lined road back toward Breaker's Point.

By the time he reached the front of Wayne Manor, the tears were gone but his face was still flush. He got out, slamming the car door as Jarvis Pennyworth came out the front door.

“Master Tom,” Jarvis said in a British accent that managed to convey both serenity and alarm at the same time. “We were concerned for you. I trust your evening went well, sir.”

“I had a fine evening, Jarvis,” Thomas lied. “It is always a delight to be out in the company of Miss Martha Kane. Is my father home?”

“No, sir, he left about an hour ago. Some pressing business downtown.”

“Good,” Thomas rejoined, tugging his bow tie loose from its knot. “You know how he loves pressing business. This may be a record for him—I haven't even been home a day and he's uncovered some pressing business to keep him away.”

“Yes, Master Tom,” Jarvis bowed slightly as Thomas passed toward the main doors of the mansion. “But he left instructions that you were to come to his office at eleven thirty, following your meeting with Dr. Horowitz at Gotham University Hospital.”