Dick shook his head as if he could shed the bad memories like water. He'd seen much worse things since that time, but he supposed the early memories would always be the strongest. Back to work. He found a VCR and television set in the bedroom and inserted the first of the tapes. He grimaced as the images appeared on the screen -- yep, that was Thompson, all right. He fast-forwarded through the rest of the tape to be sure there weren't any surprises, but it was all Thompson and Jen Hill.
He put in the next tape. That was Thompson as well. The third tape revealed a different man -- a man who was also the subject of the collection of photos in one of the envelopes. The fourth tape featured this same man. Dick didn't recognize him, but he figured Babs would be able to figure out who he was. Dick would take the materials in any event.
"Babs? You got a minute?"
"Yeah, Dinah's gone to ground until the heat blows over."
"Don't tell me she's actually being sensible for a change?" he asked facetiously.
"Oh, like you're always the sensible one?"
"Of course I am! Sensible is my middle name!"
"Your minute's about up, handsome. Are you ready for me to transfer the money?"
"Yeah. $4,000,000 back to Palmer Electronics."
"What about the $400,000 Thompson paid her himself?"
"I think Mr. Thompson needs to take some kind of punishment over this whole thing, don't you? I mean, if he hadn't cheated on his wife in the first place, none of this would've happened."
"Works for me. You need anything else?"
"Nope. I'm just going to wake Ms. Jennifer Hill up, introduce myself, explain what's happened, and then I'm out of here."
"Introduce yourself?" Barbara squeaked.
"Of course," he replied, surprised.
"What do you mean, 'of course'?!?! Are you out of your mind?"
"I took this job as Dick Grayson. What's wrong with telling her who I am?" he asked. When Barbara didn't reply, he continued in a more serious tone, "Babs, this is something I need to do. You keep insisting that old incident between her and me must still bother me. I don't know, maybe you're right. I just know I need some closure here, and I can't have that as 'Robbie Malone.'"
"Dick ..." Her voice trailed off, sadly.
"Look, if you want, I'll keep an open mike while I talk to her. Would that help?"
"Yeah. I think so. Okay."
"Okay."
Before leaving Jen's bedroom, Dick swiped a couple of scarves from the closet. He went back downstairs to the living room, and after surveying the furniture, positioned the unconscious woman in an armchair next to a heavy, glass-topped display table. Taking the scarves, Dick first tied one of her arms to the table; then he tied one foot to the leg of the chair. Finally, Dick pulled out a small wrapper of smelling salts, broke the seal, and waved the salts under Jen's nose. When she started to come around, he put the salts in her unbound hand and stepped several feet away from her.
It took several more minutes, but soon Jennifer Hill regained consciousness and began looking around her in some confusion. She quickly realized that one of her hands wasn't moving the way it was supposed to. She started pulling at the scarf binding her to the table, but her coordination was still off. She didn't make the connection between her situation and the man in front of her until Dick began to speak.
"You know, Ms. Hill -- you really should be more careful about letting strange men into your home."
Jennifer gasped in fright and began pulling frantically at her bindings.
"Don't worry, I'm not going to hurt you. The only reason I tied you up was that I wanted to make sure you didn't go anywhere until after I left. Once the knockout gas completely wears off, you shouldn't have any problems untying yourself."
Jennifer started to calm down as she realized the man she knew as Robbie was just sitting in another armchair across from her. "What do you want?" she finally asked.
"Oh, I've already gotten everything I came for. Do you recognize these?" Dick held up the envelopes and the tapes.
"You bastard!"
"Now, now. You played the game, but you lost. And, by the way, all of the money Thompson embezzled for you has gone back to his company. I don't know who the other sap is yet, but I'm sure I can find out and let him know he's also off the hook."
Now she just gaped at him, too angry to speak.
"Finally, I really should introduce myself properly. My name isn't Robbie Malone. You may not remember, but we've actually met before -- I'm Dick Grayson."
He could tell the moment when she remembered who Dick Grayson was. Her face flushed, the tendons on her neck stood out, and she almost pulled the glass table over in an attempt to get to him.
"Oooh! How dare you! You ..." She began shouting obscenities at him and continued on for quite a while until Dick finally had enough.
"I'd suggest you stop insulting me and start thinking about what you're going to tell the police."
"The police?!?"
"Sure. I can't say for certain that he will, but Thompson could easily charge you with extortion. Then there's the whole corporate sabotage thing."
"Wha...what are you talking about?"
"Oh, come on! You don't expect me, or the police, to believe that you came up with that accounting scam? Maybe you can cut a deal if you roll over on Sarah Montgomery or Hart Electronics."
"How do you know about...I mean...who's this Sarah Montgomery?"
"Lady, I'm not going to sit here and play games with you. I just want to make sure you're out of the extortion business whether the police charge you or not, and I intend to make sure of it."
"H..how are you going to stop me?" she asked somewhat defiantly, still reeling from the threat of police involvement.
"I plan to keep an eye on your activities. As long as you stay on the right side of the law, you need never see me again. Otherwise, we'll have to have a nice reunion or something," he smiled sardonically.
"I guess I should be flattered you've waited all this time to get your revenge on me," she said viciously.
"To be honest, I hadn't given you a thought since you divorced Mayor Hill."
"From what Brucie said, I was supposed to have traumatized you!"
"Parents have a tendency to overreact sometimes."
"Oooh, parents, huh?" she responded tauntingly. "So that's what you're calling him now. I'm sure the family 'get-togethers' must be just fascinating. Do you ever get to be on top?"
Dick remembered the scene in the library between Bruce, Flynn, and Jen. He remembered how she had attacked Bruce -- the accusations she'd made while he hid behind the sofa. The anger that he'd never been allowed to express came bursting to the surface, surprising him with its intensity. "Aren't you a little...old...to be making childish comments like that?" He felt a distant sort of surprise at his own cruelty. "I mean, you're what...almost forty aren't you?"
"I'm thirty-three!" she corrected involuntarily.
"I'm sorry," he responded in mock apology. "I guess it's those lines around your mouth that made me think that. I've heard smoking can do that -- add wrinkles, I mean." He continued, mockingly, "Have you given much thought to what you're going to do when you can't use your body to get what you want? Oh! Maybe that's what you were blackmailing those men for -- that was your retirement fund! Sorry to disrupt your plans. You've still got a few more years to figure something out."
As much as Dick wanted to continue, he brought himself up short. He would not allow himself to descend to her level any more. "I'm sorry," he said, honestly this time. "I don't want to be cruel. I did play upon your weaknesses in order to get close enough to...acquire this material. I don't really blame you for being angry."
Jennifer Hill stared at Dick in blank astonishment. She'd taunted and insulted him; he'd retaliated -- that she understood. Now he was apologizing?!?
Dick saw her confusion and smiled. 'A soft answer turneth away wrath,' he heard his mother's voice say inside his head. Maybe, just maybe he could make some good come out of this whole situation.
"Why do you do it, Ms. Hill?" he asked gently.
"Do what?" Sullenly.
"Why do you prostitute yourself like this?" He smiled at her look of indignant denial and continued, "What else do you call having sex with men in exchange for money? What makes you do this? The money?"
"Believe whatever you want. You got what you came for. So go."
"No, really. I want to know."
Jennifer stared at the young man sitting across from her. Despite everything that had happened, she found herself unable to remain angry with him. Her instincts were still telling her she could trust him, for God's sake! "Why do you want to know? Are you some kind of shrink or something?"
"Nope. It's just...I was never able to figure out why you came on to me when I was sixteen, and when I learned you were blackmailing that man...it was really easy to think of you as some sort of sexual predator. Maybe you really are, but I'd like to understand why -- both for then and now."
Jennifer gave a short, unamused laugh. "You must not have looked in a mirror much when you were sixteen, kid." She laughed again with more humor as Dick blushed. "I'm serious, although I'll admit, figuring out who you were made you more...amusing...to play with."
Dick frowned in remembered anger. "I was not a play thing! What would you have thought if our situations were reversed? If you were a sixteen-year-old girl, and I was the twenty-something-year-old adult?"
Jennifer was silent for a long time staring off into space. "That no one would care...that no one would believe me." She seemed to sink deeper into herself. "And then they just throw you away. They only want one thing, you know. And once you're not pretty anymore, the cold will get you."
"The cold?" Dick asked gently, trying not to disturb the flow of her confession.
She whispered in a childlike voice, "The cold got my momma -- he turned us out, and one morning I woke up, and she was dead." Her voice got stronger as she continued, "And I swore that the cold was not going to get me. No, I was going to be safe before they could throw me away." She started, as if she were waking up from a trance. Jen glanced over at Dick and then looked away in embarrassment.
Dick almost smiled as he finally put the pieces together. "This is all some kind of power game. That's it, isn't it?" She looked at him in some puzzlement, so he explained, "It's not about sex, is it? You like having power over men, whether it's through sex or blackmail or whatever."
"I don't know what you're talking about!" she said defensively.
Dick knew he'd struck a nerve. "As an old friend of mine once said, 'You grab a man by his dumb handle, and he'll follow you anywhere.' You must have gotten quite a kick out of turning the tables on men like the ones who'd hurt you before." Jennifer nodded almost involuntarily, a rather vicious smile on her face. Dick smiled as well, but then his expression turned serious again as he asked, "But is this kind of life making you happy? Don't you want something more...meaningful out of life?"
"What makes you think I'm not happy?" she asked sulkily.
"I don't think someone who's happy would still be looking for revenge for something that happened almost twenty years ago. Or if it isn't revenge, who only sees a relationship between a man and a woman as a power struggle."
"It's like I said, men only want sex. Once a woman's too old or ugly, she's stuck; so she needs to get as much security as she can while she can."
"Jennifer, obviously I can't speak for every guy out there, but there are those of us who do want more than sex from a woman," Dick replied. At her continued expression of disbelief, he continued, speaking now from his heart. "Let me tell you about the woman I love." Jennifer stiffened in her chair, and Dick smiled slightly at the small gasp he heard in his earpiece. "Please?" Jennifer reluctantly nodded.
"The woman I love is beautiful, yes, and our...uh...sex life is great," he said, blushing in embarrassment. Babs was going to kill him. "But that's not all there is to our relationship," he continued earnestly. "We laugh together, we talk -- I can talk to her about anything. Her laughter can brighten the darkest day for me. It hasn't always been easy for us -- there have been misunderstandings, even arguments, but through it all there has always been this...bond between us."
He looked at Jennifer to see if she was listening to him; amazingly enough, she was -- the skeptical look was gone and in its place was a sort of amused, thoughtful expression he wasn't quite sure how to interpret. Now for the hard part.
"I haven't told this to anyone else, but I have this dream: I want to wake up next to my sweetheart every day for the rest of my life; I want us to grow old together. Every once in a while, I'll see a little old man and a little old woman walking down the street holding hands, and I'll think, 'I want to be like that one day.' It doesn't really matter to me that one day her hair will turn gray, or that her face will have wrinkles, because I plan to be gray and wrinkled right there with her. I guess, what I want to emphasize, is that my love for her is based on more than her physical appearance. I love her for who she is, not what she looks like."
Jen's amused look had turned to one of resignation. She sighed, "That's nice, but that sort of thing doesn't happen to people like me."
"Why not?"
"Because...because I'm the 'Other Woman,' the 'Tramp,' the 'Homewrecker,'" she said cynically. "I'm the one who disappears from the scene while the hero and heroine live happily ever after."
"Well, to be blunt, if you'd stop hanging around married men, you wouldn't be any of those things," Dick replied honestly. "Look, as I said earlier, I'm not a psychologist. Whether you need one or not is your call; all I'm saying is that ruining men's lives now won't punish the men who hurt you before. You need to find some way to move on."
He looked at his watch and realized the window Babs had created in the building's security net was going to be closing soon. "I'm sorry, but I need to get going. I honestly don't know whether Thompson will press charges, but I tend to doubt it. I would certainly recommend you disassociate yourself from Ms. Montgomery." He pulled out his billfold and took one of the Wayne Enterprises business cards he had brought along just in case. Turning it over he wrote down the phone number of his Gotham apartment.
"I'm leaving you my phone number. Think about what I've said. If you ever need help, give me a call. Good-bye, Jennifer."
"Good-bye, Dick. I'm still not sure whether to swear at you, laugh at you, or thank you. But it's certainly been a memorable evening."
"My girlfriend tells me I often have that effect on her," he replied, smiling. Gathering his things, he walked out the door to the garage, got on his motorcycle, and sped away into the night.
Then came a voice like unto the sound of doom through his earpiece.
"Okay, Grayson. Now that you're out of there, we need to talk."