A/N: Happy Haloween!!
Disclaimer: I still don't own them, but the plot is all mine.
Disclaimer 2: If you're a fan of Remington Steele you'll recognize the introductry monolouge from season one, I of course don't take credit for that, but I did bend it for my own devices bwhahahahahahah.
“Are you a fan of The Cure Mr.Kent?”
Clark quirked an eyebrow in confusion “Not particularly, but I don’t see how an 80’s alternative rock band has anything to do with Remington Steele”
Jason smiled, if nothing else it was amusing to antagonize Kent. He was weak, just like his father…
“Your right of course Mr. Kent they have nothing to do with Remington Steele I was just trying loosen you up you seem a bit tense.”
“Lets just get down to business” Lois sighed, eager to hear what horrible secrets Remington Steele had to hide. In truth she really hoped this guy was just a nut case. Some disgruntled criminal who’d been apprehended by Steele out to get revenge. She had a feeling in her gut the moment she’d met Steele, or Ruggles as he’d introduced himself, that he was trustworthy. It wasn’t the instant sensation of ease she’d had with Clark, or the hero-worship she defiantly had for Superman. It didn’t come close to the power rush she’d got from Lex, but as a hard nosed cynical reporter she’d learned to trust her gut. And right now her gut was telling her the man she was dealing with might be one card shy of a full deck.
“Ah yes 1955, an interesting year for our Mr. Steele. He was born in Ireland a bastard son of an English con man, and a young peasant girl. She died in childbirth you see. Her parents were so over come with grief that they decided they couldn’t stand the sight of our Mr. Steele.”
“Do you have any records, any hard evidence of this?” Clark asked, his reporter’s instincts flaring.
“Of course Mr. Kent, I’m more then ready to back up every claim I make this evening.” Slowly Jason retrived a small package from his coat pocket “This is all the research I’ve done for the last seven years on Remington Steele. All of it can be corroborated by ‘trust worthy’ sources, if you so desire. To tell you the truth I’m surprised no one’s ever made these connections before.”
Lois snorted in disgust “Well so far the most damaging thing you’ve told us, is that L.A.’s most celebrated Private Investigator was a fatherless child. That’s hardly headline news.”
“I wasn’t finished Ms. Lane, nor was I addressing you at any point during the conversation.” Jason snapped his control ebbing momentarily. Not that he was the poster boy for self control, but the role he was playing required him to chill his emotional reactions to a minimum. Jason was good at playing roles, which was one of the reasons he hated Steele with such a passion. He and Steele were once actors cast in the same role, only luck had been on Steele’s side and he’d gone on to success while Jason was trapped in the relative obscurity of hired help.
“Anyway after that he was an orphan, living on her majesty’s good graces. He bounced from foster home to foster home, some of which were his relatives others…well lets just say they were well compensated for the hardship of caring for an extra child. Contrary to popular belief it is possible to live on government welfare, especially if you have more then one person dependent on the system living with you; in particular someone who has no idea just how much money comes every week to help take care of them.”
Jason smiled. He’d never had that problem himself, as he’d been a teenager by the time his parents had died. And in any case he’d been self reliant for years, even, before his mother had been killed. He’d already been well into petty crime, and could make a living for himself easily by lifting wallets.
“Suffice to say it was the hard-knocks for our intrepid detective…after a while the beatings became too much for him, and he hopped a cargo ship to England. At this point he took a job as a dishwasher at a restaurant, but supplemented his income by petty theft. He even did some time in a reform school, but he escaped and went back to the streets…eager to continue his life of crime. By the time he was in his late teens Remington Steele was about as remarkable as a mud smear on the side of a pickup truck, but that all changed with the introduction of one of the most important players in his life—Daniel Chalmers.”
“Mr. Chalmers was one of the most affluent conmen in Western Europe. I say was, because Mr. Chalmers died of an unfortunate lung infection some years ago. Anyway Chalmers recognized the potential residing in this young ruffian, and carefully polished Steele into a mirror image of himself. He took a boorish violent east ender, and turned him into a charming, sophisticated, worldly, gentleman convincing enough to fool even the most elite of the upper class. Not since Archie Leech changed his name to Cary Grant, has there been such a profound metamorphosis.”
Jason halted his narration momentarily to light a cigarette. Lane was busy scribbling notes on her legal pad Kent was also jotting things down in a small notebook…hook, line and sinker he thought to himself haughtily. Who would have guessed that after so many years of lies and deceit, simply telling the truth could be more damaging then any story he could devise.
“Eventually running cons became to dull, so Chalmers decided grand theft would be their next undertaking. They started off simply—rare antiquities, paintings, several very expensive works of art including the ‘Four Nudes of Cairo’, eventually Steele decided that jewels appealed to him far more then dusty old oil paintings so he and his, woman of the moment, Felicia, left Daniel for greener pastures. If you check, several of the European law enforcement agencies still have outstanding warrants for their arrest. Of course with only a dated physical description and phony names it’s not much to go on.”
“Question.” Clark said still not wholly convinced he wasn’t being lead on a wild goose chase “If they don’t have a good physical description, Steele and Felicia used aliases, then how can you positively identify them as the thieves?”
Lois smiled slightly, good old Clark always looking for the best in people. Of course she was just about to ask the same question.
“Well you see Mr. Kent,” Jason said drawled anticipating such a question “Felicia found religion a few years back, and decided to confess what she had done in her memoirs. Fortunately for us she kept an audio/visual diary as well as a written one. Copies will be made available to you at the close of this meeting.”
“How did you just ‘happen’ upon her diaries?” Lois asked, her reporter’s instincts kicking into overdrive.
“Funny you should ask that, Felicia and I became quite good friends at the end of her life. She’d never been close to anyone up to that point. When she passed all of her things were willed to me, among them were her personal diaries.”
“How did she die?” Clark asked
“Complications from heart surgery, though she was quite a young woman Felicia believed in living life to its fullest. She drank heavily, and partied more then all The Rolling Stones put together. It came back to haunt her later in life, metastasizing into a malignant growth on her heart.”
“How did he come to be in the U.S?”
“Another good question Ms. Lane, and exactly what I was going to discuss next. How much do you know about Royal Lavulite?”
“It’s a gem more valuable then Diamonds bluer then sapphires, and extraordinarily rare. The last time they were in the U.S. someone tired to steal them.” Clark remembered the story from when he was in college.
“Ah, but did you also know that the Remington Steele agency was contracted to transfer the gems cross country, ironically enough the only reason there is a Remington Steele is because of those little stones.”
“Remington Steele was a private detective for years before that incident” Clark interjected slightly confused.
“Or so you were lead to believe Mr. Kent. Try this on for size: A young woman who’d always loved excitement and adventure went to school and earned herself a degree in mathematics from Stanford University, she could have gone on to do anything she wanted but the lure of danger and exploration was always just around the corner, so she studied and apprenticed, and eventually she purchased her own private detective agency. Unfortunately a female private investigator was just too…feminine. So she created a superior, a decidedly masculine superior. Suddenly there were cases around the block, and as long no one ever had to work directly with Remington Steele the charade was perfect.”
“Things were looking great for our heroine, until an Irish/English conman showed up, and attempted to steal the Royal Lavulite from under our PI’s nose. Under some circumstance or another, this conman was mistaken for the real Remington Steele, and the rest as they say is history. Laura Holt had her male figurehead, and the conman who goes by the name of Steele had a warm place to stay a steady paycheck, and a beautiful woman at his beck and call.”
“Now they’re here in Metropolis, their appearance just happening to coincide with the jewelry heist a few weeks back. A heist in which nothing was stolen, but some documents, the contents of which more valuable then all the Royal Lavulite on the face of the earth.”
“What exactly are you trying to say?” Lois queried
“I’m trying to say that maybe Remington Steele isn’t as altruistic as he seems. I have a strong feeling that Remington Steele and Laura Holt are behind this whole debacle, and I believe very strongly that he was attacked the other night because of his involvement in this whole affair.”
Clark furrowed his brow, something was off here. This explanation was all ‘too’ neat. And besides the Steele’s hadn’t even been in Metropolis that long, not long enough to rob a jewelry store anyway.
Apparently Lois felt “This is all too convenient. Blame the jewel thief, excuse me ex-jewel thief for the robbery. Everything I’ve read about Remington Steele tells me he’s an upstanding citizen now. Maybe he did some bad things in the past, but there’s no indication he’s involved with what happened to Albert Haas.”
“Well if my answers frighten you Ms. Lane you should cease asking scary questions.”
“And if you reference pop-culture one more time I’m gonna punch you in the nose.” Lois tightened her fingers into a fist, her knuckles whitening.
“I think I’ve given you and Mr. Kent enough information for one day. The rest is up to you.” Jason dropped his cigarette butt on the cold concrete floor. Using the heel of his shoe he snubbed the hot coals into ashes, laughing to himself he turned and eased out of the parking garage remaining as always in the cover of shadows, leaving a brown package were he once stood.
****
The next day Lois and Clark sat down with Perry. Obviously a story of this magnitude, implicating one of America’s most well known and well loved citizens in a ring of jewel thefts would be damn near impossible without hard evidence; evidence they just happened to have in their possession. The video diaries of Felicia made were more then enough to corroborate the man’s story. Photographs, proved beyond a reasonable doubt to be real, depicted a young Remington Steele standing in front of the Four Nudes of Cairo the night it went missing. Eyewitness accounts describing a man similar in stature and appearance to Remington Steele as the main suspect in the robberies were also provided. As well as several different passports with different names all authenticated by the master forger who made them, all of which bearing the picture of the famed L.A. detective.
Daniel Chalmers had indeed passed, but in his wake he’d left a lengthy incarceration record. Felicia never had an arrest record and she’d never really known her family, but many people from her old neighborhood remembered her and a man named Michael (Steele’s alias at the time) often ran around together. Not exactly damning evidence, but circumstantial enough to place Steele with Felicia a confessed thief. Then of course the accusations against Laura Holt, while making up a male superior to combat chauvinism wasn’t against the law, falsifying documents to bring him to life, was.
All in All, the Remington Steele agency’s future looked bleak.
“I don’t think I’ve ever said this to any reporter, and I don’t think I ever will again, but the ball is in your court. You wanna run with this I’ll back you one-hundred percent, but if you decide not to…well I’ll understand that too. You guys have brought me enough evidence to back all your claims up in print, but I get the feeling this don’t sit right with you…especially you son. You’ve been wearing this look all day like a scalded hound.”
“I just think we should go to them first chief, get their side of the story.” Clark looked to Lois for some indication she felt the same way.
“We don’t have any gurantee that they’ll even talk to us let alone break down and confess. I agree that there isn’t enough here to link them to Haas’s death, but the evidence of what they did in the past is as close to air tight as most of our stories get.”
Lois sighed, they’d had this argument on the way back from garage, and they’d been running in circles ever since. Lois thought they should run with the story exposing Remington Steele’s past. Clark thought it was a news worthy story, but wasn’t sure if all the information was factual.
“Say we do run this story, we ruin this mans life his work all that he’s accomplished. What if twenty years down the road we find out it was all an elaborate set up, that we were taken in on this big lie, and we destroyed an innocent man all in the name of a story.” Clark sighed “The fact is I couldn’t live with myself Lois and I know you couldn’t either.”
“You two have met the Steele’s have you not?”
“yeah” Clark said, the night of the Black and White ball seeming so long ago.
“Well did you get the feeling that they were wolves in sheep’s clothing”
“No, but it doesn’t help their cause that they lied to us from the very beginning.”
“They were undercover Lois, something you and I do quite often if you’ll recall.”
“I don’t get you Clark, you’re so quick to blame Lex for things when they go wrong, but everyone else you give the benefit of the doubt. You have no evidence that Lex is even slightly dirty, and yet we have a mountain of evidence against Steele, and you’re ready to bury it because you like the guy.”
“You don’t know Luthour the way I do, and besides this is different…”
“How?!”
“It just is”
Clark felt trapped; he couldn’t tell her the reason behind his distrust of Luthour because it would reveal his secret. He felt a sort of strange kinship the Steele, which only those who were brought up without a real sense of self could feel. The big difference being his adoptive family had given him more love and support then he could ever have hoped for. Johnathan and Martha Kent had raised him to be a loving accepting adult. They’d instilled him with their morals from a very young age, and so he’d become Clark Kent easy going respectable guy. He was polite well mannered and at all times courteous to those around him. Had their situations been reversed, he could easily see himself in Steele’s shoes. Unloved, unwanted only shown affection when it was time to cash a welfare check, it was a miracle Steele hadn’t stayed trapped in that life of crime.
“Would you be this eager to go to print if Superman had done things like this in his past?” Clark turned to Lois her face unreadable.
“Superman is different we all know he’d never—“
“How do you know?! Because of what he does now his actions now define who he is, what he may or may not have done in the past is irrelevant. So maybe Steele was a thief in the past, he should be held accountable, but the statute of limitations on all of his crimes is way past. And you and I both agree that he’s a good man why should we ruin his life over things that he did when he was younger, that have no legal bearing here and now.”
“I can’t believe what I’m hearing. You want us to bury a story because he can no longer be legally prosecuted. The public has a right to know who they hire to protect them.”
Lois stood, pacing the floor in agitation; couldn’t he see this was wrong? She would admit that Remington Steele and Laura Holt were good people, she would even concede that they more then likely had nothing to do with the heist of Albert Haas’s personal affects. But what she wouldn’t do—no couldn’t do—was drop a story of this magnitude just because the statute of limitations was expired.
Perry chose to sit quietly in the background. Both kids made good arguments, and it was more then apparent that neither of them would back down. In the end he hoped they would make the right choice, whichever one that may be.
“And yet you willingly trust Superman with your life, even though you don’t know the first thing about him.”
“That’s not fair Clark. Superman has saved countless lives, he’s donated his time to charity helped the sick and the elderly, and he’s never asked for anything in return.”
“Well maybe it’s because he has something to atone for. Maybe he committed so great a transgression in his past that he feels like helping people will let him sleep at night.” Clark treaded carefully. He was dangerously close to revealing something. Not that he had some outlandish sin to atone for from his past, he didn’t, but he didn’t want Lois to lose her faith in him, or Superman as it were.
“Well until I get hard evidence of something like that I’m not willing to through Superman under the bus.”
“uh…may I make a suggestion boys and girls.” Lois and Clark turned to Perry as if noticing his presence for the first time.
“Sure chief” Lois sighed leaning her hip against his desk in exasperation.
“Why don’t the two of you trek on down to the hospital, and have a little one on one with this P. I., maybe then we can figure out what course of action ya’ll are gonna take.”
Lois threw her hands up in resignation, “fine, but don’t come crying to me when they clam up or tell us where to shove it.” With a final grumble of exhaustion Lois exited the room her hair bouncing against her back trying desperately to keep up with her body.
Clark straightened his suit pants and turned toward the door, he stopped suddenly at Perry clearing his throat.
“That was a big risk you took their son, you don’t want Lois nosing around Superman’s business looking for some big secret.”
Nervously Clark cleared his throat, “I don’t think she’d find anything chief I was just using him as an example.”
Perry leaned back in his chair propping his feet up on his desk “Uh huh…I think we both know what she’d eventually figure out Kent, and don’t think a little pair of glasses will protect you when she does.”
Clark gaped at the older man unable to believe what he’d just heard wordless sounds came out of his mouth, but nothing formed into sentences “Don’t you have somewhere to be son” the editor asked as if he hadn’t just told Clark he knew his secret identity.
“Yeah…I…Lois” and in a flash he was gone.
Perry sat back, a grin on his face, “Rookies”
******
