Superman’s meeting with Bill Henderson went well. He told Bill how Lex had captured him in the basement, and how through the stupidity of Lex he managed to escape. He also told Bill that the fact that he could be killed by exposure to Kryptonite was not widely known, and he would appreciate if the policeman would keep that fact to himself. He was assured that Bill, himself, would oversee the destruction of the cage that was in police custody. He then would wrap the ashes in lead wrap so they could be thrown into the sun. It was more a friendly discussion than a police interview, as the person responsible for capturing Superman and holding him prisoner was no longer alive. Both agreed that kryptonite would be treated as a deadly weapon if found by the police. It was not used for any good purpose other than the control or killing of Superman.
When Clark returned home after his Superman interview, he asked Lois if she wanted to go with him to Smallville. He had a few things he wanted to do with his parents, and since she had nothing to do so she decided to go with him. He laughed when she mentioned that she had nothing going on except a wedding and an investigation. Lois just was never completely still. She seemed to always have something in the hopper. It was so nice to see this Lois, who was happy, busy, and brightly looking forward to the future. The Lois he had encountered right after the almost-wedding with Lex was none of those things. Also different this wedding was the fact that the bride was actually in love with the groom, and the groom with the bride.
*******************
The Daily Planet was now theirs. The payment was made to the investors, and the ownership was firmly taken back from them. It was questioned whether Superman would be a part owner of the paper, and he assured the news media that he would not be even a silent partner. The forty-nine percent interest in the Daily Planet was put on the open stock market and sold to investors. Perry set up a board of directors to guide the management of the paper and hired some really sharp accountants to keep the money straight, as he was interested in making a profit from his investment. An opening date for the newspaper was set, and it was a month after the wedding; just enough time to have a really good honeymoon.
.
*******************
“Mom, please listen…” began Lois as the telephone exploded with verbiage. “I need to tell you something and I can’t seem to finish a sentence right now. Let me talk, or I’ll hang up.”
“Lois, you cannot be serious with this nonsense about a small wedding. And I have to have more than ten invitations, if your Dad will let me have his portion. You had a wedding with 250 people in attendance only six months ago and now you don’t want anyone to come. Are you ashamed of who you are marrying?”
The phone slammed down in Ellen’s ear. “Oh dear, I think I pushed that one too far,” Ellen told herself.
Lois was spitting fingernails. She reached over and pulled the plug on the phone and located her cell phone and turned it off also. Her mom had her chance, and now it was over.
Clark arrived on the balcony just then and walked into the room while spinning back into his jeans and shirt. He found Lois as mad as an old wet hen. He took her in his arms and held her close to him. Lois was too mad to even cry, so he just soothed her by rubbing her back and talking softly in her ear. He had no idea what had happened, but he was sure that it was going to take all of Superman’s strength to be able to soothe her.
“Clark, my mom thinks I’m embarrassed about this wedding, and that is why we are only sending out a total of 50 invitations. If the truth be told, we don’t have even 100 really, really close friends that we want to have there. The number 50 might be ambitious.” She was beginning to settle down, but he could hear her heart beating a drum beat. She obviously was upset by anyone thinking that she was not happy about THIS wedding.
“I offered Mom and Dad a total of ten invitations to send out and she was insulted. I cannot think of anyone other than Aunt Jane and Uncle Mike that I want them to invite. That leaves her five and Dad four more to send out. That’s very generous, I think,”
“Do you want me to help you make up the list of who we are going to invite?” asked Clark. “I will do my best to figure it out. Since my parents are coming from Smallville I doubt they will want 10 invitations, so maybe your folks can have their invitations. Just let’s not lose sight of the fact that we want this to be a cozy, intimate affair just to celebrate our day.”
“Oh, Clark, you know what to say to me.” Lois was pulling herself out of his arms to walk over to the table where the invitations were placed. She thought better of leaving and turned around and kissed him on the cheek. He grabbed her and put his mouth firmly on hers.
“Don’t tell me I have to show you how to kiss me, Mrs. Kent?” The grin on his face when he let her go spoke of his love for her.
“What else do we have on the list to get for this wedding?” asked Clark. “We are running out to time to do things, so we might as well get some of them done this week so that we have a last few weeks to relax.” Lois was looking for paper to make a final list.
They decided to ask Jimmy if he would take the photographs of the wedding. The band idea was dismissed and Clark said he would rather make up a CD of their favorite songs from their own music collection. Clark thought that he would ask Jack if he would be in charge of being the disc jockey at the reception. They still needed to go to the required marriage classes at the church. Since it was to be a simple wedding, Lucy was Lois’ only attendant and Clark wanted to ask his Dad to stand up with him. He thought of asking Pete Ross, his best friend from high school, but since Pete was engaged to Lana Lang, he dismissed the idea. He liked that the Dad who had so willingly taken him into his family would be the one to give him to the love of his life.
*******************
“What is it with you and Clark hating phones?” asked Bobby Bigmouth. He had tracked Lois to her apartment and reminded her that in the light of the day that her temper tantrum from yesterday had left the phones disconnected.
“What have you got for me, Bobby?” asked a very excited Lois. “You know who the head of Intergang is?”
“I have heard a few names, but they are all over the place. The first name is Nigel St. John, Lex Luthor’s old side kick. The other one is Bill Church, the founder and president of the CostMart store. Neither is a firm guess, but it gives you somewhere to start.” Bobby was mentally licking his chops. Lois managed to get him the good stuff, and in large quantities. His appetite was eclectic and massive.
“Are these just guesses or are they pretty solid leads? I have a few things going on right now and do not have the time to play a game of connect the dots. “ Lois was impatient with the investigation. She had other things like her wedding that kept her distracted, but she also wanted to firmly plug up this new crack in the crime family of Metropolis.
“Yes, I heard about the wedding. Congratulations, Lois. You are getting a super guy.” That caught Lois off guard, but she was sure that Bobby’s “super” crack was just a fluke on his part. Like Clark had said to her a few months earlier, she was a buffer zone. Since Lois never knew that he was Superman, chances are good that no one else did either.
“What are you going to serve at the reception? Do I want to be there?” Bobby was looking very expectantly at Lois.
“Clark will have to get another reward from stolen art works if we are going to invite you. We do not have that kind of budget for food, Bobby. Besides, you do not want to come, you just want to have the leftovers.” Lois was pretty sure she had hit the nail on the head.
“Okay, as long as you remember your old buddy, Bobby, when you get ready to put away the leftovers.”
They grinned at one another.
**********************
Lois plugged the phone back into the wall socket.
“Am I being thin-skinned about the comparison of the Lex wedding and our real wedding?” asked Lois. “I just wish I had never said yes to Lex, and there wouldn’t be these snide remarks about the short time between grooms.”
Lois felt a hand on her shoulder.
“Lois, where are you? I told you that you had the best groom in the world for this wedding and you did not even crack a smile. Are you having second thoughts?”
“Oh, sweetie, you are the one and only groom a girl could want. That is why I’m so mad at my mom. I finally do something really smart, like agreeing to marry you, and she makes remarks about it. You and I should have eloped a month ago instead of putting this wedding together. All we really want is someone to join us together and tell us to go and live happily ever after.”
“I like the idea of eloping and getting to the honeymoon stage,” Clark said with a look of amusement on his face. “Meanwhile, I need to order my tux. We would not want the groom to come to the wedding in Superman’s suit.”
“And why not in Superman’s suit?” asked Lois with a big grin on her face.
“You know, that brings up a thought I had about Superman attending our wedding. Since my Dad is going to be the one standing up with me, it would be easy to slip out and arrive at the wedding in the suit. I could
have an emergency just seconds before I need to be at the altar, and everyone would be sure that we are two different people.” Clark looked at her awaiting her reaction to this. If she agreed, he’d have to learn how
to tie a bowtie in less than a second, but it was possible to do it with a little practice.
“Wow, that’s a great idea.” Lois was sure that this would help his credibility and steer those who saw as resemblance between Clark and Superman in a different direction.
*********************
Lois was rather quiet when Ellen called her. Ellen Lane did not exactly apologize to Lois, but she admitted the fact that Lois was really, really happy about this wedding. She had been so unhappy before she went down the aisle at Lex’s wedding, and it had made her mom pause when it turned out that her daughter’s instincts about the groom were correct.
After getting off the phone, Lois cranked up her lap top and went to work looking up the two names she was given in relation to Intergang. She was surprised to learn that Nigel St. John had been a spy in England and he had a criminal history in Chicago before coming to work for Lex in Metropolis. His name and face were plastered over quite a few sites on the internet. When Lois entered the name of Bill Church, Sr., the head of CostMart stores, she was amazed that very little came up except that the chain of stores had made a huge amount of money and had gone from one store in Metropolis to a total of seventy-six stores all over the country in a very short period of time. That was curious! Could you really make a lot of money by slashing the mark-up on merchandise? Or were they making their money another way and laundering it
through their legitimate businesses?
Since Lois had not heard the location of Nigel St. John recently, she chose to take on the inquiry of Bill Church. She decided the place to start her quest was with CostMart store number one. If anything
illegal was happening with the Churches, it would have started at that location . She pulled on a pair of jeans and a white button-down shirt and went to the store. When no one was watching, she slipped into the storeroom in the rear of the store and got a red vest like all the employees wore. She slipped it into her purse and walked back out the front door of the store, hoping that any cameras that caught her action would assume she was another employee taking home her vest.
********************
Repairs to the building housing the Daily Planet were progressing, but were so slow. Perry was just about completely moved back to Metropolis and was so very impatient with the crews that were doing the construction work that it was requested that he no longer go to the Sunrise Building. His presence was not wanted, and if truth be known, he was holding up the progress of the repairs. He changed things after they were finished, and finally the crew chief told him not to come back unless he had requested an appointment for a tour of the repair site.
Clark made a trip to visit the Superman Foundation lawyer to have the non-profit Foundation set up a new endowment for the money that came from the sale of the stock of the forty-nine percent interest of the Daily Planet. The proceeds of the funds were earmarked for schools and libraries in rural areas of third world countries. There were also scholarships set up in Lois Lane’s name for female students who wanted to go into Journalism. Constance Hunter, who really did not like having to go to court, was over-joyed to have so much corporate law work to do. It thrilled her to manage the funds for such wonderful causes. Between the donations to the Superman Foundation, the profits from selling the interest in the Daily Planet, and all the product sales profits from the Superman’s likeness items there was millions of dollars to be managed and herded into the proper places where it could help the most people. All donations, Superman’s included, were channeled through the accounting department of the non-profit. There were salaries paid only for lawyers and accountants. Everyone else donated their efforts to make the world a better place, especially Superman.
********************
Lois put the last stamp on the last invitation and was heading out the door to the post office when she remembered that she also wanted to go to the Police Station to talk to Bill Henderson about Intergang. Since she would be out already, she backtracked into the house and made a phone call to warn the policeman that he should expect her to come by in about an hour. They talked for a minute or two, and then Lois, satisfied that she was making real progress on the case, got to the business of her wedding and her life.
She walked up the block toward the taxi stand in the next block. She vowed to talk to Clark about them getting a car. Why, even Jimmy had a car and he was just a grunt at work. There would be days that Clark would thank her for thinking of that purchase. Besides, her driving was far superior to that of any taxi driver.
Arriving at the post office, Lois marched inside to hand deliver the invitations to a clerk. She did not want them to become separated and some people to receive invitations before others. The clerk took the small box with the addressed invitations neatly stacked inside and tossed it into a gurney sitting at the end of her cubical. All the neatly stacked invitations went in different directions and Lois took a deep breath to keep from yelling at the stupidity of the woman. Gee, she could have stayed in the taxi and tossed them into the mailbox at the street’s edge for the same effect.
When Lois arrived at the Police Station, she was in a bit of temper. She told Henderson that she was on the trail of the new gang, Intergang, and wanted to know exactly what it would take for the police to be able to get a warrant to search a place? Bill explained that they had to have “probable cause” that criminal activity was going on in a place.
“Piece of cake, “ said Lois. “I will get back to you very soon. Oh, by the way, Bill, you and Betty are invited to our wedding. I mailed the invitations today, and we’d love to see you both there. Keep May 22 open on your calendar.”
“I’ll look forward to it, Lois. You are getting a great guy, and probably the only fellow I can think of who can keep up with you.” Bill looked like he had more to say, but knew to keep it to himself.
