But perhaps to win the trust of these two hard-won customers, the man began telling his story. There was not much to tell, really. One day, while cleaning, he lifted the vacuum incorrectly, causing its nozzle to shift. The tag happened to be hanging outside and got sucked in.
Although he eventually rescued the tag from the vacuum nozzle, the string had snapped and the tag was scratched. The man clearly had no way to reconnect the string or forge a new tag. When his boss found out at the end of the shift, he was told he had to buy the damaged item himself.
Jason picked out two suspicious points. First, Batman could not possibly be too stupid to use a vacuum cleaner. Even if Alfred handled his daily life, Batman had maxed out his mechanical skills. Not only could he operate the Batmobile and the Batplane, but any machine in his hands behaved itself perfectly.
Second, even if Batman really did something that stupid, he had ten thousand ways to fix it before anyone noticed—including, but not limited to, instantly crafting an identical string by hand and attaching it, fully restoring the scratched tag, or, at worst, convincing the arriving shop owner not to make him pay compensation.
But this man, who looked exactly like Batman, had simply stood there helplessly and waited for the worst outcome. He was far too different from Batman.
So Jason began subtly asking the man about his name and his past. There were no other customers in the store, and the man looked bored out of his mind. He actually started chatting with Jason.
The man was named Bruce, but his surname was not Wayne. It was Gordon. He said his parents really had been Mr. and Mrs. Wayne, but after they