Cruise Control Page 3

  I had the photo that Frederick Connors had taken of Guy X on my phone, and I had taken a good hard look at it to imprint the general impression of it on my memory. It wasn’t a clear enough shot to define the guy’s face well, so I searched the crowd for a sense of him. He was a dark-featured guy, maybe late thirties or early forties. Quite a bit younger than Frederick. As I ran my eye across the men, I dismissed anyone older or balder or fairer. There were a few dark-haired guys but none of them had the jawline or deep-set eyes I was looking for.

  Our line inched forward until we reached a banner that was set up like the advertising backing behind an athlete when they were interviewed after a game. But instead of logos for sports apparel or deodorant, this banner featured the cruise line’s branding. Danielle was directed to stand in front of it and a perky young girl with a large camera took her photo. She then shuffled Danielle onward and pulled me in with an energetic smile.

  “Sir, stand right on the dot for me,” she said, dropping in behind her camera.

  I frowned. “Why?”

  “Big smile!”

  “Why?”

  She popped back out from behind the camera. It was considerably bigger than her head.

  “You don’t want to look grumpy on your ship pass, do you? Now, big smile!”

  She dropped back in behind the camera and I dropped the frown but didn’t quite manage the big smile. Or any other kind of smile. The flash burst and the picture was taken and the camera girl ushered me away to keep the line moving. I joined Danielle at a table where another young woman was producing things that looked like hotel keycards. A little printer was pushing the plastic cards out. The girl at the table pulled out a card and looked at it.

  “Ms. Castle,” she said. “This is your ship pass. How would you like to fund it?”

  “Fund it?” Danielle asked. “What do you mean?”

  “The ship is cashless. All payments are made via your ship pass. It acts as both your ID and your payment for incidentals.”

  Danielle looked at me, which I thought was a good way to both avoid and answer the question at hand.

  “I’ll take care of it,” I said to the girl. She nodded and then turned back to the little printer from which she pulled out another plastic keycard. She looked at it and then at me.

  “Mr. Jones,” she said.

  “That’s me.”

  I handed her my credit card. She took it, processed a transaction for an amount she didn’t care to share, and then handed it back with a smile. Then she slipped the ship pass into a clear plastic pocket attached to an orange lanyard with Canaveral Star printed on it, and handed it to me. She then did the same for Danielle.

  “Enjoy your cruise,” she said as she turned to the next person in line.

  Following the lead of the people in front of us, Danielle hung her lanyard around her neck. I wrapped mine around the card and put it in my pocket. I’m not a lanyard kind of guy, and I prefer not to wear ID around my neck. I generally don’t want people to know who I am until I’m good and ready. We moved slowly toward the exit. I kept an eye out for Guy X but didn’t see anyone who fit the bill.

  Now that we were properly identified and branded, we were allowed to wind our way out of the terminal and onto the dock. The Canaveral Star sat moored beside us, and we got our first proper glimpse.

  And it was huge. Ron had told me for a fact it wasn’t large as far as cruise ships were concerned. The Port of Palm Beach was targeting the short-haul market—two-to-five-day trips around the nearby Bahamas—and leaving the longer tours to the bigger facility up at Port Canaveral. Ron had said the Star held up to two thousand passengers, and I believed it. I craned my neck to look up at the top, way above. It looked like a massive apartment building had been built out over the water. It was high and wide and solid. The notion of a prison crossed my mind, and I tried to brush it away. It really didn’t seem to be the right way to start a vacation.

  But I wasn’t on vacation. My eyes drifted down from the upper decks to the gangway by which passengers were embarking. It was there I saw a familiar face.

  Frederick Connors. My client—who didn’t swim and didn’t cruise as a result—was walking up the gangway. He glanced down across the dock and our eyes met. What he would have seen in my eyes was surprise. I saw no such thing, but then, he was expecting me to be there. He might have offered a soft nod, the sort of thing people who watch too many movies think spies do. Then his attention was taken by someone handing him a fruity drink as he stepped onto the ship.

  “You okay?” asked Danielle. “You look a million miles away.”

  “Just saw my client.”

  “I didn’t think he was going to be here.”

  “Me neither. What say we get on this tub and find a drink?”

  “There are many reasons why I love you Miami Jones, and that is definitely one of them.”

  We did the slow shuffle onto the gangway and up onto the ship. We stepped into a large foyer that might have been stolen from a mid-level business hotel. We weren’t anywhere near the top floor—or as they all seemed to prefer to call it—the deck. A man dressed in a white uniform offered us a choice of fruity blue drinks or champagne. Danielle always went with the fruity drinks. I never ate or drank anything blue, so I took some bubbles.

  A crew member wearing Bermuda shorts and a shirt with little ships offered to help us locate our cabin. I wanted his shirt, but didn’t see much point in finding our cabin. They had taken my bags so I had nothing to deposit and therefore no reason to go to our room. But it seemed to be the thing to do. He looked at Danielle’s ID.

  “Ah, deck three. Elevators straight through the foyer here, and you’ll be toward the stern. Enjoy!”

  I drained my champagne and handed him the flute. He gave me a look that suggested holding empty glassware wasn’t part of his job description and I gave him a look that suggested it wasn’t part of mine either. He lost. We moved in the general direction of the elevators. Then I stopped.

  Frederick Connors was standing off to the side of the foyer, in the mouth of a corridor than ran along the side of the ship. He wore a blue blazer and a white shirt with a white pocket square, and was holding one of those blue travel bags. He watched me but he didn’t motion me over. I went anyway.

  “Mr. Connors,” I said. “I wasn’t expecting to see you.”

  “I wasn’t expecting to be here, Mr. Jones.”

  “I thought you didn’t cruise.”

  “I don’t. I can assure you I don’t like being here one iota.”

  “So why are you here?”

  He glanced beside me at Danielle. “Hello,” he said. “I’m Frederick Connors.”

  “Mr. Connors, this is my fiancée, Danielle Castle.”

  Danielle offered her hand and gave him a good grip the way law enforcement types do.

  “Mr. Connors,” she said.

  “Enchanté,” he replied. For a second I thought he might kiss her hand like she was Maid Marian or something. That would not have gone well for him so I was thankful he dropped her hand and turned to me.

  “You didn’t tell me your fiancée was such a beauty, Mr. Jones.”

  “No I didn’t, Mr. Connors. So why are you here?”

  “I guess I thought I should be here.”

  “I’m not so sure that’s a great idea.”

  “I can’t imagine why.”

  I could imagine a thousand reasons why, starting with the idea that he didn’t like being on water let alone open ocean, and ending with the idea that if I discovered firm evidence of his wife’s infidelity he might go postal and do something incredibly stupid.

  “Mr. Connors, if you are here, do you really think that your wife will do anything? It makes it most unlikely.”

  “Mr. Jones, I disagree. I think it makes it more likely. And it decreases the time and place. It could only happen when she knows I am not around. Like if I take a massage, for example.”

  I took a breath. I didn’t like it, but he was pay
ing the bills.

  “All right, Mr. Connors. But if I can’t do my job because you’ve spooked the game, I will spend the rest of the cruise at the bar and send you the tab. Do I make myself clear?”

  “I won’t be in the way, Mr. Jones. I assure you. And I can introduce you to my wife. As the security personnel for her jewels.”

  Connors told me the auction was setting up in the second ballroom. I wondered how many ballrooms a ship needed. We agreed to meet there after we had settled in. Connors turned down the corridor toward the forward elevators. Danielle and I made our way to the elevators in the middle of the ship.

  The cars were glass enclosures on either side of an atrium open to a skylight roof several floors above. The entire space felt like a high-end mall on Christmas Eve, and not just because of the decor. The area was packed with waiting people. The four elevators were working overtime, but they couldn’t keep up with the flow of people coming aboard.

  Danielle elbowed me in the ribs and directed us away from the throng toward the empty stairs. I liked taking stairs. It’s the taking of stairs over elevators that allows me to enjoy the hospitality of Longboard Kelly’s as often as I do and still keep up with my extremely fit fiancée.

  We paused at the stairs and looked up, and then at the plaque on the wall that told us we were on deck five.

  “Did he say deck three?” I asked.

  “He did,” said Danielle.

  So we went down. The stairs were wide and bright and open, so it didn’t feel like we were descending into the bowels of the vessel. But then we hit deck four and noted that the open feeling of the atrium was gone. The ceilings were lower and corridors split left and right toward rooms. We kept going down.

  Deck three was like we had descended into the belly of the beast. Although the walls and the carpet were bright and light in an attempt to perk things up, the low ceilings and mechanical hum made it feel like the entrance to the engine room. There was a maid’s cart down at the far end of the corridor, which was the only suggestion that passengers were supposed to be down here. We checked the signage and Danielle’s ID card and confirmed our cabin number. Then we set off toward the aft end of the ship.

  Our cabin was the last in the corridor. Next stop was probably a life raft. Danielle used her card to open the door. I stepped in behind her and stopped. I stopped because there was nowhere left to go. The cabin was about the size of a janitor’s closet. There were bunk beds tucked into the wall, with curtains to pull across for privacy. There was no other furniture. There wasn’t room for any. A small television was fixed to the wall opposite the beds, and the far wall featured a mirror in the shape of a porthole.

  Danielle pivoted to look at me.

  “I suppose the idea is that we aren’t supposed to hang out in the room.”

  “I’m just glad we packed light.”

  We stood in silence for a moment and I glanced into the bathroom. I figured I could use the commode and the shower at the same time, which was a nice touch if I were in a hurry. The hum had grown considerably louder.

  “Is that the engine?” Danielle asked.

  I shrugged. “Why do I get the feeling like we’re underwater right now?”

  Danielle shuddered involuntarily.

  “Why don’t we go find this ballroom?” I suggested.

  “Lead the way, good sir.”

  Chapter Five

  We were going to get in our daily allotment of steps, that was for sure. We walked back to the middle of the ship and took the stairs back up to deck five. There we found a map displaying the general layout of the ship. It seemed that we were bunking on the lowest of the passenger decks. Decks five and six were filled with shopping, restaurants and bars, while the upper decks contained cabins that I assumed were more spacious than ours, as well as the outdoor areas for pools, ziplines and a golf driving range.

  There were three ballrooms. I couldn’t imagine why they would need to hold three balls at once, but I suspected that ballroom was just a pompous way to say multipurpose room. The biggest of the three was just aft of the atrium. The other two were forward.

  The first we came to was the wrong ballroom. This one had been set up like the Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. Glass cases showed off trophies and rings and pennants, old programs from early Super Bowls, framed jerseys from Green Bay and New England and Pittsburgh. Already a smattering of people wandered through, with hushed reverence, like pilgrims visiting the Sistine Chapel.

  I surveyed the room for Guy X. Though there were a handful of likely candidates, I dismissed them all for reasons of age or manner or companion. A group of young guys huddled together, whispering in a way they no doubt thought was furtive. I knew the look. I’d seen it in plenty of guys their age. Guys who thought they were untouchable and invincible. My mother would have taken one look at them and concluded that they were up to no good.

  “What’s this one?” asked Danielle.

  I turned back to her. She was looking at silver trophy inside a glass cabinet. The trophy looked like a football sitting on a traffic cone.

  “That’s the Lombardi Trophy,” I said. “It’s awarded to the winner of the Super Bowl.”

  “So there’s just one of them?”

  “No, the winner keeps it. A new one is produced each year. Did you know they were produced by Tiffany & Co?”

  “Tiffany’s? Really?”

  I nodded.

  “So who won this one?”

  “This was . . . huh.”

  “Huh?”

  “No one won this one. It’s this year’s. It hasn’t been awarded yet.”

  I glanced at the group of young guys across the room. There was some nodding going on, like a decision had been reached, and some of the group were goading one of their number to do something. I looked at them and then I looked at what they were looking at. Then I connected some dots. At the door to the ballroom, a serious-looking security guy was standing in place, watching the room. But he wasn’t watching all the room. It wasn’t possible. I drifted over to him.

  “You got some trouble coming,” I said.

  He frowned. “Excuse me, sir?”

  “Trouble. You see the right rear corner of the room? That group of young guys?”

  “You know them, sir?”

  “No, I don’t know them. But I know the type. The guys are wearing Cleveland Browns gear.”

  “Not a crime, sir.”

  “We can debate that later. But you see that trophy they’re eyeing up?”

  The guard squinted like his vision was failing him.

  “It’s a Heisman Trophy,” he said.

  “Not any Heisman. It was won by BJ Baker at Southern Cal.”

  “How do you know it’s Baker’s Heisman? They all look the same.”

  “That trophy and I know each other well. You remember BJ Baker?”

  “Not at college.”

  “What about after college? Do you know where he played professional football?”

  The guard thought for a second. “Pittsburgh?”

  “Right.”

  Then the penny dropped. Cleveland and Pittsburgh were close, geographically speaking, and not close in any other respect. The Pittsburgh Steelers might have considered any number of other teams to be their biggest rivals, but the Cleveland Browns fans reserved a special kind of hatred for Pittsburgh.

  The guard lifted a walkie-talkie radio from his belt. “Central, we have a possible situation in ball three.”

  He began edging his way toward the right rear of the room. I dropped in behind him like a running back and followed him.

  “We got some hotshots with beers, looking to mess with the exhibits,” he said into his radio. I had to hand it to him. I hadn’t noticed the beers, but they were certainly there.

  One of the guys separated from the group. He had sandy blond hair and a cocky swagger and reminded me of me, back in the day, but not in a good way. He held a beer can in his hand and moved rapidly toward BJ Baker’s Heisman Trophy.<
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  The Heisman looked defiant, his hand thrust out to perform a stiff-arm and then continue on to the end zone. The blond guy pulled his can back and set himself to pitch his drink.

  But he didn’t. The guard stepped in front of him and the guy only got halfway through his action, pulling himself up short and almost falling into the guard in the process.

  “I’m sorry, sir, we can’t allow beverages in the exhibition hall,” said the guard.

  “What?” The blond guy knew he’d been caught in the act, but his brain was trying to process the fact that the guard wasn’t going to take him to the floor or something worse. Two more security guards moved in quietly.

  “Why don’t we just move back to a bar area and finish our drinks quietly?” The guard ushered the guy toward the door without laying a hand on him. These three were pros and I had to hand it to them. What could have become a situation fizzled into nothing.

  The other two guards nodded the guy’s buddies toward the door.

  “Thanks for the spot,” the first guard said to me.

  I nodded in return and noted the scowl on the face of the blond Cleveland Browns fan. He clearly wasn’t impressed with me, and I wasn’t even wearing any kind of team colors. But I had rained on his parade before he had even gotten his float out of the garage.

  I left the guard and the young guys to their testosterone and returned to Danielle. She wore a big grin.

  “What is it with you and that trophy?”

  “It’s like we’re cosmically connected, isn’t it?”

  “Why is BJ Baker’s Heisman here anyway?”

  “They probably asked him to loan it to them for this Hall of Fame or whatever it is. He wouldn’t miss a chance to showboat.”

  “Shall we find this other ballroom?”

  I nodded and followed her out.

  We found the other ballroom after getting lost twice. It felt about the same size as the ballroom we had just come from. At least that was my sense from the doorway. Unlike the Hall of Fame room, the security guard here wasn’t letting in any old Harry or Sally.