Cruise Control

by A. J. Stewart

  Frederick Connors had never run before. It was obvious to everyone in the lounge. I wasn’t the only one watching. Mouths were dropping all throughout the bar as Frederick made his way across. I couldn’t help thinking that it would have been quicker to just walk. His knees went up and his feet came down but he really didn’t really get anywhere. There was no stride to his stride. He sort of bounced across the carpet with splayed legs like a newborn colt. But foals picked up the whole running thing within an hour. Frederick wasn’t going to have any such luck. I watched him go until Danielle appeared at my shoulder.

  “What is he doing?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure. I think he’s running away.”

  “To where? We’re still on a ship.”

  We watched him head toward a set of concertina glass doors, which had been pushed aside to allow access to a deck where party lights hung in subtle clusters.

  “You don’t think he’ll jump, do you?” she asked.

  “I am not going in again.” I wasn’t. If Frederick wanted to go over he was on his own.

  “We should get him,” said Danielle.

  I nodded and started walking. Nothing more was required. It was a slow-motion chase. I ambled across the lounge. Fredrick hit the outside deck about five feet in front of me. He kept going. I could have reached out and grabbed him but I didn’t see much point. If he made to go over the edge I was going to kick his feet out from under him. Otherwise he was running himself into a corner.

  He reached the gunwale and put one hand against it. I could hear him breathing heavily. All that herky-jerky motion would take it out of anyone. Frederick stumbled like he might collapse, but he caught himself and thrust his body forward at the gunwale.

  And then he flung the blue travel bag out into the air like a discus. He couldn’t run but he could throw. The bag spun and spun, the handles reaching out as if they wanted to be caught. Then the bag dropped away into the night. I didn’t hear the splash over the sound of the ship cutting through the ocean.

  Frederick put both his hands on the gunwale and collected his breath, and then he turned around and leaned against the edge and looked back at me.

  I stayed where I was just outside the doors. Danielle and Army joined me. Then Anastasia arrived. She wasn’t a fast mover, but she didn’t need to be. She walked like she had rollers on her feet, drifting like a ghost. She got to the doors but she didn’t step out.

  “Frederick, have you lost your mind?”

  We looked at Frederick for an answer but he didn’t give one. He just stood in glow of the colored party lights.

  “He hasn’t lost his mind,” I said, “but he did steal your rings.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Anastasia gave me the look. At this point, a different facial expression would have been a surprise. She could never have been an actor. Her facial expressions for mad, confused, contrite, exasperated, disappointed and plain disgusted were all exactly the same.

  Frederick, however, had found a new expression. Smug. Maybe he’d taken it from his wife when he took her rings. The thought of which made a whole lot of things become clear. In my mind, I watched the bag flying out over the water one more time and it was like filling in that one word in the crossword that makes all the other words apparent. Not that I did a lot of crosswords. But I understood the concept.

  Anastasia looked from her husband to me. Then her face did change. Like a penny was dropping.

  “Why did you throw that bag overboard, Frederick?” she asked.

  “What bag?” said Frederick.

  “My rings were in there? In that bag?”

  “What rings?”

  “You threw my rings into the sea?”

  I looked at Frederick, all smug and sweaty. Then I turned back to his wife.

  “No,” I said. “He didn’t throw your rings overboard.”

  The smugness dropped a little from Frederick’s face. He had looked inside the bag and seen the rings, and I saw the first hint of confusion.

  “He just tossed the fakes overboard,” I said.

  “I’ve told you before,” said Anastasia, “they are not fakes.”

  “Not your reproductions, Mrs. Connors. I’m talking about the fake fakes that Mr. Connors brought on board with him.”

  “I did no such thing,” said Frederick.

  “Yeah, you did. And you switched them for your wife’s rings.”

  “Oh, really? I’m a cat burglar now?”

  “Not the way you run. And I have to admit, I didn’t get it until now. It was pretty slick. How do you get valuable rings out of a locked room? There’s video, there were guards. No one went in. No one. So how could it happen?”

  “I have no idea,” Frederick said.

  “You didn’t, I’m sure. But your partners did.”

  “Oh, I have partners now.”

  “You do. See, I think you had this idea about stealing the rings but you had a couple problems. The first was how do you actually steal them? You’re many things, Mr. Connors, but as we just agreed, you’re no cat burglar. So you needed someone to help plan this thing. And then there was your second problem. How do you sell them? You needed some help there, too.”

  Frederick said nothing.

  “Now that I’m thinking it through, how do you find a person like that? I know how I would do it. I’d ask my friend Sal. He knows people like that. But they don’t advertise. So how does a guy like you find them? Answer. You don’t. They find you. You told me you ran a chain of fast-food outlets.”

  “Fast-casual restaurants,” said Frederick.

  “They’re donut shops,” said Anastasia.

  “They’re fast-casual restaurants!”

  I looked between the couple. It was clearly a sore point.

  “Whatever you call them, what they are is cash intensive. Lots of currency passes through restaurants, especially fast-food ones. And cash-intensive businesses attract the attention of people like the ones my friend Sal knows. They call it protection. The FBI calls it racketeering. I bet you pay off some guys like that. That’s how you know them. So you go to them and you make a proposal. There are these rings, worth three million bucks. And they come up with the plan.”

  “It’s genius, Mr. Jones. I’m sure you even know the plan.”

  “I didn’t. I got it just now, when you threw that bag overboard. You solved it for me. How do you get rings out of a locked room? Easy. You do it before the room gets locked.”

  “What are you talking about, Mr. Jones?” asked Anastasia. “I locked them in the safe. You were there. We were all there when the room got locked.”

  “Yeah, we were. That was the clever part, and not a little bold. Because the theft happened right before my eyes.”

  “Before your eyes?” said Danielle.

  I nodded. “Yep. Before yours, too. I had no idea, until I just remembered something I had said to Mrs. Connors. Maybe deep down I knew. Maybe not. I said there was some David Copperfield stuff going on.”

  “I remember,” said Anastasia.

  “I meant it like you had to be a magician to get something out of a locked room.”

  “I understood the reference,” she said.

  “But I was wrong. David Copperfield isn’t just a magician. He calls himself an illusionist. And what’s the key ingredient of the illusion?”

  Everyone shook their head. No one knew.

  “The art of misdirection.”

  I got a lot of confused faces.

  “We were all in the auction room. The auctioneer inspected the rings and confirmed they were the real fakes.”

  “Reproductions!” said Anastasia.

  “Whatever. The real ones. And then what happened?”

  “I went with Arnold to sign the auction agreement.”

  “Right. And our attention was on you doing that. It was then that Frederick put the rings into the safe.”

  “Exactly,” said Anastasia. “In the safe. Which, as I just said, I locked.”

 
“Right. The second part of the misdirection, or a second misdirection. I don’t know, I’m not a magician. But first he put the rings in the safe. Only he didn’t. He had the fakes—”

  “Reproductions, Mr. Jones!”

  “No, Mrs. Connors, this time I mean the fakes. The eBay knockoff fakes. He had them in his little blue travel bag. That bit was clever. Everyone had one of those bags. You could take it anywhere, and he did. Someone might question a different kind of bag, but not that one. They’re everywhere. So he slipped behind the display cabinet and opened the safe and took his fakes out of the bag and slipped them inside the safe, and put your rings in his bag. Then he let you lock the safe, so you were the last person to see your rings. But you didn’t really see them. You saw two boxes of fakes.”

  Anastasia frowned and shook her head.

  “It’s not possible.” She said it, but she didn’t sound convinced.

  “Good luck proving any of this,” said Frederick.

  “Yeah, it’s all pulled tight, your plan,” I said. “Except for that one weak link.”

  Frederick said nothing.

  “You had to get them off the ship,” I said. “That was the tough part, really. There’s security and passport control and everything. But your partners had a plan for all that, didn’t they? Only something went wrong.”

  “Something went wrong?” Danielle asked.

  “Yeah. You remember when we were in the casino last night? The opening cocktails thing? There was a bit of a disturbance. Someone accused someone of cheating or something. Security was called.”

  Danielle said, “I remember.”

  “So fine, no big deal. But then Army came in and told me there had been a fight in the Hall of Fame room. Again, it’s a cruise, people are drinking, things happen. But they happened at the same time. Dumb luck as much as anything. But it made all the vendors skittish about their stuff. So we all trooped down to the auction room. It was then we found out the rings were fakes.”

  “We know all this, Mr. Jones,” said Anastasia. “You can be quite tedious.”

  “Tedious or not, we now knew about the theft. But imagine we didn’t. Imagine that disturbance didn’t happen in the casino, no fight in the Hall of Fame. We didn’t bother to check the rings.”

  “We wouldn’t have known it happened,” said Danielle.

  “Exactly.”

  “Of course we would have,” said Anastasia. “Buyers would have verified their purchase at the auction. It has to be done to validate the certificate of authenticity.”

  “Sure. But that would happen when? A couple hours from now. After the auction tonight. So we wouldn’t have known until then.”

  “And the rings would have walked off the ship on Paradise Cay,” said Danielle.

  “Exactly. We wouldn’t have even started looking for them until way too late.”

  Everyone stood silent for a moment to think it through. I did the same thing. After all, I hadn’t been sitting around for the past two days with the plan in my head. Things only came to me once I realized Frederick was the one behind it. But I waited for the question I knew would come.

  “You’re saying they got off the boat?” asked Anastasia. “How?”

  “It was a good plan and it might have worked if we hadn’t known about the theft as early as we did. Frederick couldn’t do it. Passengers are often security checked on and off the ship. Bags can be searched. But crew, they have more freedom of movement. So Frederick gave the bag to Martin Perkins.”

  “Who on earth is Martin Perkins?” asked Anastasia. She was rapidly losing her composure. I could understand why.

  “The bartender who just handed Frederick the bag.”

  “Him? What has he got to do with anything?”

  “Nothing. He’s just a guy who would carry a bag onto the cay and give it to another guy, and then pretend to be that second guy getting back on board so the passenger numbers would add up.”

  “He gave the bag to whom?” asked Anastasia.

  “Frankie Martelli,” I said.

  Anastasia leaned against the glass panels of the folded door and put her hand to her head. “Mr. Jones, you will be the very end of me. Who on earth is this Martelli person?”

  “I’m willing to bet he works for the people your husband approached to do this job.”

  We all looked at Frederick. He sort of shrugged, like he didn’t care. I had a good idea why. He knew who he had gotten in with. He knew they were serious people. The sort of serious people whose people didn’t turn on them. That was a death sentence. Or life in the witness protection program, living in Des Moines, which for those guys was the same thing.

  I said, “Mr. Connors knows that his partner’s people won’t turn on them. They’re those kind of guys.”

  Connors smiled, just a little.

  “But the bartender isn’t one their guys. He’s not dumb, though. He won’t roll over on them. But he will roll over on you, Fred.”

  Frederick dropped the smile. Maybe it was because I used the short form of his name but I didn’t think so.

  “He’s got plenty to say. Like how he received stolen property from you, and was asked to pass it on to an organized crime figure, who, he says, he cannot identify.”

  I watched Frederick. He hadn’t looked his polished self since getting fished out of the Atlantic Ocean. His look wasn’t improving. I wasn’t sure why he had done what he had done, but I figured things were not all they could be in his life, and they had clearly just gotten a good deal worse.

  His eyes drifted to his wife. They were sad eyes. Sad because of what he had lost or sad because he had been caught out, I couldn’t say. But I followed his look and turned to Anastasia. Her look was not one of sorrow. Or even anger. If I were pushed, I would have called it a look of resignation. Of an expectation that Frederick would one day disappoint her to a level that put all other disappointments to shame. Her eyes bored into him for an uncomfortable amount of time. Then she turned her eyes to me.

  “Mr. Jones, does this story end with you telling me where my pieces are?”

  I nodded. “It does.”

  Army stepped forward. “Mrs. Connors, I have your items in the safe in my office.”

  “So we can still partake in the auction.”

  “Well, yes. I suppose. It will have started already, but I guess they could slip your items in. I’m not sure that the buyers will be able to take their items home, though. The authorities in Palm Beach may want to hold the rings as evidence.”

  “I understand,” she said. “But that will only increase their value. You’ll get them for me?”

  “I will.”

  “Thank you.” Anastasia turned to leave.

  “Mrs. Connors,” I said. “What about your husband?”

  She spun around to looked at me. She didn’t look at him.

  “You can throw him overboard if you wish. I have to get dressed.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  I didn’t watch Anastasia and Army leave. I kept my eye on Frederick. I wasn’t worried about him getting away. He couldn’t swim and he couldn’t run, so unless a helicopter dropped a rope ladder from the sky he was out of options. And I didn’t even like his chances of making it up a rope ladder.

  He wasn’t quite so smug anymore. Rather, he looked annoyed. The muscles at the edge of his mouth twitched like he wanted to snarl, but he either didn’t know how or he had suppressed the urge to do it to his wife for so many years his muscles had forgotten the process.

  “If you think you’re getting paid now . . .”

  I shrugged. “Why not? You hired me to find out if your wife is having an affair. And I did. By the way, she’s not.”

  “You haven’t proven anything. About her or about me.”

  “Freddy, my boy, you really are a card.”

  “My name is not Freddy.”

  “I’ll let your fellow inmates come up with your new name.”

  “You have nothing.”

  “Wrong, Fred. I would
have had nothing. I would have come back with no definitive proof of anything. We owe our thanks to one person.”

  “Who?”

  “You, Fred. You were the architect of your own demise.”

  I liked that line and had been wanting to deliver it for some time.

  “You think so, do you?”

  “I do, Fred. I figure it like this. You’re unhappy in your marriage, or something like that. Maybe it’s midlife crisis time. I can’t read your mind, so I don’t know why you did it exactly. Maybe you were sick of Ana talking down your business. Maybe your restaurants were in financial trouble. I don’t know and I don’t care. But I see it going down like I said. You pay some bad hombres protection money. You figure they know about things like jewel heists. You take the idea to them. Three million in rings. Specially designed for this weekend and best of all, being moved out of the relative security of your wife’s store and onto a relatively unsecured ship.”

  “It’s a fine story, Mr. Jones.”

  “Nah, it’s a terrible story. Because I don’t like sad endings. I’ve been around my fair share of them. Some through my own actions and some despite me. And I’ll tell you now, Fred. You don’t know these people like I know these people.”

  “You do, do you?”

  I nodded. “I do. And I know this about them. They’re like pirates. Plan A is always to take it all whenever they can. There really is no honor among thieves. They always want it all. So after you laid out the job, the first thing they did was look at all the ways they could do this thing without you.”

  Frederick frowned and said nothing. But I could tell I had his attention.

  “I’m sure they checked out the store, did a wander through, maybe two, pretending to be customers. They would have checked out any other weak points. Maybe your house or other places your wife goes. Maybe they canvassed the idea of kidnapping her and forcing her back to the store. But there’s a lot of risk in that. And considering what these guys do for a living, they’re generally more risk-averse than you’d think. But they were a bit sloppy. They were careful not to get made by the mark—Mrs. C—but they forgot about you. You spotted them.”