by Cathy Ace
I felt like a complete twit until Bud whispered, “Who needs their very own grand piano on a boat?”
I grinned, though I couldn’t help but hiss back, “It’s a ship—if you can put a boat on it, it’s a ship. If you can’t, it’s a boat.”
Derek was the perfect host, encouraging us to enter, but I dared take no more than a few steps across the thick pile of the carpet. Like everything else in the room it was a symphony of blues, greens, grays, and creams. Modern, elegant, not quite minimalist, but airy and spacious, the room was delightful. As Bud and I hovered, a man emerged from a door to our right. We both turned, startled.
“Is there anything I can do to be of service?” The small, neat man wore a navy suit, a brilliant white dress shirt, a bow tie, and shiny black shoes. He looked to be about thirty. His badge told me his name was Michael and that he was from Goa. He had good, white teeth; I suspected he had to smile a great deal in his job as a butler, which was another piece of information on his badge.
“Thank you, Michael. Yes—let’s have some drinks on the deck. And some nibbles too. Hors d’oeuvres, please.” Turning to Bud and me, Derek asked, “And how about some sangria?”
“That sounds lovely,” I said.
Bud shrugged and said, “And maybe something soft?”
“There you go, then. Thanks, Michael,” concluded Derek.
“Momentarily, sir,” said the smiling butler as he disappeared through the door from whence he had emerged.
“Just give me a moment to check that Laurie is receiving,” said Derek, striding across the acres of carpet toward the deck. “Make yourselves at home,” he added airily. I couldn’t have imagined anything less like home if I’d tried.
One particularly imposing piece in the room was a glass-topped coffee table, standing between two sofas, the base of which was a pair of breaching dolphins, frolicking in the foam, which was silver-tipped marble. A couple of $100 poker chips, yellow with a red border, lay forlornly on the edge of the table beside a pack of well-worn playing cards.
Derek reappeared at the slider. “Why not come out and join us here?”
Bud and I complied, and headed for the deck.
Once in the open air, it was clear that what we’d been able to see from the sitting room was just half the deck. The rest of it swept away to the left, and housed a large hot tub, out of which Laurie Cropper had just emerged. Swathed in a long, luxurious white velour robe, she smiled and waved.
“I’ll just dry off, and be right there,” she said, then disappeared into another set of sliders, which I assumed led to the bedroom and, more likely than not, the bathroom.
Derek waved at the loungers, inviting us to relax, but I knew I’d feel more comfortable at the dining table, as did Bud, who pulled out a chair for me. Luckily we were shaded from the sun by a white canvas awning, which wriggled in its stainless steel housings in the stiff sea breeze. I scrabbled around in the overstuffed shoulder bag I was carrying, trying to find my sunglasses.
“Been one heck of a day,” smiled Derek, settling himself at the table, his back to the fabulous view. “Has that security guy been to see y’all yet?”
“He just released us from our room,” I lied.
“I guess he must’a come to you when he left here. All a load o’hooey, if you ask me. Course, I’m sorry that poor Tommy’s gone but, you know, it’s gonna be everyone’s turn one day, and this ain’t a bad place to be when it happens, I reckon. He went quick at least, lucky guy.”
Derek’s comment struck me as rather heartless, but I decided to take my chance. “Did you and Laurie know Tommy Trussler well?” I asked. Bud glared at me.
“Nope, like I told the guy earlier, hardly knew him, really.”
That seemed to be that, so I thought I’d try a different approach. “Did you enjoy the Islands, Derek? Is that why you came—to see them? Or is the ship the destination for you and Laurie?”
“The ship’s as good as ever. First time to Hawai’i. We enjoyed the Islands. I think my favorite was Maui, but the wife seemed to prefer O’ahu, especially Honolulu. They’re well set up, aren’t they? All the right stores, great beaches, some excellent hotels, and I have to say that I enjoyed the cleanliness of the place. I guess that’s the rain. Stops everything looking dusty. And I might not be a great gardener, but I sure did enjoy the plants they have everywhere. Great colors, even just the leaves. And the flowers? Laurie liked the hibiscus and enjoyed wearing a plumeria flower in her hair every day. It suited her. Ah yes, I could take to the Island Life, as they call it.” He waggled his thumb and little finger in the sign seen across the Islands, “Hang loose,” he grinned, “though, again, sorry for abandoning you guys that night at the Royal Hawaiian.”
“No need at all,” said Bud. “The ground’s been covered, as Laurie explained when we ran into you the first formal night.”
The first time we met, you were both plastered, was what I thought, quickly followed by, but what of it? “Derek, it’s totally understandable; the travel, the time change, and probably a bit of dehydration—it’s going to make a person feel quite out of sorts,” was what came out of my mouth, though Bud’s expression led me to suspect he was doing a bit of mind reading.
Laurie Cropper made her entrance to the deck from her boudoir. Her neat, slim figure was now encased in a fitted crimson top and white pedal pushers, and she wore crimson kitten heel mules. Her expensively highlighted hair was still damp and she peered over her giant sunglasses, which covered most of her small face, at a manicure I suspected wasn’t up to standard.
“How wonderful to see you folks again!” she gushed in a genuine, if overly friendly, manner. “Derek—did you tell Michael we have guests?”
“I sure did!”
“Good. Just time for a little drinkie-poo before I head off to the spa. I don’t know what time it is, but I have to be there for five o’clock. It’s formal tonight and we’re dining at the captain’s table. He’s so dashing, so I want to look my best.” She grinned at her husband, who smirked back at her. They seemed to be a genuinely affectionate couple.
Michael the butler appeared, as if by magic, and laid out platters of succulent treats along with jugs, glasses, and ice buckets. Derek allowed Michael to present him with a drink that appeared to be almost entirely vodka, with the tiniest drop of cola added at the last minute. He smiled greedily, then gulped.
“Thanks, Michael, very refreshing,” he said. “Help yourselves, won’t you? Michael will tell you what he’s brought.”
Michael nodded and listed the hors d’oeuvres in front of us. “Today we have a selection of blue cream cheese with celery, smoked salmon mousseline on a miniature bagel crisp, cherry tomatoes stuffed with basil-infused mascarpone, frozen grapes, and fresh strawberries dipped in chocolate; the drinks are ginger lemonade with citrus fruits, and guava punch with red berries, as well as the sangria. I can also bring anything else anyone might desire in no more than a moment.”
He sounded proud of his offerings, and I got the impression he’d been selected and trained to be a butler in the most expensive suite on the ship because he was the best at his job. When it came to being civil without obsequiousness, he nailed it.
Laurie sipped heartily from the exceptionally large mai tai placed on the table in front of her with a final flourish by Michael. “A little less orange juice next time, Michael, but otherwise, very good.”
While the butler was still within earshot, she turned to me and said, “I guess he’ll get it just right the morning we’re getting off the ship.”
I replied with, “mai tais for breakfast, you mean?”
Laurie’s good-natured, tinkling laugh stopped only when she sipped again.
As I poured soft drinks for Bud and myself—best to keep a clear head—Derek spoke quietly. “This is all very tragic, and I know we can’t talk about it, other than with the folks who were there this morning. Did Eisen tell you how he died? Do they know yet? He was a kinda cagey about it when he talked to us.”
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I suspected that Derek and Laurie had discussed little else—until she’d decided to dunk herself in their private hot tub, that is.
Bud shook his head. “He didn’t say.” He sounded quite convincing.
“It was sudden, we all know that,” I added. “And you’re right, it’s very tragic. Though I only met the man for the first time this morning, he seemed pleasant. Derek said you didn’t know him well, either, Laurie.”
Laurie sucked her drink through a straw. “Derek and I ran into him when we were visiting the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor,” she said. “We’d been in Honolulu for a few days before that, but hadn’t got about much. It was a long trip from Nashville, and we were pretty tired after, weren’t we, Derek?” She looked at her husband with gentle eyes.
“I ain’t as young as I once was.” He winked at Bud. “But none of us will admit that, right?”
I felt bad for Bud, who was probably a decade younger than the bald, flaccid man sitting opposite us.
“I guess I should’a taken a couple’a days off work before we traveled, but, for all that I’ve ‘retired,’ I just don’t seem to be able to keep my nose outta my businesses,” added Derek wryly.
“What line are you in?” I asked. I hadn’t broached the topic with the couple during our previous meetings, so it seemed like a natural question.
Beaming, our host answered, “Cars, my dear. New, used, rebuilt, yet to be designed. Been in the game my whole life. Cropper’s Cars is a sign you see in many places around the state. Seven dealerships, five more outlets for used cars only, several repair shops.”
Squirming from being referred to as “my dear,” I replied with, “I expect you’ve noticed the change in the economy over the past few years.” I heard Bud inhale deeply.
Derek smiled in a way that suggested he thought me to be rather dimwitted. “In Tennessee, everyone needs to drive something, anything. If we can’t sell ’em a new one, we sell ’em an old ’un. And if they can’t afford that, we fix up the one they’ve got. Some of the small guys have gone under, but we were big enough to muscle our way through. We’re doing just fine, thank you ma’am.”
Our surroundings bore testament to the truth of his statement, so I shut up and allowed Derek to continue, which, thankfully, he did. He sipped his drink, then said thoughtfully, “Tommy was a pleasant guy, but didn’t know squat about cars. He knew a lot of historical stuff about Hawai’i, though, I’ll say that for him. Usually Laurie and I hire a guide for the sort of thing we were doing the day we met him, but we’d been planning to go somewhere else, some palace or museum or other because it was raining. But then it cleared up, so we told our driver to take us to Pearl Harbor instead. She watched a movie about it on her pad on the airplane, so she was full of it, and I like to please her when I can.” He winked at his wife, who nibbled on a strawberry. “It’s been a long time since we’ve gone off on our own like that, me and the lady-wife, so we kinda palled up with Tommy. Then we found out he was going to be on this cruise with us, and we got to chatting about ships and different cruise lines. We hung out with him a few hours, then we left. It’s quite a place, that memorial site. Makes you think. Makes you realize we sometimes don’t know when it’s our time. Didn’t see him again until we were on the ship, which was when I found out about him being the card-playing guy here. He hadn’t mentioned that when we first met. I just thought he cruised a lot.”
So Tommy Trussler had portrayed himself as more of an equal than he really was when he’d met the Croppers. I wondered if he’d been sizing them up as possible marks. I judged that places like Pearl Harbor would be an ideal spot for a pickpocket to operate. Lots of people passed through, all with their minds on something else, something so big, dark, and terrible that they might not notice a light-fingered, ordinary looking man with a bit of a limp.
“And what about after you’d met up with him again here, on the ship, and ashore as we cruised—did you mix much with him then?” I asked.
Dropping the end of her strawberry onto a little plate and wiping her fingers on a napkin, Laurie replied, “Before we got on the ship, he was at the luau the last night at our hotel.”
“I didn’t see him at the luau,” responded her husband, sounding puzzled. “You didn’t tell me about that, and you certainly didn’t mention it to Ezra.” He sounded sure of himself.
“Of course I didn’t mention it to him. Nothing of any consequence happened there. But I told you, dear.” Laurie Cropper didn’t sound cross or impatient; she just spoke with a certainty that matched her husband’s. “I told you he was carrying his own little plastic pot of poi in a fanny pack.” She looked at me as if sharing a confidence when she added, “Tommy told me he always did that because the poi they served at luaus was dreadful. Which it was. I mean, I don’t want to sound like that French queen, or whoever it was, but why can’t they eat relish, or mustard, or ketchup? That gray stuff is just disgusting.”
So here was someone who knew something about Tommy and poi. It was an interesting lead, but I thought it best not to reveal my fascination immediately. “What did you think of him, Laurie?” I asked. “Was Tommy Trussler a pleasant man?”
Bud glared at me.
Laurie Cropper’s fingers hovered above the plate of snacks as she gave my question some thought. She nibbled the smoked salmon mousseline on top of a chip, depositing the chip itself on her plate before she answered. Terrible waste of a perfectly good chip.
Finally she said, “He was the sort of man who made me want to count the rings on my fingers after shaking hands with him.” She cocked her head slightly as she spoke. Her sunglasses made it impossible for me to read her expression, but it surprised me that she’d said something that hinted at an ability to read a person’s true nature. I was immediately more interested in Laurie Cropper. I wondered what role, if any, she’d played in her husband’s business success; he’d referred to the business as a joint effort, not merely his own, which was unusual. Then again, the old adage about every successful man having a strong or successful woman behind him is not one that’s appeared out of thin air.
I decided to follow up by saying, “That’s a very curious comment to make, Laurie. Could you maybe explain what he did to make you think that of him?”
Laurie removed her sunglasses and rubbed her eyes with small fists. She wasn’t wearing a scrap of makeup—she’d been plastered with the stuff every time I’d met her before—and she looked about ten years younger than I’d imagined her to be. I reckoned Derek was in his late sixties, and had guessed at Laurie being his junior by a decade. Now I thought she might be in her early fifties. Interesting.
As I was revising my assessment of her age, Laurie regarded me calmly. She began to wriggle in her seat, then pulled a long tube from her pants pocket and shoved it into her mouth. A second or two later, a trail of white vapor poured from her lips.
“An electronic cigarette?” asked Bud.
Laurie nodded and smiled. “No flammables, no smoke. I know that smoking isn’t allowed in staterooms or on private decks, but this ain’t smoking, right?”
Tilting her head coquettishly toward her husband while exhaling a plume of vapor into the air above her, Laurie Cropper said, “By way of an answer to your question, I’ll tell you this: Derek and I have worked together for thirty years to fill what we like to call our ‘Cropper Coffers.’ We always had a plan, and that plan meant working our socks off until we could afford to live like this all the time—or at least whenever we wanted. I started work at Derek’s first-ever dealership back when I was right out of high school. I meet a lot of girls these days who moan about how women don’t get a fair shake. Well, I just up and beat all those men I was working with, sold more cars than any of ’em and became Derek’s best asset within a year. No help from anyone. No whining. Eventually we married, and we’ve worked together ever since. A true partnership, in every sense of the word. I don’t see why women can’t have everything, but there’s nothing says they can have it all a
t the same time. We chose not to have children. It didn’t make me popular with other women in the area, but I took the whispering and the gossip, and I ate it up. Now we live like this, and the ones with children run around after their grandkids, and I’m sure they just love ’em to bits. But we prefer this. One of the things I’ve learned to be good at is sizing up a man and knowing what he really wants. Tommy Trussler was a slippery sort. Not to be trusted. I saw that in him eventually.”
“She’s never wrong,” added Derek. “She’s warned me off writing finance agreements with people in the past, and I’ve always been grateful. She’s known when to upsell, and when to walk away. She’s guided me to do deals with people I haven’t known well, but whose aims have coincided with my own. Though I must admit I didn’t get the same feeling about Tommy that she did, not until she told me how she felt about him, in any case. He struck me as …” he took a long draught of his drink, almost polishing it off, “… a little sad. Kinda invisible, but wanting to puff himself up a bit. He was a good teacher at the card table, I’ll say that. He pointed out a tell I have that I’ve never known about.” He chuckled. “I won’t be doing that again.”
“Did you mix with Tommy outside the Games Room?” asked Bud. “I saw him around the place a fair bit, but he didn’t seem to have any particular friends onboard.”
Laurie and Derek both shook their heads. “To be honest, we don’t leave our suite a great deal,” said Laurie. “Why would we?” I probably wouldn’t, I silently agreed. “The pool is always busy, and we certainly don’t need or want to shop onboard. I guess I go to the spa every day, for something or another. We do like our massages, don’t we, Derek? And we would pop into the Games Room early in the day if we wanted. As he said, Derek’s been brushing up on his poker there. I think it’s helped him at the tables after dinner.”