“And there’s another thing I don’t think you’ve thought of. He’s scared to death of you, and if you touch him he’ll go completely berserk. You may be stupid enough to want to see what’ll happen when a man runs amok on a forty-foot yacht with four other people on it, but the rest of us are not. Also, this is no hospital, so what do you do if he dies? So far, everything that’s happened has been the result of an accident or bad luck or his crackup, and nobody’s committed a deliberately criminal act—”
“You call what he did to my wife an accident?”
“For Christ’s sake, Bellew, he panicked! You want to beat him to death because he got scared and lost his head?”
“Captain Ingram!” It was Mrs. Warriner this time. Well, he’d been expecting it.
He turned to her. “Bellew’s right,” he said wearily, “and you know it. I don’t know why you want to saddle yourself with the blame for the whole thing, but your husband didn’t crack up because he thought you and Bellew tried to kill him. That’s just another place to hide, another way to try to pass the buck. There’s no doubt he’s afraid of Bellew, and he’ll be ten times as afraid of him now, but nobody in his right mind who’d known you for as long as an hour would ever believe anything as stupid as that. He was already irrational when he came up with that gem—”
“Wait a minute!” Mrs. Warriner interrupted. “You still don’t know the whole story. Why do you think we were both in that one cabin when you found us? Hughie hit Bellew and locked us in there because when he came below he found this vermin —this incredible, filthy, loathsome pig—already there trying to get into bed with me. What was he supposed to think? If he’d had any doubts before, that would settle them. I hadn’t made any noise; being raped was preferable to having Hughie come running down there and probably be beaten to death.”
Ingram looked at Bellew, trying to keep the contempt from showing any more than necessary. Don’t push him, he thought; he’s pretty close to the edge. But the latter was completely at ease. “Rape! Geez! So maybe I was trying to collect what you owed me; it had nothing to do with it, anyway. Hughie-boy already had his club with him when he came down there. He brought it from deck, because he’d already sighted this boat over here.”
The son of a bitch, Ingram thought. The dirty, sad—
“If you were that broken up over your wife’s death,” Rae asked, “how did you ever happen to notice she was missing?”
Ingram gripped her arm and shook his head at her, but neither of the others had heard her anyway.
At least he knew now why Mrs. Warriner insisted on assuming all the guilt, even if she was probably still wrong. “Listen,” he said, “that doesn’t change anything. He locked you in there because he was already irrational, and he was irrational simply because his mind refused to accept the fact he’d been responsible for Mrs. Bellew’s death.” Then he wondered if he was being very smart. This would only inflame Bellew even more. No, Bellew already knew it anyway, and if he was brutal and stupid enough to want to smash up a boy who was mentally sick, this was merely superfluous and would have no effect on him one way or the other. And somehow he had to reach Mrs. Warriner.
Even while he was conscious of a faint self-disgust for beginning to sound like a cocktail-party psychiatrist, he couldn’t escape the feeling that her illogical burden of guilt was probably as dangerous here as Bellew’s vindictiveness, and just as likely to trigger an explosion. And certainly it made it a lot more dangerous, and unnecessarily dangerous, for her. Not having any interest at all in what happened to her if anything happened to Warriner, she’d attack Bellew with anything in sight, and the consequences of that wouldn’t be anything you’d ever want to remember—if you lived long enough to remember anything. Then, just for a moment, he was tempted to throw up his hands and let the three of them go ahead and kill themselves. Why did he have to defend Warriner, who’d caused the whole thing, when obviously his responsibility was to Rae? Was he going to endanger her life again for that alibi-artist, merely because he was helpless? But he knew he couldn’t turn his back on it, even aside from the fact that once it started it couldn’t be contained or avoided anyway. And, in the end, there was always Mrs. Warriner. She was worth fifty of the other two, and you couldn’t let her throw herself into the meat-grinder from some misguided feeling of guilt.
“For God’s sake,” he went on wearily, “none of it was your fault, and you’re not even doing him any good by trying to take the blame. I’m no head-shrinker, but it seems to me the chances are very good he can be brought out of it, with proper treatment. But he has to admit it. I don’t think it’s a feeling of guilt that made him crack up, but just the refusal to accept the blame. And as long as you go on grabbing all of it in sight, he never will. Jesus, there’s no crime in losing your head. Anybody can do it; it’s unpredictable. You know that yourself, Bellew—”
“No, I don’t, good-buddy. I say nobody but a limp-wristed punk like Hughie-boy could do it, but then I’d never argue with a smart bastard like you. Why don’t you write a book?”
He bit down hard on his temper. The whole attempt to appeal to the man had been futile, and any minute it was going to get out of hand. He had to move Warriner, and he’d better do it now, before he waked up. If he could get him shut up in that forward cabin, out of sight, they might make it through the night without an eruption of violence, and by morning Bellew would have had a chance to think twice about it. But getting him out from behind the wheel and down the ladder wasn’t going to be easy. He was on the point of telling Bellew to give him a hand when he remembered the old axiom: never give an order you know is going to be ignored.
He turned to Mrs. Warriner. “I think the best place for him is in the forward cabin. The rest of us can use the two bunks in the main cabin in relays, or flake out on deck, subject to the watches we work out. So if you’ll take his feet, we’ll move him down there now.”
“Yes, of course,” she said. She stood up.
“No,” Bellew said. “As you were.”
“What?” she asked.
“Goldilocks stays right where he is.” Bellew reached out a foot, put it against her midriff, and pushed. She sat down again.
There was no point in even saying anything, Ingram thought coldly. The act was deliberate and self-explanatory. He was already on his feet, and he hit Bellew as hard as he could just under the ear, as he was getting to his. The only chance he had was to hurt him, and hurt him badly, right at the start. But even as the blow landed, he knew he’d lost. Bellew rolled back with it with the ease and the beautiful reflexes of a pro and counterpunched with almost unbelievable speed for a man his size. Ingram felt the wind go out of him as a fist like a concrete block slammed into his stomach; and then another, which he only partially blocked, hit him over the heart. He started to fall but came back against the mizzen. Bellew hit him twice more in the stomach. Sickness ballooned inside him. He heard Rae shriek behind him, and Mrs. Warriner was trying to get past him to reach Bellew herself.
It was no place to fight; there was no room. He pushed off the mast, blocked Bellew’s next punch, and managed to get under his guard with a right. Saracen rolled down to starboard. Bellew straightened, off balance, and Ingram hit him again. Bellew went back across the cockpit seat. Ingram swung again, lost his balance, and came down on top of him. They were in the after end of the cockpit, against the binnacle, and Ingram landed with his right forearm across the side of Warriner’s face. Warriner stirred and groaned.