She sounded about the same, a little more excited than usual. She went in for some pretty far-out clothes, but tonight she was wearing a short striped jacket over a low-necked print dress. He smelled gin and perfume.
She swayed toward him. She was among friends; she wasn’t wearing a bra.
“Throw out the sea anchor,” she said. “Batten down the hatches or whatever you do. I’m not inviting you to an orgy, though that might be nice at another time. We’re having a small argument, my husband and I, and I want you to witness a signature. There’s money involved. Pots and pots of money.”
She picked off his cap and clapped it on her own head. He needed that cap, it was part of his image. He made an involuntary movement after it and kicked over the bottle.
“Captain, you’re drinking,” she said lightly. “All by yourself-it’s unsociable.” Then she added in her nasty voice, “Come on, damn you.” She didn’t use that voice too often, but she got results when she did. “I’ll tolerate no mutinous officers aboard this ship.”
She had that a little wrong. They were outside the three-mile limit, and the captain gave the orders. True, she was wearing the captain’s cap, but Petrocelli was still the captain.
He gave the Chryslers a quick goose before switching them off so they would start again when he needed them. She was waiting in the doorway, giving off a wave of impatience. He could have refused to go, he supposed, but the truth was, he was curious about what was going on down there. As the responsible person aboard, it was his obligation to find out.
He didn’t interrupt anything when he walked in. The two men were sullen and silent, and they both looked as though they wished they were somewhere else. The reason De Rham was no longer playing his guitar was that somebody-three guesses who-had slammed it against the corner of the table, which must have made De Rham very sore. He loved that guitar.
In bathing trunks, De Rham was rather scrawny, which he made up for as well as he could by wearing a beard, a full one, all the way to the ears. Now his only garment was a pair of faded jeans torn off at the knees. Paul Brady, stretched out on the built-in couch with a drink on his paunch, was trying to look cool. He only succeeded in looking rigid. He was wearing a pullover, yellow linen slacks and topsiders; his ankles were crossed.
“Captain,” he murmured, “want to umpire?”
Mrs. De Rham had been a blonde that afternoon-the color was more or less natural, at least it was her own hair. Now she was wearing a dark wig. You wouldn’t have known it wasn’t real.
“I found the captain drinking gin,” she said pleasantly. “So we’re heaving to for the night. Is that the expression? Raphael Petrocelli, I think this is the first time I’ve seen you without your cap. Your forehead is unnaturally pale.”
Brady corrected her. “Naturally pale. When his cap is on the sun can’t reach it. An analogy would be those parts of a woman’s body not covered by her bathing suit.”
“Such as it is,” De Rham said.
“Such as it is,” Brady agreed.
Drunk as skunks, both of them. They were drinking scotch, against Mrs. De Rham’s gin.
“Henry, you’re the host,” she said. “Captain Petrocelli would like a drink. Spring into action.”
“I’ve sprung into action enough for one day.”
“One of the things wrong with this country,” she remarked to Petrocelli, “is the poor manners among the men. They get worse every year. When I was a girl the boys had to wear white gloves to dancing class. They bowed from the waist. They stood up when a girl came into the room.”
“That was before World War II, wasn’t it?” her husband said-which was unfair, Petrocelli thought. She might be thirty, at a stretch, but De Rham wasn’t a hell of a lot younger. Possibly twenty-six. The beard made it hard to say.
Meanwhile Mrs. De Rham was making him a drink. It didn’t take any skill. All she did was put gin in a glass.
“I’m sorry to say we’re out of ice.”
As a matter of fact, there were things Petrocelli liked better than warm gin. He probably had a few ice cubes left in the wheel-house, but he didn’t offer to get them. She was spoiling for a fight. Her mouth had a sulky look, as though she was waiting for somebody to say something, no matter what, so she could jump on it with both spike heels. The thing for Petrocelli to do was drink up and get the hell out. He was a working man. Who needed this?
“Raphael Petrocelli,” she said. “A beautiful name, and I want you to sign it to a beautiful piece of paper. Here it is. You can use my pen and keep it as a souvenir.”
She handed him a sheet of notepaper covered with a nearly illegible scribble, the lines descending steeply from left to right. She showed him a space at the bottom. Her name was already on it, Dorothy Winslow De Rham. Paul Brady had signed as a witness.
Petrocelli didn’t like to sign things without knowing what he was signing. It was one of his rules. “What is it?”
“All you’re doing is witnessing my signature, to make it more legal,” she said irritably. “It’s a formality.”
“It’s a new will,” De Rham explained. “Disinheriting me. I’m all broken up about it. I may seem indifferent, but I’m broken up inside.”
“Cut him off without a penny,” Brady said.
Petrocelli would have felt better if everybody hadn’t been so plastered, but what the hell? He wrote his name, and it was easily the most readable signature of the three. Mrs. De Rham’s had apparently been put there by a neurotic chicken.
“Now it’s official,” she said. “Captain, you have exquisite handwriting. Darling, look at his signature. Isn’t it like something on the Declaration of Independence?”
De Rham continued to stare at the overhead. Mrs. De Rham offered Petrocelli another warm drink, but he refused and headed for the door. The words being passed back and forth were polite, if a little icy, but there was violence in the air. She took him by the sleeve and stopped him.
“The boys are ganging up on me for some reason. Listen, I’m all juiced up. If anybody started playing an amplified guitar, to give a far-fetched example, I’d go through the roof. At times like these I like a little love making, the more strenuous the better. I don’t think I’ll get it from either of these esthetes. So stay on call. Do you know what I mean?”
She put his cap back on his head. Of course he knew what she meant, and he didn’t like it a bit.
“You’re a handsome male, Raphael Petrocelli. A bit lardy in spots, but definitely macho.”
Then she did something that astonished him, for all his experience with unpredictable rich women. She closed with him and kissed him. Nothing too astonishing there, but while one arm snaked around his neck the other came between them and she took hold of him. There was only one word for it-he was shocked. It was the frankest approach he had ever had from a woman. If the other two men were interested they could easily guess what she was doing. It was for their benefit, probably. But there was no pretense about the kiss. Her tongue was in his mouth.
He was swearing savagely to himself when he made the deck. She was out of her goddamned skull! Here they were, the four of them, penned in a space of forty-four feet by eighteen, out of sight of land. If she was that anxious to get laid, why couldn’t she wait till they got to Miami? She was fooling around with TNT. Somebody was going to pick the bitch up and toss her overboard. There were some things you didn’t do on a boat this size.
He went back to the pilothouse for the bottle and the ice. After shutting himself in the forward cabin he hesitated a moment, then bolted the door. She could come looking for him in the middle of the night, but he was damned if he was going to let her in. He wouldn’t enjoy it.
CHAPTER 2
Henry De Rham, on one of the bunks, was beginning to wish he had had less to drink. He literally couldn’t move.