So Lush, So Deadly Read online

  Brett Halliday

  So Lush, So Deadly

  CHAPTER 1

  Raphael Petrocelli, at the wheel of Nefertiti III, a forty-four-foot fiberglass motor yacht, did his best to ignore the noises coming up from below. It was apparently quite a party. Dotty De Rham, the owner’s wife, was high as a kite on gin. She referred to what she drank as martinis, but Petrocelli—captain, navigator, odd-job man—had carried enough of those drinks to know that they had only two ingredients, ice cubes and Beefeater.

  You couldn’t call her subdued at the best of times, but after a dozen so-called martinis she was as unpredictable as a drop of fat on a hot skillet. Anything she took it into her head to do she did. Petrocelli himself was sipping a weak gin and tonic in self-defense. He knew very well that this was not a good idea. It was against his principles to drink with a fifty-thousand-dollar boat in his charge. But after all. He had a straight southerly heading, the night was clear with a three-quarter moon, and the Atlantic was as still as it ever gets. What could happen?

  Mrs. De Rham had a hoarse, somewhat masculine laugh, and every time it came up through the floorboards it roughened the skin at the back of Petrocelli’s neck, and he had to have another drink to ground the charge. The fact of the matter was, she was a damned unsettling woman. He knew he had to watch his step or he could get in the wrong kind of trouble. For a couple of hours that afternoon, for example, she had sunbathed on the forward deck under the wheelhouse window, wearing a nothing bikini, two little wisps of cloth that concealed very little. Petrocelli was used to that and it didn’t bother him. But after a while, when she was lying face down, she reached around and untied the top so the string line wouldn’t spoil her tan. It was amazing what a difference the little string made. Now, instead of wearing a bathing suit—it might be skimpy, but that was what women wore nowadays—she was half naked.

  It was lucky for everybody that they were in deep water, with no rocks or shoals within miles, because Petrocelli had a hard time keeping his mind where it belonged. She didn’t stay flat on her stomach the whole time, but kept raising up to reach for her drink or to get Paul Brady to light her a cigarette. Brady—he was a funny one. Petrocelli hadn’t been able to make him out. He was supposed to be married, but he hadn’t brought his wife along. He was about the same age as Henry De Rham, the owner—Mrs. De Rham was older—but was he the husband’s friend or the wife’s? Petrocelli hadn’t been able to figure that one out. He had long hair, he was plump and indolent, and he made a point of saying things he thought were clever, in an offhand way. A little flitty, Petrocelli thought, not that it was any of his business.

  Brady had done most of the talking that afternoon. Mrs. De Rham was quiet, her eyes half closed. At one point she interrupted him and had him oil her. Now if Petrocelli had been doing that oiling he would have had a hard time knowing at what point to stop. Her skin was as smooth as sour cream. He would have loved to get his hands on it. But from the way Brady acted he might have been waxing a car. He kept on talking. Petrocelli, who couldn’t quite hear the words, had the feeling he was trying to sell her something. Petrocelli understood that she was the one with the money in the family, though as far as the boat went De Rham was the owner of record and he signed the checks.

  The sky clouded over, ending the sun-bathing, and Mrs. De Rham did a peculiar thing, or Petrocelli thought it was peculiar at the time. Still lying on her stomach with the string untied, she reached out more or less blindly and put her hand on Brady’s can. His ass, not to get too fancy about it. She left it lying there for a minute, then gave him a kind of good-natured pat and came to her feet, clutching the bikini to her breast.

  That put her on a level with Petrocelli. They looked at each other for a long moment through the thermopane glass. She had a lazy smile on her mouth, which changed to a laugh as she looked in at him. She went below. What was he supposed to think about that laugh? That she had suddenly realized he wasn’t part of the furniture, or what?

  The wives were one of the hazards of his job, if you could call sex a hazard. He had been captaining pleasure boats for fifteen years, and during that time he had probably banged about thirty percent of the wives, a .333 average, not bad in any league. Of course, to be honest, it wasn’t happening as often now as it did when he was getting started, a slim, well-muscled kid who took a nice tan. He was now thirty-five, and you don’t get much exercise on a boat. He had a waistline problem. He fingered the fold of fat around his middle and sat up straighter.

  Still, he was making out as well as ever with the drinkers, and Mrs. De Rham was definitely one of those. He had to be careful about the first move. It was his livelihood, after all. The kind of look she had given him through the window was not enough. These women knew how to clobber you. They had a grapevine. It you grabbed the wrong one, or the right one at the wrong time, they could drive you out of the business. The way it generally worked, the wife showed up at the marina by herself and said she felt like going out for a little sail. They wouldn’t be gone long before she broke out the ice cubes. Nobody likes to drink alone. Even after a couple of drinks he would wait till she committed herself. And later, when the husband was around, it was back to “yes ma’am,” “no ma’am,” “what do you want me to do now ma’am?” They liked that part of it best, Petrocelli sometimes thought.

  De Rham, in the salon, was playing his electric guitar. Not bad, either, for a non-pro.

  Petrocelli reached for the bottle on the floor and added gin to his drink. One idea had suggested another, and he was remembering his last employer, a skinny redhead. She hadn’t looked too exciting in shore clothes but in the sack she had behaved like a broken high-tension wire in a thunderstorm. Mrs. De Rham was fleshier but she had that same quality. She was walking around with an explosion inside her, and if you happened to be the one who touched it off, you’d remember it the rest of your life.

  Since leaving New York the weather had been pleasant, and they would reach Miami early the following afternoon. Brady was leaving them there. The De Rhams were flying on down to Brazil for the carnival, or whatever it was called, but they would have a couple of days before the plane left. They had reserved a berth in an Indian Creek marina, and Petrocelli was now reasonably certain that Mrs. De Rham would show up around two o’clock the day after they arrived. If it didn’t happen by then, it probably wouldn’t happen at all. The city heat would be mentioned, “Wouldn’t it be cooler out on the water?” “Yes ma’am.” Perhaps she would break out one of the deck mats to do some work on her tan. And would the captain please fetch some Beefeater and ice, and apply the suntan oil to the places she couldn’t reach herself? “Certainly ma’am.” “Where did she want it, exactly? Here?” “Yes, indeed. Now a little lower!” “Lower?” “Still lower!”

  The breaking of glass brought his mind back to the present. For some time now, he realized, he hadn’t heard Mrs. De Rham’s mocking laugh, and De Rham had stopped playing the guitar. Petrocelli listened carefully. They were snapping and hissing at each other. He had expected something like this ever since Mrs. De Rham had given Brady that pat on the hind end. For some reason it always seemed to happen the last night out, when everybody realized that there was no longer unlimited time ahead. Another glass broke, if it was only a glass.

  Then light fell on the deck and he heard footsteps on the ladder, a woman’s footsteps. He was no more superstitious than the next man, but he didn’t like to overlook anything. He rapped his knuckles sharply against the mahogany panel. If Mrs. De Rham was really looking for trouble, he would need as much luck as he could get.

  “I need you, Captain,” she said. “Captain Petrocelli, Captain Raphael Petrocelli, I need you badly.”

  She sounded about the same, a little more exc
ited 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.

  He watched the caress his wife was giving Petrocelli, feeling oddly detached. Even if he’d known what to do about it, he was physically incapable of doing anything at the moment. Petrocelli had the look of a brawler. In a fair fight,
which of the two would end up unconscious? The outraged husband, obviously.

  And did he care that much? This was going a bit far, but it was a difference of degree, not of kind. Dotty wasn’t the most faithful wife in the New York metropolitan area, by any means. She was up to something, something that had nothing to do with her wayward sexual impulses. Unless she had cut the fragile ties that held her to sanity, and was really adrift?

  Once, before they were married, he had thought her an agreeable kook, pretty irresponsible—but hell, so was he. She was a pleasant change from all the half-dead conventional people he had always known. Lately he had begun to think she might be overdoing the unconventionality a little. She was up, she was down. Each swing was wider than the one before. His part of the marriage was like being strapped in a roller coaster, and if it hadn’t been for other factors, namely money, he would have looked forward to the moment when the ride was over.

  He and Paul Brady had been roommates at Harvard. De Rham squeaked through the four years, but Paul had pulled one D plus too many and didn’t get the diploma. Everybody they knew had a definite idea what they wanted to do after graduation. He and Paul wouldn’t have been accepted at a graduate school even if they had had the desire. They were discouraged by the thought of joining some corporation as executive trainees. They liked to write light verse, they took good photographs and liked music and theater, but they had no particular talent or overriding interest. So one night, in the course of a drunken conversation which neither took very seriously, they decided that the only sensible thing was to marry a woman with money.

  And that was the way it turned out. Paul’s wife had only one drawback. She believed her husband should go to an office, any office, every morning at nine. She didn’t care what he did, so long as he did it in an office, with a phone and a secretary. Paul couldn’t go along with that, and the marriage was now on the rocks.