'Tomorrow, right?' Nicholson asked.
Click. Buzz. 'Son of a bitch. Harvey! Son of a bitch!'
In less than an hour Campbell and Harold Hill were listening to the tape in Coastown.
'Interesting.' Campbell recognized the silky voice. 'It was Rose.'
Still under guard at the Golf and Racquet Club, Peter sat in front of the San Dominican Broadcasting Corporation's blurry evening news.
For the first time in two days he was clear-headed enough to consider the effect of a sniper's bullet. Every president's daydream... your car wind- shield splattered against a bug. Half an ounce of steel entering your forehead at three thousand feet per second.'Insane and nauseating.
Around 8:30 he made a phone call to his family in Grand Rapids.
His mother couldn't understand why air force one hadn't flown him home already. 'Make them put you on the first plane out of that place, ' Betsy Macdonald told Peter. 'My God, they've put you through enough already. they can come right up here to ask you any more questions they have. Tell them that, Peter.
Peter's father wanted to know what the real story was. He'd talked to his friend Senator Pflanzer, and Pflanzer wanted to know, too. 'Pete, don't take any chances for those sorry bastards,' Colonel Edward Macdonald said-Big Mac. 'They're not doing shit for us anymore-the whole damn government. they don't deserve anything back from us. I mean it. '
As he listened, occasionally talked, Peter tried to picture Big Mac and Little Betsy. He saw them maybe ten years younger than they really were now.
He saw the Super Six posing like some roughneck hockey team.
'I'll try to get home real soon,' he said to his father. 'Tell that to Mom. Tell my brothers, too. Miss the hell out of all of you. I really do.'
After the call, Peter just sat in the dark pseu- dotropics condominium bedroom. Thinking.
He imagined a slow-motion pistol shot to a man's forehead. Like the famous Vietnamese execution photograph. The tall blond man's head actually vaporizing.
At 1:30 in the morning one of the CIA agents came into the bedroom-a little Italian guy who was always imitating Peter Falk.
'We're going to move you, Pete. Get ready, will you?' Getting dressed, Peter prepared himself mentally. No point in getting scared now. Scared or stupid. maybe there was, but fuck it.
Three agents with automatic rifles walked him to a station wagon waiting outside with the motor running.
A quick breath of fresh air. Appropriately fishy smell of the sea. No ca-rack of a rifle from the dark palm trees.
they rode to the Dorcas Hotel in Coastown in eerie silence. No questions asked; no information volunteered. No phony-baloney bullshit on their side or his.
The gray-haired CIA man-Harold Hill-was waiting for him inside the new hotel suite. A pleasant enough place-like a Holiday Inn.
'My family has put in a formal complaint to the State Department.' Peter lied simply and effectively. 'It went through Senator Pflanzer,' he announced to Hill and to Brooks Campbell, who were sitting in the living room. 'If you don't give me a crack at the blond mystery man, I'm going to force you to send me home. You know the tune-'War Hero Claims CIA Monkeyshines!'
'All right, all right.' The gray-haired man nodded. A very sober professor type, Peter noticed. 'Let's sit down and talk, Peter.'
By 2:00 A.M. Peter Macdonald was officially part of the manhunt for Damian and Carrie Rose.
Shortly afterward the fat black police chief arrived at the Dorcas. Strange man! Dr. Johnson just sat around talking with Peter. About the initial mistake by his constable at Turtle Bay; his own mistakes during the difficult case; the night he'd spent with Jane at Mandeville Hospital.
'I couldn't sleep at home the likable San Dominican finally said. 'I thought you might understand. '
'I understand.' Peter smiled. 'I think this is going to be an awfully long night. Glad you're here, Dr. Johnson.
CHAPTERTWENTY-SEVEN
Damian had gotten uncharacteristically grubby-vacant-eyed and distracted during the last months of our preparation for San Dominica. His hair was hardly ever combed. He spent entire days inside the house, wandering in wrinkled silk pajamas. He was obsessed with the idea of master criminals.... I came home one night to find him reading a book called On Aggression, babbling about brown rats and piebald eagles. Another time he was reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Lots of Nazi books after that. The Master Criminal Race, he called them....
The Rose Diary
Trelawney, San Dominica
in a small den lit by a black-and-white TV, Damian sat cleaning an M-21 sniper's rifle.
First he pressed out the rear pin and opened the rifle. Then he withdrew the bolt and bolt carrier assembly. He withdrew the thin firing retaining pin. Withdrew the cam pin, the bolt from the bolt carrier.
On and off he watched Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious coming over the island's erratic TV network. Overall, Damian decided, he could have been a much better performer than the very one-dimensional Cary Grant. He wasn't certain if he could have been as good as a Claude Rains or an Ingrid Bergman, though. Those two were perfectionists. they could have made something out of Basil, the Children's Minstrel.
