presents for everybody and their brother.... Now if this was the Christmas Islands... '
Suddenly Faye O'Mara looked awfully sad and tired. She was thinking that her kids didn't care anymore. Mike certainly didn't care. Nobody in this big wide world cared a whit what she thought about anything.
'Aren't you having fun here, Mike?' she asked for real. Serious. Then the bucktoothed Irishwoman grinned- the eternal struggle between the two of them-sharing that... something... making her smile and feel tender toward Mike.
The answer to her question never came, though.
Because Mike O'Mara was running for the first time in fifteen years. Huffing and puffing forward, looking as if his knees were locked.
He couldn't believe his eyes and waved for Faye to stay back. 'Go back, Faye. Go back.'
The Philadelphia doorman had found a bloody machete driven halfway to China in the sand. He'd found the two hippies who had been killed and mutilated by the Cuban and Kingfish Toone. And so had a hungry band of wild goats.
CHAPTER SIX
We forget that policemen are relatively simple-minded human beings for the most part. Damian said that they are basically unequipped to deal with the creative personality (criminal). It's impossible for them now, and it's getting worse. An amoral generation is coming up
fast. Can another police state be far behind?
The Rose Diary
Wednesday Evening
It was getting dark fast, black and blue and pink out over the Caribbean, when the chief of San Dominica's police force came to see the extraordinary machete murders.
Twenty or so less important policemen and army officials had already arrived. they were deployed all over the beach, like survey engineers.
Taking notes. Making measurements. Spreading out litters and yellow sheets that looked like rain slickers from a distance.
The policemen's white pith helmets floated through the crowd like carnival balloons.
Before he did anything else, the chief of police counted the valuable helmets on the heads of his men.
Then Dr. Meral Johnson quietly pushed himself through a buzzing ring of bathing suits and cutoff blue jeans; bald heads and brown freckled decolletage; double-knit leisure suits and pantsuits and flowing Empire dresses.
At least four hundred very frightened and very confused vacationers had gathered on the fingercove beach.
to get a look at the bodies.
And then not to believe their own eyes; not to believe their luck.
Once he was inside the circus of people, Dr. Johnson stopped to catch his breath. He lit up a stumpy black Albertson pipe. Pup, pup, PUP,
PUP...
The Americans were restless tonight! He made a small joke, then quickly felt very bad about it. Very bad. Awful.
A little shorter than five feet ten, four-eyed, seersuckered, two hundred fifty pounds, Metal Johnson looked rather tenuous as a policeman, he knew. Tenuous, or was it timorous?
More like a proper, stern West Indian schoolmaster-which he'd been-than a Joseph Wambaugh-style policeman come to solve grisly murders. More like a hick islander who polished his shoes with palm oil, his teeth with baking soda.
Well, so be it, Meral Johnson thought to himself. So be it. The massive policeman thereupon entered the machete Terrors.
Almost instantly the flustered German manager of the nearby Plantation Inn began to shout at him.
'What took you so long? Now you stop to smoke a pipe?'
Dr. Johnson paid the hotel manager as much attention as he would some sandfly buzzing around his trousers cuffs. Speaking to none of his subordinates first, he began to walk around the yellow rubber sheets that covered bits and pieces of the teenagers' bodies.
After his short walk, the police chief stood with his back to the sea and simply watched the scene of the double murder. He tried to bring his mind back down on an even keel.
The manager of the Plantation Inn had apparently ordered his waiters to cordon off the bodies of the two young people.
The waiters, mostly old blacks with fuzzy white crew cuts-eaming less than thirty dollars a week-stood at parade-ground attention in their stiff white dinner jackets. Each man had on black dress shoes with especially shiny toes. Each held a flaming torch removed from the inn's dining veranda. Each of the waiters looked sad and dignified and, above all, respectful of the terrible situation.
The scene was extraordinary-both colonial and primitive-and Johnson wanted to be certain he had it reproduced, burned into his optic nerve, before he began the thumb-screwing work ahead of him this night.
What a sight-tragedy, mystery. The worst he'd ever come upon.
First, Dr. Johnson approached the very inexperienced, frightened constable of Turtle Bay District.
