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the policeman seemed to be smirking. He was so know-it-all in his attitude, Peter wanted to rap him.
    “I know, mon. I know it. Blond Englishmon type. Tall. Green car license starts CY. Check it out for you, mon. Check it out…. Okay—
who’s next with stories here?”
    As the only legitimate witness walked out of the investigation … as the unbelievable confusion and mistakes just started to mount … Dr. Meral Johnson wandered out on the dark Plantation Inn grounds.

C HAPTER S EVEN
    People never want to die, for some strange reason. Especially young people. Especially young, unfulfilled singles on vacations they can’t afford. Originally, we’d planned the first machete murders for the island’s version of Club Mediterranee. The Plantation Inn was chosen because of secondary considerations.
    The Rose Diary
    Turtle Bay, San Dominica
    In the noisy background of the Plantation Inn’s Cricket Lounge, a young, bone-tanned woman complained that she would never be able to shut her eyes and catch some sun at a beach again.
    “Two murders. Just like the movies,” someone was saying—a short-haired man with a coke spoon dangling around his neck.
    Up at the lounge bar, Peter Macdonald talked to his girlfriend, Jane Cooke. He also served up gallons of planter’s and boom-boom punch; rum toddies; Jamaica coffee; swizzles; fog-cutters—and an amazing quantity of good old-fashioned neat whiskey.
    “I know how paranoid this sounds,” he said to Jane, “but the police didn’t seem to want to listen.”
    “That constable took your statement. He did, didn’t he?”
    “Yeah. I guess. But he seemed to have the whole thing wrapped up, Janie. Colonel Dred! Colonel Dred! Forget everything else. The tall blond man. The fancy rifle. Jesus, I don’t know. I
hope
they’re right…. It’s just that they weren’t very professional about it. It was like Ted Mack’s
Original Amateur Hour
in there.”
    “Ahhh, Pee-ter, mon.”
    The lilting voice of the lounge calypso singer drifted across the room.
    Then the singer whistled into his microphone. He tapped the mike with a long, effeminate fingernail. Blew softly into strange, snaky bamboo pipes.
    “No need be afraid of Leon,” he whispered to his white audience. Couples out of John O’Hara and John Marquand. Lots of bright WASPY green in their outfits—green and Bermuda pink.
    He sang to them. “San Dominic’ woman’s love day say … is lak a mornin’ dew…. Jus’ as lakly it fall on de horse’s turd … as on de rose.”
    The singer laughed. A pretty imitation of Geoffrey Holder.
    A few people in the dark, red-lanterned bar started to clap.
    Peter Macdonald pulled at a bicycle bell hidden somewhere in the liquor bottles over the bar.
    “I wan’ to sing yo peoples lubbley song ‘bout sech a ooman,” the singer went on. “‘Bout her rose. An’ … well, you know it, my friends … de unworty objet ub dat gal’s affection. Me own rival.
A real shit!
”
    At the same time, Chief of Police Meral Johnson walked down damp stone stairs, then along a row of cells in the dimly lit medieval basement of the Coastown jail.
    Walking behind him was a lineup of seven policemen and clerks. Nearly everyone in the Coastown jail at that late hour.
    The somber parade turned down another row of cells. Then another. At the end of the third row, a tall, perspiring constable waited beside an open, steel-plated door.
    Inside the cell, the chief of police could already see the white man who shot Leon Rachet the previous morning.
    The mysterious, middle-aged white man was lying on his cot with both arms spread wide. His hairy bare legs dangled off one end of the bed. A puddle of urine and blood ran out of the cell, right down a big drain in the dirty corridor.
    While Dr. Johnson had been out at the Plantation Inn, the man had been murdered.
    Killed in his bed. In jail. By a sugar-cane machete.
    The crude knife was sticking out of the dead man’s hairy belly—a red wool cap hung