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bellyful of technology, and if the digital revolution was happy to go on without me, I was happy to let it.
    And you might think building custom kitchen cabinets and architectural detail was less complex, but only if you hadn’t tried to build any.
    After our chat with Tommy, the group went back to the core pursuit—drinking enough to anesthetize ourselves against our respective painful realities. Luckily all three of us possessed a heroic capacity, so only God and Geordie knew how much we drank and how little it showed to the outside world.
    I HAD no trouble finding my old car, which I thought was parked well away from potential harm, so it surprised me to see the rear window smashed in.
    The safety glass had sprayed into the backseat, where it formed a ground cover and small drifts, like a snowstorm. I never kept anything of value in the car, so there was no reason to worry about that. The ignition switch looked okay, so likely no attempt to start the engine. Though why would you? The antique value of a 1967 Grand Prix was basically zilch, and why pick such a hulking oddity in Southampton, the home of ultrarare collectible cars?
    The answer was apparent. The point wasn’t theft, it was damage. And not wanton, but with a purpose. I’d seen it before. It was a message, and I got what it said: Back off.
    Bad strategy on their part.
    F INDING A replacement rear window took some doing, but the people who rebuilt the car after a bad crash a few years ago had one shipped FedEx, and I was back in business a day after that. Meanwhile I got to borrow Amanda’s Audi A4 Avant, which wasn’t all that tough a sacrifice. I used it to go see Jimmy Watruss, Alfie’s former landlord.
    Jimmy lived in the apartment above a storefront on Main Street in Southampton. The store had a different tenant every summer. That year it was overpriced clothes for young women and older women who hadn’t caught the article in Vogue on age-appropriateness.
    The year before it was an art gallery. Before that, giant stuffed animals all the kids wanted to climb on, but weren’t allowed to. This might have been to teach the lesson of thwarted desire to the children of the very rich. Which is why it immediately went out of business.
    Jimmy owned the building, and several more in the Village, including Mad Martha’s, the seafood restaurant and fish distributor, all inherited from his parents. It made for a nice living without him having to do a lot of work. This left plenty of time for Jimmy’s other interests—working with veterans groups on drug and alcohol rehab and hanging around the neighborhood bars, usually his own. Always good to stay close to your subject matter.
    So he was easy enough to find.
    Mad Martha’s, a few blocks from downtown Southampton Village, was half seafood wholesaler and half locals-only joint. Not that they wouldn’t let the summer people come in for food and drink—none wanted to. Dark as a cave, with stained wood paneling on the walls and post-and-beam construction, the building had been converted from an eighteenth-century blacksmith’s shop about one hundred years before. The walls were covered with paintings of fishing dories hard to the wind and whalers harpooning creatures that looked more like ferocious sea monsters than innocent whales. Artifacts of obsolete fishing technology also graced the walls and hung from the open beams overhead. The aroma of fish cleaning and packaging occasionally wafted in from the back, adding to the authentic ambience.
    The patronage was largely Anglo construction workers who represented the last vestige of local, working-class guys born on the East End to families who’d been there since the first English ship stumbled onto shore. Their attitudes shifted between pride of survivorship and resentment as strong and deep as a concrete pylon.
    My background wasn’t that different, though they never quite got over the Italian name. Early on when I moved back to town, I had to establish my