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bona fides by kicking the ass of the first meatball who thought it would be fun to kick mine. Luckily that status didn’t have to be renewed every year, a former boxing career having a definite shelf life.
    Another inhibiting factor for the summer people was a sign above the bar: “None of that electronic shit allowed.” An iPhone was stuck in the middle of the sign with a screwdriver. (Though this never discouraged Jackie from coming in once in a while, and I wouldn’t want to be the guy who instructed her on the house rules.)
    Jimmy was standing outside the elbow of the L-shaped bar, drinking a beer with a few of his regular mates. He was a lot younger than I, and like Joe Sullivan, meaty but far from fat. His complexion was the color and consistency of oatmeal, a liability somewhat relieved by a moustache and goatee. His lion’s mane of dirty blond hair had witnessed few encounters with a comb, though you rarely saw him without a cowboy hat. Worked well with the cowboy boots.
    He’d been chewed up by something over in Iraq, costing an eye, an ear, and two fingers on his left hand. Anything else, I wouldn’t know. I never asked and he never told.
    “Yo, Sam,” he said as I approached. “I wondered when I’d see you.”
    “Hi, Jimmy,” I said, and nodded to the other guys. They all nodded back.
    “Pretty fucked up,” said Jimmy.
    “Yeah. What do you know?”
    “What I read in the papers. And what I told Joe Sullivan. The guy didn’t have any enemies outside of the ones in his head, and nothing was really much different lately. Not that I really knew. We were cool, but I didn’t, like, hang with him all that much. Not like you.”
    I shook my head.
    “I don’t know anything either,” I said. “Though somebody took a baseball bat to my rear window the other night. After I was asking around about Alfie.”
    I scanned the other guys, who took on that “Hey, it wasn’t me” look.
    “That old Grand Prix?” said Jimmy. “That’s just wrong.”
    “I’m not happy about it, but I owe ’em a favor,” I said.
    “How so?”
    “It tells me the people who killed him are here. So I probably don’t have to go looking elsewhere. Not yet anyway.”
    “With all due respect, Sam,” said one of Jimmy’s friends, “who the hell around here would do something like that?”
    “You think you know everybody?” another asked. “You don’t know all them wetbacks.”
    He was referring to the Latino day laborers who congregated around the 7-Eleven every morning hoping to get a cash gig on a landscaping crew, or bull work on one of the monster construction sites around the East End. Since the real estate bust, there were a lot fewer of them to incite ethnic and economic hostility, but it was still there.
    “Sam don’t like that kinda talk,” one of the other guys said.
    “Well fucking excuse me,” said the offending party, a young guy called Jaybo Flynn who stuck to Watruss like an extra appendage. Everyone assumed Jaybo was Jimmy’s cousin or nephew, but I knew the kid’s mother from high school. A classic pretty girl gone to seed, her only relation to Jimmy was living next door and needing some backup after her husband disappeared. Jimmy gave Jaybo a job in his restaurant and it turned out Jaybo was a pretty good cook, and well suited to the restaurant life. So by then he was managing the place and all Jimmy had to do was show up at the bar and convert the profits into free drinks.
    “I don’t like it, either,” said Jimmy, glowering at Jaybo and putting a stop to further bigotry, at least for the time being.
    I gently moved Jimmy out of the crowd so I could ask a touchier question.
    “Apparently they can’t find Alfie’s next of kin. The medical examiner has his body up there in Riverhead in the cooler, but he needs to figure out what to do with it.”
    “Alfie’s an orphan,” he said, after a strangely long pause, as if reluctant to share the information. “I don’t know what that means now