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the owner of Amity Hardware, let it be known that they were buying cheap steel nails instead of galvanized nails and were charging their customers for galvanized. In a seaside climate, steel nails begin to rust in a few months. Dick Spitzer, who ran the lumberyard, told somebody that the Felixes had ordered a load of low-grade, green wood to use in some cabinets in a house on Scotch Road. The cabinet doors began to warp soon after they were installed. In a bar one night, the elder Felix, Armando, boasted to a drinking buddy that on his current job he was being paid to set supporting studs every sixteen inches but was actually placing them twenty-four inches apart. And the younger Felix, a twenty-one-year-old named Danny with astubborn case of acne, liked to show his friends erotic books which he bragged he had stolen from the houses he worked in.
    Other carpenters stopped referring work to the Felixes, but by then they had built enough of a business to keep them going through the winter. Very quietly, the Amity understanding began to work. At first, there were just a few hints to the Felixes that they had outworn their welcome. Armando reacted arrogantly. Soon, annoying little mishaps began to bother him. All the tires on his truck would mysteriously empty themselves of air, and when he called for help from the Amity Gulf station, he was told that the air pump was broken. When he ran out of propane gas in his kitchen, the local gas company took eight days to deliver a new tank. His orders for lumber and other supplies were inexplicably mislaid or delayed. In stores where once he had been able to obtain credit he was now forced to pay cash. By the end of October, the Felix Brothers were unable to function as a business, and they moved away.
    Generally, Brody’s contribution to the Amity understanding—in addition to maintaining the rule of law and sound judgment in the town—consisted of suppressing rumors and, in consultation with Harry Meadows, the editor of the Amity
Leader
, keeping a certain perspective on the rare unfortunate occurrences that qualified as news.
    The previous summer’s rapes had been reported in the
Leader
, but just barely (as molestations), because Brody and Meadows agreed that the specter of a black rapist stalking every female in Amity wouldn’t do much for the tourist trade. In that case, there was the added problem that none of the women who had told the police they had been raped would repeat their stories to anyone else.
    If one of the wealthier summer residents of Amity was arrested for drunken driving, Brody was willing, on a first offense, to book him for driving without a license, and that charge would be duly reported in the
Leader.
But Brodymade sure to warn the driver that the second time he was caught driving under the influence he would be charged, booked, and prosecuted for drunk driving.
    Brody’s relationship with Meadows was based on a delicate balance. When groups of youngsters came to town from the Hamptons and caused trouble, Meadows was handed every fact—names, ages, and charges lodged. When Amity’s own youth made too much noise at a party, the
Leader
usually ran a one-paragraph story without names or addresses, informing the public that the police had been called to quell a minor disturbance on, say, Old Mill Road.
    Because several summer residents found it fun to subscribe to the
Leader
year-round, the matter of wintertime vandalism of summer houses was particularly sensitive. For years, Meadows had ignored it—leaving it to Brody to make sure that the homeowner was notified, the offenders punished, and the appropriate repairmen dispatched to the house. But in the winter of 1968 sixteen houses were vandalized within a few weeks. Brody and Meadows agreed that the time had come for a full campaign in the
Leader
against wintertime vandals. The result was the wiring of forty-eight homes to the police station, which—since the public didn’t know which houses were wired