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country.”
    “Interfering with an ongoing investigation.”
    “What interfering? You’re just talking to her.”
    “I don’t get it, Joe. What’s the hang-up?”
    Sullivan found a small rock in the grass and tossed it across the beach and into the bay.
    “Two years is all I got,” he said.
    “Two years?”
    “Of college. Two years at the community college. Studied beer mostly.”
    “We had that at MIT.”
    “Exactly my point. You went to MIT. You been around, you did some things. You got the education. The problem with those boys in East Hampton is they don’t even know what questions to ask. Fuckin’ PhDs, financial analysts, all that shit, it’s like, you know, inhibiting.”
    “Not for you.”
    He put a meaty fist up on his hip just behind the black leather holster that held his .38.
    “That’s right. I’ll talk to anybody. But I need an angle,” he said. “Something they haven’t thought of yet. Something to chase down. You might come up with it, you might not. Plus, I’ll owe you a favor. That’s got to have some appeal.”
    I made him look me in the face.
    “I can’t afford to go messing with anything more controversial than breathing Southampton air. The Chief frowns every time he sees me.”
    “That’s just Ross. He’s suspicious of his own mother. Assuming he’s got one.”
    “His mother wasn’t a murder suspect.”
    “That case is closed,” said Sullivan. “Over and done.”
    “I need to keep my head down.”
    “Right,” he said, “and I need you to go talk to this lady and tell me what you find out.”
    He turned away from the bay and slapped my shoulder as he walked by on the way back to his car.
    “This is entirely fucked up,” I called to him.
    “Just let me know how it goes.”
    “I don’t even know who she is.”
    He turned around and walked backward as he spoke.
    “I left the name and address on your kitchen table. And phone number. And a list of questions. And a summary of the case I got from East Hampton. Burn it all when you can. Ross finds out I gave it to you he’ll can me in half a New York minute.”
    After he left, I went up the ladder to set the two rafters that formed the addition’s south gable. First I measured the dimensions with my lucky twenty-five-inch tape. Then I recut the angles at both the ridge and the top plate to suit themeasurements instead of the math I’d been using before. The rafters fit perfectly. I checked it all with the framing square, then re-checked all the elevations with the transit. For added insurance, I scabbed a few Techo gussets at the joints and tacked the sixteen-foot two-by supports to the floor deck.
    Then I went inside and got another beer, which I drank out at the edge of my lawn, waiting for the first signs of sunset to form over the top of the North Fork and looking for errant sailors and windsurfers to come crashing into my private coast, and yet again mess up the layout of a life that always worked better by eye than formal calculations.

THREE
    I’ D MOVED OUT HERE after an act of self-immolation cleared out the preceding thirty years of my life. My parents were dead, leaving me the cottage where I’d been raised. It stood at the tip of Oak Point, a scrubby peninsula that juts fearlessly into the Little Peconic Bay on the northwest border of the Town of Southampton, Long Island. My father was an old-school mechanic, so it wasn’t surprising that his cottage expressed the character and refinement of a
’55
Chevy. Sturdy, sure-footed and unadorned. My mother had tried to introduce a little gentility after he died, but the effort withered on the vine. Since I moved in, I hadn’t done much to improve the situation. With few friends or family, no job or any other meaningful pursuit beyond drinking vodka and watching the sun sizzle down behind the green mounds of the North Fork, home improvement seemed pointless.
    I don’t know why I started building anyway. Probably some newfound professional enthusiasm. Every