Read Online Further Lane by James Brady - Free Book Online

people who live here believe themselves to be special, touched by the hand of God. When they’re just people who happened to have a little money and the sense and taste to want to own a piece of this part of the good green world.”
    â€œI know, I’m being oversensitive.”
    â€œYou’re a journalist and a good one, if I’m any judge, based on those pieces you wrote from North Africa and Yugo. Writing about your own town—well, maybe a touch of delicacy and tact might be called for. Beyond that, write the truth, be fair, be yourself.”
    He was the moral spine of my ethical core, always had been, and I listened to what he said. Their car was coming at three to take them in to JFK so after lunch I thanked him and said good-bye, wishing him good luck with the salmon, and then mentioning as a postscript I was going by the Reservation to see Jesse, and getting a cautionary bit of paternal advice.
    Despite fatherly counsel, I drove the twelve miles to Southampton and then the few miles more to the Shinne-cock Reservation. There were still two Indian tribes on Long Island; the other was the Poospatucks at Mastic, both sets liberally intermarried, mostly with blacks but also some whites. Jesse, typically, was more black than Indian. On the reservation side of the highway an Indian in a shanty bright with garish signs promising savings was selling cigarettes by the carton without the excise tax, so I bought a carton of Luckies. Not to smoke. To get him talking. He looked more Sicilian than Shinnecock and took me for a cop and wasn’t very talky until I showed him the press card.
    Jesse lived in a pretty nice little house with a healthy garden down by the shore on Shinnecock Bay. He had a green thumb and was handy with tools, and it showed. A nubile young woman came out barefoot and said he didn’t want to see nobody. Not cops, not reporters, not nobody. I didn’t know if she was his girlfriend or one of his kids. Jesse was capable of coming up with either. So I shouted in at him that I was Beecher Stowe from Further Lane that used to play ball with him and how more recently he’d done work for my old man. Jesse chewed that bit of vital information for a little and then shouted back.
    â€œThey find out yet who killed the bitch?”
    This wasn’t very diplomatic of Jesse, speaking ill of the dead, especially when he was among the leading suspects; but when he came out to shake hands I said no, and did he have any ideas?
    Yes, he said, he did. “If I killed her, Beech, and I thought about it a few times, there would have been lots more wear and tear on the body, I can tell you.”
    What kind of person would use a spear as a weapon, did he think?
    That seemed to puzzle Jesse for a time.
    â€œSome of them Guatemalans and Aztecs and such they got mowing lawns along Further Lane, them fellas got strange ideas. Voodoo even. You might inquire of them if you speak the lingo.”
    No, he never heard of local Indians using a spear as a weapon, not since the old days. Not since they got guns. And when the long-ago Shinnecocks did use spears it was mostly for fish or as harpoons for whaling, and back then they used hardwood for the shaft and topped the spear with flint, and later with metal when they could get it. Who ever heard of a soft wood like privet hedge, hardened in flame, for a weapon? Didn’t make sense; it was just stupid.
    It occurred to me Town & Country wouldn’t have believed this conversation. They had their own image of the Hamptons; a man like Jesse Maine had no part in it. Nor maybe did a leg man like me.
    Then Jesse had an idea: “That Swami fellow down there near you on Further Lane. You might look into him for sheer nonsense. He’s got them rich bitches out on the lawn in their skivvies, barefoot and dancing all but naked to the tom tom, eating bees’ honey and pondering the Ouija board. They’ve all given up martinis and espresso,