The Spoiler

by Domenic Stansberry

  Amanti lived down a side street. He decided to walk. He did not want to drive up in his rusted car. Her place was an anomaly on this quiet street of older houses. She had the lower apartment in a wood-grained fourplex, a dwelling more like one in a West Coast suburb than a New England town.

  He knocked, but no one answered. He stood on her porch step, in the bright, muggy air, feeling conspicuous in his rolled-up shirtsleeves. He remembered feeling this way in college, once, when he had knocked on a coed’s door. He had suspected the girl was inside, refusing to answer. But there was no reason now for him to feel like an intruder or an unwanted suitor. He was only working on a story, tracing a lead, doing his job.

  He knocked again, but there was still no answer. He swore to himself, then turned to find Amanti coming up the walkway behind him.

  “Sorry to make you wait. I just took a walk to the grocery.”

  “It’s all right. I enjoyed standing here.” He tried to say the words as if they were true. If she had heard him cursing, she did not let on.

  Inside, the apartment was spacious, sparsely furnished. A wood-block table. A white rug. A couch with chrome armrests. And a high, arching roof, wide beams stretching from end to end. Several paintings hung on the wall, all contemporary, all similar: light-hearted colors patterned in elusive, meaningless designs.

  He followed her into the kitchen. She did not speak to him as she put the groceries on the counter.

  “So what’s up?” Lofton asked. The question sounded awkward, foolish. Amanti let it hang in the air unanswered.

  She put the groceries away with brusque movements, ignoring him, as if he were a neighbor who had stopped by uninvited. When she had finished, she glanced about the room, avoiding his eyes. She seemed confused, as if trying to remember something she had forgotten. Then she took a step toward him, placed her fingers on the kitchen counter, and let out a quick sigh. Lofton studied her fingers. She held them very still on the countertop.

  “I know I told you I had a story, but now that I’ve had time to think about it, I’m not sure, really, that it would be the best thing.…”

  Lofton said nothing. Some people, when they told you something—whether you were a reporter, or a lifelong friend, or the slob next door—blurted the thing out to you, giving it up all at once. Others wanted you to ask questions, to work the information free, while they pretended they didn’t want to let go. Either way, whether you were quiet or asked questions, once they had decided to tell something, they usually told it. People knew, mostly by instinct, that the only way for a person to remain objective was to remain ignorant, and once they had told you what they had to say, you were no longer outside the situation, but inside it. You were involved, and that’s what they wanted.

  “The reason I hesitate is that it has to do with one of the owners of the Redwings. Jack Brunner.”

  She mentioned Brunner’s name so casually—in the same way she might tell him she had forgotten to buy something at the store—that he wondered if what she had to tell him would be important, or even interesting. Then he saw her seriousness: the tenseness in the way she stood, in the way she turned her head when he tried to look at her directly. There was an incongruity in her manner he could not place. Maybe it lay in her features: the high cheekbones of a German woman, the blue and crystalline eyes, yet the dark skin of a Mediterranean. And there was that birthmark, or scar, a place on her cheek where the skin was white and mottled, as if she had stayed out in the sun too long and her skin were peeling. She lit a cigarette, its acrid, unhappy smoke filling the air around them. Without asking, he reached to the pack and pulled one for himself. For a second he imagined that moment of stillness on the ballfield, that infinitesimal pause in which the pitcher, already wound up and ready to throw, stood balanced on one foot, his weight hung back, the other foot in the air, and the batter stood waiting, his bat cocked—a moment as quiet, and as brief, as the moment between heartbeats.

  “You don’t have to tell me anything,” he said. “I can just turn around and walk out the door. It’s up to you.”

  “No, why don’t you sit down?” She blew out smoke as she said it and gave him an unsure glance he found seductive. He nodded but remained standing. Amanti still held her fingertips pressed against the counter. The tips were turning white.

  “Brunner’s burning Holyoke. He’s doing it for the insurance money.”

  “So?” Lofton heard the edge in his voice. The sudden revelation bothered him. Why was she telling him this?

  “I found out by accident. I don’t want Brunner to know.”

  Amanti’s face seemed suddenly old. He lit the cigarette he had taken, looked at the smoke curl from its end, then put it out without smoking any.

  “Why don’t you go to the police?”

  “I don’t have any proof. Besides, he owns Holyoke. They all love him there. And other reasons. I just can’t go to them myself. I’m too close to the whole thing.”

  He was about to ask her what difference it made, why didn’t she just keep quiet and let Brunner go about his business? He thought back to the interview with Jack Brunner and Tony Liuzza that he’d witnessed in the press box. There had definitely been some tension between the two men. If what the boys in the press box said was true, Liuzza’s jump from one side of the Democratic party to the other was not pure principle. Meanwhile, Jack Brunner had his business interests to look after. If the state was balking on providing funds for his Holyoke buildings, then maybe Brunner was recouping his losses in other ways. Burning the buildings, collecting the insurance—that would be one way out of a bad investment. Maybe Amanti was right.

  “How do you know all this?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer right away, and when she did answer, it wasn’t to the point, or didn’t seem to be. “I don’t want anyone to get hurt,” she said. Still, he could understand her being afraid of Brunner. The man reminded him of a bulldog. And if Brunner was capable of hiring arsonists, he was probably capable of hiring other characters as well.

  “No, I don’t want anyone to get hurt,” she said again. He suddenly realized, by the way she turned and looked at him, by the tone of her voice, that she was about to give him somebody’s name, that of the person who would be hurt. He remembered a woman he had interviewed once, a burglary victim, who had suddenly spat out her nephew’s name.

  “You have to promise to keep me out of it. I can get you in touch with someone who knows more than I do, but you’ll have to be careful. You’ll have to approach him right. He’s frightened.”

  “I’m a reporter, not a psychiatrist,” Lofton said. The edge in his voice grew sharper. “I can’t worry about your friend’s feelings. I really don’t know if there’s anything I can do anyway. What’s your idea, for me to write a story that puts Brunner away? That’s not the way things happen. And why me? There are a hundred other reporters in this town.”

  “You’re new. Brunner, well, he controls a lot of people.”

  Amanti went to the window. He was angry. He liked this less and less. Most journalists stayed away from anything that looked dangerous. A lot of stuff went on that the law termed crime, but it was the way the world worked, legal or not. To try to make your reputation by nailing someone to the wall, that was foolish business. If you wanted to write something like that, you’d be best off changing the names and calling it fiction. That way readers could draw their own conclusions, and there would be no lawsuits, no angry politicians, no angry men in organized crime. At least not usually.

  He got up from the table. Amanti followed him to the front room, where he hesitated in front of the colorful, cheerless paintings. She touched him gently on the arm. He liked the contact but mistrusted her at the same time. Yet he had to admit she might be leading him into a good story: the Redwings struggling while the team’s owner burned the city around them.

  “Randy Gutierrez …” she said. That was the name, the person she did not want to see hurt.

  “Gutierrez? The Nicaraguan?”
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br />   Amanti looked at the painting. She pressed her fingers against his arm in the same stiff way she had pressed them against the counter. He looked at the scar on her cheek and wanted to touch it.

  “Gutierrez. Well …” Lofton sighed. He had been thinking of interviewing Randy Gutierrez, the Redwings’ shortstop. He might as well go ahead.

  “I’ll feel him out and let you know.” Lofton suddenly saw himself dead, lying on the garage floor in Colorado, blood dried on his mouth.

  Amanti withdrew her hand. “Good, but please don’t come up to me in front of Brunner, not at the field. Call me here.”

  Lofton followed her to the door. He watched the way she pressed her fingers against her thigh—a nervous, absent gesture.

  “Tell me,” he said, pausing at the open door. “Why bother? Why not just keep it to yourself?”

  She gave him a startled look. “I don’t know, maybe I’m bored,” she said. “Maybe I just want to do the right thing.”

  She touched his arm again, not avoiding his eyes this time but staring straight into them, as if trying to decide whether or not she had made a mistake talking to him. He thought of asking her about the business with Sparks in the parking lot but decided to keep it to himself, at least for now.

  After Lofton had left, Amanti went to the phone and dialed Senator Kelley’s office in Boston. Just as she heard the ringing on the other end of the line, however, she hung up. No, not this time, she thought; he can call me. She went over her conversation with the reporter. He was a disheveled man, who had an odd habit of not seeming to look at you while you spoke, except occasionally, and then very directly, in a way that was disarming and made you wonder if you had said something you hadn’t intended. At such moments, despite his loose, ill-fitting clothes and sloppy manner, he was not bad-looking: dirt-colored olive brown skin, dark eyes, and a nose that looked as if it had been broken, maybe, when he was a kid.

  “We can use him,” Kelley had said, sitting on the edge of her bed. “And he’ll get lost when we want him to—with a little incentive. He’s done the same sort of thing before.”

  She lost patience and called Kelley’s office again. This time she let it ring through. Amanti had talked to the secretary a hundred times over the last four years, left a thousand messages, but she had never seen the woman; she had never been to Kelley’s office. Still, the secretary knows me, Amanti thought; she recognizes my voice, too. “No,” the woman said, “the senator is out of the office. He won’t be back till tomorrow.”

  “Where will he be tonight?”

  “He has an engagement.”

  “With his wife?” Amanti asked. The catch in her voice was barely noticeable.

  The secretary hesitated. “No,” she said at last, “his wife’s at their cottage on the shore.”

  When Kelley called, it was late, past midnight. He asked her about Lofton but only enough to see that everything had gone the way they’d planned. His voice was that of a slightly drunk, happy man, gruff and pleasant, like the sound of a stream rolling over a bed of rough stones. She tried to imagine his face as he spoke, but she couldn’t. It was just his voice, the stream in the darkness: I’ll be out to see you soon, any day now. Amanti wondered where he was at the moment and whom he had been with. He went on talking, the same melodious sound, and finally she saw his face—his black hair and blue eyes—reflected back at her in the running stream.

  2

  Early the next morning, before dawn, the fire sirens caterwauled, loud, mournful, insistent, and raised Lofton from his bed. He ran to his window. The roof of the neighboring building was flat, and he could see over it into the street. Down there the cars slowed in the blue air, pulling to the curb, while, for an instant, the engine raced by, its lights flashing red and angry down the alley. Lofton climbed down the fire escape. By the time he reached the street, the engine was gone, but he could still hear it, moving somewhere deeper into the neighborhood. He tried to follow the siren, but suddenly its wailing stopped; the truck parked on some corner he could not find. Up one long, narrow street he saw the glare of a fire, he thought, high in the windows of an apartment building, but closer up he saw the glare was only the reflection of neon from across the street. He stood on the corner, trying to catch his breath. A couple of boys, bandannas around their heads, stood nearby, watching him. They wore T-shirts torn at the sleeves, pants torn above the knees and split upward, exposing the dark skin of their thighs. Three or four more boys stepped out of an alleyway, and the groups called to each other in Spanish. Lofton stood between them. He saw the dark passageways of the city spreading out in front of him, saw himself lost in the city, and knew he would not be able to find the fire. He put his head down, like a bull, so no one would bother him, and headed back toward the hotel.

  The next afternoon Lofton sat at the Formica table in his room, puzzling over an assignment his editors at the Dispatch had given him, puzzling and sweating. A radio outside was blasting. The temperature was in the nineties. A Caribbean pressure cooker, said the radio weatherman. A heat wave from hurricane country. Lofton did not know if it was the heat—thickening like fog in his head—but he could not, after hustling over the hot streets all day, figure out how to play the story they wanted him to write. Everyone he had talked to, even his editors, seemed double-handed, manipulating the information for reasons of their own. The names in his notebook were becoming difficult to keep straight. He wrote them down with an old tarnished silver fountain pen, something his brother had given him years back. It was one of the few possessions that he had kept over the years; he did not take the pen out into the streets with him but left it in a drawer in his room, knowing he would lose it otherwise, leaving it behind on a bar counter or on someone else’s desk.

  Earlier that morning, when he had gone to the Dispatch, the sports editor had sent him over to the city desk, to McCullough. McCullough was the one who had sent Lofton on the funeral parlor story, to follow the woman looking for money to bury her dead sister-in-law. “I want tough, meaningful stories,” McCullough had said. Today, since the Redwings were gone on the road, McCullough wanted Lofton to talk to a man who had been assaulted on the street. When police responded to the call, McCullough told him, they had ended up arresting the victim, a man named Lou Mendoza. The cops took Mendoza on a vandalism charge, and the assailants got away.

  While McCullough gave Lofton the story, Kirpatzkex walked up. Kirpatzke was a thin, nervous man with a bad complexion and long yellowish hands he seemed unable to control. Technically Kirpatzke was the night editor, but he seemed to be around all the time. Smiling slightly, as if he were half-amused but mostly weary, he walked over, as he always did, to find out what McCullough was assigning. Kirpatzke often said nothing, just stood and listened and watched, though sometimes he cut in to change the story’s direction or to suggest killing it altogether. He irritated McCullough, Lofton could tell, but McCullough, a serious bruiser of a man, played along anyway. Press box rumor said Kirpatzke used to have a better job, more prestige, more money, up at the Springfield Post. There was a hint of scandal—something Kirpatzke had done wrong or bungled—which made Lofton curious, of course, but he did not know for sure why Kirpatzke had left the bigger Springfield paper to work at the Dispatch.

  “What story you giving him?” Kirpatzke asked.

  McCullough told him, and Kirpatzke shook his head. He waved his long yellow hands in the air, then settled them near McCullough and drummed the fingers on the desktop. “Where did you get that idea for this business, Einstein’s notes?”

  “Einstein?” Lofton asked. The editors ignored him. McCullough watched Kirpatzke’s fingers in the same way you might watch a roach before killing it.

  “From Einstein?” Kirpatzke repeated.

  The second time Lofton heard the name, he remembered where else he had heard it recently. It had been in the press box on the night Jack Brunner and Tony Liuzza were interviewed. After the others had left, Lofton had asked some more questions about the Redwings’
owners’ involvement in Democratic politics, and about Brunner’s building investments downtown.

  “Who do you think you are, the new Einstein?” Tenace had said, and laughed. One of the remaining reporters laughed, too, though not so loudly or so long. At the time Lofton had thought it was nothing but another one of Tenace’s bad jokes.

  Now the two editors stared at each other. They were at odds: Kirpatzke wry and bemused, his tie loose around his neck; McCullough frowning, comically, like a short, fat boy in a cartoon strip.

  “There’s no sense chasing that stuff,” said Kirpatzke. McCullough didn’t agree.

  “Listen, I’d rather do sports anyway,” Lofton said.

  “Wouldn’t everybody?” Kirpatzke turned to Mac. “Did you get it from Einstein?”

  “Einstein was a reporter here?” Lofton asked.

  McCullough nodded.

  “Where is he now?”

  “He’s not with us anymore.”

  “Where is he?”

  Neither editor answered. They were more concerned with each other than with Lofton’s questions. “I’d like to do something on Randy Gutierrez, the shortstop,” Lofton said.

  “Another baseball story, hell. We’ve given Brunner and that bunch all the publicity I can stand. Everybody else in this state might be working for the Democratic party, but we’re not. Or at least I’m not,” McCullough said, shooting a look in Kirpatzke’s direction.

  Lofton mentioned the scene at the ballpark and repeated what he’d learned: how the younger owner, Liuzza, had joined up with Kelley, and how both men were backing the liberal candidate, Richard Sarafis, for governor. “That leaves Brunner the odd man out, and I don’t think he’s too pleased about it.”