The Spoiler

by Domenic Stansberry

  Lofton scanned both papers, the Holyoke Dispatch and the Springfield Post. There was a recurring story that worked its way through the years—the back and forth in the state legislature on Holyoke’s downtown renovation project. One season it was on, the next off, and the money never got out of committee. This year, with the election coming, the issue was alive again.

  Starting with the issues from April, when the minor league season began, he studied the papers more closely. He found an opening day story which pictured the Redwings’ owners, Jack Brunner and Tony Liuzza, standing with the mayor of Holyoke at MacKenzie Field. The three men smiled for the camera. Liuzza told the reporter that he and Brunner had gotten to know each other through meetings of the local Democratic party.

  “Jack just came up to me one day and told me the Redwings were up for sale. Being a frustrated ballplayer myself, I couldn’t resist. I liked the idea of free tickets to the games.”

  The story told him little he didn’t already know. It mentioned how Brunner’s construction company, Bruconn, planned on renovating an abandoned mill downtown: American Paper. The more Lofton thought about it, the more buying the team seemed a good move for Brunner, something to endear him, and his business interests, to the local politicians. Only, with his partner, Tony Liuzza, flip-flopping in the Democratic party, the situation might be going sour. No wonder, Lofton thought, there had been tension between Brunner and Liuzza that night in the press box.

  Lofton found some business on Kelley, too, a story announcing how the state senator had endorsed Richard Sarafis for governor. “I support Richard Sarafis because he’s the candidate who cares about the disenfranchised, the people away from the power centers, and that includes not only the citizens of Holyoke but all of western Massachusetts.”

  Lofton had seen Richard Sarafis speak once, back when Sarafis was a young liberal—as Senator Kelley was now—the candidate with the clean record and clear eyes who worked the college campuses, the immigrant wards of Boston, the parlor halls of the wealthy, all with the same deft skill. Though Sarafis had aged more than a dozen years from the time Lofton had seen him, you couldn’t tell time had touched the man at all from the looks of the picture at the top of the newspaper page. The makeup men, the hair dye specialists, and the tailors conspired to keep him forever young.

  The real focus of the picture, though, was Senator Kelley. He moved with his hand extended—a small man, slightly burly, with his hair vaguely mussed. The camera had caught him in motion, just as his head turned away from Sarafis, so that his expression was disarming. It was Kelley’s eyes. They seemed almost black in the photograph, as if contemplating some inner depths. If you did not know the circumstance of the picture, you would have guessed that the smaller man was the one with the power and that Sarafis, stiff, smiling, practiced, was some kind of plaster dummy set up for show.

  The article said little else of substance, just the usual campaign rhetoric, but there was again brief mention of the renovation project planned for downtown Holyoke. The funding issue was currently being swatted around a committee that Kelley headed: “The Wells people are trying to foul the Holyoke money by attaching unacceptable stipulations. They don’t want it to go through, not unless we award the contracts to their cronies. They’re just daring me to kill it, knowing how much the people in my district need that project. The truth is, their stipulations are unacceptable, and I’ll kill the whole thing before we let them have their way, even if it is an election year. I’m not playing partisan politics.”

  All told, the articles on Brunner and Kelley told Lofton little he had not already learned. Senator Kelley supported the challenger Sarafis. So did Liuzza. Brunner was on the other side with the incumbent Wells. Both groups seemed to want the Holyoke project to go through; they just wanted to make sure their side got the credit and their supporters got the cream.

  As it turned out, the reporter who wrote about the fires in Holyoke was Einstein, the same reporter whose name Tenace had mentioned and who, according to the boys at the Dispatch, had left town without so much as blowing them a kiss good-bye. Lofton came across Einstein’s work often in the paper: “Maria Ramirez, mother of six, her dress torn and soot-smeared, watched as rescuers searched the debris Tuesday for the body of her sister, believed dead in the recent blaze.” In his stories Einstein made a practice of listing the owners of the buildings that burned; not one of the buildings had belonged to Brunner. One anonymous man who’d been burned out of his apartment said all the fires in Holyoke were arson, part of an insurance fraud scheme. A lieutenant on the arson squad said no, the buildings were old, they were fire traps. Sure, some of them were torched, but most went up through carelessness, just like anywhere else.

  Einstein’s most interesting stories, however, were his pieces about the Latinos, the street gang Lofton had learned about from Lou Mendoza. Over the course of several months Einstein had tracked the career of one of the gang’s leaders, and eventually he had written about the young leader’s death.

  The leader of the Latinos had been named Angelo. The pictures showed him to be in his late twenties: a good-looking, dark-skinned man, with thick, full lips and wild black hair. When he talked, he mixed the language of the street with the slogans of the sixties’ left wing, which Angelo was too young to have been part of but which he may have remembered or read about in books. He had been mobilizing the Puerto Rican community in an unusual way, at least for the leader of a street gang: giving speeches on street corners; criticizing the police and the drug dealers all in one breath. Angelo’s popularity grew, and as it did, so did the size of the Latinos. He set up Latino patrols to protect storekeepers, to watch the streets at night, to try to stop the fires that, despite everything, still burned. In the process a street war broke out between the Latinos and a rival gang, the Wanderers.

  Angelo’s credibility became tarnished, however, after a street battle that left three young men dead on the street. Afterward Holyoke’s mayor called the incident “tragic, barbaric” and made a public appeal—directed mostly at Angelo—for both street gangs to disband, to join the community, to let the police patrol the streets.

  In full battle gear, scarves flying, chains hanging from their belts, knives sheathed at their sides, Angelo and a half dozen Latinos stormed into the next City Council meeting. Angelo took the platform and addressed the people in the auditorium. His people would not disband, he said, not ever.

  “If you lived in our houses, in our streets, in our tenements—in our city that is burning—then you know why we can’t disband. People like Mayor Rafferty say that it’s all accident, all vandalism, simply our own people destroying ourselves and our homes. Would you burn your own homes?… The police, the white businessmen, the neighborhood crooks and thieves—like the Wanderers—they’re the ones who gain. It’s a system.”

  Lofton looked at the newspaper photo Einstein had taken of Angelo at the meeting. The gang leader stood on the platform, legs straddled wide, his finger pointing at the audience.

  “We know who’s burning our city, and we won’t stop our war until they’ve been stopped. And those who think they’re too powerful to be punished—we’ll drag them down, too. That’s why the politicians want us to disband and why the police are afraid of us.”

  Afterward the mayor had dismissed Angelo as “a fringe lunatic—a low-rent Al Capone trying to pass himself off as Che Guevera. We can’t let him terrorize us.” Then he announced that the Wanderers, the rival street gang, had agreed to throw off their colors and disband. He called on the Latinos to ignore their leader and do the same.

  A few nights later, after walking out of a corner grocery store, Angelo had been shot twice in the head. He’d taken a bodyguard along with him to the store, but the Latinos did not carry guns, only knives. Both Angelo and his guard died at the scene. The store owner hadn’t seen the murderer, he said; he didn’t know anything about it. The two Latinos bought cigarettes, walked outside; then they were dead. “That’s all I know,” said the own
er, “and all I want to know.”

  After Angelo’s death Einstein did a story on the gang leader’s funeral, and then that was it. Einstein’s by-line disappeared from the Dispatch in early July, just before Lofton had got to town. Since then the paper had run little else about the Latinos or the Wanderers. Lofton now realized, thinking back on what Mendoza had said about taking off his colors, that he should go back and press Mendoza harder on the status of the rivalry, try to get to the bottom of what had happened between the two gangs, and see how it related to the fires.

  Late one afternoon Lofton left the library for a while, taking a walk to clear his head. When he returned, the librarian approached him.

  “Did your friend catch up to you?” asked the librarian, a shy, thin woman who tried hard to smile when she spoke.

  “Friend?” Lofton said. He did not understand what she meant.

  “Yes, he asked how you were coming along with the project. And he asked what papers you were looking at.” The woman’s smile faltered.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “Right.” He still had no idea what she meant.

  “Good,” the woman said, her smile firm now, satisfied.

  Lofton sat awhile longer at the table. He could no longer concentrate. Who could be looking for him? No one could know he was here—except, now that he thought about it, he had mentioned, during an idle moment in the press box, that he needed to do some research in the library. But who would be following him? One of the reporters? Tenace? It didn’t make any sense. He went up to the librarian’s desk and called out to the young woman. “My friend?” he asked. “What did he look like?”

  The woman seemed embarrassed.

  “What did he look like?” Lofton repeated. He began to wonder if she had made a mistake, confusing him with someone else.

  “About this high.” The librarian raised her hand a few inches over her head. “Brownish hair.” Her smile was gone; her cheeks were red. “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t really remember.”

  On Friday he headed for his lunch with Amanti at the Little Puerto Rico Café. He left his hotel early, thinking maybe he could stop along the way at Mendoza’s, get a few last details for that story McCullough wanted, and at the same time maybe learn something more about the Wanderers and the fires.

  As he walked through the Flats, where Einstein had gone for his stories and where the fires were the most serious, he saw kids picking through the debris of a recently burned building. Perhaps they were even the same kids he had seen in some of Einstein’s newspaper photographs. In the full-color glare of midday the young boys, wearing cutoff shorts, T-shirts, crucifix chains hanging around their necks, seemed less real, more frightening than a newspaper photo.

  When he reached Mendoza’s building, three young Puerto Rican men, teenagers really, were standing at the top of the steps. They did not move from the door as Lofton approached. The tallest of the three wore a brightly colored scarf around his head, silver and gold: the colors of the Latinos street gang. He shot a question at Lofton, speaking in rapid, clipped Spanish. Lofton did not understand. He thought it best, however, to pretend that he did.

  “I’m looking for Lou Mendoza.”

  One of the other two took a quick stutter step toward Lofton. The tall kid with the head scarf extended his arm outright, across his friend’s chest, signaling him to stop.

  Lofton stood still, his heart pounding in his head. Now he noticed all three of them were wearing scarves. The angry one who’d been intercepted by his friends wore his colors tied around his arm. The third man, who leaned against the doorframe as if bored, had his scarf hanging from his belt, near a knife in a leather sheath.

  “No está,” said the one with the headband.

  “Okay, gracias.”

  Lofton blinked up at the gang members. He tried a ridiculous, friendly wave and then—turning his back—headed down the stairs. Halfway up the street he braved a look over his shoulder. They were gone.

  Just machismo, bravado, Lofton thought. The kid had no plans to come after me. Mendoza’s name, though, had sure set him off.

  The Little Puerto Rico Café was on a partially renovated block below the city’s business section. It was hot and crowded, full of men and women talking loudly, mostly in Spanish. A quick-footed counterman yelled out orders over the din and paused, every fourth or fifth step, to wipe his hands on his dirty apron. A solitary waitress hurried back and forth between the customers and the kitchen.

  Amanti was waiting in an upholstered booth in the back. She wore a black skirt and red blouse, so at first he did not recognize her, her clothes were so like those of the women in this district.

  “Have you talked to Randy Gutierrez yet—the shortstop?” she asked.

  “No, the team’s out of town.”

  She smiled. Up close he noticed the faint white gloss on her lips and her red stone earrings—garnet maybe, he couldn’t be sure; he only knew the stones looked like nothing women here could afford.

  “I’ve been doing a lot of reading down at the library, looking into the fires.”

  She stared at him, her eyes a distant blue, as if she were staring at the ocean. She seemed to enjoy sitting here. He could feel himself sweating. The five-blade fan whirring overhead did little to cool the place. The waitress set down some water and hurried away. The water was warm, without ice. He wondered when Amanti would say why she had called him. Did she have some new information?

  “A man named Einstein used to do the fire writing, a good job really.” Lofton paused. She did not seem to be listening to him, but glancing about the place, studying it. She enjoyed it, the slumming.

  “What happened to your face?” she asked.

  Lofton scowled, touched his cheek; he had forgotten about the other night in the park.

  “I slipped.”

  She nodded, smiling, and he got the impression that, improbable as it was, she somehow knew of his adventure alone at MacKenzie Field.

  “Anyway,” he said, wanting to see how she’d react when he contradicted the story she’d told him the other day, “according to Einstein, a lot of the locals feel someone’s behind the burning, for insurance. But all the buildings are owned by different men, no pattern at all. And Brunner doesn’t own any of them.”

  She looked at him, her eyes no longer clear blue but smoggy, like the sky over Holyoke. When the waitress came, Amanti ordered without even looking at the menu card. Apparently she had eaten here before.

  “So that’s what the papers say about the owners.” She tried to say it with confidence, as if of course the papers were wrong; but her tone was quirky, quavering, and it occurred to Lofton that the way she had breezed in here, her apparent self-confidence, was a sham. He was so pleased with his observation, with her weakness, that he forgot to ask her how she knew the papers were wrong about the owners. In another moment the weakness was gone, and she held her fingertips against the tabletop in the same stiff way she had held them against the counter at her apartment.

  “How long have you known Brunner?”

  She laughed. “I’ve known him awhile. He’s a friend of the family. Not my family exactly—the Liuzza family. Tony Liuzza’s my cousin.”

  “I know. I heard that in the press box.”

  Lofton felt, he thought—it was one of those fleeting sensations that afterward seem to have been imagination—her shoe brushing against his leg. The restaurant was unbearably hot. He could smell the scent of her perfume. He saw Amanti was hot, too, a faint trace of sweat where her hair swept over her brow.

  The food came, a thick mix of rice and tomatoes and vegetables and pork, not very good, or at least not what he had expected. He was used to the spicier Mexican food of California and, because the people were Hispanic, had thought this would be the same. They ate quietly, and he studied the turn of her cheek, the slight blush of rouge on her dark skin, near the scar. On one hand, he wanted the meal over as soon as possible—it was too hot here and he had little appetite—but on the other hand, he wanted t
o stretch it out. He did not look forward to spending the evening in his impossibly warm hotel. He asked her how Randy Gutierrez had come to tell her about the fires. She passed over the question. She leaned back in the booth, putting her hands underneath her legs and rocking herself, incongruously, in a way that reminded you of a teenage girl. She told him the neighborhood they were in had not always been Puerto Rican. Ten, fifteen years ago, it had been inhabited by Irish, Polish, a few Portuguese.

  “My father would walk us down here sometimes, me and my brother, back when this place belonged to some Poles. My father was in the restaurant business, too, and my brother and I would sit here, drinking Cokes, while the owner and my father talked.”

  “Is your brother still in town?”

  “No, he’s dead. A car accident.”

  Though her face grew serious for a second, she didn’t stop rocking, swinging her feet like a child. Ironically, when Lofton tried to imagine her as a child, he saw her—small, dark-skinned, quiet, standing by her father’s side—as one of those young girls who seemed to carry adult secrets inside without realizing, not yet, what the secrets were, the type of girl grown men, even decent ones, would look at and see in a way different from the way they saw their own daughters. Though her shoe brushed him again, there was nothing in her face betraying she had touched him. It was still the girlish look. Lofton moved away, avoiding the swinging foot. She didn’t talk to him about the arsons, the way she had the first time he talked to her, but instead, she told him about her family. People sometimes did that when you interviewed them, talking about anything but the matter at hand, sometimes because they were nervous and sometimes just because they wanted you to like them. With Amanti, it was hard to see what her reasons were. She told him how her parents had moved to Holyoke at the time of the Korean War. They’d left their old immigrant neighborhood in New Haven, she said, not because they were suddenly prosperous, like some of their neighbors, but because the Italians were moving out and the blacks moving in. So her father opened a restaurant on Locust Street in Holyoke. A small place, as much a tavern as a place to eat. Her brother had been born before the move, but Amanti had been born in Holyoke.