The Spoiler

by Domenic Stansberry

  “Actually,” Kirpatzke went on, “I’m up all night anyway, I prefer it, so I keep the place open. That’s all. And sometimes someone else comes in with a story.”

  Lofton glanced around the building, dark except for the faint glow of the computer screens. He could hear the computer’s hum as well and imagined Kirpatzke sitting here alone, night after night, in the deserted building.

  “You better get working on that story if you don’t want to be here forever,” Kirpatzke said finally. “Grab a terminal. The computer man’s not here, the system’s junk, but I think it’ll hold.”

  Lofton went to the area known as the ghetto, where proofreaders corrected copy on the green computer screens. The proof-readers, of course, were not in at this hour, and Lofton sat alone. He painted the story in bright, sordid colors, describing the angle of Gutierrez’s body on the floor, the plaster Virgin with the cocaine, the crackling static, and the neighborhood crowd in the street outside. He described Gutierrez’s last at bat during the previous home stand, how he had crossed himself over and over between each pitch. He did not mention, of course, the letters he himself had taken from Gutierrez’s apartment, and he left out what Amanti had told him about Brunner and the arson downtown. When the police saw the story, they might come after him, asking where he found his information. There was a chance one of the cops would recognize him, and they would want to know why he had left the scene. He would say he had given his name to the detective; he could not help it if they were too goddamned incompetent to write it down. If that did not work, well, he would think of something else.

  He was still working early in the morning when the proofreaders came in. Kirpatzke wandered by to read over his shoulder. The proofreaders, women mostly, fell silent and hunched their shoulders when Kirpatzke approached.

  “I want you to do another story on Gutierrez, a follow-up,” Kirpatzke said. “A feature piece, color, not hard news.”

  Lofton nodded, keeping his eyes on the screen. Kirpatzke touched him on the arm. “I don’t want you trying to solve the murder, nothing like that. Let the cops take the risks. You do the people stuff, talk to the man’s friends. You know, human interest.”

  Kirpatzke gave him a weepy smile that was only partly ironic. “You know, touch their hearts.”

  When Lofton finished the story, his body itched. Too much coffee, too many cigarettes. Back in the hotel, he had trouble sleeping. His sheets were dirty, the night was hot, and there was noise in the apartment below. He floated on the surface, not quite awake, not quite asleep. He dreamed of his wives, and he dreamed of the Amanti woman. They watched from the left field bleachers while he ran the bases. Something pursued him, he didn’t know what. He woke in the morning so hot and feverish, so drenched with sweat, that he thought he must be dying. The doctor knew something he wouldn’t say. But no, the desk clerk and the men in the lobby were drenched in the same sweat, their faces red and puffy. It was simply the heat wave. If it was killing him, it was killing everyone else as well.

  He tried calling Senator Kelley’s office in the morning, then again in the afternoon. He didn’t know how Kelley fitted in to things, or if he fitted in at all, but for the moment it didn’t much matter. The senator wasn’t coming to the phone. “He’s out of the office,” the secretary said. “He’s tied up in a meeting. Could you please hold?”

  The Redwings would start practice at four. Lofton decided to go to the park early to start his follow-up, although he did not relish the prospect of talking to Gutierrez’s roommates. He was sure they would be reading his story, and the police had probably seen it as well. The Dispatch had given the story good play, running it alongside a news file photo of Gutierrez, dark-eyed and handsome.

  Before he left his hotel, as he stood sweating in the lobby, the clerk handed him a telegram. It was from Maureen, “AM GOING AHEAD WITH PROCEEDINGS.”

  Lofton felt bitter, though he knew he had done nothing to prompt his wife to act otherwise. Here I am dying, he thought—am I dying?—and Maureen was going ahead with proceedings.

  In the midst of his anger he dialed Amanti from a phone booth in the lobby. A man answered, a harsh, possessive voice dirty with sleep. Lofton hung up without saying a word. Brunner?

  He left the hotel, circled the block, and dialed again from a booth on the street. This time Amanti answered.

  “You’ve heard Gutierrez is dead.” Lofton was impressed with his brutal tone, then ashamed of himself. He saw the body on the floor, the skull splintered and bleeding. The air in the phone booth seemed too thick to breathe, too hot, and the light outside too bright.

  “Yes.”

  She sounded composed. Lofton wanted to shout at her. He waited a long minute. He imagined the man with the insidious voice standing behind her.

  “Can’t you talk?”

  The same stillborn silence followed, a pause he could not interpret. Was she trying to get rid of him? Who was the man who’d answered?

  “Yes, that’s fine. Do you think you could deliver it sometime later in the week?”

  “Deliver what?”

  There was another pause. Then he realized his mistake. “All right, I understand. Should I call back later, after the game?”

  “Yes, that would be fine. I’ll be here.”

  Lofton was glad when the conversation ended. Outside the booth the air was a little easier to breathe.

  Before Lofton’s phone call Kelley had been lying on Amanti’s couch, drowzing uneasily in the afternoon heat. He and Amanti had learned of Gutierrez’s death earlier that morning, and the death had made Kelley rethink his plans. He had thought he could use Lofton, as well as his own power in the legislature, to make Brunner switch sides in the primary campaign. He still thought so. Only he had not expected so quick, so violent a reaction, not so soon after the wheels had been set in motion.

  “We don’t know that Brunner’s behind the shortstop’s death,” he said, without any real conviction. “It could be coincidence. Gutierrez hung around on the street a lot with those cocaine people. He could have brought it on himself.”

  “Maybe it’s our fault,” Amanti said. “We brought attention to him, and that’s why he’s dead. Brunner, or someone, didn’t want him talking.”

  Kelley nodded. He had thought about that. The shortstop’s death was a hard responsibility, one that made his own stake in what happened seem more important, more real. Still, the death had made him very tired. He leaned back and closed his eyes. One event followed another, down a very long line, and at the end of the line was himself. He saw himself falling over, tumbling, shattered into pieces, the faces of a crowd. The crowd looked up at him. There was a reason for everything, he knew, and it was there on the platform, dressed in his own best clothes.

  Amanti knelt on the floor beside Kelley, one of her hands resting on his stomach, her finger toying with the ribbing of his blue shirt, skirting an undone button. She studied his face, the closed eyes, the partly open lips, the black tassel of hair. When she moved closer to him, she smelled the sharp, familiar pungence of his body, the mix of men’s soap and cologne and sweat. As in the past, the smell triggered the image of the dark-paneled corridors of the building where he worked, the smile of the secretary she had never seen. She imagined him walking into his office, his slight swagger, a gait that was childlike and cocky, like a boy’s strut on the day he leaves high school. She reached her hand toward his shirt collar, ready to kiss him. It was a familiar action; she had done it a hundred times, and it always reminded her of the first time they had kissed, when she had reached up and touched his collar, seen for a second the vulnerability in his face, and then pulled him closer.

  Now the phone on the table behind them rang. Kelley got to it before she did. He had been in contact with his office, worrying about a committee meeting on the Holyoke project, and he expected a call back. He answered in a voice not quite his own, as if waking from a deep sleep. In another second he laid the phone back down. His expression was puzzled.

 
; “Whoever it was, they hung up,” he said. “Not a word.”

  “Brunner,” Amanti whispered. She felt a quick chill at the possibility. Brunner called her regularly, and maybe he’d hung up at the sound of Kelley’s voice. Still, she doubted it. Brunner would be more likely to ask for her anyway, to bludgeon his way through Kelley. The senator smiled. He seemed to derive pleasure from the possibility that it had been Brunner on the other end.

  A moment later the phone rang again. This time she answered it herself. The voice was Lofton’s. She glanced over at Kelley, saw his wry, confident smile, his eyes—almost black now, it seemed, unreadable—and she turned away from him. Lofton seemed upset, a little crazy. She talked to him without letting Kelley know who it was. When she got off, she told him it had been a deliveryman with a new part for the air conditioner, a pump or a filter or some damn thing, she wasn’t exactly sure.

  “Why did he hang up the first time?”

  “I didn’t ask,” she said. “Maybe it was a bad connection.”

  She enjoyed the lie. There weren’t many opportunities for her to lie to Kelley in the way he lied to her. While she watched, Kelley called his office in Boston. The secretary gave him his messages. There was one he hadn’t expected: The reporter, Lofton, had been calling his office. Persistently. Suddenly Lofton seemed to be everywhere.

  “Did you mention my name to him?” Kelley asked Amanti.

  “No,” she said.

  “I don’t like him calling my office. He’s getting too close.”

  For a moment Amanti hoped Kelley might abandon his whole scheme. Gutierrez’s death, Brunner’s potential for violence, Lofton’s persistence—things were happening in a way he hadn’t planned. If he were patient and let it all pass, then his career, his power, would develop regardless, she told him. “Your father-in-law will see to that,” she added, somewhat bitterly. “By pushing too hard, you’re risking what you already have.”

  “You sound like my wife,” Kelley said. His face twisted into a smile. “I’m not afraid of Brunner, and you shouldn’t be either. He might be behind the shortstop’s death, but Brunner wouldn’t do anything to hurt me—or you.… I’ll just have to get some other things moving sooner than I planned.”

  Kelley paced. His movements were a little wilder than usual, like a horse jittering in the pasture before a thunderstorm, but his voice was the opposite, very low, very calm—as if he were somehow the horse’s master, too, soothing the animal—saying how before he confronted Brunner with the arsons, he needed to line up his committee vote on the Holyoke project. Pressure Brunner from that angle, too. Brunner should worry about the reporter, he should feel pressure, but we don’t want Lofton to actually write the story. No, that would foul everything. No money, no nothing, the fruit knocked from the trees before it was ripe.

  “It’s going to take a little time to get everything set up. In the meanwhile, I want you to stay away from the reporter. At least until I tell you. Let him turn in circles for a while.”

  “You’re using me,” she said. She heard the wildness in her voice. It hadn’t been what she intended to say. “You’ve got another woman in Boston.”

  “You know I’m married. You’ve known it all along. When all this is over and Sarafis is in office, I won’t need her anymore, or her father. I’ll have my own power base. A good one. But we need Brunner’s support, his money, and he’ll kick back a lot to keep his arson ring going. After this is finished, no one will be able to hurt me—to hurt us.”

  His voice had the quality it had onstage, as if he were talking to a group of people. At the moment she did not believe anything he said. “It’s not your wife I’m talking about. You have another woman—a mistress.”

  “As soon as we’ve gotten rid of the reporter, you and I’ll get out of here for a few days. We’ll go rest. Just hold on a little while longer. And don’t talk to Lofton again until I tell you.”

  Kelley touched her on the cheek, lifted a strand of her hair. She closed her eyes. For a brief second they were just two people anywhere. The things they had been discussing were no more important than the daily conversations of newscasters, the analysis of intrigues in remote nations, events that occurred on back-alley streets in cities you would never see. When she opened her eyes, Kelley’s face seemed unbelievably delicate, as if she were looking at it through glass. She had an undeniable urge to reach through, to break the glass.

  “I don’t know if any of this is fair to Brunner,” she said, knowing the effect the remark would have. “After all, Jack has helped me a lot. It doesn’t feel right.”

  Kelley’s face blanched; the red rose fiercely to his cheeks. He pulled away from her. As she watched him turn away, the satisfaction the remark had given her, his small pain, started to fade. “I won’t talk to the reporter until you tell me,” she promised. “I’ll stay away from him.”

  From his place high in the stands Lofton watched the players drift in. They came alone or in pairs, dressed in their street clothes: crew-neck T-shirts or light button-down short sleeves; thin chains—tokens from lovers or family—around their necks. As Tim Carpenter walked in, he glanced up at where Lofton was sitting. Elvin Banks, the center fielder, walked beside him, carrying a portable cassette that played a tinny, melancholy Stevie Wonder.

  You are the sunshine of my life.…

  Even after the pair had gone inside the clubhouse, Lofton continued to hear the song, an echo in the hot, breezeless afternoon. It reminded him of that day in his junior year at college when he had fallen from the roof: the sun hot on his back; the tar vapor rising from the shingles; the radio playing on the porch. It had been a bad season, his body thickening, maturing. He had lost a step on the long run to first base and spent a lot of games riding the bench. He had been climbing down the ladder from the roof, looking down at the grass as he did so. Maybe it was the angle, or maybe the heat, or the tar vapors, but the lawn below him had seemed to stretch luxuriantly away, infinitely almost, like a golf course or a cemetery. Then he had slipped, falling to the grass, landing crookedly, twisting. The first thing he thought was, there it goes, my pivot, no more second base. And with the thought he had been relieved.

  It was a long time, longer than usual, before the players came out of the clubhouse. Lofton guessed they were having a team meeting, Coach Barker talking to them in his gruff, impossible manner, telling them to win this one for Gutierrez. Finally the men filed out, not in haphazard groups as they usually did but in a continuous, determined stream, one player after another, each with a black armband over the blue sleeve of his practice jersey. A few glanced up at Lofton—the same steely dislike—but there was no whispering, no talking among themselves.

  The players started their warm-up, wandering off in groups or alone now, stretching on the outfield grass, running laps and wind sprints, whipping baseballs to one another through the heavy air. He needed to talk to a few of them, to get quotes for Kirpatzke, but instead, he stared at the playing field, watching the slow, clocklike motions of the players, listening to the over-and-over slap of the ball against leather. The air was thick, almost palpably so, as it had been in the phone booth earlier. The players moved through it as if they were underwater. Below him, Tim Carpenter pulled a bat from the rack near the dugout. His face was red and flushed, as if he were angry, conscious of Lofton looking down at him. But that could be the heat. Carpenter’s jersey was already streaked through with sweat.

  “Randy has been down, really down.” Lofton had quoted Carpenter in the story. He had mentioned the drugs in the Virgin, insinuated that Gutierrez was having trouble with money. All true.

  One of the papers Lofton had lifted from Gutierrez’s apartment was his bank statement, an almost empty savings, an overdrawn checking, not too much different from Lofton’s own.

  He had not lied in the article. There had been sympathy in his portrait of Gutierrez, he told himself, and compassion. But it was not just the article that bothered him. If I hadn’t taken on the story, if I hadn’t
started poking around, then Gutierrez would still be alive. Gutierrez had died, it seemed, because someone was afraid of what he might say. Either that, or his death was sheer coincidence. Who else knew about the interview Lofton had planned with Gutierrez? Amanti, that was certain. Now that he thought about it, lots of other people had known as well. He had mentioned the upcoming interview with Gutierrez to Kirpatzke and McCullough, that day at the Dispatch. And to Carpenter, Tenace, Barker, Golden. They all had known he was looking for Gutierrez. But none of them, as far as he could tell, had any reason to murder the shortstop. Not unless they were involved with Brunner and his arsons.

  If Amanti had not placed her fingers on his arm, he thought, he would never have seen Gutierrez’s dead body on the floor. Somebody else, Einstein maybe (what the hell had happened to him?), would be writing this story.

  Tim Carpenter took a batting tee and set it up near the fence beyond home plate. He placed one ball after another on the tee, driving each one into the steel mesh of the backstop, his bat a vicious blur in the thick air.

  Finally Coach Barker came onto the field. He unlatched the gate behind home, and some of the fans who came early to watch—including the weird kid Lofton had seen at the library, the kid who seemed to be everywhere—helped push the batting cage onto the field. A few of the players came into the dugout, grabbing helmets and sorting through the bats; others took positions around the field, while still others drifted farther away, continuing their warm-ups. Carpenter kept hammering at the tee while the batters lined up. Coach Barker pitched, and fielders began to call out, their chatter like the scattered crying of insects, a distant rising and falling in the high grass along the roadside. Lofton stood up. He was hot and dizzy; his shirt, like the players’, was soaked through with sweat. He walked down the bleachers slowly, pausing at each step. He had his interviews to do.