The Spoiler

by Domenic Stansberry

  The batters smashed Barker’s pitches back onto the field, driving the ball into the ground sometimes, sending it in low, bouncing trajectories over the infield dirt; other times knocking it farther, so the ball hit in the outfield, skimmed, and disappeared into the grass, like a rock thrown over the surface of a pond; and occasionally connecting so well that the ball flew over the outfielders’ heads, hitting against the stadium wall or leaving the park altogether, landing in the street and ricocheting in the rush-hour traffic. The fielders chased the balls, sometimes straining and diving, more often letting them fall in and die, then walking over casually and throwing the scattered hits, one by one, back to a young pitcher who stood behind second base and tossed the retrieved balls into a bucket. Sparks, tonight’s starter, paced the warning track in left field.

  Lofton worked his way down the bleachers, leaned awhile against the low cyclone fence, then climbed over. Barker did not like reporters on the field, but at this moment Lofton was not conscious of boundaries. The field was as much his as theirs. He had stood at home plate the other night, run the bases, and fallen down as hard as any real player in any real game. He had lain awake as a child, long after the house had quieted and his brother slept in the other bed, and listened on his transistor to the Giants at Candlestick Park, the static and hum of cracked bats, leather against leather, announcers saying the names of Mays and McCovey and Marichal.

  Lofton stepped over third base, the sweat streaming down his forehead, as Coach Barker went into his windup again.

  “A lot of the players, they’re at the age where if you’re good—not great, not excellent—just good, then baseball’s going to break your heart. They’d be better off going home,” Barker had told Lofton once during an interview. Lofton, looking across Barker’s desk into his crusty eyes, had not expected him to say that. Then he realized the manager, with his twenty-five-odd years coaching the minor league circuit, was talking about himself. He should have quit a long time ago.

  Now the batter at the plate connected, and someone from the outfield cried out, “Hey, you, heads up!”

  Lofton did not have time to react, which, when he thought about it later, may have been fortunate. The ball shot by, inches from his head, so close that he could hear it. He took a step forward, threw his hands back, lost his balance, and fell onto the ground.

  Lofton sat in the dirt. Several players, including the man who had been in the batting cage, rushed forward. “It’s okay. It didn’t hit him,” yelled someone, Carpenter, he guessed. Then he saw the second baseman standing nearby, smiling grimly.

  Lofton grinned up at the players around him. They stared dumbly back. He caught Barker’s eye. Barker knows, he thought suddenly, but what did he think Barker knew? That, sometimes, it was just impossible to leave, that you always yearned to make the great catch, to feel your cleats in the velvet grass, to hear the crowd whispering your name? It was silly. Barker looked him over, shook his head, and turned away. Someone came running with a bag of ice.

  “No, I’m fine. Scared me but didn’t touch.”

  Lofton hurried away, breaking through the circle of broad-chested uniformed players. He felt the players watching as he headed toward the bleachers. Why do I do such things? he wondered as he climbed the bleachers, feeling himself gasp, short of breath. He had deliberately walked into the middle of the field, just as last night he had almost given himself away to the police. “Fuck,” he whispered, his breath suddenly gone, replaced by a pain, like a gnarled fist, rising in his chest. The air went gray, and he reached through the fog, making it to the long grandstand seat, then rolling over onto his back. He lay that way a long second, then remembered the players were still watching. He sat up.

  “Just catching a suntan,” he yelled. “Go on without me.”

  He was surprised at their laughter and more surprised, a second later, when he realized his pain was gone.

  Holyoke retook the field at game time, the black armbands crisp against the bright white of their game uniforms. The crowd was a little bigger than usual, more people from the Puerto Rican neighborhood, fans of Randy Gutierrez. Before the national anthem the public-address man asked for a moment of silence in memory of the shortstop. That silence would be Gutierrez’s only public eulogy, aside from Lofton’s work in the paper, but Lofton felt a current of emotion run through the crowd. After the anthem the fans gave the Redwings a strong, bitter round of applause.

  The game turned into a pitchers’ duel. Sparks had a wild, nervous look about him, as if he were afraid the murderer was in the ballpark, his gun trained on the mound. Sparks tugged at his jersey and scanned the stands between every pitch. Lofton remembered the scene he’d witnessed between Sparks and Amanti in the parking lot. Was the pitcher scanning the stands, looking for her? Either way, the tension served Sparks well because he had an edge on his fastball that had been missing since early in the season.

  The West Haven pitcher was a black from the Caribbean, Jose Hernandez, who had grown up in Springfield and had pitched on this field before, when Springfield High School played Holyoke High. West Haven had picked him up out of the Yankees’ organization just the week before. The Carib had a sidearm delivery, a pistol-whipping motion that Lofton had not seen before and that baffled the Holyoke batters. Neither team scored through the first four innings. In the fifth Sparks weakened, as he always seemed to in the middle going, and gave up a two-run homer. Lofton winced. The fans swore. But in the sixth and seventh Sparks, though struggling, held West Haven scoreless.

  Lofton kept expecting Holyoke to come back. There was just that feeling in the air. The team was playing too crisply, with too much determination to lose. In the eighth Elvin Banks got to the Carib, pulling an inside fastball over the left field fence. Holyoke had cut the margin to 2–1. Sparks held West Haven again in the ninth. The crowd stood and clapped. Sparks ran from the field, head down, looking harried and uncomfortable.

  In the ninth the Carib seemed to lose control. The fans started in on him, loud and mean. He walked the catcher Lumpy and the first baseman Lynch, perhaps the two weakest hitters in the lineup, and with one out and Singleton at the plate, he wild-pitched the runners along.

  The West Haven manager came out. From the quick, brisk way he moved, Lofton guessed the manager meant to pull the Carib from the game. The Carib shook his head. He did not want to go. The infielders gathered in a semicircle around the mound. The discussion continued until the manager relented, turning the ball back over to the Carib and letting him have his game, win or lose. The Carib struck Singleton out swinging.

  That left Holyoke with runners at second and third, two gone, and Tim Carpenter coming up. Lofton joined in yelling encouragement. He doubted Carpenter could hear him.

  Before stepping into the box, Tim Carpenter leveled his bat at the Carib and took several practice swings. In three at bats so far, Carpenter had struck out, fouled out, grounded weakly to second.

  This time, when the Carib went to his windup, Carpenter stepped out of the batter’s box. The Carib stepped off the pitching rubber and waited. After Carpenter reentered the box and cocked his bat, the Carib stared at him a long time. He finally went to his delivery, but just as he did, Carpenter stepped out. The umpire, raising both arms high, ordered Carpenter back to the plate. Lofton liked the way Carpenter was playing it, back and forth, teasing the Carib.

  At last the first pitch came, a wicked, breaking curve thrown with the velocity of a fastball. The pitch broke inside for a strike. Carpenter had not even swung. The next pitch was the same, only Carpenter swung this time, and missed. He backed from the plate again. The umpire, raising his hands again, commanded Carpenter back to the box. Carpenter snarled, and the fans cheered him on.

  Carpenter fouled off the next pitch, hitting a weak grounder to the right side. It had been the same pitch, the fast curve. Though Lofton expected the Carib would come in with something different now, the pitcher stuck with his pitch. And Carpenter fouled the curve again. Surely the Carib wo
uld throw a straight fastball, or a change-up, something to catch Carpenter off guard. But no, a third time he came in with the curve, and a third time Carpenter fouled it away, only harder this time, again down the first base line. A few feet farther to the left, and the ball would have been fair, bouncing over the base at first. The two runners would have scored. Holyoke would have won. Carpenter’s tenacity is paying off, Lofton thought; the Carib is getting impatient, coming over and over with the same pitch.

  The crowd was on its feet now, all of them yelling at Carpenter to hit the ball, to whack it back at the Carib, to knock it down his throat, to do it for Gutierrez. It was a shabby crowd, and Lofton was moved by its vehemence. The Carib looked the crowd over, grinned, and lifted his cap. They hooted and hollered as he went to his windup.

  Here it comes, thought Lofton; here comes the change-up. He was wrong. It was the same pitch, the mean-hooking curve. Carpenter swung and missed. The game was over.

  Lofton hurried to catch the players before they reached the clubhouse. He needed some quotes for Kirpatzke, anything. Some of the fans leaned over the low sideline fence, reaching out to the players, trying to shake their hands. A band of kids followed the West Haven team, yelling insults. A small police guard formed near the West Haven team bus.

  He spotted Singleton, Gutierrez’s replacement. Walking up to him, his reporter’s brashness returning, he asked Singleton, as sympathetically as he could, how he felt.

  “Not too good,” said Singleton, a short, sulking man who stared guiltily at the dirt. “It’s a hell of a way to get into the starting lineup.”

  4

  Among Gutierrez’s papers, Lofton had found three letters, two from Gutierrez’s wife, and another letter, half-finished, that Gutierrez had been writing to her. He laid them out on the table and tried to translate, to remember his high school Spanish. He did not know whom he could trust to translate the letters for him. Worse, he felt guilty handling the dead man’s papers; it was like digging around in the grave. He motioned to the waitress to fill his coffee cup—only here, in this air-conditioned restaurant above the expressway, was it cool enough to drink coffee—and he looked toward the phone. He had tried calling Amanti last night, after the game, and tried again this morning, standing in the parking lot booth across from the Dispatch. It was almost noon now. He was beginning to get worried.

  Both Kirpatzke and McCullough had been behind their desks at the Dispatch when he had taken his story down this morning. He would have preferred to talk to Kirpatzke, but McCullough had sequestered him first. McCullough had read the first line of his story out loud.

  “Wearing black armbands in honor of their lost compadre”—McCullough paused at compadre, gave Lofton a look, and went on—“the Redwings lost a bitter game devoted to the memory of Randy Gutierrez.”

  Kirpatzke, sitting a few desks away, looked over at Lofton and McCullough. He wore the same grimy shirt he had worn the night Lofton saw him in the darkened building, as if he’d never gone home.

  “This a mood piece?” asked McCullough, puffing out his cheeks. Between the two editors, Lofton didn’t know which was worse: the hard-nosed, one-track McCullough or the sardonic Kirpatzke. Though Kirpatzke was within earshot, he showed no signs of participating in the conversation. It could be that the editors had already had an argument once this morning, and Kirpatzke just didn’t feel like haggling.

  “All right, this looks good,” McCullough said at last. “We can use it. It’s fine. But what about the murderer? They got any idea who killed the shortstop? Or why? There’s no hard, investigative work in this story.”

  “Kirpatzke said he wanted it this way.”

  “What’s this supposed to be, a tea party?”

  Lofton shrugged. Kirpatzke, across the way, had his head down, pretending not to be listening. McCullough frowned heavily at the top of his desk for a long moment, as if trying to decide something.

  “What about the other story—Lou Mendoza, the assault victim? Did you ever talk to him?”

  “Sure, I talked to him.”

  “Well, Mendoza called the paper. Said he wants to talk to you. I set up a meeting.”

  “He called here? Why?” Lofton remembered his second visit to Mendoza’s house, when the Latinos had chased him away. He wasn’t so sure he wanted to step into the middle of that conflict again, even though it might lead to more information about the fires.

  “I think there’s a story there,” said McCullough, and slid him a piece of paper. “This is where you’re supposed to meet.”

  “A church,” said Lofton. “You’re kidding?”

  “Check it out,” McCullough said, his face widening into a sudden smile. “You’re doing a good job.”

  Outside, Lofton shook his head. McCullough was like a lot of small-town editors: unreasonable one minute, your best friend the next—so long as you were doing what he wanted and not asking for much money. Lofton headed across the parking lot to a phone booth on the street. He still wanted to get in touch with Amanti. Before he could reach the phone, however, he heard someone behind him. Kirpatzke. The editor hurried to catch up.

  “He sending you on that Mendoza stuff?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’d stay away from it if I were you. Mendoza’s hooked up with those street gangs, you know, knives and chains.”

  “I had that figured out. But why tell me now? You’ve known all along. You published Einstein’s stories; you’ve seen his notes.”

  “Just making sure you know what you’re getting into. It’s your choice. McCullough won’t care if you don’t do that story. A lot of our regulars won’t deal with those people.”

  “Einstein did, didn’t he?”

  “That’s something you might want to think about,” said Kirpatzke. “And this, too: Einstein never picked up his last paycheck.”

  “So?”

  “Maybe Einstein loved truth and justice, but he didn’t love the Dispatch. That check isn’t the kind of thing he’d leave behind.… Anyway, I’ve got another story I want you to do on that dead shortstop.”

  Kirpatzke outlined the new feature he wanted on Randy Gutierrez, more interviews with the team, the atmosphere of grief.

  “Why didn’t you give me this in front of Mac?”

  “I thought I’d do us both a favor and save some arguing.”

  When Kirpatzke was gone, Lofton tried the phone booth. Still no Amanti. He tried all morning, then got in his car and drove to her apartment to see if he could find her. As his car mounted the Notch, he thought things over, trying to keep everything straight. He knew Brunner and other businessmen owned property downtown, buildings that would cost a lot to renovate, particularly if the federal money didn’t come through. A lot of people in town said even the most honest landlords hoped their buildings burned now, before the renovation funding was canceled and while insurance paybacks were still high.

  Angelo, the Latinos’ leader, had said he knew who was behind Holyoke’s fires. Then, a few days later, Angelo had died. According to Amanti, Randy Gutierrez had known something linking Brunner to the arsons. Now Gutierrez was dead, too. Einstein was missing. Amanti didn’t answer her phone. Glancing in the rearview mirror, Lofton wondered again who had been looking for him that first day at the library, when he had begun researching the fires. The road behind him was empty. He was tracing two story lines, one starting with the dead shortstop, the other with the warring street gangs. As he accelerated his old station wagon into the curve, he had the hunch that the two lines were going to intersect sooner or later, as almost always happened.

  Approaching Amanti’s house, Lofton heard light jazz coming through the open window. She did not come to the door right away, and he grew frightened. He did not want to walk in and find Amanti as he had found Gutierrez. He knocked again, the music lowered, and a little while later Amanti came to the door.

  “I’ve been calling you since last night,” he said.

  Amanti let out an uneasy sigh, touched his arm, and led
him to the living room. He sat on the sofa, and she sat in one of the low-slung modern chairs. He bent over, nervous despite himself, clasping his hands together between his knees.

  “Would you like a drink?” Amanti asked. She picked up her own glass, half-empty on the table beside her, and made drinks for them both. He had to hold himself from taking his down too quickly, from losing himself in the coolness of the ice.

  “Why haven’t you been answering the phone?”

  “I was afraid,” she said.

  “Afraid of who?”

  Amanti did not answer. Lofton listened to the pause, to the sound of the insects in the grass. “Who was that man who answered the phone yesterday?”

  “No one,” she said. “A friend.”

  Amanti ran her finger around the rim of her glass. She wore a thin cotton blouse and summer slacks. Gutierrez, Brunner, the Redwings, the dust and ash of Holyoke—all seemed remote, a distant setting. Lofton felt himself slip into the moment. The banter. The starts and stammers. The averted eyes. The cigarettes. The tonic spiked with gin.

  “Did you know what was going to happen to Randy Gutierrez?” he asked.

  “No, of course not.” She said it briskly, offended. She held her finger still on the cool lip of the glass.

  Lofton rubbed his hand through his hair. The alcohol had gone to his head in the heat. “Why did you bring me into this?”