The Spoiler

by Domenic Stansberry

  “I thought somebody should know.”

  “Right, so now Gutierrez is dead, and I’m the one who had to find the body. I don’t like looking at dead people.” His vehemence surprised him. Lofton glanced at the bad paintings and swirled the ice in his glass. He imagined Gutierrez again. He saw the cramped kitchen, the body on the floor. He smelled the blood on the linoleum.

  Amanti would not look him in the eyes. She lit a cigarette, and the smoke curled back around her head. She hid herself in the smoke. He reached over and took a cigarette from her pack.

  “You have to tell me what Gutierrez told you. There’s no other way for me to know.” Lofton’s voice was calm now; he could hear the calmness as he had felt it the night he found the body. Glancing down the hallway, he saw the door to Amanti’s bedroom stood open. He heard his words as if he stood in that bedroom listening to himself, as if he were in a movie and the camera were focused on somebody listening in the other room. Suddenly he became afraid that there really was somebody in that other room.

  “Sparks, does he know about the fires?” It was a guess, wild as the wind from left field, based only on the fact that he’d seen Amanti and the pitcher talking together out in the parking lot. Amanti shifted in her seat, enough so that Lofton thought his guess had been right. He walked down the hall and glanced into the bedroom, then came back. There was no one there, not unless he was crouched somewhere Lofton couldn’t see. He chided his imagination.

  “What are you doing?” asked Amanti.

  “Nothing,” he said, embarrassed. “Tell me what Gutierrez told you. And tell me about Sparks. Start from the beginning.”

  She was not sure how much she wanted to tell Lofton, if she should tell him anything at all. Kelley had told her to avoid the reporter. She had done so, she told herself. Despite her charade with Lofton that day on the telephone, she hadn’t answered the phone since. But when she’d seen him coming up the walk, she’d let him in. He had heard the music in her apartment, she guessed, and not to let him in, to pretend that there was nothing at all that she knew would be worse than to walk the line between saying just enough and too much. Besides, she wasn’t worried about Sparks; the pitcher was interested in only one thing, and that was the movement on his fastball. It was all he ever talked about.

  “Sparks used to search Brunner out after he pitched,” she said. “Brunner takes an interest in the players, and I guess Rickey thought he might get some help when it comes down to whether the Blues decide to pull him up at the end of the season. The times he talked to me, it was always about his career. He’s worried about it. It worries him to death.”

  “I thought Golden filled out the scouting reports. Why should Sparks bother with you and Brunner?”

  “I guess he’s just playing every angle he can think of. He’s obsessive. But underneath it all, he loves playing baseball, I guess. At least that’s what he says.”

  Amanti did not know much more about Sparks than she was saying. Her only close contact with him had been several weeks back. That particular night Brunner had left the game early, and Amanti had remained alone in the stands. Earlier in the season she probably would not have stayed. She had started coming to the games because Brunner had asked; it was better than staying at home. Brunner watched the game ferociously. He would tighten his fist when the team fell behind, whispering heatedly to himself, a running commentary on the game, and he would stand up to cheer and swear, but only for an instant, when something good happened on the field. (Her cousin Tony Liuzza watched the games with far more detachment. He seemed bored, like a child with a toy he’d never really wanted.) Though baseball itself did not interest her, and she could have made excuses to Brunner, she had continued to come to the games. There was something about sitting in the sparse crowd that she enjoyed, the quality of light as it struck the field, the movements of the young players, their determination, and how that determination could be frustrated, or rewarded, simply by the angle at which the ball hit the turf. She paid little attention to the score; she often left the game without knowing who had won, though she knew it was true that Holyoke usually lost.

  This particular game, however, Holyoke had won. She left the field alone, and by coincidence, it seemed, she ran into Rickey Sparks.

  “Where’s Jack?” he said. Though he often sought Brunner out after he had pitched, he did not seem to enjoy the conversations themselves. Sparks had a look of perpetual scorn. “Did he see the movement on my fastball?”

  “Brunner’s gone, but I’ll tell him. I’ll make sure he knows.”

  Sparks nodded. He seemed amused. Then he asked her, with as much challenge in his voice as anything, if she would like to come over to a small party at the apartment he shared with Tim Carpenter. “The team’s got tomorrow off, and I have trouble sleeping after I pitch anyway.” His voice was strong with innuendo, enough so that she knew that the challenge was a bluff; he did not expect her to come over.

  “Sure,” she said.

  Once there, she felt a little awkward—and Tim Carpenter had felt that way, too, she thought—because Sparks and Randy Gutierrez had brought along a couple of the ballpark girls, obviously their dates, and that made it appear that she and Carpenter were a pair, an idea neither of them was too comfortable with. Carpenter stuck it out for a while, until one of the girls took out her mirror and laid it out on the table. Then Randy Gutierrez took out a plastic Ziploc and drew some lines on the glass. Carpenter excused himself and went back into his room. He had roomed for a while with Gutierrez, she knew, but apparently he didn’t want anything to do with coke. Sparks gave her a look, as if to see how she would react; it was plain he was worried what she would say to Brunner, but it was also plain that there was another side to Sparks: Part of him did not care what anyone thought. He would do as he pleased.

  “How about you? Did you do the coke?” Lofton asked.

  “Maybe I did,” Amanti said. “I don’t see what difference that makes.… But Gutierrez, he got himself wired, talking half Spanish, half English. He started going on about buildings burning and people, sometimes, getting trapped inside. At first I thought he was talking about Managua, where his wife lives, he was so upset.”

  While Amanti spoke, Lofton imagined the scene in the ballplayers’ apartment: the vinyl couch where the girls sat flirting with the players; the white Formica tabletop; the stereo against the wall; the spackled ceilings; and Gutierrez leaning over, moving his hands as he talked. Lofton saw the echo of those movements in Amanti’s gestures. Amanti, seeing the way Lofton studied her, moved her hand to her collar.

  “How did Sparks react to this?”

  “He didn’t seem to like Gutierrez talking so much. It was a little crazy. I think maybe he was worried that the whole scene would get back to Coach Barker. Or to Brunner. But he was pretty high himself, having a good time. To tell you the truth, he didn’t hear most of what Gutierrez told me. He went off with the girls to a package store, to get something to drink, some beer, and that’s when Randy told me he knew who was burning the buildings in Holyoke.”

  “Who?”

  Amanti hesitated again. Her blue eyes seemed dark, the light inside them once again remote, receding, the last light on the last car of a train deep in a mountain tunnel.

  “Did he mention Brunner’s name?”

  “No.”

  “Then why do you insist that it’s Brunner?”

  “He mentioned Golden …” Amanti said. “Gutierrez liked to hang out on street corners, Puerto Rican bars, places like that, and he heard things. At least that’s what he told me, and he said that he knew that Golden was delivering money to the torch, to un hombre del fuego. I remember the phrase because he kept saying it over and over. Un hombre del fuego.”

  A man of fire. It was a dramatic term, almost silly, thought Lofton, except he could imagine Gutierrez speaking the words, dead serious, pausing for effect. “Gutierrez was really raving,” she went on. “One minute he seemed proud of everything he knew, of the informat
ion about Golden; he would act completely confident. The next minute he was afraid. He said they were going to kill him.”

  “Who was going to kill him?”

  “I don’t know. If you want to know the truth, though, I got the idea that he was in trouble with the dealers, that maybe they had fronted drugs to him, and now he couldn’t pay back.”

  Lofton wasn’t sure what the story proved. Gutierrez’s ravings could have been sheer nonsense, events scrambled in his mind by drugs and paranoia. Maybe, as Amanti said, he owed some street pushers some money. Maybe the pushers had threatened him. At the same time Gutierrez had to be worried about his status with the Redwings. Golden was a symbol of authority on the team. It could be that Gutierrez had taken all the things he was worried about and scrambled them together and come up, the way drug freaks often did, with this new explanation for his problems.

  “What else did he tell you?”

  “Nothing. He said, ‘Randy Gutierrez is a good man.’ That’s all. He said all he wanted was to play baseball, to bring his wife and family to America. He didn’t care about anything else.”

  “Could be,” he said, “that Gutierrez was setting the fires. Maybe that’s how he paid for his drugs.”

  “Do you believe that?” she asked. Her voice scolded, but she stood up to refill his drink.

  He leaned back and closed his eyes. The insects seemed louder. Not crickets after all, not like the ones he remembered. He wondered what the insects were. Cicadas? Tree criers? He could not tell. Settling back, he tried to imagine Gutierrez lighting the fires. Instead, he saw Managua—or his vision of that place—the inner city in rubble, the small, narrow streets spiraling away from the center into the impoverished neighborhoods where electric cables ran to small shanties. In the center of the shanties, in a clearing: a baseball diamond. Jungle ferns by third base. Cheap wooden bleachers. Colorful streamers. The type of place Gutierrez would have played when he was a boy, when the politics of Holyoke streets—and of Nicaraguan revolution, for that matter—were nothing, not real yet, not even a nightmare.

  “No, I don’t see Randy Gutierrez setting fires. But why do you think Brunner had anything to do with this? Golden was the name Gutierrez mentioned, not Brunner.”

  “Golden works for Brunner. It’s that simple. Golden wouldn’t be involved in something like that on his own.”

  “Maybe so,” Lofton said. “But Gutierrez’s story, if he was as wired as you say, doesn’t prove anything. Besides, it’s secondhand information. It’s just rumor, something overheard on a street corner by a cranked-up minor league ballplayer, who barely spoke English when he was alive. Now that he’s dead, his story won’t even translate. It doesn’t mean a thing.”

  Amanti shrugged. Lofton still had the feeling there was something she wasn’t saying, some information she was holding back. The story about Gutierrez wasn’t everything.

  “Who picked up the phone when I called here the other day? Brunner?”

  “No.” She crumpled her cigarette pack and dropped it on the table. She went to the bedroom. No, Lofton thought, don’t go there. He imagined Brunner, his pig-thick face, coming out of the room with her. Lofton sat on the edge of the couch. He knew it could not be true.

  She came back alone. She carried a fresh pack of cigarettes. She sat close to him, so there was only a small space between them on the white cushion.

  “That night you first contacted me,” he said, “when you came up to me in the stands. Afterward, when the game was over, I saw you talking to Sparks out in the parking lot.” He looked down as he talked. The space between Amanti and him had all but disappeared. “What were you talking about?”

  “He had a bad game, you remember, really awful, and he was worried that I’d mention that other evening to somebody, that his using the coke would get back to management. It’s not exactly what a young player’s supposed to do in his spare time. He avoids me now, doesn’t come anywhere near me, or Brunner either, at least not when I’m around—just hoping I’ll forget I ever saw him. But he doesn’t have to worry because I’ve already forgotten him.”

  “There’s nothing else between you and Sparks?”

  Amanti laughed. “I’m not interested in Sparks, and Sparks isn’t interested in me. Even if he were, he wouldn’t do anything about it. The last thing he wants is to get Brunner mad at him.”

  Lofton was quiet. He guessed he believed her story. He would talk to Carpenter and Sparks and find out if there was anything else.

  “Looks like we’re in this together,” Amanti said. A line, and a bad one—she knew it, too, he could tell, because he saw her wince. She seemed uncomfortable beside him, weary, a little drunk, and he reached to touch her. His mouth—filled with the taste of cigarettes and gin—would taste to her like one of the open gutters in Holyoke, like burnt ash and stale alcohol. He did not care. She would taste the same. Between them, neither would notice.

  Though she kissed back, closing her eyes and touching him at the same time, the moment was sloppy, the kiss awkward. The second time was better. Just as he was catching her rhythm, Lofton heard a rustling noise in the hall. He jumped to his feet.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  He went to the bedroom. He glanced under the bed, into the closet, opened the door to the room across the hall. There was nobody there, nothing at all.

  Amanti lay in the dark, not in her usual room, but in the extra bedroom at the front of the apartment. She came here when she couldn’t sleep, when her bedroom seemed too dark and she needed a place where sleep would sneak up on her. In the dresser drawer, wrapped in a blue towel, was a gun. Brunner had bought it for her back when he first moved her into this apartment. “Something to keep you safe from the college kids,” he had said, with only the slightest trace of a smile.

  Lofton was gone. He had gotten up in the middle of their embrace, started checking around her apartment, then told her he had to get back to the ballpark. She wondered why she had kissed the reporter. She hadn’t meant for that to happen, she told herself, but then she knew it wasn’t quite true. She liked Lofton, she was angry at Kelley, she was afraid of Brunner, and touching the reporter had brought all the emotions together at once.

  Now she thought about Brunner. In some ways what she had told Kelley the other day was true: Brunner had been good to her. Though she had never intended for things to go on with Brunner as long as they had, it wasn’t until recently that she’d started to fear the man, that the steel edge of his personality had seemed untempered, razor-sharp. Of course, that edge had always been there. It had been there on the first day she met him, at her uncle Liuzza’s. It had been there two years later, when her affair with Kelley seemed to be collapsing and Brunner had shown up at her doorstop in Boston, unintentionally comical, clutching a bunch of flowers in front of him. Sometimes she wondered why she had let him in. Though she had told herself she had taken up with Brunner to inspire Kelley’s jealousy—and that was true—she did enjoy Brunner’s protective spirit, his thick charm, his way of watching over things important to him. He had a firm desire to control. Sometimes that desire collapsed into a wide smile that expressed the need for admiration and affection. It was that moment of collapse that she liked, though such moments had gotten rarer, and sometimes dangerous.

  Brunner came from a neighborhood not too much different from Kelley’s, or her own, but unlike Kelley, he had not gone to college. Instead, he had worked himself up in the construction trade. He now lived in a house that he had bought from the bankrupt son of a New England pulp merchant. It was an old house, finely kept, emblematic—at least to Brunner—of a class of society that he both envied and despised, a class that Kelley had walked into easily. Amanti understood the frustration in Brunner. Sometimes, particularly when Kelley appeared to be vacillating in his affection for her, she even shared Brunner’s dislike for Kelley, his hatred. She had made love to Brunner, in those first days, with a fierce intensity that expressed that hatred.

  That intensity had wo
rn off, so their intimacy now was as simple and cold and startling as the wind over a winter lake. But intimacy wasn’t the point anymore, at least not with Brunner. He was supporting her and had been doing so for several years now, ever since Uncle Liuzza had cut off her money.

  Brunner had moved her out to Amherst. He took particular pleasure in the fact that he had a mistress in a university town; he enjoyed fucking her in the midst of the lives of professors and students. He also enjoyed the fact that he had gotten her farther away from Kelley, though his own interest in her waned with the senator’s distance and increased if he knew the other man had visited. (Sometimes it seemed to her that each man was only interested in her in direct proportion to his rival’s interest. Who they really want to fuck, she thought, is not me but each other.)

  Still, there had always been times with Brunner, as with everyone, when you could see behind the mask and read the thoughts there, knowing what he was feeling, even if a second later you could read nothing, and you were no longer sure the moment had even happened.

  Last April, Brunner had picked her up early one morning, then taken her around with him from construction site to construction site. He had said little. There seemed no point in the excursion, but she had gone along anyway. After lunch he had started drinking, uncharacteristic of him, and he had told her, as they drove around in the car, that the entire state was corrupt, that the big politicians played ball with each other, in their Ivy League suits, and pretended to be clean and pure when they were not clean and pure. A man had to watch out for himself. The government dallylagged on contracts and federal money, and the men in the Ivy League suits got rich from the dallylagging while your regular guy went poor. Well, not this regular guy, he said, pointing at one building, then another, as they drove down the street. They were government garbage, kindling, fire to warm your bones. Brunner’s voice was thick and he was drunk and he wanted her to know that he was as important as Kelley or anyone else. He had himself well protected. He had papers, and those papers would make sure that no one could hurt him without hurting everyone else, and that would never happen because the big boys never got hurt. Though he hadn’t said what was in those papers, he had taken her to where they were. He had opened the safe and added some more papers, and then turned to her with a look in his eye that seemed close to crazy, the moment of collapse gone awry. The next day he was the same as ever. His expression admitted nothing of what had happened.