The Spoiler

by Domenic Stansberry

  “That’s him. I’m not answering the phone.”

  “Who?” Lofton asked.

  “Kelley.”

  Lofton sat down on the edge of the bed. The room seemed filled with a blue haze. The phone stopped ringing, and the night was very quiet. For a while they sat listening, as if maybe there were some great secret out in the darkness.

  “How do you know it’s Kelley? It could be Brunner, maybe, or someone else.”

  “Kelley was supposed to call me the other night, but he didn’t. The phone’s been ringing all day. I know it’s him.”

  She sat up in the bed, her fingers still holding the collar of her robe, waiting, it seemed, for him to ask another question. But she lost her patience, just as she had that day when they had been walking out on the street, and the words came out in a gush, quick and rapid, telling him about her long affair with Kelley, about Kelley and Brunner’s rivalry, and finally about Kelley’s plan to use Brunner’s arson scheme against him. This time she told him the names; she told him just about everything. Lofton had to admit Kelley’s plan made a certain sense. Use Amanti as bait. Get the reporter interested. When the reporter got close, and Brunner got nervous, then pull Amanti off the hook. Replace her with cash. Let Liuzza string the lure. That way Kelley’s own hands stayed clean—no dirty fish smell. He could walk up to Brunner and say: Listen, old friend, I’ve heard some rumors, and if you’d like to go ahead with your scheme, switch your money and influence over to my candidate, then I can help get rid of this reporter; otherwise, your renovation money … well, we can throw that fish to the dogs.

  “Okay, but why me? Why does he think I’ll go along?”

  “He checked into your background. He found out about something in California—”

  Lofton held up his hand. He didn’t need to hear the rest. He could see Kelley’s idea as clearly as if he had a box seat inside the guy’s brain. “And what’s your payoff?” he asked Amanti. “What do you get?”

  Amanti looked at the floor. She swung her foot back and forth, but the effect was not what it had been the day he talked to her at the Little Puerto Rico Café. It no longer made you wonder about the girl beneath the woman’s surface but instead made you realize that the girl was long gone, that the only thing to remind you she had once existed was something about the way the woman swung her leg.

  “Are you still in love with Kelley?”

  The foot stopped swinging. When Amanti looked up at him, her eyes seemed to glimmer a little, moist in the darkness.

  “Tell me, what are you going to do? Are you going to take the money and back off the story? Or are you going to write it?”

  “That business, a few minutes ago, when we were wrestling on the bed, were you doing that for yourself, because you wanted to, or were you doing it for Kelley—a little sweetening to get me on your side, to make sure I don’t nail both of you away?”

  Amanti flared. “That didn’t mean anything. It was just an action, movement, and don’t let anybody tell you different. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, that’s it. You can move any which way you want, and it doesn’t make any difference. You know that, don’t you? Didn’t they pay you pretty well just to walk out of that office in California? All you had to do was a little movement, right, just put one foot in front of the other.”

  “That’s not the way it happened. Kelley got it wrong.”

  “Are you going to write the story?”

  “Right now,” Lofton said, “I don’t have a story. There’s no evidence that Brunner is burning anything. All we have is Gutierrez’s word, and Gutierrez is dead. And even if we could resurrect him, all we’d get is a coke-smeared blur. When you get down to it, I’m surprised Kelley would rig together this elaborate business for blackmailing Brunner on just this small bit of evidence. There must be something else you have on Brunner. What is it? Tell me, and I’ll write the story.”

  Lofton leaned against the bedroom wall, watching her, waiting to see what she would say. She had some more information, he could tell, but she was holding it back because if she told him, it would give Lofton the real evidence—and even Kelley didn’t want things to go that far. Kelley wanted only to humiliate Brunner, to make him switch sides. Though Lofton was angry with Amanti, he could see her dilemma. The only way she could keep Kelley’s interest, even now, was by betraying him, but she had to be careful it wasn’t a big enough betrayal to ruin everything.

  Amanti came up close to him. Her robe was gathered loosely, and the light in the room was faint. He could smell the warmth of her body, and at the same time he could feel a very slight, cooling breeze coming through the window. She stepped forward, pressed her body against his, and kissed him hard. She hooked her thumb into his pants pocket; the fingers of the same hand arched against his thigh, held stiff and tense as she’d held them on the tabletop that first day he’d met her. He touched her robe, feeling the cloth in his hand, then pulled her closer. For a while they tried the impossible stunt of fucking against the wall—at least it had always been impossible for Lofton—so in a moment they were on the floor. She was on top of him, the white robe open all the way, her mouth just out of reach, his hands on her breasts, her head tilted up, eyes away. He pulled her hard down to him, and they rolled over again. She was underneath him, her back against the carpet. She put her fingers on his shirt collar and kept them wrapped there tightly, pulling him closer, and for a second all the rest of the world was gone—the business with Brunner and Kelley and the arson—and she pulled him tighter yet, her fingers still touching his collar, his legs flat against hers, and when he lifted his head, he could see outside to the stars, and for a brief instant it was as if the two of them were outside under those stars, and he were lifting his head above the line of the high grass, gazing, searching, and the breeze were cool in his face. But then Amanti pulled him back, her fingers still clutching at the shirt, and he fell into her rhythm.

  Sunday was Dazzy Vance Day. The white-haired Hall of Famer showed up at MacKenzie Field, wearing plaid golf pants, an alligator shirt, and an old Brooklyn Dodgers’ cap. Dazzy Vance made a living traveling the minor league parks, talking about the old days and throwing a few pitches from the mound, tossing them to old-timers and Little Leaguers. Afterward he wandered through the stands behind an advance man who sold black-and-white glossies.

  The reporters asked the old ballplayer questions. The same ones, Lofton guessed, Dazzy heard in every town. A gaggle of kids hung nearby, looking for a chance to get an autograph. Dick Golden had also joined the crowd around Dazzy. Golden’s mood seemed to have darkened. He glared bullishly at the ground, turning his head from side to side, glowering at the press.

  “Sure the old hitters were great,” Dazzy Vance was saying, “but there are some good ones around now, too. When I was young, just starting out, people said the same: The great days, the great players, all those times are over. And it’s the same thing now. When these players here are my age, God forbid, when they’re dead, people will look back and say they were the great ones. But really, no one is great. It’s the game that’s great.”

  Lofton wondered. Was Dazzy sincere? Smart or dumb, ballplayers tended to be sincere.

  “Even the Redwings, are they winners?” shouted one of the kids, his voice lilting.

  “The Redwings?” Dazzy said, confused, as if he no longer remembered what town he was in, what field he was working. There was a pause; Dazzy raised his eyebrows; then there was strained laughter from the onlookers. It was a joke; of course Dazzy knew where he was. He grinned, the shy smile of a huckster caught off guard.

  Soon the television crew arrived. They upstaged the print journalists, with their polished clothes and smooth voices, the cameramen calling people out of the crowd, kids mostly, positioning them in the background.

  “Television pushing you shoddy guys around,” Dazzy said to the newspaper people. “Same thing used to happen to me whenever Johnny McGraw’s Giants crossed the river from New York.”

  Lofton ba
cked away, scanning the stands. Amanti had told him she would be at this game with Brunner and her cousin. Last night, in the darkened room, he had told her about his encounters with Lou Mendoza. Mendoza seemed to want publicity, the same sort of publicity the dead Latino leader had gotten, not because it would do him any good, really, but simply because he wanted it. She listened carefully, especially when Lofton described the rival gang leader, Angelo, the dead Latino whose picture Lofton had seen in an old paper. Dark, full lips. Wild black hair. Smashed nose. He’d told her how Angelo had been speaking on street corners, criticizing the police, using his following as a patrol force, rebuilding houses. He’d told her about the City Council meeting when the Latinos showed up in battle gear and Angelo said he knew who was setting the fires.

  “The Latinos say Mendoza’s the one whose been setting the fires. At least that’s the word on the streets. Could he be the one Gutierrez was talking about? The one hooked up with Golden?”

  Amanti had shaken her head. She didn’t know. He still wondered if she had anything else on Brunner, something he could actually put in the story—some hard, substantial proof. Einstein, Lofton realized, must have been faced with the same dilemma. The reporter had figured things out more or less, but he had only the word of the street gang as proof; Amanti’s stories, too, were hardly reliable, when you got down to it, just as entangled in personal conflict and rivalry as the accusations of the Latinos. There had been a moment last night, just as he left her apartment, when she’d seemed on the verge of revealing something more, but his intuition could have been wrong, nothing more than the romantic cast of light on her face or the feeling that you get at such moments, walking away from a woman’s house into the dark alone, that there is something unexpressed, something under the surface of things which you have missed.

  Lofton looked up at the stands again, then over at Dazzy Vance. For a moment he was envious of the old ballplayer. His was a simple scam, driving from park to park, the long, anonymous gray of the highway broken only every few days, then only for a few hours, while you gladhanded children and told stories you’d told so many times that it was as if the stories were things in themselves and had nothing to do with you. And then it was back into the cab of the truck, where you were no one at all, or practically no one—just a stack of pictures headed for the next motel room. Lofton was thinking of this, of the sweet emptiness of the road, when suddenly he felt his heart jump. Someone jostled him gently from behind. Then a hand touched his waist, his arm. Amanti.

  “What are you doing here?” he said. Although he’d known she would be here, he hadn’t expected her to approach him. Regardless of her motivation, it did not seem a good idea for them to be seen together.

  “Have you seen this?” She held today’s paper, the one with his story on Gutierrez.

  No, he had not seen it. Though Lofton still clipped his stories for his files, he rarely read them until much later. Either way, he was not much interested now. Lofton noticed that today she did not look well. Her complexion had gone pale; her hair was mussed; her blouse loose and untucked. He guided her by the arm to the other side of the press box, away from the flurry of activity, out of the sight of the crowd in the bleachers. He pointed at the paper in her hand.

  “What’s with that? Did I write something I shouldn’t have?”

  “I’m not talking about that; I’m talking about this piece, here, on the front page.”

  Lofton took the paper. The story was the one he had heard from the Springfield reporters: how the state legislature had canceled Holyoke’s renovation project. Lofton scanned the lead paragraph, a quick summary of things he already knew.

  “So?”

  “Kelley’s behind this,” she said. “He’s trying to put pressure on Brunner. That’s why he wanted to get you involved, like I told you, and that’s why he got the committee to vote against the Holyoke project. He’ll get the committee to swing back if Brunner switches.”

  She pointed to a paragraph well inside the article, on an inside page. City officials were concerned, the article said, because—as the result of the state’s decision—several large insurance companies planned to devaluate the property downtown. They had threatened to cancel all insurance contracts in the core area immediately. “If they cancel the contracts, Brunner can burn all he wants, but he won’t collect anything. Don’t you see what Kelley’s doing? It’s blackmail.”

  “All right, but this article doesn’t prove anything. It doesn’t prove Brunner is behind those fires. What about the big building, American Paper? It’s almost too late for him to burn that, especially if the insurance companies are reassessing. And besides, Brunner didn’t own any of the buildings that went down this summer. He wouldn’t have gained anything by burning those.”

  “Yes, he would. And I can get you proof. I can get papers that tell you everything.”

  Lofton didn’t know what to think. He had suspected she was holding something back. Now that she offered to give it to him, he wondered about her motivation. She was angry at Kelley, he knew that, or at least she seemed to be. But she could have talked to Kelley since last night; things could have changed. He glanced around the corner of the press box. The only person looking this way was Tenace. He was talking to Golden, but the general manager was looking the other way. The scorer gave a friendly wave, and Lofton turned back to her.

  “How will you get these papers?”

  “Never mind. I’ll take care of that.”

  “I’ll go with you. It could be dangerous.”

  “No. It will be better if I’m alone.” Amanti shook her head and looked wearily down at her shoes. “Come by my house, Wednesday. I’ll have everything then.… Brunner and Liuzza are in the stands. They’re going to be wondering where I am. I’d better get back.”

  “You should be careful,” Lofton said. He thought of going with her, but she smiled so suddenly, so sadly and awkwardly that he was disarmed. He put his hand on her shoulder and urged her away. She reached up, touched a thin curl of hair at the back of his neck, then hurried back into the crowd. Kelley put her up to this, he thought; the man wants me involved, he wants more pressure on Brunner. That might be the way it was. Or it might be that Amanti was tired of Brunner and Kelley, that she was acting on her own. There was no way for Lofton to be sure. He could not see into the darkness; he could not read her thoughts. When he walked around the back side of the press box, he saw Tenace standing with Golden. They both were watching him now; then the general manager stalked off into the bleachers. Golden was on one of his downswings, or maybe he was worried, afraid of getting caught.

  Sitting in the press box, Lofton flipped through the paper to his postmortem on Gutierrez. His editor, Kirpatzke, had come up with three photos to accent the piece: an action shot of Gutierrez pivoting at short; a shot of him in street clothes, standing in front of the clubhouse; and a third, final picture, this one showing his casket as it was wheeled onto the airplane at Bradley International. The effect was maudlin, but it would get the reaction Kirpatzke wanted. People would read it. They would ponder the random violence, wanting to draw the conclusion that Gutierrez had done something for this to happen to him. But the link wasn’t quite there; there was no apparent cause and effect. They would ponder awhile longer.

  “Reading your own work?”

  Tenace stood grinning. Lofton was embarrassed. He closed the newspaper.

  “You’re getting to be pretty hot shit, huh?”

  “Dead shortstops bring out the best in me.”

  “I guess you’re getting the angle on this place pretty good. You going to make us all famous?”

  “Sure, you’ll be the star.”

  Tenace grimaced, then forced out a laugh. Lofton turned to the field. Holyoke was up, 5–0. The team had come around in the last few weeks. With the slip-sliding going on at the top of the division, the good clubs losing momentum, Holyoke, impossible as it seemed, had a long shot at the division crown.

  “We should get together, hav
e a few beers,” said Tenace.

  “Sure. Anytime.”

  Lofton did not take the offer too seriously. He thought instead about what Amanti had told him. He knew Brunner owned several square blocks downtown, including the old American Paper Company, once the second-largest mill in New England, now boarded up and closed. Brunner planned to renovate the building, to put in polished floors and cordon the rooms off into small boutiques. Such projects had met with success in large cities like San Francisco and Denver. But Holyoke was not a large city. And there was another reason the project didn’t quite make sense. He remembered what the reporters had said the other day, that Brunner’s construction company, Bruconn, owned a percentage of the Hillside Mall. Why would Brunner create another shopping area to compete with himself? Maybe I should go down to American, Lofton thought, and take a look around.

  “How about after the game?” Tenace persisted. “We could knock a few down then.”

  Lofton squinted. Before he could answer, the public-address man reannounced Dazzy Vance’s presence. A few people hissed—a few always did, no matter what was announced—but most cheered.

  “And next weekend,” the PA man went on, his voice echoing across the field, “MacKenzie Field will host another distinguished visitor: Democratic candidate for governor, Richard Sarafis.”

  There were more hisses and boos now, and a good deal of laughter. The announcer went on. “After a rally at the Hillside Mall, Richard Sarafis will be on hand here to throw out the game ball and answer questions from local citizens.”