The Spoiler

by Domenic Stansberry

  “He should go to Amherst,” said Tenace. “Go there and talk to the college kids about the bottle bill and nuclear power.”

  “What’s he doing out at Hillside anyway?” asked Lofton. “I thought Brunner supported Ed Wells, the incumbent. Why is he letting Sarafis have a rally on his property?” Even as he asked the question, Lofton thought of an answer: Kelley’s pressure had worked; Jack Brunner was making ready to switch sides in the Democratic race.

  “Beats me. It’s a free country. I don’t like any of them.” The scorer moved closer. “I was serious about those beers. Besides, I’ve got something you should hear, something important.”

  “Sure.”

  “No, I’m serious.”

  Lofton heard an unusual urgency in Tenace’s voice. The man’s lonely, he guessed. “All right, let’s get together for a beer.”

  “Tonight?”

  “No, I’ve got something else going.”

  Lofton thought of American Paper, the building in the darkness, outlined by the moon. He wanted to go there, to see the old mill. “Tomorrow night,” Lofton said, “I’ll meet you at Barena’s.” Then Lofton hurried away; he did not want to talk with Tenace, not now.

  He paused at the top of the stands. Dazzy Vance wandered through the crowd below. It was a warm day, the temperatures rising again, though not so high as before. The sun felt good; the crowd was larger than usual, and healthier-looking. Parents from the suburbs had brought their children to see the Hall of Famer. Even so, MacKenzie Field still seemed a seedy place. Young couples sat in the sparse grass beyond the bleachers, smoking pot and drinking beer. Long-haired young men sat cross-legged and shirtless in the dirt; next to them their wives or girlfriends—or old ladies, as the men called them—sighed under the weight of the children who played in the laps of their print skirts. Teenagers scuttled hard after foul balls. A white boy fell on his face when a Puerto Rican pushed him from behind.

  A dozen rows below Lofton, Amanti sat between Brunner and her cousin. Brunner touched her to call attention to some action on the field, and she smiled, nodding and touching him back.

  No smoke poured from the tall stacks of the abandoned paper mill; its dock was empty. On the other side of the street, which dead-ended at the canal, National Paper was still going despite the late hour. The night shift workers leaned against cars, eating sandwiches and listening to rock ’n’ roll. In one car a man sat behind the wheel, his head tilted against a headrest. From a distance Lofton thought he looked asleep. Then he saw the red-orange glow of a cigarette raised to the man’s lips. Coming closer, he saw the man pass the cigarette out the window to one friend, then another. They cupped and hid the glow as he passed.

  Not all the men were on break. While some rested, others worked, wheeling barrels of fiber onto the docks, pausing to catcall to the men who lazed against the cars. Lofton crossed the street toward the darkness of American Paper. The road had worn through in places; the asphalt, thin and peeling, showed the old brick cobbles and trolley tracks beneath. A high chain-link fence separated American’s dock from the street.

  As he approached the corner, he saw the dark waters of the canal. A street ran parallel to the canal, and a cruiser turned the corner: a Puerto Rican cop riding shotgun, an Anglo behind the wheel. They stared glassy-eyed at Lofton, as if they really did not see him—but he knew they must have—and then drove past the workers, up toward the river.

  He walked down the street, the canal on one side, American Paper on the other. The same cyclone fence, barbed wire at the top, surrounded the building. Up ahead, between the building and the fence, lay a large lot littered with broken concrete and scraps of wood. Several bulldozers and Caterpillars were parked in the lot, and a chained gate spanned the driveway. The space between the bottom of the gate and the asphalt seemed almost big enough for a man to crawl through.

  Yellow signs with black letters hung on the gate, NO TRESPASSING, BEWARE OF DOGS, GUARDS ON DUTY. The signs were a bluff. Lofton had seen no evidence of dogs, no guards. Maybe Pinkertons patrolled the place, driving by a few times a night, shining their high beams on the buildings. But the old mill seemed too desolate to be worth much protection. Still, he wished he had brought something with him other than the small penlight and his pocket camera, both of which he carried in his shirt pocket. Maybe a lead pipe, something he could use on the dogs if there happened to be any.

  According to what he had read in the library, American Paper had bailed out because the State Building Official had told the owners to get the building into shape. The old support system had rotted. The place was unsafe. But rather than fix it up and maintain a break-even operation simply to support the workers, American Paper had abandoned the building. Brunner had picked it up cheap. How much money he needed to bring it up to code was another matter. Lofton wanted to see what shape the building was really in and how much work Brunner had really done.

  He glanced down the street. Nobody. He got flat on his stomach and crawled under the gate. The gravel crushed against his face. The bar at the bottom of the fence scraped on his tailbone. “Fat-ass,” he whispered to himself, and scrambled through. He hurried to the building. He felt safe in its dark shadow, near the heavy equipment, the Cats and the dozers. Now he had to find a way inside.

  The logical way, of course, was through one of the doors. He tried the sliding dock porticoes, where the huge sheets of paper, bundled and stacked, had once been loaded onto trucks. He tried the heavy steel office doors. These, as he expected, were drawn shut and locked. A bank of windows ran in a low line around the building. Most were boarded over; the others were made of thick, fogged glass that let in light but through which he could not see. The panes were small, bordered by steel bars. To squeeze in, he would have to smash out the panes, then somehow pry the bars away. In the corner of each window someone had placed a small decal: “Protected by AACO.” American Alarm Company. Dummies, he guessed, distributed by the police force to help stop burglaries.

  Checking the boarded windows one by one, he looked for a board that had not been nailed quite right, one he could pry loose with his hands or with a two-by-four from the parking lot debris. He chose a window a different size from the others, thinking it might not have the same small panes behind the boards. He pulled and twisted—there was a sticker here, too, pasted on the wood—then pried the board free from the crumbling brick. Behind the boards, he saw glass, clear stuff, not like the fogged panes. The steel bars were not there either.

  Suddenly a car rumbled by on the road between the building and the canal. Lofton jumped into the shadow of a dozer. The car did not stop. Probably just teenagers out driving, he thought, but he stayed hidden until it was well past. For a second, crouching there idly, he contemplated starting the dozer. He knew how to do it. He and his brother, Joe, when they were kids in California, used to sneak out to the sites and climb on the machinery. Once, they’d gotten a dozer started, driven it through the half-finished streets of a new subdivision, and abandoned it in a ditch. Another time, they’d made a dummy out of newspaper and old clothes, then hurled it into the street, waiting for a passing car to stop, for someone to investigate the body. A deaf policeman heard the noise and came to kill the two dead boys. He had not thought of the old childhood rhyme—they used to recite it together, laughing secretly in their bedroom, after being punished—nor had he thought of their childhood adventures, not in years.

  Lofton looked inside the dozer’s cab. There, over the ignition, was another yellow sticker. Surely the stickers were a sham. He imagined one of Brunner’s crew lumbering through the yard, sticking the things everywhere, avoiding the heavy work.

  He went back and shone his light around the edges of the window, looking for the tiny wires of an alarm system. He looked at the top of the windowsill for the clips that sometimes held the wires together, triggering the alarm once the connection had broken. He saw neither wires nor clips. Possibly the place was wired some other way, or—even less likely—there was a hidden ca
mera, knee-high, that hit an alarm when you walked across its eye. But he could see no evidence of that, or of any alarm system.

  Lofton picked up a brick and smashed the window. He expected the glass to sparkle, to catch the blue light as it broke. Instead, the brick went through with a clean snap, and there was only a clearer, darker hole where the window had broken. He picked the glass from the frame, smashed out the jagged edges, and climbed inside.

  The mill was all but empty. All the factory equipment was gone. The place still smelled like pulp and resin, wood and chemicals. Renovations had not begun.

  He examined the support posts. The wood had rotted badly. He tore small, wet pieces from the posts with his fingers. He took his camera and photographed debris that had been pushed up around the supports in places, almost like kindling stacked under a fire. It might be coincidence; it might just be the natural thing to do with the junk before clearing it out, to push it into piles. Then he walked around the warehouse and took pictures of everything, all the floor space. There was nothing valuable here, except maybe the building itself, and the more he looked at it, the more of a wreck it seemed to be, hardly worth restoring. If I owned it, Lofton thought as he climbed to the second floor, I would burn it, too. In the meantime, though, I would have it patrolled, at least often enough to make it look as if I were protecting my property.

  As soon as he reached the second floor, he saw light coming from outside. He went to the window. A Pinkerton car, motor running, was parked outside the gate. Lofton was sorry he had stayed so long. But if he had left a moment earlier, he would have been out in the lot just now, and the Pinkerton would have caught him. He watched the private cop get out and unlock the gate.

  His first impulse was to hide somewhere in the building. Fuck no, they’ll shoot me. So he hurried downstairs, counting on the fact that the Pinkerton, afraid for himself, would not enter the building until the real cops came. Besides, there was no way for him to know exactly when the window had been broken. It could have been hours ago; the intruder could have come and gone.

  He heard the Pinkerton’s car churning gravel out in the lot. He hurried around the debris on the cement floors, past the rotting timbers. He wanted to find a way out on the side of the building opposite the Pinkerton. He tried one door, then another, but they were locked as well. He ran through the building. He found himself in a large room with several steel porticoes and doors to the outside. He went to a window but could not see out. The glass had been painted black. He pushed against a door, expecting it to be locked, but it swung noisily open.

  He found himself on American’s dock, looking across at National Paper, where some of the workers still lounged by their cars. Several sat on the National dock, smoking cigarettes. One man pointed at him, and the others looked. None of them spoke.

  Lofton looked up at the high fence. Barbed wire lined the top, slanting away at an angle toward the street, designed to make it impossible for someone climbing in from the outside. It would not be much easier from his direction. Either way, he had no choice. He did not want to wait around for the cruisers, sweeping the fence with floodlights. He put his camera in his back pocket and started up. Meanwhile, the workers watched from across the way.

  When Lofton reached the top, he got crossed up. He tried to throw one leg over the three strands of wire, thinking—insofar as it was possible for him to think—that he could sit sidesaddle, never mind the barbs, then throw his other leg over, hang from the wire by his hands, and, finally, drop. It did not work that way. His right leg slipped between the wires before he could turn around. If my brother could see me now. He struggled to get his left leg between the same two wires. Maureen’s probably sitting in his kitchen. The barbs tore at his palms and at his legs, digging into his thigh as he tried to ease himself down. His back scraped against the fence. He lost his grip. A barb ripped up his pants leg, catching his pants near the groin. He hung in midair for an impossible second—all the time conscious of the millworkers across the way, staring silently up at him—and then he hit the ground.

  He got up quickly. His hip hurt where he’d landed. Had he heard the camera break? He hurried away, touching himself as he limped, feeling his balls first. The millworkers still watched; he could feel their gaze on his back as he disappeared into the darkness. Then he touched his face, his legs, his arms. His fingers came away bloody.

  On the other side of the canal Lofton felt safe. He could still see the lights at National. He could see into the lot at American Paper where the Pinkerton had been. The Pinkerton’s car was gone. No bright glare. No humming radios. No cops from downtown. He thought it unlikely the cops had come and gone. They would make a production out of it, walking around the building, flashing lights all over, talking back and forth on their intercoms. He peered into the darkness across the canal, but he still could not see the Pinkerton’s car. It wasn’t there. Maybe the rent-a-cop had not seen the broken window. Maybe he had seen it and not cared. Maybe he had just been lazy. Or maybe, Lofton thought, touching the gash in his palm, I’m just luckier than I think.

  The next morning he went to call the paper. The story on Gutierrez’s funeral had run its course, and he wanted a new assignment. He thought he would feel out the Dispatch on the questions of the arson, to see if the paper might want him to pick up where Einstein had left off. McCullough seemed to be pushing him in that direction anyway, and it might be time to bring the story out of the closet. He got Kirpatzke on the phone. Before he had a chance to say what was on his mind, Kirpatzke told him that Einstein was dead.

  “They found his body a few weeks back,” Kirpatzke said, “in a gutted building down on High Street. The old Taylor Arms. The place had been torched. The coroner said Einstein’s skull was pretty smashed up. Whoever did it probably killed him somewhere else, then dragged him into the building; Einstein was already dead when they set the place off.”

  “If he’s been dead for weeks, how come you’re just telling me about it now?”

  “I just found out myself. All the police had was a bag of bones down in the morgue—no name, no wallet. It all had been burned in the fire.”

  “Then how did they identify him?”

  “His mother. Einstein was from New York, and he used to take the milk train down to see her every couple weeks. When he didn’t show, she started calling here. I told her to call the police. They tried to cool her off, telling her he had probably just gone to Bermuda or someplace. Then somebody down in the morgue got the bright idea of checking dental records. Took ’em awhile. Quite a few squatters die in those fires.”

  “So what happened?”

  “So Einstein’s mother got the dental records and sent them. Identification positive.”

  “Are you going to run a story on it?”

  “No. I don’t see the point.”

  “What? One of your reporters dies on an investigation and you’re just going to let it fly? Where’s his notebook? What was in it?”

  “As far as I know, Einstein’s notebook burned with him. I don’t have any idea what it contained.”

  “But when McCullough asked me to interview Mendoza, you asked him if he had gotten the name from Einstein’s notebook. I was standing right there. You started arguing about the notebook and over whether I should do the story.”

  “Mac is an idiot. He had no idea of what he was giving you. He couldn’t put two and two together with a fork.”

  “Einstein was investigating the fires. You know it, and I know it. The Latinos had told him they knew who was setting them. Then, next thing, that man Angelo is dead, and so is Einstein. So what am I supposed to think? That Mendoza’s name came from nowhere, like magic, out of a hat.”

  There was a huge silence on the other end. “Mendoza’s the torch, isn’t he?” Lofton said. “That wasn’t just one of the Latinos’ crazy stories. And you knew it all along, didn’t you? You figured it from Einstein’s notes. How come you tried to keep me off this story?”

  “Mac knows where the cente
r of power is in this city.” Kirpatzke sounded weary now, as if he had been through this one too many times, with other reporters, on other stories. “He knows how these investigations turn out, but he doesn’t care. He doesn’t think things through. I don’t want to see another reporter dead.”

  “Is that why you got fired up at the Post, because you cared too much for your writers? Or was it because you were suppressing information? Who pays your salary anyway?”

  “From what I understand, Lofton, you’re not Mr. Purity yourself—”

  Lofton hung up. The conversation confirmed what he’d already put together: Mendoza was the torch, the one who burned the buildings, who received Brunner’s money, probably by way of Golden. He didn’t need proof positive to know the Latinos, during their brief conversation, had led him in the right direction. He could feel it in his bones, as surely as Einstein had felt it in his.

  7

  When Lofton walked into Barena’s the following night, Tenace was there, waiting. He sat alone in a Naugahyde booth, watching the Red Sox game on television, a half-empty pitcher of beer on the table in front of him. Already slightly drunk, he waved Lofton over.

  “So you think the Redwings can make a run at the play-offs?” Lofton asked him.

  “No chance. If they get close”—Tenace pointed at the ceiling with his thumb—“everybody will get called up. Cowboy’s taking Kubachek this week, and Sparks ain’t worth shit anyway, anywhere.”

  “He’s taking Kubachek?”

  Tenace nodded and looked at the game. Lofton looked, too. The TV’s color was bad, the picture a blurry green, and the players seemed to be playing underwater. Zeke Strom, the famous slugger, was at bat. Boston was losing. Once again the team had gone into its late-season skid, slowly sinking in the standings, losing ground on Milwaukee, Baltimore, New York, Detroit. It was a problem that had haunted the team for over a decade, some said even longer; the town had good teams that started out fast and faded inexplicably in the stretch. Even those precious years when the Red Sox didn’t fade, they still lost the big game, muffed the big play. Nevertheless the fans hoped each year that this would be the year Boston broke its jinx. “We’ve got the talent but not the luck,” they’d tell each other on the all-night talk shows, “and luck will change, it always does.” They might be right, Lofton thought, but not this year, not yet. The television announcer, having little else to talk about, focused on Zeke Strom. Strom was a timeless player, the announcer said. His was a name synonymous with baseball. With Boston. A great competitor. The reddest of the Red Sox. Strom knew, the man went on, better than any one of these high-paid youngsters, how to swing a sizzling stick, how to knock the white ball over the Green Monster, Fenway’s famous left field wall.