The Spoiler

by Domenic Stansberry

  “¿El reportero?”

  “No sé.”

  “Un pendejo mas.”

  The men laughed, all except the one in the white T-shirt. He seemed to be in charge, and he did not take his eyes off Lofton. Lofton raised his arms above his head to show he had no weapons.

  “I’m not looking for trouble,” he said. “I’m looking to help.”

  For a moment he imagined the scene as it might look from above. The three young men circling and himself in the middle, his hands in the air, the trainyard spiraling away, the city flaming. He was frightened, but the scene was melodramatic, funny. He laughed.

  “¡Vamos!”

  The men rushed him. Lofton turned one way, then the other; he felt his arms pulled back; he caught a glimpse of steel. The men pinned him to the gravel, face down; the man in the T-shirt held a knife under his throat.

  “No. Don’t kill him. Es el reportero.” The Latino went on in Spanish, explaining something to the others. Lofton coughed into the dirt.

  One of the men searched him, running his hands along the inside of Lofton’s thigh. Satisfied, the Latinos pulled Lofton to his feet. Up close, Lofton recognized the tall one in the white T-shirt; he had been the one who did the talking that day out on the street in front of Lofton’s hotel. The other two, however, did not look familiar. They looked him up and down, amused at his clothes, at the bright orange helmet he still wore on his head; one of the men, laughing as he did so, tugged at Lofton’s jersey.

  “What are you doing here?” the tall one asked. Lofton stammered over an explanation. He did not want to mention the kid because he did not want them to think he had come here looking for Golden’s murderers; the Latinos might not appreciate such curiosity. The young man in front of him, however, did not wait for an answer to his question. He remembered Lofton from that day on the street. “We have Mendoza,” he said proudly, self-satisfied.

  “Let me talk to him,” Lofton said. “I need to do that.”

  The three men led him toward the river. They took him to a concrete tunnel, built into the riverbank, that seemed to go back toward town, toward the main canal. A bleeder tunnel, he guessed, used as a safety valve if the canals got too full too quickly. He remembered what the kid, in his hysteria, had told him: how the Latinos had dragged Golden into the tunnel and beaten him, shouting as they pulled money from his pockets. Golden had always paid Mendoza before, Lofton thought, and most likely he’d been on his way to make the payoff again. Except this time the Latinos, persistent in their tracking of Mendoza, happened to have the place staked.

  One man led the way, and the other two followed behind Lofton, their shoes splashing in the seepage that flowed along the bottom of the tunnel. A moaning sound came from deeper in the tunnel—voices, Lofton realized, echoing and vibrating against the old concrete. A light flickered ahead. Soon they stood with other gang members. Lofton listened as they talked in Spanish, apparently deciding what to do with him.

  In another moment they’d made up their minds. They shone a flashlight in Lofton’s face. Somebody grabbed him by the arm and pulled him forward. Mendoza lay at his feet. Mendoza was alive, but he was bleeding from the mouth and asking to be let go. When Lofton looked up, he saw a Latino he hadn’t seen before, the gang’s headman evidently, the one who had been trying to hold the gang in place since Angelo’s death.

  “Es el hombre del fuego. The arsonist,” the leader said, pointing at Mendoza. “He’s paid by the Mafia.”

  Lofton laughed, his quick chortle. It was a funny idea. The Mafia. People liked to think there was a group of men behind the corruption in the world, overweight thugs in movie suits, and that you could shoot a few, put a few in jail, and solve everything. The truth was that the Mafia was not a single group of people or an organization, at least not anymore, so much as it was a system, a method of operation, one that a lot of people used.

  “How do you know it’s the Mafia?”

  “That’s what he says.”

  They kicked Mendoza in the legs.

  “¿Quién te pagó?”

  They kicked him again.

  “¿Quién te mandó?”

  “The Mafia.”

  “See.” The young man turned to Lofton. “They’re burning our town. Go ahead, ask him what you want. When you’re finished, get out, write it for the paper.”

  Lofton knelt over Mendoza. Then he turned to the Latinos. “All right. But tell me, what do you plan on doing when you’re finished beating on him? It won’t do any good to kill him.”

  The Latinos did not answer. The tunnel was silent, the only noise Mendoza’s sharp, irregular breathing.

  “You know what they’re going to do,” Mendoza hissed. “One of your people was here earlier. A white man. Ask what they have done to him. Ask.”

  The Latinos stood quietly. One man turned a flashlight on Mendoza, so Mendoza’s eyes shone in the darkness, small, yellow, like a candle flame about to go out.

  “Ask,” Mendoza said again, his voice still hissing, still defiant.

  Lofton hesitated. He thought of the ballpark kid trembling in this tunnel while the Latinos collared Golden. “I have one more errand to run for Brunner; then I’m finished.” He imagined the man’s screams. He thought of Golden’s wife in the wheelchair. He did not like thinking that Golden was dead.

  Mendoza breathed heavily. The Latinos were silent, watching, waiting. They could still turn against me, Lofton thought, and a simple idea occurred to him, one that he’d had before but that seemed more important now: The Latinos were fighting for vengeance, for blood. Nothing he said would persuade these men to let Mendoza go. Whatever ideals Angelo had expressed, those were shattered now. Down here, below the city—just as above, in City Hall—what was good, what was evil, the line between them was all murky. If the Latinos had killed Golden, Lofton didn’t want to hear about it, not here, not now. Because if the Latinos guessed that he suspected they were murderers, then they might not let him go.

  Mendoza raised his head. The Latino’s leader shot out a command in Spanish. One of the men kicked Mendoza in the stomach.

  The tunnel was silent again except for Mendoza’s gasping, trying to regain his breath in the dank air. Lofton could feel the Latinos behind him. Mendoza rolled over. He peered at Lofton, struggled to regain his focus. He looked around him in the dark, and for the first time he seemed afraid, like a child waking up from a bad dream. He reached a hand toward Lofton.

  “I’ll tell you everything, just get me out of here. Get me away from them. To the police. I’ll tell you everything.”

  Mendoza held on to Lofton’s shirt pocket. Lofton looked back at the Latinos. The leader said nothing, he did not move his head, there was no sign of assent.

  “All right,” Lofton lied. “You’ll be safe.”

  Mendoza’s eyes flickered back and forth. For a moment they held a flash of the same defiance.

  “Mentiroso,” he scoffed. “You’re a liar.” He let out a loud laugh. A Latino kicked him in the face.

  Mendoza moaned and rolled over again. Blood came from his nose, his mouth, his teeth. Slowly he struggled up to his elbows.

  “Gutierrez,” Lofton asked. “Who killed him?”

  Mendoza smiled; there was no focus in his eyes. “One of my men, he told me not to come get the money by myself. He had a bad feeling. But I wanted the money in my own hands. I made a mistake.”

  “Do you know who Golden was working for? Who paid him the money he gave you?” Lofton felt the Latinos bristle at the mention of Golden’s name, but he shot out the questions, trying to get answers while Mendoza was still coherent. He knew, of course, that Brunner was behind it all, but he wanted to hear it from Mendoza, to have some confirmation besides his own and the papers that had been taken away from him when the police found him on the side of the road. Mendoza, though, was quiet again, his eyes vacant.

  Lofton grew impatient. He took Mendoza by the collar. One of the Latinos laughed.

  “What happened to Gutier
rez?”

  “Yourself—you are lucky you didn’t come to the depot. Your boss wanted us to use your corpse for kindling, to help light the fire. The same thing we did to the other reporter. When you didn’t show up, it was a bad sign. My men told me it was a bad sign, but I said, ‘Go ahead, to burn the building. I’ll go alone for the money. You burn, I’ll go alone.’”

  Lofton listened as Mendoza’s voice drifted off. Mendoza started to repeat himself, but Lofton grabbed him a little tighter by the collar and asked his question again. “What happened to Gutierrez?”

  “You were supposed to die tonight, not me.” Mendoza paused to catch his breath. He struggled awhile before answering Lofton’s question. “Your Mr. Shortstop, the big baseball player, he came to me. He said he knew about the fires. He said if I gave him money, or maybe cocaine, he’d be quiet.…”

  And there was that funny smile again, like the one Mendoza had given him in the church pew. It was a smile Lofton had heard about from other reporters and even seen a few times himself: in jails, in asylums, in the faces of men fighting guerrilla wars.

  “I had to do to him what these men are going to do to me.”

  Lofton headed out of the tunnel alone. The lights went dim behind him. He heard voices murmuring, he heard a thick, thudding sound, over and over in the darkness, but he did not hear Mendoza cry out. Outside, the smoke from American Paper had drifted over the railyard, a thick gray pall that covered the bit of sky overhead and made it impossible to see the stars.

  He hurried along the railroad tracks. The Flats burned down below, not all of the houses, of course, but enough so that you could not count them, so that the sky seemed to flicker and turn bright, the darkness creased with the beautiful flames.

  Lofton left the tracks and ran across Andersonville—a small outcrop of shacks, part of the city, a neighborhood of dark-skinned children, houses with corrugated roofs, tomato gardens, and narrow alleys. A hill beyond the neighborhood rose up to a highway that snaked along the ridge out to the suburbs. The streets here were dark, the fires had not spread this far, but Lofton, as he ran down a street, looking for a way up the hill, thought he could feel the people in the neighborhood—old men, women, children—staring at him from their porches. There was no road up to the ridge, but he found a path into the trees. It was dark, and he had a hard time seeing, but he hurried on. Something rattled in the bushes ahead of him: a dog maybe. Lofton swerved off in another direction, off the path. He took off the orange batting helmet, threw it into the bushes, and struggled upward. He heard young voices calling to each other in Spanish down below. He pushed on, found himself tangled in the bushes, very close to the top. A vine ensnared his foot and he fell, and then he heard more rattling nearby—my imagination—and he felt a sudden, crazy panic, his heart palpitating unevenly, and he burst through the bushes. He stood on the street, on the sidewalk of a four-lane highway. He walked along more slowly now, catching his breath. He decided he would go to the Dispatch and take his chances with Kirpatzke. He worried about Kirpatzke, of course. He wondered, again, who it was that had followed him to the library, who it was that had told Golden where to find him, that he was investigating the fires, and who it was that had trashed his room. He doubted it was Kirpatzke. It didn’t seem his style. Kirpatzke might kill my story, Lofton thought, Brunner might have that much power over him, but I don’t think Kirpatzke would do anything direct.

  He worked his way through the streets until finally he was at the Dispatch, pushing through the glass doors and standing in the cool air-conditioned building.

  There were a few reporters here, more than usual for this time of night, but not so many as he expected. An older man, a younger woman each sat at their desks, absorbed in the computer screen. Three young reporters stood gathered around Kirpatzke’s desk.

  “We need someone on the official end … fire chief, mayor, insurance companies. We need someone to talk to the merchants downtown. And someone on the human interest … burn victims, relatives of the dead.…”

  Kirpatzke talked sadly, laconically, his lips twisted in a half smile. Lofton stepped forward into the circle of younger reporters. He could feel the men bristle.

  “What do you want?” asked Kirpatzke. He looked Lofton up and down, and Lofton remembered how he was dressed: green baseball jersey, sagging pants, makeup on his face.

  “I have a story about the fire,” Lofton said.

  “Thanks. But I think we got it covered.”

  “I’ve got the arson angle,” said Lofton. “I didn’t hear you mention that.”

  Kirpatzke sighed.

  A reporter turned to Lofton. “They don’t know it’s arson yet. They can’t start to investigate until the fire cools down.”

  “Just hold off, Lofton. We got it covered,” said Kirpatzke.

  Lofton turned away. He headed to the proofreaders’ ghetto. He worked on his story there. Kirpatzke ignored him.

  Several hours later, when the darkness outside had started to lift, Lofton was still working. He had gone to the Dispatch’s files for Einstein’s fire stories; he had patched some of the other reporter’s work into his own piece for background. Because Lofton’s own notes had been taken while he was in the hospital, he had to rely on his memory for the stuff he had dug out on his own. Inevitably that meant some of the quotes were not quite right, words transposed, sentences forgotten. But that didn’t bother him too much; that sort of thing happened in every story, though most reporters wouldn’t admit it. Still, there were other weak points. He did not want to mention Amanti by name; it could be dangerous for her. That strained the story, and so did the fact that he could not prove he’d seen Brunner’s papers. The story was weak on figures. Still, it had to be that way. If Amanti wanted to come forward later and make some kind of on-the-record statement, then she could do that. As for the rest of them, whatever they had said to him and whatever bits of it he could remember, he used. Except for Golden. He was not quite sure why, but he refrained from mentioning his name either. He had a dogheaded loyalty to the man that he himself did not quite understand. Perhaps it was because Golden had been a big leaguer once, or because Lofton didn’t want to believe Golden was dead, or because if the man was alive, he wanted to give him a chance to come forward on his own, to leave town forever, to do whatever he had to do.

  By the time he had finished the story, the other reporters had gone. Kirpatzke, however, still mused at his desk. Lofton read over what he had written.

  Investigations begun earlier this summer indicate that a statewide arson ring may lie behind the fire that devastated Holyoke’s mill district last night.

  The alleged conspiracy involves people from all ranks of society, ranging from the members of local street gangs to those at the highest levels of state government. The conspiracy reportedly involves such figures as Holyoke businessman John C. Brunner, Senator David Kelley (D.-Holyoke), and retired U.S. Senator James Harrison.

  Last night’s blaze, which lit up the evening sky for miles and spurred looting in the neighborhood near the canals, was the largest in a series of fires that have plagued the town all summer. Though local residents have often expressed the belief that an organized ring lies behind the fires, reports by the city’s fire officials have repeatedly cited negligence and random vandalism as prime causes.

  “The fire officials are lying. Somebody is buying them off. We know who’s behind the fires.… The police, the white businessmen, they’re the ones who gain,” said the leader of the Latinos, a local street gang, in an interview with Dispatch reporter Dennis Einstein earlier this summer.

  The leader, known only as Angelo, was killed shortly afterward in a street clash with a rival gang. According to members of the Latinos, Angelo was killed by the Wanderers, an opposition gang that was paid to set the fires and that used the payoff money to finance a drug operation.

  Einstein’s investigations into the fires stopped abruptly in early July, when the reporter disappeared without explanation. His charred body
was finally identified last week after having been discovered sometime earlier in the ruins of an apartment building on High Street.

  A third person, Randy Gutierrez, was shot to death just hours before a scheduled newspaper interview in which he was to discuss the arson. Gutierrez, a shortstop for the Holyoke Redwings at the time of his death, reportedly had information linking the team’s front office to the arsons. The team is co-owned by John C. Brunner and Anthony Liuzza, Jr.

  “Randy Gutierrez was really scared. He told me he knew who was behind the arsons, and he was afraid they would kill him,” said one source who talked to Gutierrez before his death. The source, who asked not to be identified, claimed that Gutierrez believed a member of the Redwings’ management was delivering money to the arsonists, acting as a go-between for someone higher in the Redwings’ organization.

  Gutierrez apparently told the same story to several of his teammates, including second baseman Tim Carpenter and pitcher Rickey Sparks. “I didn’t know what to believe; Randy was pretty wired up those days,” said Carpenter. Sparks refused comment.

  Material evidence apparently indicates that a majority of the buildings which burned were owned not by Brunner himself but by proxy owners who then forwarded the largest percentage of the insurance premiums to Brunner via Nassau & Associates, a Boston-based law firm. The only building directly in Brunner’s name was American Paper, which was engulfed in fire last night and which should continue to burn for several days.

  “Is it wrong to destroy the slums or to give landlords money to rebuild? And if the government doesn’t help, maybe we should do it our own way,” Brunner said yesterday afternoon before the fires, when questioned about his role in the arsons. Brunner stands to collect upwards of $10 million in insurance from last night’s blaze.

  The arson scheme apparently took on political overtones when it was uncovered by Senator Kelley, Holyoke’s representative in the state legislature. According to one source, Kelley threatened to reveal the scheme if Brunner did not use a percentage of the arson money to help finance challenger Richard Sarafis’s election campaign. Kelley reportedly reneged on his threat when he discovered his father-in-law, Senator Harrison, had received large sums of money from Brunner in the past.