The Spoiler

by Domenic Stansberry

  “The family Gutierrez stays with, their name’s Rosa,” the reporter told him. “They live off Beech on some side street, Franklin, I think. She rents out a walled-in porch out back.”

  Lofton said thanks. It was a first from Rhiner, an effort to be friendly, to help him out on a story even though they were on competing papers.

  When he reached the grassy area behind the first base bleachers, the crowd was cheering. Another walk, this one to the Redwings’ first baseman, Lynch. The jittery youngster loaded the bases, and up came Singleton, Gutierrez’s replacement, a short, bulky man, surprisingly fast on his feet but a little clumsy with the glove. He hit the first pitch hard. The ball rose off the bat, traveling just this side of the left field line and clearing the fence. A home run. Lofton headed to the exit. Five to nothing, Holyoke. A good lead, but the Redwings had let games like this get away before.

  He found Franklin Street, a small avenue on the border between two neighborhoods, one white working class, the other Puerto Rican. He identified the house more easily than he thought he would, the name Rosa in pink letters on the mailbox. He walked around the back, following a narrow concrete walkway, cracked in places so the grass grew through. He ducked under a low-hanging willow and found a door off to the side of the house. A small shrine to the Blessed Virgin stood at the bottom of the steps that led to the door. He knocked on the door, but no one answered. He tried to see through the gauze curtains hanging on the inside of the door’s window. He could see nothing distinctly, only hear a radio inside playing Hispanic music. He knocked again, tried the handle, and stepped inside. He called Gutierrez’s name and knocked on the wall framing. He hesitated. Maybe Gutierrez was sick, or asleep. Maybe he should forget it and go back to the park. No, he wanted this story. He needed to feel out Gutierrez before returning to Amanti. Lofton stepped around the corner into the kitchen and saw Gutierrez lying on the floor, dressed in his baseball uniform, his body twisted at a bad angle between the table and the refrigerator.

  3

  Gutierrez was dead. By the angle at which he lay, it looked almost as if he’d died before hitting the floor. His shoulder jutted into the air, his head was bent back, bleeding through a large wound in the skull, and his cheek was pressed against the table leg. The body was twisted too violently, and there was too much blood, to imagine he had lived long after being shot. A good-size gun, Lofton guessed, maybe even a rifle, fired from close range. Inches.

  Years ago, when Lofton’s mother died, his father had kept both Lofton and his brother away from the funeral. The deaths he had seen since were those of strangers: a kid buried under a bus; a woman pulled from a river; a heart attack in an airport lobby. When such events happened, they did not seem real, but rather like something from television or the movies. This was like that, too: the death of a stranger, his blood smeared in a bright, cinematic puddle on the linoleum. Unlike the movies, however, there was no camera to fade to another scene. Lofton had to turn his head away, take a deep, unconscious breath—the brief image of the Amanti woman flickered through his mind—but when he turned back, Gutierrez was still there. Lofton felt he should do something; what, he wasn’t sure. He could not escape the feeling that someone was watching, that he was somehow guilty. He had the urge to run, but instead, he stood and stared at Gutierrez’s blood. Out the kitchen window he caught a glimpse of the evening sky. It was the same sky as always. No difference in the world.

  Finally, he bent over to feel the shortstop’s pulse. As he did so, he imagined himself sitting in his room, staring into the ghost light of the television, into the land of violence and shadows, the seductive world of black revolvers and red lips. Then there was the No in his mind, the denial. I am not responsible. I did not do this.

  He dropped Gutierrez’s wrist and lit a cigarette as he walked away from the body. He reached for the telephone, then stopped. No fingerprints, no trace of involvement. A stack of papers and unopened mail was scattered on the table. He picked the papers up, started to sort through, then changed his mind. He could do that later. He grabbed a dish towel. Using it as a glove, he searched the apartment: the kitchen cabinets, the bathroom, the dresser drawers. He found some letters with Nicaraguan postmarks, a bank statement, a vial of pills, a thin chain with a medallion of Jesus. He added them to the papers on the table and then went over every place he might have touched, wiping it clean with the towel. He gathered the pile of Gutierrez’s things and left. As he wiped the door handle outside, he noticed again the shrine of the Virgin at the base of the steps outside; her plaster base was cracked and crumbling, as if she had been a long time out in the weather. He hurried away. A young couple walked hand in hand on the street, but they did not notice him.

  A few blocks from MacKenzie Field he stopped at a gas station. He called the police from the phone booth and told them there had been a murder at Gutierrez’s address. The police operator tried to keep him on the line, but Lofton hung up. He would not give his name.

  As he approached MacKenzie, the kitchen towel and bundle of papers still under his arm, a pair of squad cars drove by with their sirens off. They turned the corner quickly, one after the other, in the direction of Gutierrez’s neighborhood. He was surprised they’d responded so soon.

  The game was over. The stadium lights were still on; but the entrance was chained, and Lofton could not see the scoreboard from this angle. He paced nervously back and forth, wondering what to do. A small group of teenagers stood not far away. The boys stared at him, their eyes dull, glittering pools, as if they were high on drugs. He asked them who had won the game.

  “Holyoke,” one of them said. “We beat ’em good.”

  A few minutes later an ambulance rushed by the ballpark. The kids grabbed their bicycles, and Lofton followed, too, with the vague idea that he was somehow safer close to the crime. On the way he stashed the towel and papers beneath a hedge.

  The ambulance stopped on Gutierrez’s street. By the time Lofton arrived, a neighborhood crowd had already gathered. The kids from the ballpark were there, too, joking and laughing, standing with their bicycles in the revolving ambulance light: red and blue, blue and yellow, yellow and red. The ambulance driver stood by the wagon’s rear door, talking to a paramedic. The paramedic lit a cigarette. Apparently the police were in no hurry to get Gutierrez to the morgue.

  A patrolman guarding the driveway held a long-handled flashlight, and the air around him was electric with voices. Some voices came from downtown, operators relaying trouble and its code names over the squad car intercom. Other voices came from the walkie-talkie at the cop’s belt, chatter from inside the house.

  Lofton walked up to the policeman, thinking—it seemed natural enough—that he should turn himself in. The cop shone the flashlight beam in Lofton’s face, a bright, intense light that forced him to close his eyes and turn his head. Instinctively he raised his hands in a gesture of surrender.

  “I’m the man who called in,” he said quickly. “I found the body.” He listened to himself speak the words as if he said nothing unusual.

  The flashlight dropped slightly. The policeman scanned him up and down but would not meet his eyes. Lofton had noticed that about policemen before. When they were dealing with the public, when they had a job to do, they often did not look you in the face. They could not take the chance of succumbing to individual entreaties. The cop kept his eye on Lofton’s hands.

  “I have a witness here.” The cop spoke into his walkie-talkie. There was a scuttle of static, some conversation back and forth—he could make out the officers’ voices inside the house—and finally, one of them told the patrolman to hold Lofton inside the squad car.

  Though he was beginning to have second thoughts, he did not resist. He walked in front of the cop to the passenger side and waited while the man opened the rear door. After Lofton was inside, the cop reached through the front window and pulled a switch. The door locks clicked. A sliding metal screen, closed shut in the center, divided the front seat from the back.


  “Sit tight,” the cop said, laughing a little, then moving down the walk to take up his old position. When the cop was gone, Lofton tested the rear doors. They were locked solid.

  From where Lofton sat, he could still hear the voices of the men inside the house coming over the patrolman’s walkie-talkie. He could see a man stationed outside the apartment door, another man roaming the backyard, and he could hear them talking to each other over the static, joking and exchanging information with the men inside. He heard continued references to the plaster Virgin and some grim remarks about Gutierrez’s body on the floor. He imagined the men rummaging through Gutierrez’s apartment, the rooms lit with bright strobes. Over the crackle of the walkie-talkie, he heard them say it looked as if someone had gone over the place already.

  “I guess whoever was here before us, they didn’t look up inside the Virgin.” Someone laughed. “Too bad, because the fellow missed himself a bonus.”

  Lofton grimaced. He wondered what he had missed. And why the hell he had turned himself in. He had learned better years ago. Once, as a young reporter, he had spent three hours in the station detailing a holdup he had witnessed to the police, then promised he would not write it up until the man had been apprehended. His editor had had him transferred back to obituaries. This could be a lot worse. Not only would the police try to tie up the story, but they might figure out he had lifted Gutierrez’s papers. Even if they couldn’t prove he had taken anything, they would accuse him, make him go down to the station. They would swagger, threaten—play it just like TV. Lofton wanted none of that.

  He looked down the street. The cop was busy with his flashlight. Lofton tried the sliding door on the metal screen that separated the front seat from the back. It wouldn’t budge. A man dressed in street clothes—a detective, he guessed—came down from the house. After looking at Lofton in the back seat, he tried to open the car door. When this new cop found the back door was locked, he cursed. He got in the front of the car, then reached under the dash to trigger the switch. The detective paused to relay some technical information to the operator. He gossiped with the operator about the murder.

  “Some Puerto Rican in a baseball uniform. No identification around anywhere, no papers, only the name across the back of his shirt. Gutierrez. Looks like a drug thing, maybe. Found some coke stashed up inside a plaster Virgin on the porch. We got a witness here.”

  “Is he the one that called in?” the operator asked.

  The detective glanced through the screen at Lofton. “You the one that called in?”

  Lofton nodded.

  “Why didn’t you give your name?”

  “I was scared.”

  The cop turned back to the microphone. “Yeah, he’s the one that called in. Says he was scared. Should I hold him here for O’Neill? All right.”

  After hanging up the mike, the cop came around to the back of the car. He opened the door and slid in next to Lofton. He showed his wallet and his badge.

  “I’m Detective Ryan. You’re going to have to wait a minute or two. Our homicide chief wants to talk to you.”

  Lofton could smell whiskey on the man’s breath.

  “You a friend of the deceased?” Ryan asked.

  “No, I was here by coincidence.”

  Ryan nodded wearily. “Yeah, I was just off duty when this happened, sitting with a couple of the guys. Now it looks like we’re in for a whole night of shit.” His face was pale, deeply creased, although he was probably only in his early fifties.

  There was some more noise over the intercom; in the static Lofton heard a voice asking Ryan to come back up to the house.

  “I’ve got to get back in there. You just hang on.”

  Detective Ryan started up for the house without shutting the cruiser’s door. He would have left the door open if the cop with the flashlight hadn’t called, “Hey, lock ’em up!”

  Shaking his head, Ryan walked back. He slammed the cruiser door, then hesitated for a second. Looking back at Lofton, he reached under the dash and threw the lock.

  Lofton mumbled to himself. They hadn’t let him go, but they hadn’t questioned him either. Ryan hadn’t even asked him his name. The detective had talked about the case in front of him, giving away information casually. True, Ryan did not know he was a reporter, but it still seemed like sloppy police work.

  He sat for a few minutes more, growing restless the whole time. The homicide chief Ryan had mentioned did not show up. He wondered if this homicide chief was inside the house, or down at the station, or at home watching “Kojak.”

  Someone else from the crowd approached the cop who guarded the driveway with the flashlight. The cop went through the same routine he had gone through with Lofton. He shone the light in the man’s face. Though Lofton recognized the man, he couldn’t remember his name: a beat reporter from the Springfield Post. Must have been hanging around late when the murder came over the CB. He guessed the other reporter could not know much. No name for the victim. Nothing about the drugs. No sense of the story. Still, he cursed himself. This story should be his. He tried the door again, but of course it was still locked.

  After a while Detective Ryan came back down from the house. He reached into the cruiser and took some cigarettes off the dash.

  “I can’t believe this,” he said. “I want to go home and get some goddamn sleep.”

  “How much longer is your chief going to be?”

  “Forever,” said Ryan. Then he said it again, apparently liking the sound of the word. “Goddamn forever.”

  “Can I go over to those bushes?” Lofton asked.

  “What for?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I’m not supposed to think,” Ryan said, looking up at the house, shaking his head in irritation. “I’m not supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be off tonight. These people are full of all kinds of silliness. You seen one body, you seen them all. They got half the city in there; I don’t know what they need me for.”

  Lofton asked him again if he could go over to the bushes.

  “Go ahead. If you want to piss, I’m not stopping you.”

  “I can’t. Remember, you got me locked in here.”

  “Right. I forgot about that.”

  Ryan reached beneath the dash. As Lofton got out of the car, he noticed the Post reporter was busy again with the cop at the driveway. The reporter was persistent. The policeman had his back to Lofton. Some more voices came over the static of the cruiser’s intercom, asking again for Ryan.

  “Those bushes, over there,” Ryan yelled out. He pointed at the house next door.

  Lofton stepped behind the bushes. He could see Ryan. The detective was not watching him at all; he was standing up, barking into the microphone and scowling up at the house, one elbow leaning against the roof of the car. The detective started to swear into the mike. Lofton stepped out of the bushes and walked into the darkness, trying to be as calm as he had been next to Gutierrez’s body. Cutting across a corner lawn, he waited for the cops’ cries. He imagined the shots breaking out, himself collapsing, the grass against his face as he died. He broke out running. After a while he stopped. He made it to his car, in the lot next to his hotel. As he drove over to the Dispatch, his hands were unsteady. He had probably made a mistake leaving the squad car. He should never have gone back to the crime to begin with. He had made a simple thing into a mess.

  From outside, the Dispatch looked shut down. There were no lights and only a single car stood in the parking lot. Inside, the building was dark and hot. He found Kirpatzke at the night desk, his tie loose around an unbuttoned collar, sitting alone in the green glow of the computer terminals. Kirpatzke told him the electricity had gone, the air-conditioning didn’t work, and the only power was the backup generator to the computer. Kirpatzke’s shirt was damp, and so was his brow.

  “I just stumbled into a murder.”

  Kirpatzke tilted his head. He held a paper clip between his teeth and thumbed at it with his nervous hands.


  “Remember that ballplayer I was going to interview? Randy Gutierrez? The Redwings’ shortstop? Well, I went over to his place and found him dead on the floor. A bullet in the skull.”

  Kirpatzke raised an eyebrow. “Thrilling.”

  Despite himself, Lofton smiled. “They found some drugs stuffed up inside one of those plaster Virgins, at the bottom of his steps as you walk in. I was there with the cops for a while, but they don’t know I was the one who found the body. I think I can write it up pretty well.”

  “Yeah, well, you know,” Kirpatzke said, smiling slightly, ironic, “we don’t play murders here. It’s poor taste.”

  Lofton was about to protest when he realized Kirpatzke was toying with him. There was no way the paper would pass up the story of a dead ballplayer. The editor’s smile deepened, but it lingered too long. His amusement now seemed forced, weary, his features lined with exhaustion. “A murder, huh?”

  “Why don’t you get a day job?” Lofton said. “Or try another business?”

  “It’s my commitment to the truth. I can’t let it go.” Kirpatzke laughed, self-deprecating. Even in the darkness the editor’s skin seemed jaundice-colored, tinged by nicotine; that was odd, Lofton thought, since as far as he knew, the editor didn’t smoke. Lofton glanced around the empty building.

  “Always like this at night?”

  “Depends. Usually we get a few people in and out. I weed through the wires, listen to the citizen band. Maybe write a story.”

  “Not too many small-town papers even bother to keep the place open at night. Why here?”

  “The Post does it, so we do it.”

  Lofton nodded, but it still didn’t make sense. He knew that Kirpatzke used to work at the Post. That paper, he knew, was part of the Klondike Syndicate, a newspaper chain that knew how to make money, moving into weak markets and dominating the smaller papers with its money and its size. Here the Klondike people put out a morning paper and an evening. The basic core of each was the same; only the evening paper was more sensational. Small papers like the Dispatch competed by hiring men like McCullough, who could glance at a police log and see a front-page grabber. And they also, Lofton knew, needed reporters, writers willing to stay in town for love or lack of imagination. None of that, however, explained Kirpatzke’s presence here in Holyoke. He had had a better job, more money, more prestige, up the road. Why had he left the Springfield paper? Maybe the rumors—the hints of scandal Lofton had heard in the press box (the reporters gave no details)—held some truth. Still, you could tell Kirpatzke had been in the business for a while; he had worked hard.