“What night do you mean?”
“After the game.”
“We play lots of games. What are you after?”
Lofton paused. He knew he should be careful. If he said too much to the wrong person—and if word got back the way it had gotten back on Gutierrez.… Yet he had to ask questions to get answers; there was no other way.
“It was a night after Sparks had pitched. He had won, and then you and Amanti and Sparks and Gutierrez and a couple of those ballpark girls—you all went up to the apartment. Do you remember?”
“I remember. Who you been talking to?”
“Never mind. I just need to know what Gutierrez had on his mind. Did he talk about anything that might be hooked up to his death?”
“Randy was crazy those last weeks,” Carpenter said. “Maybe his motor was running extra hard that night, I don’t remember. I went to bed early, but Gutierrez, he had some strange raps.” Carpenter laughed, then shook his head. “Listen, I thought you were going to keep the drug stuff out of it. That doesn’t need to be in the papers.”
“One minute you guys swear Randy Gutierrez was straight, the next minute drugs were ruining his life. It can’t be both ways, and there’s no sense in trying to protect him now that he’s dead. To tell you the truth, this stuff about the snowflakes in Buffalo, it’s not really what I’m after. I’m trying to figure out who killed Gutierrez. I need to know what he was talking about those last days.”
“After Randy wound himself up, he said a lot of things. They’re hard to remember. He was paranoid. He would tell a hundred stories, and everybody in every one of them was out to get him. Sometimes I wonder about it, maybe there was something buried in his talk that made sense, but back then I had to turn him off. I just stopped paying attention.”
“Did he ever mention arson?”
“Arson?” Carpenter scowled. He seemed uncomfortable with the turn in the conversation, and he was no good at concealing it.
“From what I understand,” Lofton said, “Gutierrez was spinning pretty hard that night at the apartment when he was talking to Amanti. Sparks was there. You two were roommates; you can’t tell me Sparks didn’t mention it to you.… Did Gutierrez ever talk to you about arson?”
“He talked to me about it,” Carpenter said, though he didn’t like saying it, and turned to stare out at the ballfield, as if something out there might help him out of the conversation.
“Did Gutierrez say Golden was involved?”
Carpenter sighed heavily. “Yeah, he said that, but he said a lot of things. I remember once he thought everybody on the team was out to get him. He even suspected me.… You aren’t going to use this stuff in the paper, are you?”
“No,” said Lofton. “I’m just trying to figure out why Gutierrez is dead.”
Carpenter shook his head. He didn’t know anything else. It was a mystery to him, he said, as spooky as the man in the moon. And that story about the arson, he’d kept it to himself until now. He didn’t believe it, not really. He hadn’t even told anyone on the team.
“What about Sparks? Did he believe it?”
“You’ll have to ask him yourself,” Carpenter said, his tone shifting. “I haven’t learned to read minds yet.”
Practice ended, and the game began, the Redwings whirling the ball one last time around the horn. Lofton wanted to talk to Sparks, but the pitcher still had not materialized. He was back in the training room, getting his arm worked over; at least that’s what they’d told him at the clubhouse door.
Lofton felt someone tap him on the arm. It was the kid with the Redwings cap. The boy’s eyes darted around, and his voice stammered hard—his right hand moving, touching his face—as he gave Lofton the message.
“Someone wants to talk to you. Up by the candy stand.”
Lofton noticed burn marks down the kid’s arm. The scars were mottled and brown, as if the kid had scratched at the skin before it could heal.
The kid close by his side, Lofton headed toward the concession. Amanti stood waiting. She wore sunglasses, so he could not tell if she watched him as he approached. She turned her back when Lofton reached the stand, but she did not walk away. Her hair was tied back with a thin black ribbon.
Lofton ordered a Coke from the girl in the concession.
“Didn’t expect to see you here,” he said to Amanti.
“I was worried.…”
The boy stared up at them; his hand moved nervously about, almost shaking.
“Kid gets around,” Lofton said. “I see him all over.”
“Yes, he does things for the team. Runs down to the store, grabs sandwiches. Retrieves fouls. Things like that.”
The kid smiled at Amanti, enraptured. Amanti reached into her purse, counting out quarters. She handed the kid his money, and he took off, hurtling away from the concession, down to where some boys played flip, tossing their knives at a circle scratched in the dirt.
“He’s awfully young to be so nervous,” Lofton said.
“I don’t know what’s wrong, but he’s a smart kid, you can see that sometimes. Once in a while he gets mixed up. They’ll send him down to get one of the players and he’ll come back with somebody else, or he’ll go off down to some strange place or the other. Most of the time he’s fine, but he doesn’t have any parents. He lives in a halfway house, and one of the counselors says they think he was beat up a lot when he was little.”
Lofton was surprised by the compassion she expressed; he had not seen it in her before. He stood there with her, watching the kid. After a few minutes she said that she wanted to talk to him, but not here. She asked him to meet her outside the right field gate.
Lofton sipped at his Coke and headed slowly, casually toward the third base bleachers. Amanti had made her way past the press box and was working her way through the opposite grandstand. Lofton decided to go out the main gate and circle around the ballpark to his meeting place with Amanti. Ahead of him, Dick Golden leaned over the third base fence, watching the action. The visiting Lynn Sailors had scored two runs in the top of the first. Now Holyoke had one run in, two men on, and nobody out.
“Gonna be a wild one,” said Golden. He smiled, friendly. He did not seem like a murderer, an arsonist, but it was an easy thing to lean over a baseball fence and lose your identity, to forget about what twist of luck, good or bad, had conspired to make you what you were. The foul lines touched at home plate, then angled away from one another, the space between them growing greater the closer they came to the outfield wall, and growing still greater, infinite, if you imagined the lines continuing past the boundaries of the park. You could lose yourself in that space, there was nothing but the ball game, there was no other world. Once inside it, Lofton didn’t know how to ask Golden about the fires. Instead, he stood with the former pitcher and watched Elvin Banks wally-loop a slow curve down the right field line, a ball that hit fair, bounced first right, then left, then over the charging outfielder’s head and into the deep grass.
“Kill the whole business. Drop the story. The more I think about Gutierrez’s death, the more frightened I become. Brunner knows I’ve been talking to you, at least I think he does. It’s time to stop.”
Amanti walked beside him, her heels clicking on the broken pavement. Her reversal didn’t surprise him, not completely. He could understand her fear of Brunner, but when trouble came, he knew, it would come in his own direction, not hers. Brunner would move against the outsider, not wanting to admit that the real trouble originated down home, in his own bed. Lofton knew he should be afraid, but the fear was not enough to chase him away. Partly it was because he was almost invisible on the Holyoke streets. No one knew him here; he had no identity. So if he happened to die, it would almost be as if nobody had died. Though he didn’t like the idea of being nobody, there was a certain freedom in the idea, too, and it kept the fear down to a minimum, to a cold gray wave in the chest. A second later he abandoned this whole line of thinking. It was nonsense. He was scared to death.
&
nbsp; “Why did you bother with Brunner in the first place? That’s what I can’t figure. It doesn’t seem that you like him, let alone love him. His money and that apartment—those can’t mean that much. I mean, you could just marry someone, some halfway decent guy with a little cash, and get the same thing. You could probably even sleep around if you wanted.”
Amanti’s face flushed. He could see that she did not like the way he was talking. At the moment Lofton didn’t much care. She was backing off the story, abandoning what she had started, and he felt he could say pretty much what he pleased.
“What’s it to you how I live?” she asked.
“It’s nothing to me.”
There was anger in her voice, anger in the staccato clicking of her heels. Her arms swung loosely, but her hands were rigid, tense; she flexed her fingertips, over and over, in and out of her palm. All around them the evening light was soft and red. Amanti’s eyes welled for a second with a surge of anger and self-pity, and then it was just anger. It was the sort of anger that comes when someone touches a nerve close to the truth. The touch makes you want to talk, to be touched again, to feel the electric flashes as the truth becomes speech and then disappears into the air.
“Listen, you don’t know anything,” she said. “You don’t have any idea.”
“I’m not paid to have ideas. I just write things down. Other people have the ideas.”
“Bullshit,” she said. “Fuck yourself.”
Across the street some schoolgirls walked along, dressed in their Catholic school outfits, white blouses and green plaid skirts. A small brown-skinned girl shuffled sloppily along behind the others, unconcerned, lost in her own reverie.
“That girl is me; that’s what I was,” Amanti said. Lofton couldn’t see it. It wasn’t how he had pictured her.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” she said. “This place is cold as death all winter, then nothing but heat in the summer. There’s hardly anything in between, just a few days in spring when everything bursts to life, so thick it could strangle you, and then a blaze of color in the fall—a blaze that comes after the heat and sinks straight into winter. There’s no mild seasons, no transitions, nothing you can live in.”
Lofton hadn’t heard her talk like this before. The words burst out as if they’d been inside a long time, phrasing themselves over and over, and now they rang sharply, incongruently, in the evening air. Still, he understood what she meant. His last year in Massachusetts, after the breakup with his first wife, the winter had been so cold it had seemed to settle deep in his bones, in his heart, as if the flame that kept his body alive had been receding, dying with the weather. Then it was spring, and the flame roared back, and he could no longer stand being in the town where he and Nancy had lived together. So he moved back to the Santa Clara Valley in California, where the seasons were mild and the sky was blue and perpetually sunny.
“I hated my uncle Liuzza, I hated his money and everything about him, but when he offered my mother to pay for my college in Boston, I grabbed it, glad as hell to get out.”
“Why didn’t you stay in Boston?”
“You don’t want to know that story.” She spat the words out, not bothering to look at him, but then she told him the story anyway, caught up in her own anger. She told him how she had fallen in love when she was a student in Boston. She didn’t mention Kelley’s name—she was on the verge, but she held it back; her anger hadn’t taken her quite that far, not yet—but she told him about the affair, how the man had been engaged to be married when they met and how Uncle Liuzza had found out and done his best to kill the whole thing. Then she’d taken up with Brunner, she said, to get her lover jealous. It worked for a while, but not well enough. So she went back to Brunner. And the other man came back again. Even now it was going on, she said, the same stupid dance, the same back and forth.
“What’s the other man’s name?” Lofton asked.
Amanti turned and took Lofton by the wrist. She gave him a look—her eyes wide and impossibly blue—that was so earnest it took him by surprise.
“Don’t work on this story. It’s time to drop it. You’ll never get Brunner.”
“So you need his money, is that it? Afraid to go out into the world on your own?”
She was shaken, he thought, but doing her best not to show it. She went on looking at him in the same way. He wondered what was going on beneath the surface.
“If you’re so dependent on Brunner,” he asked, “why did you try to get me to go after him in the first place?”
“I’m not after Brunner.”
“Then who are you after?”
“No one,” she said.
They separated at the field, and he watched the rest of the game alone. Both starting pitchers were already gone. The whole relief staff paraded to the mound. But Holyoke held on, won, 16–13, the difference Banks’s three-run homer in the eighth. Two wins in a row for Holyoke. The team had scrambled out of the cellar.
After her talk with Lofton, Amanti drove home. The undergrowth was dense close to the road, covering the guardrails. In places the undergrowth gave way to vistas that, during the day, would have revealed farmlands and suburbs reaching to the rolling hills. Now the same vistas offered only an expanse of darkness broken by the scattered lights of houses and roads. Despite the general darkness, the landscape seemed palpable, as if it were not simple scenery, a backdrop, but instead possessed a consciousness of its own. The consciousness was not great enough to understand itself, only to express itself—in the chirring crickets, the barking of a stray dog, the turning of gravel under the wheel, sounds whose meaning was poignant yet still unclear. At times, through the canopies of trees over the winding road, Amanti caught glimpses of the stars that punctuated the black sky overhead.
Kelley, of course, had put her up to talking to Lofton. She had done as Kelley had asked: She’d told Lofton to drop the story. Now she and Kelley planned to go away together for a few days to a cabin in the New Hampshire countryside. They’d been to the cabin once before, a few years ago, when Kelley had been making plans to leave his wife.
Tonight Kelley was supposed to meet her at her apartment. When she reached home, Kelley hadn’t yet arrived. She took a shower, washed off the heat and dirt, then changed into some fresh clothes. She put on a new skirt, a white linen material that wasn’t quite thin enough to see through but that was cool and loose around her legs. The skirt was very much like one she used to wear on the warm evenings when she and Kelley had first gotten together. When she had finished changing, she fixed herself a drink and sat down at the kitchen table. She sat with her legs crossed, swinging the top one back and forth, studying her fingers, sipping at her drink, and listening for his car in the drive.
She finished her drink, made another, and Kelley still didn’t come. Kelley was always late. The feeling she had now, the excitement alternating with anxiety, was very similar to the feeling she used to have when she lived in Boston and would wait for him in her apartment. Except now the excitement and the anxiety were no longer new, but instead a kind of repetition that was more wearying than exhilarating. She remembered waiting until it was time to meet Kelley, then walking alone through the back streets of Italian and Irish neighborhoods. When they walked together, it was always away from the rush of the main avenues, where someone might recognize him. Eventually, though, they would have to walk down the busy street that led to her building. They would step into the street, into the sudden jostling of the crowd and the stream of lights. Once inside her building, Kelley would clutch her skirt in his fist while she reached up and touched his white skin, his black hair.
She had felt a similar excitement walking the Holyoke streets with Lofton; only the danger of discovery seemed more real, more dangerous, because there was always the image of the dead shortstop, and of Brunner, and the feeling, stronger than ever, that things were no longer under control. She had done what Kelley had asked, basically, but Kelley had not meant for her to tell Lofton the story of their
love affair. She had almost come out with Kelley’s name. In fact, she had almost told Lofton everything. At the last minute, as he was turning to go, she had almost grabbed him by the wrist and said, “I’ll show you. I’ll help you.”
Kelley still did not call. She made herself another drink. She sat on the floor beneath the wall phone and put her hand on her white skirt. She knew now that he wasn’t coming, that the phone would ring and she would hear his voice explaining that there were things he had to do in Boston. While he explained, she imagined, he would be in the apartment of his new mistress, and while Amanti listened to his voice, distant over the wire, the mistress would be hearing the same voice from the darkness of her bedroom, in the same way Amanti herself had heard it often enough when Kelley used to visit her and call home to his wife. Only this time Kelley didn’t call. The phone didn’t ring. He’s tight in her embrace, Amanti thought, and she buried her fingers in the folds of her skirt.
The clerk reached into the dark bank of cubbyholes and pulled out a pair of envelopes for Lofton. All week there had been nothing; now two letters at once, one from Maureen, the other an unstamped envelope with Lofton’s name written on the front in the clerk’s crabbed handwriting. It was the clerk’s method for passing on messages, phone calls, or the weekly bill. Lofton guessed it was the latter. He took both envelopes upstairs and put them down in his room, on the Formica table with the rest of his papers. He stared out across the rooftops; he could smell the roof tar sweating in the evening damp and heat.
The clerk, Lofton remembered, would not be giving him this week’s bill until Monday. So the envelope held a message. He lit a cigarette before he tore the envelope open. The note inside told him to call Tony Liuzza.
Liuzza. Lofton wondered what Amanti’s cousin wanted. Maybe he didn’t like the story Lofton had written about Gutierrez’s death. Bad publicity, tasteless. Lofton agreed. Murder stories were almost always that way. He imagined the black-framed print of Gutierrez the Dispatch planned to run with his next piece, and he tried to guess which of the quotes Kirpatzke would pull out and block, to draw attention to the story. “I see him sometimes in the back of the bus out of the corner of my eye.” And Lofton thought how it really made no difference who wrote this story. He had written pieces like it a hundred times, read them a thousand, shaking his head just like the man in the street, imagining that the dead man was himself, glad that he wasn’t. Maybe Amanti was right. Drop the arson story. Pursuing it would do more harm than good.
The Spoiler Page 15