The Spoiler

by Domenic Stansberry

  Jimmy Jefferson, West Haven’s leadoff hitter—on his way to the As in Oakland at the end of the week—went after the first pitch. He hit a grounder that the Redwings’ first baseman, Lynch, had a hard time grabbing. The wet ball slipped from his hands, but it did not matter. Jefferson slipped coming out of the box, and Lynch, fumbling and stumbling, beat him to the bag. Holyoke had sloshed out a victory in the rain.

  The rain came down harder, but Lofton took his time. He was on his way to Barena’s. He felt the rain slick his hair, soak through his shirt. There was no hurry; he was already wet clean through. You were safe in a hard rain, he thought. At the top of the hill Barena’s neon flashed off and on, casting an orange shadow on the brick. Once inside, he called Amanti. Again she didn’t answer. So he got himself something to eat, then sat by the window, where he could watch the rain coming down against the darkening sky.

  Who had told Golden where to find him? From Lofton’s conversation with Sparks, he was still no wiser. The pitcher had blown up when Lofton suggested he was involved with Brunner. That could just be an act, but chances were that Sparks was just what he seemed: a guy who wanted his chance, who would push hard to get it but would stay away from anything that looked like real trouble.

  Lofton heard someone call his name. He looked up and saw the woman who worked the bar, a beer in one hand, the telephone in the other. She seemed to have lost her patience after barking his name out just once and was now ready to hang up if someone didn’t come quickly. Lofton identified himself and took the phone. He was taken aback. It was Golden on the other end, and he wanted Lofton to meet him at the clubhouse. “In half an hour. When this place is good and cleared out and I don’t have to worry about somebody coming back because he forgot his shoes,” Golden said, and hung up. So Lofton had no choice but to go back and sit down at his table and stare at the orange shadow of Barena’s neon on the sidewalk rippled by the rain. When twenty minutes had passed, he left. He walked down to the main gate at MacKenzie Field. The stands were dark and empty in the rain. Ahead of him the clubhouse door was open, but the lights inside were off. Lofton stepped in quietly. He found Golden in the next room, straddling a bench that ran in front of a row of lockers.

  “I saw you walking up the hill after the game. I figured you were on your way to Barena’s,” Golden said. “I’m taking a chance talking to you.” The room smelled of cigarette smoke and steam and sweat and dirty clothes. An ashtray sat on the bench beside Golden. The general manager wore a Redwings’ cap on his head. “I talked to Brunner today. You were right about the papers in your car. They were there, but I didn’t know it, I had no idea. The police gave them back to Brunner.… I think Brunner’s going to have you killed.”

  Lofton could think of nothing to say. His silence seemed to agitate Golden.

  “Look, I’m trying to do you a favor. This has gotten way out of control. I had no idea things were going to get like this. When I went after you, I was frustrated, I was cracking. You should be careful. Brunner has friends on the force.”

  “What about you, you his friend, too?”

  “Listen.” Golden gave him a dim look, then went on. “The bastard set me up. He has buildings all over town, most of them garbage. Going to turn them into parking lots, I don’t know, I didn’t ask. He gave me money, five, ten grand sometimes, to pay one of the community people there, to sort of spread the money around and get the rest of the Ricans out before the building was demolished. That’s all that I thought I was doing: helping clear out the buildings. But this last time the fucking building burned with people still inside. Five people died. That’s when I started thinking about what was really going on.”

  Golden lit another cigarette. Seemingly he was calm, but there was always the look about him as if he could snap any moment. He would move his hands suddenly, cast a black glance at the concrete floor, his voice rising as he talked. Then he would look at Lofton, his face as calm as the water of the Dead Sea.

  “Have you been paying the torch?” Lofton asked.

  “I didn’t put it together. I didn’t know what I was doing.” Golden studied the locker beside him. It belonged to one of the ballplayers and was decorated with pictures of the guy’s family, a bunch of blonds in front of a ranch home in the dry hills of what was probably California. “Buildings go up all the time. Coincidence, I thought. I didn’t know I was paying the torch. I didn’t know he was a torch.”

  “Who did you think you were paying?”

  “Community people, that’s what Brunner called them. They were supposed to pass the money around, help vacate buildings, stuff like that.”

  “What community people?”

  “Okay, gang leaders. Whatever word you like. You’re the writer. I really didn’t know what was going on. Or I told myself I didn’t know. I need the money. Disease is expensive.”

  “Mendoza, is he one of the men?” Lofton asked.

  Golden nodded. And so the circle closed on itself again. At least for the moment the names connected, intertwined, but when you tried to prove it, when you reached out and grabbed, your hand got snarled, you pulled in people you didn’t expect, ruined their lives, and missed whom you were after.

  “What happened with Gutierrez? Did you lose your temper with him, too?”

  Golden gave him a reckless look, the dark flash of anger. He didn’t like Lofton’s question, but he was snarled up in guilt, trying to escape, so he answered it anyway.

  “Gutierrez was a coke freak. He put things together somehow, but he didn’t talk to me about it. He went to the Wanderers and tried to put some pressure on Mendoza, thinking he could pick up some more coke. That’s another thing Mendoza’s people are into. They used the payoff money to buy coke and sell it, trying to move themselves up in the world. When Gutierrez fooled with him, they blew him away.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Mendoza told me. He seemed pretty proud, like he had done us a favor.”

  “It wasn’t Brunner behind the murder?”

  “No. He was mad as hell when he found out about it. He was afraid it would somehow come back on him. He got in touch with his friends at the police and did what he could to kill the investigation.”

  Lofton listened to the rain. It still fell pretty hard outside, but there was the sound of water dripping inside, too, back in the shower room. A faucet, maybe, or a leak in the roof. “Tell me one more thing,” Lofton said. “If you didn’t know I had Brunner’s papers, why did you bother to follow me? How was it you knew I was going to be at Amanti’s that night?”

  “I didn’t know about the papers, but I knew you were investigating me. I wanted you to stop. I still do, but I’m not so worried. You’ll never get to them—or to me.”

  “How did you know where to find me?” he asked again.

  “Let’s just say I put a nickel in the jukebox, and the jukebox sang all night. I didn’t call you to get other people involved. You don’t need to know anything else. I’m just trying to warn you. Forget your story. Just get out, and get out now.”

  “What about you? Are you out?”

  “I’ve got one more errand to run. Then that’s it. Then I’m free. I’m finished with Brunner.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  Golden didn’t answer. He lit another cigarette while the old one still burned in the ashtray and straightened the cap on his head.

  “How are they planning on killing me?” Lofton asked.

  “I don’t know the details,” Golden said. “And it wouldn’t be safe for me to tell you if I did. I’m not trying to be noble. I’m just giving you fair warning.”

  Lofton was wet, cold to the bone. He imagined how he must look—drenched clothes, sunglasses, bruised cheeks—but the cabbie said nothing. It was a good, long fare to Amherst. He still had not been able to get in touch with Amanti; he did not know if he should be worried about her safety or suspicious about what she might be up to now. In the meantime, he wanted to let his thoughts rest in the silence
, fade to nothing in the blackness of the cab. Only it wouldn’t happen. His chest tightened again, and the darkness was veined with small streaks of red, impressions of blood-colored light left lingering on his retina from passing cars. Lofton found himself sorting through the last few days. Car chases. Hospitals. Revolvers. When the cab reached Amherst, he had the driver let him off at the end of Amanti’s street. He paid and walked toward her apartment. The rain had stopped, the asphalt was wet and shining, lights glowed in the houses. He could hear voices drifting out from the porches. He guessed that while he had been standing in the rain at MacKenzie Field, these same people had heard the rain from inside their houses, listened to it thrum on their rooftops, and thought that the world was good. If he had stayed back with Maureen, back in Colorado, then it could have been the same way for him. The world could be good.

  Her place was dark except for the light in the bedroom. He knocked and waited. She did not come. After several more tries he walked to the back of the building and looked through the bedroom window. The bed was made, but there was no one there.

  “Gina,” he called through the screen. He went to the front of the house again, tried knocking, then returned to the sliding door in the rear. He called her name again, but she did not answer. He decided to go inside. He would look through her papers, and he would see if he found anything unexpected, maybe some clue to her whereabouts. He jimmied the sliding door—an old trick he had learned in high school—turned on a light, and started rummaging.

  There was a noise behind him. He turned. Amanti stood in her nightgown, blocking the doorway. More revolvers. Lofton laughed. She held a gun pointed at his chest.

  9

  Lofton took a deep breath. Amanti stood half in the darkness, half out. The light from the hall lit one side of her face and at the same time illuminated her figure from behind, making her nightgown seem bright, fringed with light. She stood very quiet and very still. She held the gun waist-high.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  She didn’t say anything. Lofton glanced down at the papers he had taken from her drawer.

  “Where did you get the gun?”

  “I was sleeping.” Amanti stepped out of the light, so now he could not see her face at all. She lowered the gun, pointing it at the carpet. “I woke up and heard some noise.”

  He toyed with the papers between his fingers and took another step toward her. With the sound of her voice, his fear had started to pass, but he was not sure, not completely, that he should let it. He sat down in the chair and switched on the light nearby. Her face was that of someone who had just woken up.

  “Why are you going through my things?” Amanti held the fingers of her free hand pressed against her thigh, just as she had held them on his first visit here.

  “Why don’t you put the gun away?”

  “You know, I might’ve shot you; you shouldn’t sneak around.”

  “I knocked a dozen times. I came around back and looked in your bedroom. It was empty.”

  “I was in the extra bedroom, up front. When I heard noise, I got up to check.”

  “Who did you think it was?” Lofton motioned toward her gun. Amanti shrugged. She sat on the couch and placed the revolver on the light stand. Well out of my reach, Lofton noticed.

  “I was just with Golden. He’s the one who smashed my face. Caught up to me in his car after the last time I was here. Or hadn’t you heard?”

  “What are you getting at?” Amanti looked at the papers he still held in his fingers. “I don’t appreciate this.”

  “How did Golden know to find me here?”

  “I don’t have any idea about that.”

  Amanti moved her hands sharply, in the motion of someone pushing someone else away, refusing to move. The gesture was unconscious, until the last minute, when she realized the effect she was creating. Earlier that evening, until the time she had fallen asleep, she had debated whether to help Lofton or to go along with what Kelley wanted her to do. She had come to no decision. Then she had woken up, heard the voice calling, the screen rattling, and had pulled the gun from its blue towel in the drawer. She had not been sure who it was. If Lofton had moved suddenly when she first saw him, or if the light had been different, then maybe she would have shot him. As it was, he didn’t seem to realize she was telling him the truth: She didn’t know why Golden had shown up out on the highway when he did. All she knew was that Brunner had his papers back. “Why would I give you the papers, then arrange for Golden to beat you up, and risk the police finding everything? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  Lofton agreed. It didn’t make sense. But that didn’t mean it hadn’t happened that way. He had the brief sensation that in some important way he was blind, that there was an easy passage out of this thing, one foot in front of the other, as Amanti had said, but instead, he groped along.

  “Your face, it looks terrible,” Amanti said.

  Lofton touched his eyes; his makeup had smeared badly.

  “Do you have any more of this cream?”

  Lofton watched Amanti go down the hallway. He picked up the gun off the light stand. The safety was on. When Amanti came back, she glanced at it in his hands, but she said nothing. As she sat down next to him, opening her bottle, he put the gun back on the table.

  “Let me see your face.”

  She ran her fingertips over his bruises, rubbing off the makeup that was already there. “Does this hurt?”

  “A little, but not much. My face is drugged.”

  Pursing her lips, she studied his face intently, with the same look Lofton had seen on other women—Maureen, Nancy, his mother—when they were concentrating on their own faces in the mirror. She obviously enjoyed the task.

  Amanti’s face was very close to his own, but he still couldn’t read her; he still didn’t know what was under the surface, what she was telling him and what she was keeping to herself. She held her tongue between her teeth while she studied his bruises. He felt her knee against his thigh.

  “Brunner wants to talk to you.”

  Amanti reached for the cream on the table behind him, but Lofton, thinking of the gun, pushed her hand away. She held her lips tight together now, her fingertips pressed against the cushion beside him. She shook her head unhappily. The scar on her cheek seemed larger, more visible, now that her face was flushed.

  “Brunner and Kelley are working together. They want you to drop the story. They’re sure you’ll do it if I ask—and if they slice the pie a little larger.… Will you calm down and let me finish your face?”

  Her blue eyes were large and wet. He pulled himself up from the couch and lit a cigarette. The smoke hurt his chest, and his face, too, was beginning to hurt. The pills were wearing off.

  “Brunner’s going to ask you to cover a political rally, to write a whitewash for him, something to cover up what’s going on with the fires. I’m supposed to tell you to take the money, do what they say, meet me, and get out of town. That’s what they want me to do, lead you out of town.”

  “Where do we go?”

  “That’s your choice. Either way, no matter what you do, I’m not leaving as easy as they would like. I stay here. I’m safest when I’m close, where I can watch.” She made the same sharp gesture again, quick, defensive, though this time she did not seem to realize it. For a second, something about her—the way she raised her head, maybe, or the way her eyes looked not at him but at the floor—reminded him of those Mexican girls in San Jose who traveled the streets alone, in stark heels and black skirts, and who, when they saw groups of men wandering the streets, white men, usually, and drunk, would follow packs like that through the streets, the stores, the arcades, keeping the group in sight until it had moved out of their territory. A girl would follow not because she wanted them but because the men were dangerous together, like young dogs. It was best to stay in the open, to keep them in sight. But later, if one of the men should approach a girl alone, when the others had scattered, then it was a different story.<
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  “Go along with what Brunner wants you to do,” she said. “Or let him think you are. Take the money; do everything he asks. Then, at the last minute, do it the way you want.”

  Her composure left her. He felt a long shudder run through her body. He watched her face, waiting for the tears. They didn’t come.

  “I don’t have much to base my story on, not without Brunner’s papers,” he said. “Losing those, that hurts things. But I can piece some kind of story together.”

  He thought of insisting that she go into hiding, a motel in Chicopee or Hartford, someplace where she would be safe until the story was written, not the way Brunner wanted, of course, but the way he wanted. He wondered how things would be if they loved each other, but he dismissed the question as soon as it came to him—like a breath taken quickly and then let go—because there just wasn’t any way to answer.

  Amanti felt herself vacillating. She was entertaining the same question she’d been entertaining all night, not the details of it, of course, but the question itself, the gut answer. She could finish setting Lofton up, the way Kelley wanted, or she could say nothing and simply let him go. The conversation could still go either way; it just needed the right ending, the right twist. Whatever she did, she should watch out for herself.

  “Maybe it’s not such a good idea for me to stay here,” she said, listening to herself, to the dip and catch in her voice. “Maybe I should meet you after you talk to Brunner. It might be better.” She thought of the paper Kelley had handed her with Brunner’s handwriting: “The railroad depot. 8:00 P.M.”

  “It’s up to you,” Lofton said. “Where do you want to meet?”

  “Barena’s,” she said suddenly. “After the game. Tomorrow.”

  Lofton heard the change in her voice and wondered what it meant. Through his half-shut eyes he could see her revolver, a black smear on the white tabletop. Can I trust her? He studied the gun until she was done with his face and her fingers glided over his cheek, moving downward, touching the soft hair on the back of his neck.