The Spoiler (20 page)

“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.

That's what he'd decided back in California, too. He'd been working as a reporter for the
San Jose Star
, footlegging through the downtown pornos, gathering information for a grim color piece on Mexican cruisers, drunks, and adult arcades. He'd soon found out what almost every other reporter already knew: that the drug trade and other illicit business that went on there were part of a statewide ring, sanctioned from on high. What bothered Lofton was that although the corruption was common knowledge, he could find no way to break the story. His editor told him to back off, that it had nothing to do with the real issues. Nonetheless, Lofton hung around the seedy bars, drank himself silly tracing the story, ignoring his regular beat.

Then, one day, he'd gotten that call from Senator Hansen, offering him a chance to leave the paper to work as his press secretary. Lofton had thought about that phone call often enough since: how pleased he'd been, how flattered, and how he'd ignored the voice whispering in the back of his head that told him something was wrong. He heard the voice again, several months later. He was in Sacramento and had just finished a press briefing for the local hacks when a reporter he knew from the
Star
approached him. The man was a drunk, Lofton remembered, but a pretty good reporter. The drunk mentioned the story Lofton had been working on before he left the paper.

“Rumor is you were coming pretty close on that one—before your new boss here bought you out.”

Lofton ignored the crack. Jealousy, he thought, drunken slander. I'm getting a good salary, but I deserve it. I've worked hard. Even so, he did some checking around, slowly, surely, and over the next few months, between briefings and churning out press memos, he figured it out. His boss, the good politician, whom Lofton admired … well, the Honorable Senator Hansen was in on it, too. He was in it for all the right reasons—to protect his power base, for political survival, so he could go on pushing his progressive programs—but he was still in on it.

Lofton worked for a few weeks more, telling himself that's the way the world worked, the lesser of evils was what it came down to, and though that was practical, and that was what he believed, he stood up at his desk one day and said fuck it. He drove to San Jose, gave the story to his friend the drunk reporter, and left the state. Only the drunk reporter never wrote the story either.

Lofton got his severance pay in the mail, forwarded to Colorado, plus a bonus he hadn't asked for or expected. There was also a friendly note from one of Hansen's aides that formally regretted his departure, thanked him for his services.

That was the last Lofton heard about it until a few weeks after he'd married Maureen. His old editor at the
Star
had called up to give Lofton the sweet news that if he were thinking about it, he shouldn't bother to come back to the West Coast because both he and the drunk reporter had been unofficially blacklisted by the California papers.

“Rumor is that you and your friend buried a few files for a slice of the take,” the editor said, his voice a strange mixture of satisfaction and bitterness, “and all this time I'd thought you were just a bumbling, honest Joe. But tell me, how much did they give you?”

“Good joke,” Lofton said, then hung up.

It didn't bother him that he'd taken Hansen's money. The final paycheck, the bonus—he'd used the money, but he hadn't asked for it; he could have gone ahead and written the story regardless. It hadn't been a payoff, he told himself; he wasn't obligated to anyone. Still, he wondered why he hadn't gone ahead and written the story. Perhaps it was because in the end he'd believed that Hansen, no matter his corruption, was better than the people who wanted to push him out. Or perhaps it was because the story had seemed like just too much trouble. He was simply lazy. Despite the business about the blacklisting, no one else had ever written the story either, at least not as far as Lofton knew. Lofton couldn't help wondering if Hansen's people had paid off his friend the drunk reporter or if the man had pushed things too hard and then simply disappeared, found himself buried in Mexico, mouth full of dirt, like all good California reporters. I should've written the story, Lofton told himself; I should've fucked them.

Now, sitting in his hotel room in Holyoke, Lofton opened the letter Maureen had sent him. “I need those papers signed,” she wrote, “and your doctor called. He wants to talk to you.”

He's calling to get me in there, to take the X rays, but there's nothing wrong with me. The doctor knows it; I know it
. It was just a game, an excuse to get out of town. He thought back to what he had told Maureen, that first day they'd met, when she had asked him what he wanted in Colorado. “A clean shot,” he had said—a ridiculous phrase, he thought now, and suddenly he remembered himself standing at home plate, back in his college days. It had been the last day of the season, his team was out of the pennant race, playing a Connecticut team that won the championship year after year. That season the Connecticut team had needed a victory to clinch the division title again. In the last inning Lofton had held his bat cocked as the pitcher reared back; then he had watched the ball come in, seeing it more clearly than he had seen any ball that season. He swung and knocked a clean hit between first and second. His team had won. Though the win had done his team no good in the standings, it had felt good to be the spoiler, to knock the perennial winner out of contention, at least for a while.

Tony Liuzza lived in a renovated house in an older section of Northampton behind Smith College. The house was painted a flawless beige, all except the elaborate cupolas, which were stained a darker brown, the color of wood.

Liuzza himself came to the door. He had light brown hair, just starting to gray, and hazel eyes. He seemed more relaxed than he had that day at the press box when Lofton had first met him. His smile carried only a trace of that painful awkwardness it had had at the park, and the awkwardness, quick and boyish, made you want to like Liuzza. He seemed open, honest, maybe even a bit naïve. As they shook hands, Lofton looked for the other Liuzza beneath the surface, for the moment when the smile hurt and the man, however briefly, let himself show. The moment did not come.