The Spoiler (23 page)

Amanti's face became needle-sharp, panicky, an expression that was replaced instantly by the same wide-cheeked innocence he had seen the other day outside the park. Lofton felt the cold fingers on his spine again, but this time the associations clicked. The gruff voice on Amanti's telephone. The picture of Kelley and the china-faced woman on Liuzza's wall. Amanti's long, unhappy story about the man who would not leave his wife.

“Kelley …” he said, then just let it hang.

“What did my cousin tell you?”

He could see Amanti was upset, starting to cry, though there seemed to be something studied about her tears, something theatrical, as if she didn't quite believe the tears herself. He sat down next to her on the bed. She let the gown stay open. This whole business was more tangled than he'd expected. He wondered again if he should abandon this situation, forget his big story, forget Holyoke. Despite himself, he felt an enormous sympathy for Amanti.

He took her chin in his hand, ran his fingers over her slightly pocked skin, touching the blemish. She reached up, to take his fingers away, he thought, but instead, she gripped his hand and held it tight. He waited for her to say something, but she didn't. She seemed calm now, almost indifferent. He moved, thinking he meant to pull himself up off the bed, to ask her some questions and get the story straight, but instead, he found his hand touching her waist. Her eyes opened wider at his touch, surprised, maybe, or pretending surprise.

“Kelley …” he said again, trying to pursue the business, but she moved deliberately toward him. Her lips were warm, but the depths of her mouth, her tongue were cool, as if she had been drinking something cold, sucking on ice. Her robe, too, was cool, damp with perspiration. They slid back together onto the white sheets, their legs intertwining. Her fingertips reached in to pull out his shirttail. Then he felt her stomach against his, and Amanti's breathing, hot inside his ear, was like the noise of the ocean inside an old shell, only crazier, and he saw the jungle all around him, exotic red plants, all blooming wildly inside his chest, Amanti's elaborate, teasing tongue, her fingers flat and tense against his skin, her eyes half-open. He raised his head. As he did so, the phone at the top of the bed rang. It startled him, and he pulled away. Amanti did not try to answer it. She lay on the bed, holding her robe at the throat.

“That's him. I'm not answering the phone.”

“Who?” Lofton asked.

“Kelley.”

Lofton sat down on the edge of the bed. The room seemed filled with a blue haze. The phone stopped ringing, and the night was very quiet. For a while they sat listening, as if maybe there were some great secret out in the darkness.

“How do you know it's Kelley? It could be Brunner, maybe, or someone else.”

“Kelley was supposed to call me the other night, but he didn't. The phone's been ringing all day. I know it's him.”

She sat up in the bed, her fingers still holding the collar of her robe, waiting, it seemed, for him to ask another question. But she lost her patience, just as she had that day when they had been walking out on the street, and the words came out in a gush, quick and rapid, telling him about her long affair with Kelley, about Kelley and Brunner's rivalry, and finally about Kelley's plan to use Brunner's arson scheme against him. This time she told him the names; she told him just about everything. Lofton had to admit Kelley's plan made a certain sense. Use Amanti as bait. Get the reporter interested. When the reporter got close, and Brunner got nervous, then pull Amanti off the hook. Replace her with cash. Let Liuzza string the lure. That way Kelley's own hands stayed clean—no dirty fish smell. He could walk up to Brunner and say: Listen, old friend, I've heard some rumors, and if you'd like to go ahead with your scheme, switch your money and influence over to my candidate, then I can help get rid of this reporter; otherwise, your renovation money … well, we can throw that fish to the dogs.

“Okay, but why me? Why does he think I'll go along?”

“He checked into your background. He found out about something in California—”

Lofton held up his hand. He didn't need to hear the rest. He could see Kelley's idea as clearly as if he had a box seat inside the guy's brain. “And what's your payoff?” he asked Amanti. “What do you get?”

Amanti looked at the floor. She swung her foot back and forth, but the effect was not what it had been the day he talked to her at the Little Puerto Rico Café. It no longer made you wonder about the girl beneath the woman's surface but instead made you realize that the girl was long gone, that the only thing to remind you she had once existed was something about the way the woman swung her leg.

“Are you still in love with Kelley?”

The foot stopped swinging. When Amanti looked up at him, her eyes seemed to glimmer a little, moist in the darkness.

“Tell me, what are you going to do? Are you going to take the money and back off the story? Or are you going to write it?”

“That business, a few minutes ago, when we were wrestling on the bed, were you doing that for yourself, because you wanted to, or were you doing it for Kelley—a little sweetening to get me on your side, to make sure I don't nail both of you away?”

Amanti flared. “That didn't mean anything. It was just an action, movement, and don't let anybody tell you different. If there's one thing I've learned, that's it. You can move any which way you want, and it doesn't make any difference. You know that, don't you? Didn't they pay you pretty well just to walk out of that office in California? All you had to do was a little movement, right, just put one foot in front of the other.”

“That's not the way it happened. Kelley got it wrong.”

“Are you going to write the story?”

“Right now,” Lofton said, “I don't have a story. There's no evidence that Brunner is burning anything. All we have is Gutierrez's word, and Gutierrez is dead. And even if we could resurrect him, all we'd get is a coke-smeared blur. When you get down to it, I'm surprised Kelley would rig together this elaborate business for blackmailing Brunner on just this small bit of evidence. There must be something else you have on Brunner. What is it? Tell me, and I'll write the story.”

Lofton leaned against the bedroom wall, watching her, waiting to see what she would say. She had some more information, he could tell, but she was holding it back because if she told him, it would give Lofton the real evidence—and even Kelley didn't want things to go that far. Kelley wanted only to humiliate Brunner, to make him switch sides. Though Lofton was angry with Amanti, he could see her dilemma. The only way she could keep Kelley's interest, even now, was by betraying him, but she had to be careful it wasn't a big enough betrayal to ruin everything.

Amanti came up close to him. Her robe was gathered loosely, and the light in the room was faint. He could smell the warmth of her body, and at the same time he could feel a very slight, cooling breeze coming through the window. She stepped forward, pressed her body against his, and kissed him hard. She hooked her thumb into his pants pocket; the fingers of the same hand arched against his thigh, held stiff and tense as she'd held them on the tabletop that first day he'd met her. He touched her robe, feeling the cloth in his hand, then pulled her closer. For a while they tried the impossible stunt of fucking against the wall—at least it had always been impossible for Lofton—so in a moment they were on the floor. She was on top of him, the white robe open all the way, her mouth just out of reach, his hands on her breasts, her head tilted up, eyes away. He pulled her hard down to him, and they rolled over again. She was underneath him, her back against the carpet. She put her fingers on his shirt collar and kept them wrapped there tightly, pulling him closer, and for a second all the rest of the world was gone—the business with Brunner and Kelley and the arson—and she pulled him tighter yet, her fingers still touching his collar, his legs flat against hers, and when he lifted his head, he could see outside to the stars, and for a brief instant it was as if the two of them were outside under those stars, and he were lifting his head above the line of the high grass, gazing, searching, and the breeze were cool in his face. But then Amanti pulled him back, her fingers still clutching at the shirt, and he fell into her rhythm.

Sunday was Dazzy Vance Day. The white-haired Hall of Famer showed up at MacKenzie Field, wearing plaid golf pants, an alligator shirt, and an old Brooklyn Dodgers' cap. Dazzy Vance made a living traveling the minor league parks, talking about the old days and throwing a few pitches from the mound, tossing them to old-timers and Little Leaguers. Afterward he wandered through the stands behind an advance man who sold black-and-white glossies.

The reporters asked the old ballplayer questions. The same ones, Lofton guessed, Dazzy heard in every town. A gaggle of kids hung nearby, looking for a chance to get an autograph. Dick Golden had also joined the crowd around Dazzy. Golden's mood seemed to have darkened. He glared bullishly at the ground, turning his head from side to side, glowering at the press.

“Sure the old hitters were great,” Dazzy Vance was saying, “but there are some good ones around now, too. When I was young, just starting out, people said the same: The great days, the great players, all those times are over. And it's the same thing now. When these players here are my age, God forbid, when they're dead, people will look back and say they were the great ones. But really, no one is great. It's the game that's great.”

Lofton wondered. Was Dazzy sincere? Smart or dumb, ballplayers tended to be sincere.

“Even the Redwings, are they winners?” shouted one of the kids, his voice lilting.

“The Redwings?” Dazzy said, confused, as if he no longer remembered what town he was in, what field he was working. There was a pause; Dazzy raised his eyebrows; then there was strained laughter from the onlookers. It was a joke; of course Dazzy knew where he was. He grinned, the shy smile of a huckster caught off guard.

Soon the television crew arrived. They upstaged the print journalists, with their polished clothes and smooth voices, the cameramen calling people out of the crowd, kids mostly, positioning them in the background.

“Television pushing you shoddy guys around,” Dazzy said to the newspaper people. “Same thing used to happen to me whenever Johnny McGraw's Giants crossed the river from New York.”

Lofton backed away, scanning the stands. Amanti had told him she would be at this game with Brunner and her cousin. Last night, in the darkened room, he had told her about his encounters with Lou Mendoza. Mendoza seemed to want publicity, the same sort of publicity the dead Latino leader had gotten, not because it would do him any good, really, but simply because he wanted it. She listened carefully, especially when Lofton described the rival gang leader, Angelo, the dead Latino whose picture Lofton had seen in an old paper. Dark, full lips. Wild black hair. Smashed nose. He'd told her how Angelo had been speaking on street corners, criticizing the police, using his following as a patrol force, rebuilding houses. He'd told her about the City Council meeting when the Latinos showed up in battle gear and Angelo said he knew who was setting the fires.

“The Latinos say Mendoza's the one whose been setting the fires. At least that's the word on the streets. Could he be the one Gutierrez was talking about? The one hooked up with Golden?”

Amanti had shaken her head. She didn't know. He still wondered if she had anything else on Brunner, something he could actually put in the story—some hard, substantial proof. Einstein, Lofton realized, must have been faced with the same dilemma. The reporter had figured things out more or less, but he had only the word of the street gang as proof; Amanti's stories, too, were hardly reliable, when you got down to it, just as entangled in personal conflict and rivalry as the accusations of the Latinos. There had been a moment last night, just as he left her apartment, when she'd seemed on the verge of revealing something more, but his intuition could have been wrong, nothing more than the romantic cast of light on her face or the feeling that you get at such moments, walking away from a woman's house into the dark alone, that there is something unexpressed, something under the surface of things which you have missed.

Lofton looked up at the stands again, then over at Dazzy Vance. For a moment he was envious of the old ballplayer. His was a simple scam, driving from park to park, the long, anonymous gray of the highway broken only every few days, then only for a few hours, while you gladhanded children and told stories you'd told so many times that it was as if the stories were things in themselves and had nothing to do with you. And then it was back into the cab of the truck, where you were no one at all, or practically no one—just a stack of pictures headed for the next motel room. Lofton was thinking of this, of the sweet emptiness of the road, when suddenly he felt his heart jump. Someone jostled him gently from behind. Then a hand touched his waist, his arm. Amanti.

“What are you doing here?” he said. Although he'd known she would be here, he hadn't expected her to approach him. Regardless of her motivation, it did not seem a good idea for them to be seen together.

“Have you seen this?” She held today's paper, the one with his story on Gutierrez.

No, he had not seen it. Though Lofton still clipped his stories for his files, he rarely read them until much later. Either way, he was not much interested now. Lofton noticed that today she did not look well. Her complexion had gone pale; her hair was mussed; her blouse loose and untucked. He guided her by the arm to the other side of the press box, away from the flurry of activity, out of the sight of the crowd in the bleachers. He pointed at the paper in her hand.

“What's with that? Did I write something I shouldn't have?”

“I'm not talking about that; I'm talking about this piece, here, on the front page.”