The Spoiler

The Spoiler

A Novel of Baseball and Murder

Domenic Stansberry

New York

1

Below him, in the dirt beneath the third base bleachers, a gang of kids played flip for quarters. When the game got slow, Lofton looked down past his feet, through the planks, and watched them. They played two at a time, first scratching a cross in the dirt, then sketching a circle around it. They flipped their knives through the air, seeing who could come closest, point first, to dead center.

When a fire truck took a nearby corner, its siren lilting and whirling, echoing through all the neighboring streets at once, the kids stopped playing and pushed toward the left field gate. Frank Lofton watched them jump on their bicycles and give chase. He imagined the warm, damp air rushing by their faces, the sweat on their arms, as they pedaled after the siren, into the old immigrant neighborhood. Closer by, other teenagers leaped over a wire fence, then ran to catch up with the engine.

Lofton couldn't blame the kids for wanting more action. The game was slow; the Holyoke Redwings were losing. The Redwings' pitcher wiped his brow, stared at the batter, then wiped his brow again. The catcher, his iron mask yanked back over his head, walked out to talk to his battery mate. More fans were moving to the top of the bleachers. They craned to see the fire, but there seemed to be nothing to see. Although fires were a familiar sight in this part of town, this time there were no flames, only the usual smoke rising from the blackened stacks of Holyoke's paper mills.

The truck had parked nearby on Beech Street, its siren off, its lights still flashing. Two men climbed from the truck and walked to one of the wooden row houses. Lofton pulled out a cigarette. He took a couple of puffs, then felt—or imagined he felt—the familiar ache in his chest. He held the cigarette a little farther from him but did not put it out.

The two firemen, small and distant in their yellow slickers, walked back to the truck, unable to find the fire. On the field the Redwings' pitcher went into his windup. Lofton stared at the siren lights blinking off and on, red and yellow, over and over. He heard the rumble of traffic. He felt the summer heat on his skin. Hypnotized, as people sometimes are by summer and baseball and evening lights, he let his mind empty. He tried to think about nothing at all. He touched his chest. He let out a deep breath.
The doctor was playing games with me. A real joker. A fraud
. Even so, Lofton supposed the doctor, despite his unfathomable manner, might be well intentioned.

Wood snapped against rawhide, like the cracking of bone. The Glens Falls runner rounded third, put his head down, and kept going. A second later he spiked his toe into the heart of home plate, and the Holyoke Redwings trailed by four. Across the way the fire engine switched off its flashing lights and pulled into traffic, headed up the hill toward the freeway and the Old Soldiers' Home, with the kids pedaling behind.

“False alarm,” said a woman in the stands near Lofton, her voice soft and gruff, like that of an unhappy lover. Lofton shared her disappointment. Like the others, he would have liked to see a fire. He took a drag off his cigarette, then put it out against the bleachers.

Lofton had learned from Marvin Tenace, the team scorer, that the Holyoke Redwings had never had a winning team here in Massachusetts. The Redwings were a minor league club, operated by the California Blues and franchised out to Massachusetts owners. The names of the local owners changed every few years, but the results were always the same: The Redwings lost a lot of games, and the crowds were small. The problem was not here in Holyoke, Massachusetts, Tenace told Lofton, but on the West Coast. Lofton heard the same from the players, the fans, and the crew in the press box. The California brass spent its money on its big-league talent, buying established stars from other big-league teams. It let its minor league club in Holyoke go its own way, a break-even affair for the local owners, maybe, and a write-off for the California organization, as well as a place for the players to mature.

“Mature, hell,” the center fielder Elvin Banks had told Lofton. “I'm an old man.” Banks was twenty-six.

Lofton, a free-lance writer for the
Holyoke Dispatch
, had been in town for only a month, since early in July. He had been a reporter for thirteen years, and it had not been too hard talking the
Dispatch
editors into giving him a few features, though the editors tried to steer him away from ballpark stories and into the city. Still, he spent much of his time at the ballpark. Lofton had played a few years of college ball—a good freshman season, a fair sophomore, a bad junior—but never, except in pure idleness, had he considered going professional. Even so, he was curious about the players. Most of those here were out of California, brought up from the Single A club in Redwood City. Now they found themselves at the other end of the country, in a struggling mill town where the unemployment rate was high and many of the downtown buildings had been burned and gutted by fire. The unmarried players roomed together in pairs. The lucky ones lived in redesigned convenience apartments not far from the ballpark, at the edge of the Puerto Rican neighborhood. The married men, at least those who could afford to bring their wives, lived farther out in places like Chicopee and Westfield and Springfield—anyplace that was not Holyoke.

Though few players admitted it, most knew they did not have the talent to make the big leagues. In a way, it was worse for those who had talent, or thought they did. Lofton had heard the players gripe. There were no openings at the top, they said, not in sunny California. The big boss, Cowboy, a retired Hollywood singer, liked to hold on to his organization's minor league talent until it was overripe and rotting on the vine. Bruised bones. Broken ribs. Torn cartilage. It was not until you were useless that Cowboy put you on the block. The other clubs had gotten wise. Nobody touched dead meat. They let anyone with Cowboy's brand float off the waiver list and out into the street.

Lofton did not know how long he would stay in Holyoke. A short, balding man in his late thirties, he had driven out from Colorado in a rusted Plymouth that threw clouds of smoke from its exhaust. While behind the wheel, he'd often looked at himself in the rearview mirror. He did not look like a man who had just left his wife. He did not look like a man who, concerned he might be dying, had slammed out of the doctor's office before getting a diagnosis. (Thinking back, he suspected his behavior that day with the doctor had been a sham; he had other reasons for wanting to run away from his life, from Maureen.) Every time he glanced in the rearview mirror, he looked fine. The police, however, did not care how he looked. They stopped him twice for the Plymouth's black exhaust, once in Nebraska, the other time just outside New York City. The car was in his wife's name, and the tickets would go to her address. Maureen had always written the checks. If she were not thinking—or caught in a moment of tenderness—Maureen might pay for the tickets.
She should tear the tickets up
, he thought, but he knew that she wouldn't. Maureen had always been generous with him, generous to a fault, and though Lofton hated to admit it, to treat her badly gave him pleasure.

On the mound the Redwings' pitcher was losing control. After giving up the run, he had walked the next man and was about to do the same with this batter.

Closer by, in the stands near Lofton, the small crowd yelled encouragement and stomped on the bleachers. A large, drunken man in a blue T-shirt beat on an overturned garbage can with a kitchen spoon. That man and the others who made the most noise, including the small contingent from the halfway house across from MacKenzie Field—these were the regulars.

Lofton eyed the young pitcher, a tall blond kid by the name of Rickey Sparks. Down from a bad year with the Triple A club in Salt Lake, Sparks had been the Redwings' only decent hurler through the first half of the season; he pitched every fourth, sometimes every third game in the rotation. It was a lot of work, some said too much, for a pitcher at this level. Nonetheless, Sparks had thrown well during the first half of the season, bluffing the Eastern League batters with a bad curve, then firing the ball past them. But Salt Lake did not call him back, Coach Barker overworked him, his only real pitch was the fastball, and now his arm was getting sore. Between games, and sometimes even between innings, Sparks sat with his arm immersed in a barrel of ice. He was determined to get back to Salt Lake, then up to the majors before the end of the season, so he could be with the big club for the play-offs, warming up in the bullpen while Cowboy watched from behind his glass booth and smoked his Hollywood cigar, smiling benignly whenever the TV cameras zoomed by.

Sparks was sweating on the mound. He bore down hard, trying to ignore the men on base. The runners broke with the pitch, and Sparks threw wild to the plate. The catcher, a lumpy Polish boy whose last name Lofton could never remember, was unable to field the ball. The runners advanced, walking the last few feet and mocking the crowd.

Coach Barker went out to talk to Sparks. He touched the youngster on the shoulder to calm him, in a fatherly manner, Lofton noticed, though he must have known he was ruining Sparks's arm by pitching him so often. Now that Lofton thought about it, he realized that Sparks, who had signed out of high school, probably was not that much older than his own boy, from his first marriage. Maybe five years. He had seen the boy once: a small, wrinkled, and ugly infant.

Barker left Sparks in. The Glens Falls batter cracked the next pitch, a weak fastball, back harder than it came. The ball, hit knee-high, backspinning and whiffling through the humid air, bounced off the infield grass, past the diving shortstop—Randy Gutierrez—and out into left field. Both runners scored. Coach Barker called time and headed out again. When Sparks saw him, he threw his glove into the dirt and stomped off the field. The crowd stood and hissed. They were mean, tired of losing.

Go soak that flamethrower, Sparks.… That's right, soak that flaming asshole.… Loser, loser, loser … Soak her up good, Sparks.… Go on, go back to your mother.…

While the new pitcher warmed up, Lofton stepped behind the press box, a beaten yellow stand with plywood benches and a door that would neither close nor open completely. Teenagers, walking by with hot dogs and Cokes, beat on the back of the box with their fists, enjoying the sound of the thumping, shaking wood. The reporters inside did not bother to chase the kids away.

Lofton was working on a story for the
Dispatch
, a quick color piece about tonight's game. The regular sportswriter was on vacation. The
Dispatch
's editor paid Lofton by the piece. Not a good way for a reporter to make money, but he was not too concerned. He still had some money left over from his days in California as a regular reporter—from those long years between his two marriages—and he had money coming from a piece on street crime he had sold in Denver. Anyway, he did not mind being broke. He hustled more; he felt more alive on the streets.

He had been headed for Boston when he left Denver. He wanted an eastern city, he told himself, something different, something far away. Holyoke had been an overnight stop. He remembered it from his college days at the University of Massachusetts, a dozen or so miles over the hill in Amherst. He had intended to drive the next morning into Boston, about two hours away; but instead, he'd stumbled across the Redwings playing ball in this dusty park. Now, several weeks and a half dozen stories later, he was still here, still in town, still wandering the streets. Sometimes he thought about his first wife, Nancy, who lived not too far away—along with his son and her husband—over the border in Vermont. Though the notion had crossed his mind, he did not intend to visit her.

Lofton leaned against the press box and watched the new pitcher warm up. He decided to wait to get his story, partly because Sparks needed time to calm down but also because he himself was in no real hurry. He did not like doing interviews, and he enjoyed leaning against the press box. He could lean there and let his thoughts spin lazily, disappearing like a fly ball into the haze over right field.