The Spoiler (11 page)

When Lofton arrived at the park, the Redwings were taking practice. A few diehard fans stood by the sidelines, watching and talking among themselves. Gutierrez was not on the field, nor was he in the locker room. Lofton could not find Golden either, so he asked Coach Barker, the manager, who was gruff and brief as always.

“Gutierrez'll be here. At least he better be.”

Game time approached, but still Gutierrez did not show up. Lofton talked to Tim Carpenter, the second baseman. He knew Gutierrez as well as anyone. The pair had roomed together for a while. The Redwings' program compared them to Luis Aparicio and Nellie Fox, the double-play infielders for the old Chicago White Sox.

“Randy had a bad road trip. Lots of errors and no hits. He has some trouble concentrating.”

Tim Carpenter avoided Lofton's eyes; something in his voice suggested there was more to the matter than a simple slump or some problem in concentration.

“Drugs?” Lofton blundered out with it, regretting it instantly, though he knew such blundering, such clumsiness in interviews, was his strength as a reporter.

Carpenter shot him a dirty look. A moment later, when the national anthem—a scratchy tape played over the public-address system—started, he placed his cap over his heart and turned to the flag. Lofton turned with him. He tried to apologize, but Carpenter did not let him.

“Save it,” Carpenter said. “You guys are all assholes.”

The anthem ended, and Carpenter trotted off to his defensive position.

Lofton felt bad. Tim Carpenter was one of the hustlers on the team, one of the few with real spirit; his position was solid all the way up through the California organization, and it was too bad no other teams had expressed interest in him. Second base had been Lofton's own position in college, back when he was light on his feet and could pivot quickly. He liked watching Carpenter play. Lofton told himself he would write a story that made Gutierrez look good for the
Dispatch
, to prove that Carpenter's opinion was unfair. He had just been doing his job; surely Carpenter could understand that. Still, he wished the interview hadn't gone sour. If nothing else, he had hoped to get Gutierrez's Holyoke address from Carpenter. Tenace, over in the press box, might know the name of the family Gutierrez lived with.

Just then, however, Lofton spotted Dick Golden. The general manager was coming in from the street with the young, retarded-looking kid Lofton had seen at the library. The boy still wore a Redwings' cap, twisted backward on his head. When the kid got Golden's attention, he fidgeted in front of him, his eyes downward, his feet jittering, his hand moving up and down as if it belonged to another person. The kid had a habit of following the players around, and recently he'd taken to Golden. Lofton guessed that the kid knew Dick Golden had been a star once, a big-league pitcher in California. As Lofton approached, Golden handed the kid some money, and the kid ran off.

“Paying him off?” Lofton asked.

Golden gave Lofton a sharp look. “No. He's getting me a Coke. The kid's always around. He likes to do things for us. Better he's here than out on the street somewhere.”

“Sure,” Lofton said. “Small crowd tonight, isn't it?”

“Sure is,” Golden said. Then he added impatiently, “You want something?”

“Gutierrez's address.”

“It's against policy,” Golden said, and turned his back on Lofton.

“If I find him, I'll send him out to the park.”

“Just mind your business.” Golden was suddenly angry, his voice sharp and bitter. “I don't need you people pestering me.”

Lofton headed to the press box. He wasn't having much luck. What he had heard about Golden was true. The man was moody, even nasty. Settling down between the other reporters, he mentioned it to Tenace.

“Oh, Golden, he's always like that,” said Tenace, entering a mark on his scorecard. “One minute he's an angel. Paint wings on him, and he'd float to heaven. Next minute he's a son of a bitch. Can't blame him, though. His wife's stuck in that wheelchair.”

When the field changed hands, Holyoke coming to bat, Lofton tried to edge Tenace into telling him what he needed to know. Tenace always loved to talk.

“The family Gutierrez rooms with, haven't they put up players before?”

Tenace squinted up at him, then away. For once he seemed at a loss for words. After waiting for a few minutes, Lofton repeated his question. Tenace turned nervously and squinted up at him again.

“Hey,” he said, “what happened to your face?”

Lofton reached a hand to his cheek and remembered the other night, how he slipped while running the bases. “I slipped in the parking lot.” Lofton shrugged awkwardly.

“Chasing that Puerto Rican pussy again, huh, boy?”

Down on the field Carpenter, the leadoff batter, singled sharply to right. Tenace made a mark on his scorecard and turned back to Lofton. He could not leave the joke alone. “Our star reporter here, he fell drunk on his face last night while trying to stick it to some Puerto Rican gash.”

Lofton laughed, trying to go along with the joke. Again he asked Tenace where Gutierrez lived. This time Tenace acted as if he hadn't heard the question.

Suddenly Lofton thought of something. “Hey, did you come looking for me at the library the other day? Was that you?”

“No, not me. I don't go anywhere near those places. Not my style, not ever.” The scorer shook his head and turned back to the field.

Annoyed, Lofton watched Tim Carpenter increase his lead off first. Carpenter jumped with the pitch, stirred up some dust, and slid headfirst into second, the throw coming in high and late behind him. The crowd stood and cheered.

“You doing a feature?” asked Rhiner, sounding amused.

“Yes,” said Lofton. “That's what I'm doing.”

Carpenter was advancing to third on a slow grounder; he scored on the next play, on Banks's deep fly. With two outs Lofton figured the scoring was over for the inning. Sitting in the press box—still trying to think of a way to coax the information from Tenace—he watched the Glens Falls pitcher, a jittery youngster just up from Single A, throw four balls in a row to Lumpy, the Redwings' catcher. As the pitcher waited for a new batter, Lofton felt someone tap him on the shoulder. It was Rhiner.

“The family Gutierrez stays with, their name's Rosa,” the reporter told him. “They live off Beech on some side street, Franklin, I think. She rents out a walled-in porch out back.”

Lofton said thanks. It was a first from Rhiner, an effort to be friendly, to help him out on a story even though they were on competing papers.

When he reached the grassy area behind the first base bleachers, the crowd was cheering. Another walk, this one to the Redwings' first baseman, Lynch. The jittery youngster loaded the bases, and up came Singleton, Gutierrez's replacement, a short, bulky man, surprisingly fast on his feet but a little clumsy with the glove. He hit the first pitch hard. The ball rose off the bat, traveling just this side of the left field line and clearing the fence. A home run. Lofton headed to the exit. Five to nothing, Holyoke. A good lead, but the Redwings had let games like this get away before.

He found Franklin Street, a small avenue on the border between two neighborhoods, one white working class, the other Puerto Rican. He identified the house more easily than he thought he would, the name Rosa in pink letters on the mailbox. He walked around the back, following a narrow concrete walkway, cracked in places so the grass grew through. He ducked under a low-hanging willow and found a door off to the side of the house. A small shrine to the Blessed Virgin stood at the bottom of the steps that led to the door. He knocked on the door, but no one answered. He tried to see through the gauze curtains hanging on the inside of the door's window. He could see nothing distinctly, only hear a radio inside playing Hispanic music. He knocked again, tried the handle, and stepped inside. He called Gutierrez's name and knocked on the wall framing. He hesitated. Maybe Gutierrez was sick, or asleep. Maybe he should forget it and go back to the park. No, he wanted this story. He needed to feel out Gutierrez before returning to Amanti. Lofton stepped around the corner into the kitchen and saw Gutierrez lying on the floor, dressed in his baseball uniform, his body twisted at a bad angle between the table and the refrigerator.

3

Gutierrez was dead. By the angle at which he lay, it looked almost as if he'd died before hitting the floor. His shoulder jutted into the air, his head was bent back, bleeding through a large wound in the skull, and his cheek was pressed against the table leg. The body was twisted too violently, and there was too much blood, to imagine he had lived long after being shot. A good-size gun, Lofton guessed, maybe even a rifle, fired from close range. Inches.

Years ago, when Lofton's mother died, his father had kept both Lofton and his brother away from the funeral. The deaths he had seen since were those of strangers: a kid buried under a bus; a woman pulled from a river; a heart attack in an airport lobby. When such events happened, they did not seem real, but rather like something from television or the movies. This was like that, too: the death of a stranger, his blood smeared in a bright, cinematic puddle on the linoleum. Unlike the movies, however, there was no camera to fade to another scene. Lofton had to turn his head away, take a deep, unconscious breath—the brief image of the Amanti woman flickered through his mind—but when he turned back, Gutierrez was still there. Lofton felt he should do something; what, he wasn't sure. He could not escape the feeling that someone was watching, that he was somehow guilty. He had the urge to run, but instead, he stood and stared at Gutierrez's blood. Out the kitchen window he caught a glimpse of the evening sky. It was the same sky as always. No difference in the world.

Finally, he bent over to feel the shortstop's pulse. As he did so, he imagined himself sitting in his room, staring into the ghost light of the television, into the land of violence and shadows, the seductive world of black revolvers and red lips. Then there was the
No
in his mind, the denial.
I am not responsible. I did not do this
.

He dropped Gutierrez's wrist and lit a cigarette as he walked away from the body. He reached for the telephone, then stopped. No fingerprints, no trace of involvement. A stack of papers and unopened mail was scattered on the table. He picked the papers up, started to sort through, then changed his mind. He could do that later. He grabbed a dish towel. Using it as a glove, he searched the apartment: the kitchen cabinets, the bathroom, the dresser drawers. He found some letters with Nicaraguan postmarks, a bank statement, a vial of pills, a thin chain with a medallion of Jesus. He added them to the papers on the table and then went over every place he might have touched, wiping it clean with the towel. He gathered the pile of Gutierrez's things and left. As he wiped the door handle outside, he noticed again the shrine of the Virgin at the base of the steps outside; her plaster base was cracked and crumbling, as if she had been a long time out in the weather. He hurried away. A young couple walked hand in hand on the street, but they did not notice him.

A few blocks from MacKenzie Field he stopped at a gas station. He called the police from the phone booth and told them there had been a murder at Gutierrez's address. The police operator tried to keep him on the line, but Lofton hung up. He would not give his name.

As he approached MacKenzie, the kitchen towel and bundle of papers still under his arm, a pair of squad cars drove by with their sirens off. They turned the corner quickly, one after the other, in the direction of Gutierrez's neighborhood. He was surprised they'd responded so soon.

The game was over. The stadium lights were still on; but the entrance was chained, and Lofton could not see the scoreboard from this angle. He paced nervously back and forth, wondering what to do. A small group of teenagers stood not far away. The boys stared at him, their eyes dull, glittering pools, as if they were high on drugs. He asked them who had won the game.

“Holyoke,” one of them said. “We beat 'em good.”

A few minutes later an ambulance rushed by the ballpark. The kids grabbed their bicycles, and Lofton followed, too, with the vague idea that he was somehow safer close to the crime. On the way he stashed the towel and papers beneath a hedge.

The ambulance stopped on Gutierrez's street. By the time Lofton arrived, a neighborhood crowd had already gathered. The kids from the ballpark were there, too, joking and laughing, standing with their bicycles in the revolving ambulance light: red and blue, blue and yellow, yellow and red. The ambulance driver stood by the wagon's rear door, talking to a paramedic. The paramedic lit a cigarette. Apparently the police were in no hurry to get Gutierrez to the morgue.

A patrolman guarding the driveway held a long-handled flashlight, and the air around him was electric with voices. Some voices came from downtown, operators relaying trouble and its code names over the squad car intercom. Other voices came from the walkie-talkie at the cop's belt, chatter from inside the house.

Lofton walked up to the policeman, thinking—it seemed natural enough—that he should turn himself in. The cop shone the flashlight beam in Lofton's face, a bright, intense light that forced him to close his eyes and turn his head. Instinctively he raised his hands in a gesture of surrender.

“I'm the man who called in,” he said quickly. “I found the body.” He listened to himself speak the words as if he said nothing unusual.

The flashlight dropped slightly. The policeman scanned him up and down but would not meet his eyes. Lofton had noticed that about policemen before. When they were dealing with the public, when they had a job to do, they often did not look you in the face. They could not take the chance of succumbing to individual entreaties. The cop kept his eye on Lofton's hands.