The Spoiler (12 page)

“I have a witness here.” The cop spoke into his walkie-talkie. There was a scuttle of static, some conversation back and forth—he could make out the officers' voices inside the house—and finally, one of them told the patrolman to hold Lofton inside the squad car.

Though he was beginning to have second thoughts, he did not resist. He walked in front of the cop to the passenger side and waited while the man opened the rear door. After Lofton was inside, the cop reached through the front window and pulled a switch. The door locks clicked. A sliding metal screen, closed shut in the center, divided the front seat from the back.

“Sit tight,” the cop said, laughing a little, then moving down the walk to take up his old position. When the cop was gone, Lofton tested the rear doors. They were locked solid.

From where Lofton sat, he could still hear the voices of the men inside the house coming over the patrolman's walkie-talkie. He could see a man stationed outside the apartment door, another man roaming the backyard, and he could hear them talking to each other over the static, joking and exchanging information with the men inside. He heard continued references to the plaster Virgin and some grim remarks about Gutierrez's body on the floor. He imagined the men rummaging through Gutierrez's apartment, the rooms lit with bright strobes. Over the crackle of the walkie-talkie, he heard them say it looked as if someone had gone over the place already.

“I guess whoever was here before us, they didn't look up inside the Virgin.” Someone laughed. “Too bad, because the fellow missed himself a bonus.”

Lofton grimaced. He wondered what he had missed. And why the hell he had turned himself in. He had learned better years ago. Once, as a young reporter, he had spent three hours in the station detailing a holdup he had witnessed to the police, then promised he would not write it up until the man had been apprehended. His editor had had him transferred back to obituaries. This could be a lot worse. Not only would the police try to tie up the story, but they might figure out he had lifted Gutierrez's papers. Even if they couldn't prove he had taken anything, they would accuse him, make him go down to the station. They would swagger, threaten—play it just like TV. Lofton wanted none of that.

He looked down the street. The cop was busy with his flashlight. Lofton tried the sliding door on the metal screen that separated the front seat from the back. It wouldn't budge. A man dressed in street clothes—a detective, he guessed—came down from the house. After looking at Lofton in the back seat, he tried to open the car door. When this new cop found the back door was locked, he cursed. He got in the front of the car, then reached under the dash to trigger the switch. The detective paused to relay some technical information to the operator. He gossiped with the operator about the murder.

“Some Puerto Rican in a baseball uniform. No identification around anywhere, no papers, only the name across the back of his shirt. Gutierrez. Looks like a drug thing, maybe. Found some coke stashed up inside a plaster Virgin on the porch. We got a witness here.”

“Is he the one that called in?” the operator asked.

The detective glanced through the screen at Lofton. “You the one that called in?”

Lofton nodded.

“Why didn't you give your name?”

“I was scared.”

The cop turned back to the microphone. “Yeah, he's the one that called in. Says he was scared. Should I hold him here for O'Neill? All right.”

After hanging up the mike, the cop came around to the back of the car. He opened the door and slid in next to Lofton. He showed his wallet and his badge.

“I'm Detective Ryan. You're going to have to wait a minute or two. Our homicide chief wants to talk to you.”

Lofton could smell whiskey on the man's breath.

“You a friend of the deceased?” Ryan asked.

“No, I was here by coincidence.”

Ryan nodded wearily. “Yeah, I was just off duty when this happened, sitting with a couple of the guys. Now it looks like we're in for a whole night of shit.” His face was pale, deeply creased, although he was probably only in his early fifties.

There was some more noise over the intercom; in the static Lofton heard a voice asking Ryan to come back up to the house.

“I've got to get back in there. You just hang on.”

Detective Ryan started up for the house without shutting the cruiser's door. He would have left the door open if the cop with the flashlight hadn't called, “Hey, lock 'em up!”

Shaking his head, Ryan walked back. He slammed the cruiser door, then hesitated for a second. Looking back at Lofton, he reached under the dash and threw the lock.

Lofton mumbled to himself. They hadn't let him go, but they hadn't questioned him either. Ryan hadn't even asked him his name. The detective had talked about the case in front of him, giving away information casually. True, Ryan did not know he was a reporter, but it still seemed like sloppy police work.

He sat for a few minutes more, growing restless the whole time. The homicide chief Ryan had mentioned did not show up. He wondered if this homicide chief was inside the house, or down at the station, or at home watching “Kojak.”

Someone else from the crowd approached the cop who guarded the driveway with the flashlight. The cop went through the same routine he had gone through with Lofton. He shone the light in the man's face. Though Lofton recognized the man, he couldn't remember his name: a beat reporter from the
Springfield Post
. Must have been hanging around late when the murder came over the CB. He guessed the other reporter could not know much. No name for the victim. Nothing about the drugs. No sense of the story. Still, he cursed himself. This story should be his. He tried the door again, but of course it was still locked.

After a while Detective Ryan came back down from the house. He reached into the cruiser and took some cigarettes off the dash.

“I can't believe this,” he said. “I want to go home and get some goddamn sleep.”

“How much longer is your chief going to be?”

“Forever,” said Ryan. Then he said it again, apparently liking the sound of the word. “Goddamn
forever.”

“Can I go over to those bushes?” Lofton asked.

“What for?”

“What do you think?”

“I'm not supposed to think,” Ryan said, looking up at the house, shaking his head in irritation. “I'm not supposed to be here. I'm supposed to be off tonight. These people are full of all kinds of silliness. You seen one body, you seen them all. They got half the city in there; I don't know what they need me for.”

Lofton asked him again if he could go over to the bushes.

“Go ahead. If you want to piss, I'm not stopping you.”

“I can't. Remember, you got me locked in here.”

“Right. I forgot about that.”

Ryan reached beneath the dash. As Lofton got out of the car, he noticed the
Post
reporter was busy again with the cop at the driveway. The reporter was persistent. The policeman had his back to Lofton. Some more voices came over the static of the cruiser's intercom, asking again for Ryan.

“Those bushes, over there,” Ryan yelled out. He pointed at the house next door.

Lofton stepped behind the bushes. He could see Ryan. The detective was not watching him at all; he was standing up, barking into the microphone and scowling up at the house, one elbow leaning against the roof of the car. The detective started to swear into the mike. Lofton stepped out of the bushes and walked into the darkness, trying to be as calm as he had been next to Gutierrez's body. Cutting across a corner lawn, he waited for the cops' cries. He imagined the shots breaking out, himself collapsing, the grass against his face as he died. He broke out running. After a while he stopped. He made it to his car, in the lot next to his hotel. As he drove over to the
Dispatch
, his hands were unsteady. He had probably made a mistake leaving the squad car. He should never have gone back to the crime to begin with. He had made a simple thing into a mess.

From outside, the
Dispatch
looked shut down. There were no lights and only a single car stood in the parking lot. Inside, the building was dark and hot. He found Kirpatzke at the night desk, his tie loose around an unbuttoned collar, sitting alone in the green glow of the computer terminals. Kirpatzke told him the electricity had gone, the air-conditioning didn't work, and the only power was the backup generator to the computer. Kirpatzke's shirt was damp, and so was his brow.

“I just stumbled into a murder.”

Kirpatzke tilted his head. He held a paper clip between his teeth and thumbed at it with his nervous hands.

“Remember that ballplayer I was going to interview? Randy Gutierrez? The Redwings' shortstop? Well, I went over to his place and found him dead on the floor. A bullet in the skull.”

Kirpatzke raised an eyebrow. “Thrilling.”

Despite himself, Lofton smiled. “They found some drugs stuffed up inside one of those plaster Virgins, at the bottom of his steps as you walk in. I was there with the cops for a while, but they don't know I was the one who found the body. I think I can write it up pretty well.”

“Yeah, well, you know,” Kirpatzke said, smiling slightly, ironic, “we don't play murders here. It's poor taste.”

Lofton was about to protest when he realized Kirpatzke was toying with him. There was no way the paper would pass up the story of a dead ballplayer. The editor's smile deepened, but it lingered too long. His amusement now seemed forced, weary, his features lined with exhaustion. “A murder, huh?”

“Why don't you get a day job?” Lofton said. “Or try another business?”

“It's my commitment to the truth. I can't let it go.” Kirpatzke laughed, self-deprecating. Even in the darkness the editor's skin seemed jaundice-colored, tinged by nicotine; that was odd, Lofton thought, since as far as he knew, the editor didn't smoke. Lofton glanced around the empty building.

“Always like this at night?”

“Depends. Usually we get a few people in and out. I weed through the wires, listen to the citizen band. Maybe write a story.”

“Not too many small-town papers even bother to keep the place open at night. Why here?”

“The
Post
does it, so we do it.”

Lofton nodded, but it still didn't make sense. He knew that Kirpatzke used to work at the
Post
. That paper, he knew, was part of the Klondike Syndicate, a newspaper chain that knew how to make money, moving into weak markets and dominating the smaller papers with its money and its size. Here the Klondike people put out a morning paper and an evening. The basic core of each was the same; only the evening paper was more sensational. Small papers like the
Dispatch
competed by hiring men like McCullough, who could glance at a police log and see a front-page grabber. And they also, Lofton knew, needed reporters, writers willing to stay in town for love or lack of imagination. None of that, however, explained Kirpatzke's presence here in Holyoke. He had had a better job, more money, more prestige, up the road. Why had he left the Springfield paper? Maybe the rumors—the hints of scandal Lofton had heard in the press box (the reporters gave no details)—held some truth. Still, you could tell Kirpatzke had been in the business for a while; he had worked hard.

“Actually,” Kirpatzke went on, “I'm up all night anyway, I prefer it, so I keep the place open. That's all. And sometimes someone else comes in with a story.”

Lofton glanced around the building, dark except for the faint glow of the computer screens. He could hear the computer's hum as well and imagined Kirpatzke sitting here alone, night after night, in the deserted building.

“You better get working on that story if you don't want to be here forever,” Kirpatzke said finally. “Grab a terminal. The computer man's not here, the system's junk, but I think it'll hold.”

Lofton went to the area known as the ghetto, where proofreaders corrected copy on the green computer screens. The proof-readers, of course, were not in at this hour, and Lofton sat alone. He painted the story in bright, sordid colors, describing the angle of Gutierrez's body on the floor, the plaster Virgin with the cocaine, the crackling static, and the neighborhood crowd in the street outside. He described Gutierrez's last at bat during the previous home stand, how he had crossed himself over and over between each pitch. He did not mention, of course, the letters he himself had taken from Gutierrez's apartment, and he left out what Amanti had told him about Brunner and the arson downtown. When the police saw the story, they might come after him, asking where he found his information. There was a chance one of the cops would recognize him, and they would want to know why he had left the scene. He would say he had given his name to the detective; he could not help it if they were too goddamned incompetent to write it down. If that did not work, well, he would think of something else.

He was still working early in the morning when the proofreaders came in. Kirpatzke wandered by to read over his shoulder. The proofreaders, women mostly, fell silent and hunched their shoulders when Kirpatzke approached.

“I want you to do another story on Gutierrez, a follow-up,” Kirpatzke said. “A feature piece, color, not hard news.”

Lofton nodded, keeping his eyes on the screen. Kirpatzke touched him on the arm. “I don't want you trying to solve the murder, nothing like that. Let the cops take the risks. You do the people stuff, talk to the man's friends. You know, human interest.”

Kirpatzke gave him a weepy smile that was only partly ironic. “You know, touch their hearts.”

When Lofton finished the story, his body itched. Too much coffee, too many cigarettes. Back in the hotel, he had trouble sleeping. His sheets were dirty, the night was hot, and there was noise in the apartment below. He floated on the surface, not quite awake, not quite asleep. He dreamed of his wives, and he dreamed of the Amanti woman. They watched from the left field bleachers while he ran the bases. Something pursued him, he didn't know what. He woke in the morning so hot and feverish, so drenched with sweat, that he thought he must be dying.
The doctor knew something he wouldn't say
. But no, the desk clerk and the men in the lobby were drenched in the same sweat, their faces red and puffy. It was simply the heat wave. If it was killing him, it was killing everyone else as well.