The Spoiler (24 page)

Lofton took the paper. The story was the one he had heard from the Springfield reporters: how the state legislature had canceled Holyoke's renovation project. Lofton scanned the lead paragraph, a quick summary of things he already knew.

“So?”

“Kelley's behind this,” she said. “He's trying to put pressure on Brunner. That's why he wanted to get you involved, like I told you, and that's why he got the committee to vote against the Holyoke project. He'll get the committee to swing back if Brunner switches.”

She pointed to a paragraph well inside the article, on an inside page. City officials were concerned, the article said, because—as the result of the state's decision—several large insurance companies planned to devaluate the property downtown. They had threatened to cancel all insurance contracts in the core area immediately. “If they cancel the contracts, Brunner can burn all he wants, but he won't collect anything. Don't you see what Kelley's doing? It's blackmail.”

“All right, but this article doesn't prove anything. It doesn't prove Brunner is behind those fires. What about the big building, American Paper? It's almost too late for him to burn that, especially if the insurance companies are reassessing. And besides, Brunner didn't own any of the buildings that went down this summer. He wouldn't have gained anything by burning those.”

“Yes, he would. And I can get you proof. I can get papers that tell you everything.”

Lofton didn't know what to think. He had suspected she was holding something back. Now that she offered to give it to him, he wondered about her motivation. She was angry at Kelley, he knew that, or at least she seemed to be. But she could have talked to Kelley since last night; things could have changed. He glanced around the corner of the press box. The only person looking this way was Tenace. He was talking to Golden, but the general manager was looking the other way. The scorer gave a friendly wave, and Lofton turned back to her.

“How will you get these papers?”

“Never mind. I'll take care of that.”

“I'll go with you. It could be dangerous.”

“No. It will be better if I'm alone.” Amanti shook her head and looked wearily down at her shoes. “Come by my house, Wednesday. I'll have everything then.… Brunner and Liuzza are in the stands. They're going to be wondering where I am. I'd better get back.”

“You should be careful,” Lofton said. He thought of going with her, but she smiled so suddenly, so sadly and awkwardly that he was disarmed. He put his hand on her shoulder and urged her away. She reached up, touched a thin curl of hair at the back of his neck, then hurried back into the crowd. Kelley put her up to this, he thought; the man wants me involved, he wants more pressure on Brunner. That might be the way it was. Or it might be that Amanti was tired of Brunner and Kelley, that she was acting on her own. There was no way for Lofton to be sure. He could not see into the darkness; he could not read her thoughts. When he walked around the back side of the press box, he saw Tenace standing with Golden. They both were watching him now; then the general manager stalked off into the bleachers. Golden was on one of his downswings, or maybe he was worried, afraid of getting caught.

Sitting in the press box, Lofton flipped through the paper to his postmortem on Gutierrez. His editor, Kirpatzke, had come up with three photos to accent the piece: an action shot of Gutierrez pivoting at short; a shot of him in street clothes, standing in front of the clubhouse; and a third, final picture, this one showing his casket as it was wheeled onto the airplane at Bradley International. The effect was maudlin, but it would get the reaction Kirpatzke wanted. People would read it. They would ponder the random violence, wanting to draw the conclusion that Gutierrez had done something for this to happen to him. But the link wasn't quite there; there was no apparent cause and effect. They would ponder awhile longer.

“Reading your own work?”

Tenace stood grinning. Lofton was embarrassed. He closed the newspaper.

“You're getting to be pretty hot shit, huh?”

“Dead shortstops bring out the best in me.”

“I guess you're getting the angle on this place pretty good. You going to make us all famous?”

“Sure, you'll be the star.”

Tenace grimaced, then forced out a laugh. Lofton turned to the field. Holyoke was up, 5–0. The team had come around in the last few weeks. With the slip-sliding going on at the top of the division, the good clubs losing momentum, Holyoke, impossible as it seemed, had a long shot at the division crown.

“We should get together, have a few beers,” said Tenace.

“Sure. Anytime.”

Lofton did not take the offer too seriously. He thought instead about what Amanti had told him. He knew Brunner owned several square blocks downtown, including the old American Paper Company, once the second-largest mill in New England, now boarded up and closed. Brunner planned to renovate the building, to put in polished floors and cordon the rooms off into small boutiques. Such projects had met with success in large cities like San Francisco and Denver. But Holyoke was not a large city. And there was another reason the project didn't quite make sense. He remembered what the reporters had said the other day, that Brunner's construction company, Bruconn, owned a percentage of the Hillside Mall. Why would Brunner create another shopping area to compete with himself? Maybe I should go down to American, Lofton thought, and take a look around.

“How about after the game?” Tenace persisted. “We could knock a few down then.”

Lofton squinted. Before he could answer, the public-address man reannounced Dazzy Vance's presence. A few people hissed—a few always did, no matter what was announced—but most cheered.

“And next weekend,” the PA man went on, his voice echoing across the field, “MacKenzie Field will host another distinguished visitor: Democratic candidate for governor, Richard Sarafis.”

There were more hisses and boos now, and a good deal of laughter. The announcer went on. “After a rally at the Hillside Mall, Richard Sarafis will be on hand here to throw out the game ball and answer questions from local citizens.”

“He should go to Amherst,” said Tenace. “Go there and talk to the college kids about the bottle bill and nuclear power.”

“What's he doing out at Hillside anyway?” asked Lofton. “I thought Brunner supported Ed Wells, the incumbent. Why is he letting Sarafis have a rally on his property?” Even as he asked the question, Lofton thought of an answer: Kelley's pressure had worked; Jack Brunner was making ready to switch sides in the Democratic race.

“Beats me. It's a free country. I don't like any of them.” The scorer moved closer. “I was serious about those beers. Besides, I've got something you should hear, something important.”

“Sure.”

“No, I'm serious.”

Lofton heard an unusual urgency in Tenace's voice. The man's lonely, he guessed. “All right, let's get together for a beer.”

“Tonight?”

“No, I've got something else going.”

Lofton thought of American Paper, the building in the darkness, outlined by the moon. He wanted to go there, to see the old mill. “Tomorrow night,” Lofton said, “I'll meet you at Barena's.” Then Lofton hurried away; he did not want to talk with Tenace, not now.

He paused at the top of the stands. Dazzy Vance wandered through the crowd below. It was a warm day, the temperatures rising again, though not so high as before. The sun felt good; the crowd was larger than usual, and healthier-looking. Parents from the suburbs had brought their children to see the Hall of Famer. Even so, MacKenzie Field still seemed a seedy place. Young couples sat in the sparse grass beyond the bleachers, smoking pot and drinking beer. Long-haired young men sat cross-legged and shirtless in the dirt; next to them their wives or girlfriends—or old ladies, as the men called them—sighed under the weight of the children who played in the laps of their print skirts. Teenagers scuttled hard after foul balls. A white boy fell on his face when a Puerto Rican pushed him from behind.

A dozen rows below Lofton, Amanti sat between Brunner and her cousin. Brunner touched her to call attention to some action on the field, and she smiled, nodding and touching him back.

No smoke poured from the tall stacks of the abandoned paper mill; its dock was empty. On the other side of the street, which dead-ended at the canal, National Paper was still going despite the late hour. The night shift workers leaned against cars, eating sandwiches and listening to rock 'n' roll. In one car a man sat behind the wheel, his head tilted against a headrest. From a distance Lofton thought he looked asleep. Then he saw the red-orange glow of a cigarette raised to the man's lips. Coming closer, he saw the man pass the cigarette out the window to one friend, then another. They cupped and hid the glow as he passed.

Not all the men were on break. While some rested, others worked, wheeling barrels of fiber onto the docks, pausing to catcall to the men who lazed against the cars. Lofton crossed the street toward the darkness of American Paper. The road had worn through in places; the asphalt, thin and peeling, showed the old brick cobbles and trolley tracks beneath. A high chain-link fence separated American's dock from the street.

As he approached the corner, he saw the dark waters of the canal. A street ran parallel to the canal, and a cruiser turned the corner: a Puerto Rican cop riding shotgun, an Anglo behind the wheel. They stared glassy-eyed at Lofton, as if they really did not see him—but he knew they must have—and then drove past the workers, up toward the river.

He walked down the street, the canal on one side, American Paper on the other. The same cyclone fence, barbed wire at the top, surrounded the building. Up ahead, between the building and the fence, lay a large lot littered with broken concrete and scraps of wood. Several bulldozers and Caterpillars were parked in the lot, and a chained gate spanned the driveway. The space between the bottom of the gate and the asphalt seemed almost big enough for a man to crawl through.

Yellow signs with black letters hung on the gate,
NO TRESPASSING
,
BEWARE OF DOGS
,
GUARDS ON DUTY
. The signs were a bluff. Lofton had seen no evidence of dogs, no guards. Maybe Pinkertons patrolled the place, driving by a few times a night, shining their high beams on the buildings. But the old mill seemed too desolate to be worth much protection. Still, he wished he had brought something with him other than the small penlight and his pocket camera, both of which he carried in his shirt pocket. Maybe a lead pipe, something he could use on the dogs if there happened to be any.

According to what he had read in the library, American Paper had bailed out because the State Building Official had told the owners to get the building into shape. The old support system had rotted. The place was unsafe. But rather than fix it up and maintain a break-even operation simply to support the workers, American Paper had abandoned the building. Brunner had picked it up cheap. How much money he needed to bring it up to code was another matter. Lofton wanted to see what shape the building was really in and how much work Brunner had really done.

He glanced down the street. Nobody. He got flat on his stomach and crawled under the gate. The gravel crushed against his face. The bar at the bottom of the fence scraped on his tailbone. “Fat-ass,” he whispered to himself, and scrambled through. He hurried to the building. He felt safe in its dark shadow, near the heavy equipment, the Cats and the dozers. Now he had to find a way inside.

The logical way, of course, was through one of the doors. He tried the sliding dock porticoes, where the huge sheets of paper, bundled and stacked, had once been loaded onto trucks. He tried the heavy steel office doors. These, as he expected, were drawn shut and locked. A bank of windows ran in a low line around the building. Most were boarded over; the others were made of thick, fogged glass that let in light but through which he could not see. The panes were small, bordered by steel bars. To squeeze in, he would have to smash out the panes, then somehow pry the bars away. In the corner of each window someone had placed a small decal: “Protected by AACO.” American Alarm Company. Dummies, he guessed, distributed by the police force to help stop burglaries.

Checking the boarded windows one by one, he looked for a board that had not been nailed quite right, one he could pry loose with his hands or with a two-by-four from the parking lot debris. He chose a window a different size from the others, thinking it might not have the same small panes behind the boards. He pulled and twisted—there was a sticker here, too, pasted on the wood—then pried the board free from the crumbling brick. Behind the boards, he saw glass, clear stuff, not like the fogged panes. The steel bars were not there either.

Suddenly a car rumbled by on the road between the building and the canal. Lofton jumped into the shadow of a dozer. The car did not stop. Probably just teenagers out driving, he thought, but he stayed hidden until it was well past. For a second, crouching there idly, he contemplated starting the dozer. He knew how to do it. He and his brother, Joe, when they were kids in California, used to sneak out to the sites and climb on the machinery. Once, they'd gotten a dozer started, driven it through the half-finished streets of a new subdivision, and abandoned it in a ditch. Another time, they'd made a dummy out of newspaper and old clothes, then hurled it into the street, waiting for a passing car to stop, for someone to investigate the body.
A deaf policeman heard the noise and came to kill the two dead boys
. He had not thought of the old childhood rhyme—they used to recite it together, laughing secretly in their bedroom, after being punished—nor had he thought of their childhood adventures, not in years.

Lofton looked inside the dozer's cab. There, over the ignition, was another yellow sticker. Surely the stickers were a sham. He imagined one of Brunner's crew lumbering through the yard, sticking the things everywhere, avoiding the heavy work.