The Spoiler (33 page)

9

Lofton took a deep breath. Amanti stood half in the darkness, half out. The light from the hall lit one side of her face and at the same time illuminated her figure from behind, making her nightgown seem bright, fringed with light. She stood very quiet and very still. She held the gun waist-high.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

She didn't say anything. Lofton glanced down at the papers he had taken from her drawer.

“Where did you get the gun?”

“I was sleeping.” Amanti stepped out of the light, so now he could not see her face at all. She lowered the gun, pointing it at the carpet. “I woke up and heard some noise.”

He toyed with the papers between his fingers and took another step toward her. With the sound of her voice, his fear had started to pass, but he was not sure, not completely, that he should let it. He sat down in the chair and switched on the light nearby. Her face was that of someone who had just woken up.

“Why are you going through my things?” Amanti held the fingers of her free hand pressed against her thigh, just as she had held them on his first visit here.

“Why don't you put the gun away?”

“You know, I might've shot you; you shouldn't sneak around.”

“I knocked a dozen times. I came around back and looked in your bedroom. It was empty.”

“I was in the extra bedroom, up front. When I heard noise, I got up to check.”

“Who did you think it was?” Lofton motioned toward her gun. Amanti shrugged. She sat on the couch and placed the revolver on the light stand. Well out of my reach, Lofton noticed.

“I was just with Golden. He's the one who smashed my face. Caught up to me in his car after the last time I was here. Or hadn't you heard?”

“What are you getting at?” Amanti looked at the papers he still held in his fingers. “I don't appreciate this.”

“How did Golden know to find me here?”

“I don't have any idea about that.”

Amanti moved her hands sharply, in the motion of someone pushing someone else away, refusing to move. The gesture was unconscious, until the last minute, when she realized the effect she was creating. Earlier that evening, until the time she had fallen asleep, she had debated whether to help Lofton or to go along with what Kelley wanted her to do. She had come to no decision. Then she had woken up, heard the voice calling, the screen rattling, and had pulled the gun from its blue towel in the drawer. She had not been sure who it was. If Lofton had moved suddenly when she first saw him, or if the light had been different, then maybe she would have shot him. As it was, he didn't seem to realize she was telling him the truth: She didn't know why Golden had shown up out on the highway when he did. All she knew was that Brunner had his papers back. “Why would I give you the papers, then arrange for Golden to beat you up, and risk the police finding everything? That doesn't make any sense.”

Lofton agreed. It didn't make sense. But that didn't mean it hadn't happened that way. He had the brief sensation that in some important way he was blind, that there was an easy passage out of this thing, one foot in front of the other, as Amanti had said, but instead, he groped along.

“Your face, it looks terrible,” Amanti said.

Lofton touched his eyes; his makeup had smeared badly.

“Do you have any more of this cream?”

Lofton watched Amanti go down the hallway. He picked up the gun off the light stand. The safety was on. When Amanti came back, she glanced at it in his hands, but she said nothing. As she sat down next to him, opening her bottle, he put the gun back on the table.

“Let me see your face.”

She ran her fingertips over his bruises, rubbing off the makeup that was already there. “Does this hurt?”

“A little, but not much. My face is drugged.”

Pursing her lips, she studied his face intently, with the same look Lofton had seen on other women—Maureen, Nancy, his mother—when they were concentrating on their own faces in the mirror. She obviously enjoyed the task.

Amanti's face was very close to his own, but he still couldn't read her; he still didn't know what was under the surface, what she was telling him and what she was keeping to herself. She held her tongue between her teeth while she studied his bruises. He felt her knee against his thigh.

“Brunner wants to talk to you.”

Amanti reached for the cream on the table behind him, but Lofton, thinking of the gun, pushed her hand away. She held her lips tight together now, her fingertips pressed against the cushion beside him. She shook her head unhappily. The scar on her cheek seemed larger, more visible, now that her face was flushed.

“Brunner and Kelley are working together. They want you to drop the story. They're sure you'll do it if I ask—and if they slice the pie a little larger.… Will you calm down and let me finish your face?”

Her blue eyes were large and wet. He pulled himself up from the couch and lit a cigarette. The smoke hurt his chest, and his face, too, was beginning to hurt. The pills were wearing off.

“Brunner's going to ask you to cover a political rally, to write a whitewash for him, something to cover up what's going on with the fires. I'm supposed to tell you to take the money, do what they say, meet me, and get out of town. That's what they want me to do, lead you out of town.”

“Where do we go?”

“That's your choice. Either way, no matter what you do, I'm not leaving as easy as they would like. I stay here. I'm safest when I'm close, where I can watch.” She made the same sharp gesture again, quick, defensive, though this time she did not seem to realize it. For a second, something about her—the way she raised her head, maybe, or the way her eyes looked not at him but at the floor—reminded him of those Mexican girls in San Jose who traveled the streets alone, in stark heels and black skirts, and who, when they saw groups of men wandering the streets, white men, usually, and drunk, would follow packs like that through the streets, the stores, the arcades, keeping the group in sight until it had moved out of their territory. A girl would follow not because she wanted them but because the men were dangerous together, like young dogs. It was best to stay in the open, to keep them in sight. But later, if one of the men should approach a girl alone, when the others had scattered, then it was a different story.

“Go along with what Brunner wants you to do,” she said. “Or let him think you are. Take the money; do everything he asks. Then, at the last minute, do it the way you want.”

Her composure left her. He felt a long shudder run through her body. He watched her face, waiting for the tears. They didn't come.

“I don't have much to base my story on, not without Brunner's papers,” he said. “Losing those, that hurts things. But I can piece some kind of story together.”

He thought of insisting that she go into hiding, a motel in Chicopee or Hartford, someplace where she would be safe until the story was written, not the way Brunner wanted, of course, but the way he wanted. He wondered how things would be if they loved each other, but he dismissed the question as soon as it came to him—like a breath taken quickly and then let go—because there just wasn't any way to answer.

Amanti felt herself vacillating. She was entertaining the same question she'd been entertaining all night, not the details of it, of course, but the question itself, the gut answer. She could finish setting Lofton up, the way Kelley wanted, or she could say nothing and simply let him go. The conversation could still go either way; it just needed the right ending, the right twist. Whatever she did, she should watch out for herself.

“Maybe it's not such a good idea for me to stay here,” she said, listening to herself, to the dip and catch in her voice. “Maybe I should meet you after you talk to Brunner. It might be better.” She thought of the paper Kelley had handed her with Brunner's handwriting: “The railroad depot. 8:00
P.M.”

“It's up to you,” Lofton said. “Where do you want to meet?”

“Barena's,” she said suddenly. “After the game. Tomorrow.”

Lofton heard the change in her voice and wondered what it meant. Through his half-shut eyes he could see her revolver, a black smear on the white tabletop.
Can I trust her?
He studied the gun until she was done with his face and her fingers glided over his cheek, moving downward, touching the soft hair on the back of his neck.

The morning was hot. “The hottest one yet, you ask me,” the cabbie told Lofton as they drove down Brunner's street in South Hadley. Lofton put on his sunglasses and loosened his collar. These clothes—a faded pink shirt, a black tie, a rumpled suit jacket—seemed to make it even hotter, but there was not much else in his old duffel. Maybe the outfit would help give Brunner the impression of someone transient and shabby, someone who would take his money and leave. The cabbie pulled over, and Lofton paid him. He went to Brunner's door and knocked.

“I heard you wanted to talk to me,” he said when Brunner came to the door. Brunner looked Lofton over as if a circus con man had just shown up on his stoop. Up close the man's face seemed tremendously large, the features exaggerated.

“Come in.”

He guided Lofton across the thick carpeting to a room in the back, a study. Here a picture window looked across Brunner's yard to the Connecticut River, drained, this time of year, by upriver mills and tobacco farms. Lofton looked across the river to Holyoke, the church spires, the tenements, the redbrick mills, all tinted green, cooler, more serene, through his sunglasses. He could feel Brunner's gray eyes on his neck; the idea of Brunner behind him made him nervous, but he did not want to show it. In the backyard a handsome older woman, with silver-gray hair—Brunner's wife, he guessed—appeared, wandering toward the rose hedge. She wore a blue day robe of a shining, almost elegant material. Lofton watched her until she disappeared around the hedge.

“Looks like you've gotten yourself into a bit of trouble,” Brunner said. He sat down behind his desk and motioned for Lofton to sit as well. Lofton hesitated. Finally, he sat, and when he did, Brunner stood up. Holding his hands behind his back, Brunner headed toward the window, then continued around the back of Lofton's chair, talking as he walked.

“I've heard a little about you, Lofton, and I admire your intelligence. Or maybe I should say cleverness. I'm not sure, yet, how smart you really are.” Brunner's voice was dull, flat, so devoid of depth, so calm that Lofton was not sure of the sarcasm. “Obviously, as a writer, you're much sharper than many of those I have to deal with.”

Brunner appeared from behind Lofton, still circling. He gave Lofton a hard look, which Lofton returned. The sunglasses, Lofton thought, give me an advantage. Brunner can't see my eyes; he can't read me.

Brunner stopped, put his hand on the desk, and picked up an envelope.

“Wasn't Randy Gutierrez sharp enough for you?” Lofton asked. “Or Einstein? How about him?”

“Don't distract me.” Brunner's voice was cold, irritated. He shook his head. “I would like to settle this matter. And I would like to do it easily, painlessly. But if we can't do it that way, then it will be settled another way. Everything is always settled.”

“Sure, let's settle,” Lofton said. “Go ahead. Shoot.”

“You talked to Ray Nassau, my representative, when you were in the hospital, so you know I am a generous man.” Brunner smiled, the first smile Lofton had seen from him. He tapped the envelope against his palm as he spoke. “Murder. Leaving the scene of a crime. Withholding information.”

“Prove it.”

“A vial of pills. Randy Gutierrez's letters. A medallion. Why were these in your apartment? Where did you get them? Officer Ryan, homicide, will find you suspicious, Lofton.”

“I've heard this story. But how did you get these things, this evidence, from my room? Who did you hire? Or maybe I shouldn't be asking you? Maybe Kelley pulls the strings here?”

A small glint flowered in Brunner's eyes, like the glimmer on his wife's robe, and then was gone.

“No one works for Kelley; they work for me. Don't fool yourself, Lofton. Be clever.”

He could tell the suggestion that Kelley might be in control irked Brunner, however momentarily. But then Brunner eyed him, calm again as a hog in a wallow, and Lofton felt himself sweating profusely despite the air-conditioning.

“Now, being clever, you probably have noticed this envelope in my hand. And being clever, you probably think you know what's in it.” Brunner stood directly in front of him. “You probably think I am going to hand this to you. You probably think I am going to say, ‘Take it, my compliments, leave town, best wishes.'”

Brunner extended the envelope toward Lofton. Then, just as Lofton moved, almost imperceptibly—as if he were going to reach out and take it—Brunner pulled back and restarted his circling.

“The intelligent man, of course, would wait a bit more patiently. Down in the little dark part of his heart, he would wonder what small favor he could do for me. This man, he might think: What are my skills? What could I do?”

“You want me to write a story,” Lofton said.

“Oh, good. We are not merely clever.”

Brunner held out the envelope, and Lofton took it. Inside, he found a check for ten thousand dollars. He held the check between two fingers and touched it to his cheek. The stakes were going up.

“The clever man, my friend, would take that check, cash it, and leave town. He would say to himself, ‘Brunner won't bother, Brunner won't follow.' And the clever man might be right. But the intelligent man, he would make the extra effort. The intelligent man would repay the favor.”

“A feature?” Lofton asked. “The man who loves Holyoke? Who struggles to bring baseball, business, and progress to this town that burns all around him?”