The Spoiler (16 page)

“What else did he tell you?”

“Nothing. He said, ‘Randy Gutierrez is a good man.' That's all. He said all he wanted was to play baseball, to bring his wife and family to America. He didn't care about anything else.”

“Could be,” he said, “that Gutierrez was setting the fires. Maybe that's how he paid for his drugs.”

“Do you believe that?” she asked. Her voice scolded, but she stood up to refill his drink.

He leaned back and closed his eyes. The insects seemed louder. Not crickets after all, not like the ones he remembered. He wondered what the insects were. Cicadas? Tree criers? He could not tell. Settling back, he tried to imagine Gutierrez lighting the fires. Instead, he saw Managua—or his vision of that place—the inner city in rubble, the small, narrow streets spiraling away from the center into the impoverished neighborhoods where electric cables ran to small shanties. In the center of the shanties, in a clearing: a baseball diamond. Jungle ferns by third base. Cheap wooden bleachers. Colorful streamers. The type of place Gutierrez would have played when he was a boy, when the politics of Holyoke streets—and of Nicaraguan revolution, for that matter—were nothing, not real yet, not even a nightmare.

“No, I don't see Randy Gutierrez setting fires. But why do you think Brunner had anything to do with this? Golden was the name Gutierrez mentioned, not Brunner.”

“Golden works for Brunner. It's that simple. Golden wouldn't be involved in something like that on his own.”

“Maybe so,” Lofton said. “But Gutierrez's story, if he was as wired as you say, doesn't prove anything. Besides, it's secondhand information. It's just rumor, something overheard on a street corner by a cranked-up minor league ballplayer, who barely spoke English when he was alive. Now that he's dead, his story won't even translate. It doesn't mean a thing.”

Amanti shrugged. Lofton still had the feeling there was something she wasn't saying, some information she was holding back. The story about Gutierrez wasn't everything.

“Who picked up the phone when I called here the other day? Brunner?”

“No.” She crumpled her cigarette pack and dropped it on the table. She went to the bedroom. No, Lofton thought, don't go there. He imagined Brunner, his pig-thick face, coming out of the room with her. Lofton sat on the edge of the couch. He knew it could not be true.

She came back alone. She carried a fresh pack of cigarettes. She sat close to him, so there was only a small space between them on the white cushion.

“That night you first contacted me,” he said, “when you came up to me in the stands. Afterward, when the game was over, I saw you talking to Sparks out in the parking lot.” He looked down as he talked. The space between Amanti and him had all but disappeared. “What were you talking about?”

“He had a bad game, you remember, really awful, and he was worried that I'd mention that other evening to somebody, that his using the coke would get back to management. It's not exactly what a young player's supposed to do in his spare time. He avoids me now, doesn't come anywhere near me, or Brunner either, at least not when I'm around—just hoping I'll forget I ever saw him. But he doesn't have to worry because I've already forgotten him.”

“There's nothing else between you and Sparks?”

Amanti laughed. “I'm not interested in Sparks, and Sparks isn't interested in me. Even if he were, he wouldn't do anything about it. The last thing he wants is to get Brunner mad at him.”

Lofton was quiet. He guessed he believed her story. He would talk to Carpenter and Sparks and find out if there was anything else.

“Looks like we're in this together,” Amanti said. A line, and a bad one—she knew it, too, he could tell, because he saw her wince. She seemed uncomfortable beside him, weary, a little drunk, and he reached to touch her. His mouth—filled with the taste of cigarettes and gin—would taste to her like one of the open gutters in Holyoke, like burnt ash and stale alcohol. He did not care. She would taste the same. Between them, neither would notice.

Though she kissed back, closing her eyes and touching him at the same time, the moment was sloppy, the kiss awkward. The second time was better. Just as he was catching her rhythm, Lofton heard a rustling noise in the hall. He jumped to his feet.

“What is it?” she asked.

He went to the bedroom. He glanced under the bed, into the closet, opened the door to the room across the hall. There was nobody there, nothing at all.

Amanti lay in the dark, not in her usual room, but in the extra bedroom at the front of the apartment. She came here when she couldn't sleep, when her bedroom seemed too dark and she needed a place where sleep would sneak up on her. In the dresser drawer, wrapped in a blue towel, was a gun. Brunner had bought it for her back when he first moved her into this apartment. “Something to keep you safe from the college kids,” he had said, with only the slightest trace of a smile.

Lofton was gone. He had gotten up in the middle of their embrace, started checking around her apartment, then told her he had to get back to the ballpark. She wondered why she had kissed the reporter. She hadn't meant for that to happen, she told herself, but then she knew it wasn't quite true. She liked Lofton, she was angry at Kelley, she was afraid of Brunner, and touching the reporter had brought all the emotions together at once.

Now she thought about Brunner. In some ways what she had told Kelley the other day was true: Brunner had been good to her. Though she had never intended for things to go on with Brunner as long as they had, it wasn't until recently that she'd started to fear the man, that the steel edge of his personality had seemed untempered, razor-sharp. Of course, that edge had always been there. It had been there on the first day she met him, at her uncle Liuzza's. It had been there two years later, when her affair with Kelley seemed to be collapsing and Brunner had shown up at her doorstop in Boston, unintentionally comical, clutching a bunch of flowers in front of him. Sometimes she wondered why she had let him in. Though she had told herself she had taken up with Brunner to inspire Kelley's jealousy—and that was true—she did enjoy Brunner's protective spirit, his thick charm, his way of watching over things important to him. He had a firm desire to control. Sometimes that desire collapsed into a wide smile that expressed the need for admiration and affection. It was that moment of collapse that she liked, though such moments had gotten rarer, and sometimes dangerous.

Brunner came from a neighborhood not too much different from Kelley's, or her own, but unlike Kelley, he had not gone to college. Instead, he had worked himself up in the construction trade. He now lived in a house that he had bought from the bankrupt son of a New England pulp merchant. It was an old house, finely kept, emblematic—at least to Brunner—of a class of society that he both envied and despised, a class that Kelley had walked into easily. Amanti understood the frustration in Brunner. Sometimes, particularly when Kelley appeared to be vacillating in his affection for her, she even shared Brunner's dislike for Kelley, his hatred. She had made love to Brunner, in those first days, with a fierce intensity that expressed that hatred.

That intensity had worn off, so their intimacy now was as simple and cold and startling as the wind over a winter lake. But intimacy wasn't the point anymore, at least not with Brunner. He was supporting her and had been doing so for several years now, ever since Uncle Liuzza had cut off her money.

Brunner had moved her out to Amherst. He took particular pleasure in the fact that he had a mistress in a university town; he enjoyed fucking her in the midst of the lives of professors and students. He also enjoyed the fact that he had gotten her farther away from Kelley, though his own interest in her waned with the senator's distance and increased if he knew the other man had visited. (Sometimes it seemed to her that each man was only interested in her in direct proportion to his rival's interest. Who they really want to fuck, she thought, is not me but each other.)

Still, there had always been times with Brunner, as with everyone, when you could see behind the mask and read the thoughts there, knowing what he was feeling, even if a second later you could read nothing, and you were no longer sure the moment had even happened.

Last April, Brunner had picked her up early one morning, then taken her around with him from construction site to construction site. He had said little. There seemed no point in the excursion, but she had gone along anyway. After lunch he had started drinking, uncharacteristic of him, and he had told her, as they drove around in the car, that the entire state was corrupt, that the big politicians played ball with each other, in their Ivy League suits, and pretended to be clean and pure when they were not clean and pure. A man had to watch out for himself. The government dallylagged on contracts and federal money, and the men in the Ivy League suits got rich from the dallylagging while your regular guy went poor. Well, not this regular guy, he said, pointing at one building, then another, as they drove down the street. They were government garbage, kindling, fire to warm your bones. Brunner's voice was thick and he was drunk and he wanted her to know that he was as important as Kelley or anyone else. He had himself well protected. He had papers, and those papers would make sure that no one could hurt him without hurting everyone else, and that would never happen because the big boys never got hurt. Though he hadn't said what was in those papers, he had taken her to where they were. He had opened the safe and added some more papers, and then turned to her with a look in his eye that seemed close to crazy, the moment of collapse gone awry. The next day he was the same as ever. His expression admitted nothing of what had happened.

At first she had ignored the incident. Whatever Brunner was doing took place in a world she had nothing to do with, over which she had no control. Then there had been the night at Sparks's apartment when she had talked to Gutierrez, when the dark-skinned shortstop had sat Indian-style, cross-legged on the floor across from her, the collar of his blue shirt open several buttons, showing his hairless chest, his dark skin. He had held the matchbook curled in one hand, and his voice, as it raced on telling her about Golden and the fires in Holyoke, had been full of excitement.

She had told Kelley what Gutierrez had said not so much because she thought something could be done as to convey the excitement she had felt, the danger. Now she was sorry that she had told him anything, but she knew that was pointless, that of course she would have told him, it wasn't a matter of volition, but of the way things happened, just as of course the phone would be ringing now, and of course it would be Kelley calling at the same moment she was thinking of him. He called almost every night lately.

“Have you talked to the reporter?”

“No,” she lied.

“Good, but I want you to talk to him now. I want you to tell him to get off the case.”

“What if he doesn't listen?”

“I'll talk to your cousin. We'll give him some extra incentive,” he said, but Amanti was paying more attention to a voice she thought she heard in the background, behind Kelley's. It wasn't his wife's voice, she didn't think, and it was too late for him to be at his office.

That evening a new pitcher joined the Redwings, Ramon Kubachek, a big, burly man who wore his uniform so baggy it looked like pajamas. Kubachek was a veteran, one of the few in the Blues' farm system, particularly at this level of play. Cowboy had bought him from the Yankees last year to help the Blues with their late-season pennant drive, but Kubachek pitched poorly. The Blues' championship bid had failed.

This year Kubachek had started out with the Blues but had thrown nothing but junk in the early going. Cowboy had sent him to Salt Lake. Now Kubachek had slipped a notch farther, down into Holyoke. For Kubachek, such slides into the minors were not unusual. Once, he had even disappeared altogether, quitting baseball for a year, then showing up with the Portland Mavericks, an unaffiliated club in the Pacific Coast League, a team filled with castoffs: Jim Bouton, Luis Tiant, Willie Horton—men perennially on the comeback trail. But then the team was bought by the Pirates, the old players scattered, and Kubachek showed up, miraculously, it seemed, with the Yankees.

Cowboy had bought him for a big price and was still paying Kubachek under that contract. Kubachek said he did not care where he played, majors or minors or on the moon, so long as he got his money. When his contract expired, he would play Puerto Rico, Mexico, Japan; it made no difference to him, he said.

“My arm's as good as ever,” Kubachek told Lofton before the game, spitting tobacco juice and sneering at the dirt as he spoke. “My being here has nothing to do with that. The Blues are playing like shit, and Cowboy needs a scapegoat. That's me. But I don't give a goddamn. They'll call me up before the end of the year, when they need help. Just watch.”

Kubachek drew a good crowd, the biggest Lofton remembered seeing in Holyoke. More important, the club seemed to come alive around the pitcher, to take the field with more excitement. The air seemed charged, as if Gutierrez's death had never happened, or had happened somewhere far away—as if it were a story that had come in over the wire, another dateline, another city.

He still needed more on Gutierrez. Kirpatzke was not quite ready to let the story drop. Kirpatzke wanted a composite—a “tribute” Kirpatzke had called it: an interview with Gutierrez's teammates, a description of the neighborhood he had lived in, a summary of his career. Kirpatzke also wanted, incredibly, to patch a call through to Gutierrez's widow in Managua. And he wanted it all for Sunday's paper. He planned to run a black-bordered picture of Gutierrez on the sports page.

Lofton told himself he would start the interviews after the game. The tribute, if he were careful, might provide a good excuse to ease in questions about the fires. On the basis of what Amanti had told him, Tim Carpenter and Rickey Sparks would be the most likely to know something helpful, though it might be difficult getting either of them to talk. Carpenter, the second baseman, had gotten angry with him earlier for writing the story that mentioned Gutierrez's use of drugs. And Sparks was so worried about the big leagues that he might not say anything at all.