The Spoiler (19 page)

“What they said wasn't true; he didn't take drugs,” said Singleton, Gutierrez's replacement. He and the center fielder, Elvin Banks, talked to Lofton together. Elvin Banks told Lofton how Gutierrez always mumbled to himself in Spanish, especially after he had struck out or muffed a play in the field. Singleton told him that back in April, at the Redwings' home opener, Gutierrez had lost his way to the park, so he had had to play in his place. Lofton wrote it down. Good. Perfect. Kirpatzke would love it. Banks, a good-looking black man in his middle twenties, told Lofton about a snowstorm in Buffalo, back in the early season, on the Redwings' first road trip. Elvin Banks was from a middle-class family in New Orleans; his family didn't want him up here playing ball; they wanted him home.

“Randy woke up and there it was: a foot and a half of snow on the ground. I'd seen something similar before, once in northern Mississippi. Bad enough for me, but Randy shook his head all day long, pinching at himself and picking the snow up in his hands. The game was called, and I walked him around town. He kept saying this had to be some strange, cold heaven.”

Afterward Lofton watched Banks go to the cage. His swing was muscular and compact. He slammed all of Coach Barker's pitches into the outfield and sent a few farther, into the Beech Street traffic. Lofton's mind went back to the powder inside the Virgin. Snow. Heaven. Cowboy and his big cigars. Salaries in six figures. Brunner and Amanti. Amanti and the white sheets rustling in her back bedroom. The air was hot; sweat trickled down his temple.

Tim Carpenter was in the cage now, one of the last batters. He had avoided Lofton, waiting for his turn on the other side of the cage. His style was different from Banks's—wide, shoulder-heavy swings that sent the ball spinning out on a line, then dropping halfway between the infielders and the outfielders, not far from that asphalt track. When he was done, Carpenter walked toward Lofton, as if now he were ready to talk. Lofton called out his name.

“Yeah,” Carpenter said in his clumsy California slur. He held the end of the bat in the dirt and balanced his weight against it. Lofton asked him about the snowstorm in Buffalo.

“Yeah, I remember that. I was still asleep when Randy got out of bed. We roomed together on the road, and the day before, he'd been chewed bad by Barker. Too many muffs. When he woke and saw the snow, he thought he was dreaming.”

Lofton wrote it down. He decided not to ask Carpenter why he had gone out the other gate, avoiding him after last night's game. It was more important to see what he could find out about Gutierrez.

“Anything else you remember?”

“No, just do it up good, Lofton, and keep that drug stuff out of there. Randy had his problems, but he was no worse than anybody else, no worse than you or me.”

“Right.” Lofton made a show of writing it down.
No worse than you or me
.

Carpenter went on leaning against his bat, then spat into the dirt. Lofton wiped the sweat from his face. This long silence, this lingering, maybe, was Carpenter's way of telling him something.

“You got any ideas?” Carpenter asked.

“Ideas?”

“Who killed him. You got any ideas?”

“None. Do you?”

Tim Carpenter twisted the bat, digging a small hole in the dust. “No,” he said, and pushed his bat back into the rack.

“Do you remember that night at the apartment? With you, Amanti, Sparks. Gutierrez was there, talking. He was upset.”

“What night do you mean?”

“After the game.”

“We play lots of games. What are you after?”

Lofton paused. He knew he should be careful. If he said too much to the wrong person—and if word got back the way it had gotten back on Gutierrez.… Yet he had to ask questions to get answers; there was no other way.

“It was a night after Sparks had pitched. He had won, and then you and Amanti and Sparks and Gutierrez and a couple of those ballpark girls—you all went up to the apartment. Do you remember?”

“I remember. Who you been talking to?”

“Never mind. I just need to know what Gutierrez had on his mind. Did he talk about anything that might be hooked up to his death?”

“Randy was crazy those last weeks,” Carpenter said. “Maybe his motor was running extra hard that night, I don't remember. I went to bed early, but Gutierrez, he had some strange raps.” Carpenter laughed, then shook his head. “Listen, I thought you were going to keep the drug stuff out of it. That doesn't need to be in the papers.”

“One minute you guys swear Randy Gutierrez was straight, the next minute drugs were ruining his life. It can't be both ways, and there's no sense in trying to protect him now that he's dead. To tell you the truth, this stuff about the snowflakes in Buffalo, it's not really what I'm after. I'm trying to figure out who killed Gutierrez. I need to know what he was talking about those last days.”

“After Randy wound himself up, he said a lot of things. They're hard to remember. He was paranoid. He would tell a hundred stories, and everybody in every one of them was out to get him. Sometimes I wonder about it, maybe there was something buried in his talk that made sense, but back then I had to turn him off. I just stopped paying attention.”

“Did he ever mention arson?”

“Arson?” Carpenter scowled. He seemed uncomfortable with the turn in the conversation, and he was no good at concealing it.

“From what I understand,” Lofton said, “Gutierrez was spinning pretty hard that night at the apartment when he was talking to Amanti. Sparks was there. You two were roommates; you can't tell me Sparks didn't mention it to you.… Did Gutierrez ever talk to you about arson?”

“He talked to me about it,” Carpenter said, though he didn't like saying it, and turned to stare out at the ballfield, as if something out there might help him out of the conversation.

“Did Gutierrez say Golden was involved?”

Carpenter sighed heavily. “Yeah, he said that, but he said a lot of things. I remember once he thought everybody on the team was out to get him. He even suspected me.… You aren't going to use this stuff in the paper, are you?”

“No,” said Lofton. “I'm just trying to figure out why Gutierrez is dead.”

Carpenter shook his head. He didn't know anything else. It was a mystery to him, he said, as spooky as the man in the moon. And that story about the arson, he'd kept it to himself until now. He didn't believe it, not really. He hadn't even told anyone on the team.

“What about Sparks? Did he believe it?”

“You'll have to ask him yourself,” Carpenter said, his tone shifting. “I haven't learned to read minds yet.”

Practice ended, and the game began, the Redwings whirling the ball one last time around the horn. Lofton wanted to talk to Sparks, but the pitcher still had not materialized. He was back in the training room, getting his arm worked over; at least that's what they'd told him at the clubhouse door.

Lofton felt someone tap him on the arm. It was the kid with the Redwings cap. The boy's eyes darted around, and his voice stammered hard—his right hand moving, touching his face—as he gave Lofton the message.

“Someone wants to talk to you. Up by the candy stand.”

Lofton noticed burn marks down the kid's arm. The scars were mottled and brown, as if the kid had scratched at the skin before it could heal.

The kid close by his side, Lofton headed toward the concession. Amanti stood waiting. She wore sunglasses, so he could not tell if she watched him as he approached. She turned her back when Lofton reached the stand, but she did not walk away. Her hair was tied back with a thin black ribbon.

Lofton ordered a Coke from the girl in the concession.

“Didn't expect to see you here,” he said to Amanti.

“I was worried.…”

The boy stared up at them; his hand moved nervously about, almost shaking.

“Kid gets around,” Lofton said. “I see him all over.”

“Yes, he does things for the team. Runs down to the store, grabs sandwiches. Retrieves fouls. Things like that.”

The kid smiled at Amanti, enraptured. Amanti reached into her purse, counting out quarters. She handed the kid his money, and he took off, hurtling away from the concession, down to where some boys played flip, tossing their knives at a circle scratched in the dirt.

“He's awfully young to be so nervous,” Lofton said.

“I don't know what's wrong, but he's a smart kid, you can see that sometimes. Once in a while he gets mixed up. They'll send him down to get one of the players and he'll come back with somebody else, or he'll go off down to some strange place or the other. Most of the time he's fine, but he doesn't have any parents. He lives in a halfway house, and one of the counselors says they think he was beat up a lot when he was little.”

Lofton was surprised by the compassion she expressed; he had not seen it in her before. He stood there with her, watching the kid. After a few minutes she said that she wanted to talk to him, but not here. She asked him to meet her outside the right field gate.

Lofton sipped at his Coke and headed slowly, casually toward the third base bleachers. Amanti had made her way past the press box and was working her way through the opposite grandstand. Lofton decided to go out the main gate and circle around the ballpark to his meeting place with Amanti. Ahead of him, Dick Golden leaned over the third base fence, watching the action. The visiting Lynn Sailors had scored two runs in the top of the first. Now Holyoke had one run in, two men on, and nobody out.

“Gonna be a wild one,” said Golden. He smiled, friendly. He did not seem like a murderer, an arsonist, but it was an easy thing to lean over a baseball fence and lose your identity, to forget about what twist of luck, good or bad, had conspired to make you what you were. The foul lines touched at home plate, then angled away from one another, the space between them growing greater the closer they came to the outfield wall, and growing still greater, infinite, if you imagined the lines continuing past the boundaries of the park. You could lose yourself in that space, there was nothing but the ball game, there was no other world. Once inside it, Lofton didn't know how to ask Golden about the fires. Instead, he stood with the former pitcher and watched Elvin Banks wally-loop a slow curve down the right field line, a ball that hit fair, bounced first right, then left, then over the charging outfielder's head and into the deep grass.

“Kill the whole business. Drop the story. The more I think about Gutierrez's death, the more frightened I become. Brunner knows I've been talking to you, at least I think he does. It's time to stop.”

Amanti walked beside him, her heels clicking on the broken pavement. Her reversal didn't surprise him, not completely. He could understand her fear of Brunner, but when trouble came, he knew, it would come in his own direction, not hers. Brunner would move against the outsider, not wanting to admit that the real trouble originated down home, in his own bed. Lofton knew he should be afraid, but the fear was not enough to chase him away. Partly it was because he was almost invisible on the Holyoke streets. No one knew him here; he had no identity. So if he happened to die, it would almost be as if nobody had died. Though he didn't like the idea of being nobody, there was a certain freedom in the idea, too, and it kept the fear down to a minimum, to a cold gray wave in the chest. A second later he abandoned this whole line of thinking. It was nonsense. He was scared to death.

“Why did you bother with Brunner in the first place? That's what I can't figure. It doesn't seem that you like him, let alone love him. His money and that apartment—those can't mean that much. I mean, you could just marry someone, some halfway decent guy with a little cash, and get the same thing. You could probably even sleep around if you wanted.”

Amanti's face flushed. He could see that she did not like the way he was talking. At the moment Lofton didn't much care. She was backing off the story, abandoning what she had started, and he felt he could say pretty much what he pleased.

“What's it to you how I live?” she asked.

“It's nothing to me.”

There was anger in her voice, anger in the staccato clicking of her heels. Her arms swung loosely, but her hands were rigid, tense; she flexed her fingertips, over and over, in and out of her palm. All around them the evening light was soft and red. Amanti's eyes welled for a second with a surge of anger and self-pity, and then it was just anger. It was the sort of anger that comes when someone touches a nerve close to the truth. The touch makes you want to talk, to be touched again, to feel the electric flashes as the truth becomes speech and then disappears into the air.

“Listen, you don't know anything,” she said. “You don't have any idea.”

“I'm not paid to have ideas. I just write things down. Other people have the ideas.”

“Bullshit,” she said. “Fuck yourself.”

Across the street some schoolgirls walked along, dressed in their Catholic school outfits, white blouses and green plaid skirts. A small brown-skinned girl shuffled sloppily along behind the others, unconcerned, lost in her own reverie.

“That girl is me; that's what I was,” Amanti said. Lofton couldn't see it. It wasn't how he had pictured her.

“You don't know what it's like,” she said. “This place is cold as death all winter, then nothing but heat in the summer. There's hardly anything in between, just a few days in spring when everything bursts to life, so thick it could strangle you, and then a blaze of color in the fall—a blaze that comes after the heat and sinks straight into winter. There's no mild seasons, no transitions, nothing you can live in.”

Lofton hadn't heard her talk like this before. The words burst out as if they'd been inside a long time, phrasing themselves over and over, and now they rang sharply, incongruently, in the evening air. Still, he understood what she meant. His last year in Massachusetts, after the breakup with his first wife, the winter had been so cold it had seemed to settle deep in his bones, in his heart, as if the flame that kept his body alive had been receding, dying with the weather. Then it was spring, and the flame roared back, and he could no longer stand being in the town where he and Nancy had lived together. So he moved back to the Santa Clara Valley in California, where the seasons were mild and the sky was blue and perpetually sunny.