The Spoiler (2 page)

“
I get men your age doing this all the time. They have trouble at home, trouble being happy. And instead of admitting what's going on, they decide it's something else. Something physical,” the doctor said. He toyed with a paper clip as bespoke. “And some of them are right about themselves. Some of them are dying. But most of you,” the doctor went on, smiling cryptically, “you're just bored. You're just looking for something to flirt with.”

Lofton thought about it. He looked out the window at the blue sky
.

“
Listen, I'll level with you. I can give you a lot of tests, and they'll cost a lot of money, and if they come up positive, there's nothing I can do. You want my advice?” the doctor asked, pointing at Lofton's shirt pocket
.

“
No,” said Lofton
.

When he looked at the field, he could not remember the name of Sparks's replacement on the mound. He had seen the reliever before, grew up in Bakersfield or some forsaken part of the Golden State. The reliever threw high fastballs and slow curves, always over the plate. His pitching was beautiful to watch. Unfortunately it was also easy to hit. The Glens Falls batters would love him. It was going to be a long game. Lofton ducked into the press box to get the reliever's name.

Inside, Marvin Tenace, the scorer, was complaining. Tenace always complained. He liked to run down the new local owners, Jack Brunner and Tony Liuzza, a businessman and a lawyer who had bought the Holyoke franchise together during the off-season. The California organization still controlled player development, of course; Brunner and Liuzza rented the park and collected the gate.

“Those jokers don't care anything about increasing attendance,” Tenace said, shaking his head. “They're too busy touching each other's cocks.”

Tenace, of course, did not say such things when the owners were around. An ungainly man, as overweight as he was rude, Tenace was uneasy when the reporters and the owners happened to be around at the same time.

There had been a general uneasiness in the press box, about a week back, on the day Lofton had first met Jack Brunner and Tony Liuzza. Lofton hadn't been on assignment that night; he had just been killing time in the press box. It was a promotion night; the team was giving away decals at the gate. Brunner and Liuzza had walked up to the box so the local writers could get a story and the team could get publicity. A young woman had walked up with them. A dark-haired woman, wearing a stark white blouse, she hung back while the reporters asked the owners questions. She had a way of standing, with her head to the side and one foot turned out, pointing away, that made it seem as if she were watching for something coming up behind her. Twenty-seven, twenty-eight years old, Lofton guessed. Despite her distracted air, Lofton could see the young woman was listening. She eyed the reporters as they asked Brunner and Liuzza the usual things, good-natured stuff intended to help the new owners get their publicity: How do you feel about your partnership now, more than halfway into the season? What are you going to do to improve attendance? What do you think the Redwings can do to get out of their slump?

Tony Liuzza, the lawyer, a neatly dressed man in his early forties, answered most of the questions. He smiled often, but his smile lingered awkwardly and gave the impression—inherent in his overly delicate, thin lips—that the smile itself was somehow painful. Even though he answered all the questions the right way, his manner was a little too studied, and he did not seem at ease talking to the reporters.

The older of the two owners, Jack Brunner, was tall and big-boned, with high cheekbones, graying temples, and sharp iron-gray eyes. He was in his middle fifties. At first Brunner said little during the interview. A businessman, he owned some buildings in downtown Holyoke and some welfare housing in the mill area. While Tony Liuzza answered the questions from the press, Brunner watched. The dark-haired woman watched, too. Lofton caught her eyes once, then a second time. He wondered what she had to do with the owners.

Toward the end of the interview there was one of those silences in which the reporters seemed to run out of questions. It happened often enough, particularly on promotion pieces like this one where you ended up with a little content and a lot of fluff. Then the Springfield reporter, a young kid named Rhiner, came up with another question, off the wall, it seemed at first, at least to Lofton.

“How are you two getting along now, with the election heating up?”

There was an awkward silence. The thin smile was fixed painfully on Liuzza's face. Brunner made no attempt to answer. The young reporter pushed the question further, directing it toward Brunner now. “What's going on in the legislature? What's Senator Kelley up to with your project?”

Lofton was curious despite himself. He had heard Senator Kelley's name batted around the press box before. Kelley was Holyoke's representative to the State Senate, a rising politician. (“The women voted him in,” Tenace had said one day. “They voted for the bulge in his pants.”) Lofton wondered what connection Senator Kelley might have to the Redwings and their owners, but the silence went on, Liuzza staring shyly at the ground, Brunner beside him as quiet and helpful as a bull whose pasture you had just strayed into. At the mention of Kelley's name, however, the young woman had lost her distracted air. She studied the young reporter who had asked the question.

“Yes, why don't you tell us about Kelley?” Lofton said, a bit surprised at himself. He hadn't intended to do anything but listen, but asking questions was something he did instinctively, grabbing at information, at names. Also, he realized, he had wanted to see if he could get the young woman's attention. He did. She studied him now as she had studied the other reporter.

“Come on, guys,” Tenace said. “This is baseball. Don't ask questions like that. You know what Jack Brunner is doing for downtown, now, don't you?”

Brunner gave Tenace a quick, hard look, then unexpectedly turned to the reporters and smiled. He had the sort of charm that large men sometimes have, despite their size, or maybe because of it; his voice was deep, seductive in its self-confidence.

“Come on, I'm a businessman,” Brunner said. “Of course I want a profit on my buildings downtown. The renovations on my property are an investment. I'd be doing that no matter what. If it's good for the town, if it builds things up, that's what business is supposed to do.”

There was another pause. Lofton didn't quite understand; Brunner was talking not about Senator Kelley but about local business, about real estate development and downtown property.

“Sure,” Brunner went on, “Tony Liuzza and I, we have our differences off the field, but it's nothing; when you get down to it, we're both still Democrats.” Brunner put a hand on Tony Liuzza's shoulder. “Don't let anybody fool you about that.… Come on, let's enjoy the ball game.”

As a way of ending the interview, Brunner shook hands with the reporters. He would have passed over Lofton if Tenace hadn't intervened.

“Don't forget our new man. He's a real reporter. From out of town,” Tenace said, trying to be funny. “He's with the
Dispatch
now—showing the rest of these guys how it's supposed to be done.”

“Down from the big leagues, huh?” Brunner said as he shook Lofton's hand. His grip was firm, and he held the handshake longer than most men, long enough to make you want to let go. The young woman was still watching, taking in this interchange.

After the owners had left, Lofton listened to the reporters' banter. He learned that Brunner and Liuzza were both active in the Democratic party. Brunner supported the current governor. Liuzza, on the other hand, had decided to support the liberal challenger in the upcoming Democratic primaries. Liuzza had political ambition as well as family money, and it was rumored that the combination would fetch him a good-size plum—maybe a secretaryship in the Massachusetts Department of Education—if his man won the governorship.

“So there's bad blood between Brunner and Liuzza?”

Rhiner, the young Springfield reporter, shrugged.

“No,” said Tenace. “No bad blood. Brunner and Liuzza are still buddies. Weren't you listening?”

“And what about that renovation project? What's that about?”

Nobody responded, at least not right away. The reporters were watching the game, and it took a while before Rhiner decided to talk.

“Brunner owns some buildings downtown. He's hoping for some federal seed money to help with renovation, but the state has to act first. Massachusetts has to cough up some funding; then the feds will follow suit. Senator Kelley heads up the committee that decides how much money, if any, the state's going to give. So Brunner's at his mercy.… And Kelley's the one who talked Liuzza into switching sides in the governor's race.”

Lofton got the general idea. It was the usual tangled business of local politics, but when you got beneath the surface—ignored the committee meetings, the press conferences, the mounds of documents and legal abstracts—it was really pretty simple. One man controlled something the other wanted. In this case Kelley controlled the state renovation funds that Brunner needed, and the two men were on opposite sides of the political fence.

“Why doesn't Brunner just switch sides, too?” Lofton asked.

“Who knows?” the reporter said, cocking his shoulders and smirking, the same wise-guy look Lofton had seen a hundred times, on a hundred different reporters, and even once or twice in the mirror.

As the game wore on, most of the other reporters cleared out, mumbling that they'd gotten their story, if you wanted to call it that, and there was no sense in hanging around any longer tonight, no use in milking a cow that had been dead as long as the Redwings, the sorry birds. The owners and the dark-haired woman stuck the game out together down below in the first base stands. A curious triangle, Lofton thought; he couldn't quite figure them out. Tenace noticed him watching.

“The woman's name is Regina Amanti. She's Tony Liuzza's cousin,” the scorer said, “and Brunner, he's giving her a little piece of pork on the side.”

When neither Lofton nor Rhiner responded, Tenace repeated himself and nudged Lofton, just to be sure, it seemed, that the reporter had caught his meaning. When Tenace still got no response, he shook his head sadly. “You guys are really something, you know that,” he said, then called down to one of the hawkers to bring him something to eat.

Since the day he'd met Jack Brunner and Tony Liuzza, Lofton had been back to the field often. The reporters in the box knew him. They nodded to him, in the way that reporters did, quick and noncommittal, giving him a fast up-and-down, sizing him up—as if he were a woman, or an athlete on an opposing squad—then turning their attention back to the game. He knew they still regarded him as an outsider. He had not gone through the ritual with them: getting drunk; talking the gossip you could not print; bitching about local editors; complimenting their work.

He saw one of his own recent pieces on a folded page of the
Dispatch
, on the metal chair next to the Springfield reporter. If he'd wanted to, he could have recited the piece out loud.

EVEN DEAD MUST PAY

For more than three hours yesterday the corpse of a 48-year-old Hispanic woman sat slumped over a table in a Ward 3 housing project while neighbors and a county examiner tried to hire an undertaker.

In the course of writing the story, he had wandered door to door with the dead woman's sister-in-law. He'd watched from the curb while she tried to collect money from neighbors and friends to bury her brother's wife. She collected the money in twenty-four hours and gave it to the mortician, who, though he would not speak to Lofton, told the woman he would not bury welfare people anymore, not without cash up front. That whole time, and now as well, reliving the memory, Lofton thought of the dead woman slumped over the kitchen table. Her image disturbed him; he could not get it out of his mind.

He had told the reporters here that he was a correspondent for the
Globe
and that he was only doing features for the local papers. In fact, he had contacted Steve Warner, an old college friend who now worked the city desk at the Boston paper.

“How's your new wife?” Warner had asked over the telephone. Lofton had not talked to Warner for some time, since before his own second marriage, but news of weddings—like news of births and deaths—had a way of traveling.

“Maureen? She's fine.”

“Where are you two staying?”

“The cemetery,” Lofton said. It took a second for Warner to laugh. Then there was a hesitation, Warner waiting for the real answer. Lofton told him Maureen was still in Colorado; she would be here soon. He asked if the
Globe
would be interested in a story about Holyoke, a color piece. Warner was encouraging but vague. When Lofton called again, Warner was not at his desk. Lofton guessed the problem was that he'd been living too far west, out of range. He was not ready, at least not yet, to move into the city and compete with the Boston hacks on their own turf.

“Working on another special for the
Globe?”
Tenace asked the question from the side of his mouth. He wore an idiot grin, but Lofton could tell he meant no harm by what he said. Rhiner, the Springfield reporter, let out a brief, unconcealed laugh.

When the game resumed, the regulars fell back into complaining, a slow slur of complaints muttered between pitches and dropped balls. Tenace complained he was not getting paid enough for scoring. The games went on too long, too fucking long. The Springfield reporter said the new owners weren't handling the press right. They weren't baseball men; they didn't understand much of anything. They'd bought the team so they could showboat to their friends. The concessioners and the hawkers, who sat in the press box during their breaks, complained the most bitterly. The crowds were rotten, and the new owners had cut their commissions. Things were better, they said, before the old owner sold out to Brunner and Liuzza. And the team—no one could remember one this bad.