The Spoiler by Domenic Stansberry Read Free Book Online Page B

nearby, watching him. They wore T-shirts torn at the sleeves, pants torn above the knees and split upward, exposing the dark skin of their thighs. Three or four more boys stepped out of an alleyway, and the groups called to each other in Spanish. Lofton stood between them. He saw the dark passageways of the city spreading out in front of him, saw himself lost in the city, and knew he would not be able to find the fire. He put his head down, like a bull, so no one would bother him, and headed back toward the hotel.
    The next afternoon Lofton sat at the Formica table in his room, puzzling over an assignment his editors at the Dispatch had given him, puzzling and sweating. A radio outside was blasting. The temperature was in the nineties. A Caribbean pressure cooker , said the radio weatherman. A heat wave from hurricane country . Lofton did not know if it was the heat—thickening like fog in his head—but he could not, after hustling over the hot streets all day, figure out how to play the story they wanted him to write. Everyone he had talked to, even his editors, seemed double-handed, manipulating the information for reasons of their own. The names in his notebook were becoming difficult to keep straight. He wrote them down with an old tarnished silver fountain pen, something his brother had given him years back. It was one of the few possessions that he had kept over the years; he did not take the pen out into the streets with him but left it in a drawer in his room, knowing he would lose it otherwise, leaving it behind on a bar counter or on someone else’s desk.
    Earlier that morning, when he had gone to the Dispatch , the sports editor had sent him over to the city desk, to McCullough. McCullough was the one who had sent Lofton on the funeral parlor story, to follow the woman looking for money to bury her dead sister-in-law. “I want tough, meaningful stories,” McCullough had said. Today, since the Redwings were gone on the road, McCullough wanted Lofton to talk to a man who had been assaulted on the street. When police responded to the call, McCullough told him, they had ended up arresting the victim, a man named Lou Mendoza. The cops took Mendoza on a vandalism charge, and the assailants got away.
    While McCullough gave Lofton the story, Kirpatzkex walked up. Kirpatzke was a thin, nervous man with a bad complexion and long yellowish hands he seemed unable to control. Technically Kirpatzke was the night editor, but he seemed to be around all the time. Smiling slightly, as if he were half-amused but mostly weary, he walked over, as he always did, to find out what McCullough was assigning. Kirpatzke often said nothing, just stood and listened and watched, though sometimes he cut in to change the story’s direction or to suggest killing it altogether. He irritated McCullough, Lofton could tell, but McCullough, a serious bruiser of a man, played along anyway. Press box rumor said Kirpatzke used to have a better job, more prestige, more money, up at the Springfield Post . There was a hint of scandal—something Kirpatzke had done wrong or bungled—which made Lofton curious, of course, but he did not know for sure why Kirpatzke had left the bigger Springfield paper to work at the Dispatch .
    â€œWhat story you giving him?” Kirpatzke asked.
    McCullough told him, and Kirpatzke shook his head. He waved his long yellow hands in the air, then settled them near McCullough and drummed the fingers on the desktop. “Where did you get that idea for this business, Einstein’s notes?”
    â€œEinstein?” Lofton asked. The editors ignored him. McCullough watched Kirpatzke’s fingers in the same way you might watch a roach before killing it.
    â€œFrom Einstein?” Kirpatzke repeated.
    The second time Lofton heard the name, he remembered where else he had heard it recently. It had been in the press box on the night Jack Brunner and Tony Liuzza were interviewed. After the others