Read Online The Spoiler by Domenic Stansberry - Free Book Online Page B

where they would pester him about Mendoza. He worked in the Holyoke Public Library, a fading white building with Corinthian columns. The building stood in the center of town, next to a park where teenagers idled beneath the trees, listening to their boom boxes. An old, sun-pocked man sold shaved ice from a wooden cart on the sidewalk nearby.
    Lofton wanted to know more about the fires in town. He hoped he could find out from old newspaper stories; at least they would give him a starting point. He could do better research at the Dispatch , or at the larger Springfield paper, for that matter, where part-time librarians clipped, sorted, and pasted the stories into books by subject matter, but he did not want anyone at the papers to know what he was researching.
    Besides, he preferred the pale anonymity of the public stacks, the heavy wooden tables, and the dim, cool whirring of the electric fans. Also, though it was sometimes distracting, he liked the fact that there were people in the library. He liked the old men who came every day to read the papers from Boston and New York, the children who drifted through the stacks piling up books on dragons and war heroes and ballplayers. He even recognized one of the boys, a pale-haired teenager who sat with the halfway house gang at MacKenzie Field, his baseball cap twisted backward on his head. The kid walked with a limp and had loose, sagging features. At first he thought the boy might be retarded, but hearing the kid talk to the librarian and seeing the books he hoarded changed Lofton’s mind. Still, there was something wrong with the kid. He had a hurt look on his face that made Lofton think again of his own son, who was normal enough, as far as he knew, but whom he thought of as somehow damaged, or scarred, or maybe just unhappy. More than once he looked up to see the boy staring at him, but emptily, as if he were not really there.
    Lofton scanned both papers, the Holyoke Dispatch and the Springfield Post . There was a recurring story that worked its way through the years—the back and forth in the state legislature on Holyoke’s downtown renovation project. One season it was on, the next off, and the money never got out of committee. This year, with the election coming, the issue was alive again.
    Starting with the issues from April, when the minor league season began, he studied the papers more closely. He found an opening day story which pictured the Redwings’ owners, Jack Brunner and Tony Liuzza, standing with the mayor of Holyoke at MacKenzie Field. The three men smiled for the camera. Liuzza told the reporter that he and Brunner had gotten to know each other through meetings of the local Democratic party.
    â€œJack just came up to me one day and told me the Redwings were up for sale. Being a frustrated ballplayer myself, I couldn’t resist. I liked the idea of free tickets to the games.”
    The story told him little he didn’t already know. It mentioned how Brunner’s construction company, Bruconn, planned on renovating an abandoned mill downtown: American Paper. The more Lofton thought about it, the more buying the team seemed a good move for Brunner, something to endear him, and his business interests, to the local politicians. Only, with his partner, Tony Liuzza, flip-flopping in the Democratic party, the situation might be going sour. No wonder, Lofton thought, there had been tension between Brunner and Liuzza that night in the press box.
    Lofton found some business on Kelley, too, a story announcing how the state senator had endorsed Richard Sarafis for governor. “I support Richard Sarafis because he’s the candidate who cares about the disenfranchised, the people away from the power centers, and that includes not only the citizens of Holyoke but all of western Massachusetts.”
    Lofton had seen Richard Sarafis speak once, back when Sarafis was a young liberal—as Senator Kelley was now—the candidate with the clean