The Spoiler by Domenic Stansberry

couldn’t be sure; he only knew the stones looked like nothing women here could afford.
    â€œI’ve been doing a lot of reading down at the library, looking into the fires.”
    She stared at him, her eyes a distant blue, as if she were staring at the ocean. She seemed to enjoy sitting here. He could feel himself sweating. The five-blade fan whirring overhead did little to cool the place. The waitress set down some water and hurried away. The water was warm, without ice. He wondered when Amanti would say why she had called him. Did she have some new information?
    â€œA man named Einstein used to do the fire writing, a good job really.” Lofton paused. She did not seem to be listening to him, but glancing about the place, studying it. She enjoyed it, the slumming.
    â€œWhat happened to your face?” she asked.
    Lofton scowled, touched his cheek; he had forgotten about the other night in the park.
    â€œI slipped.”
    She nodded, smiling, and he got the impression that, improbable as it was, she somehow knew of his adventure alone at MacKenzie Field.
    â€œAnyway,” he said, wanting to see how she’d react when he contradicted the story she’d told him the other day, “according to Einstein, a lot of the locals feel someone’s behind the burning, for insurance. But all the buildings are owned by different men, no pattern at all. And Brunner doesn’t own any of them.”
    She looked at him, her eyes no longer clear blue but smoggy, like the sky over Holyoke. When the waitress came, Amanti ordered without even looking at the menu card. Apparently she had eaten here before.
    â€œSo that’s what the papers say about the owners.” She tried to say it with confidence, as if of course the papers were wrong; but her tone was quirky, quavering, and it occurred to Lofton that the way she had breezed in here, her apparent self-confidence, was a sham. He was so pleased with his observation, with her weakness, that he forgot to ask her how she knew the papers were wrong about the owners. In another moment the weakness was gone, and she held her fingertips against the tabletop in the same stiff way she had held them against the counter at her apartment.
    â€œHow long have you known Brunner?”
    She laughed. “I’ve known him awhile. He’s a friend of the family. Not my family exactly—the Liuzza family. Tony Liuzza’s my cousin.”
    â€œI know. I heard that in the press box.”
    Lofton felt, he thought—it was one of those fleeting sensations that afterward seem to have been imagination—her shoe brushing against his leg. The restaurant was unbearably hot. He could smell the scent of her perfume. He saw Amanti was hot, too, a faint trace of sweat where her hair swept over her brow.
    The food came, a thick mix of rice and tomatoes and vegetables and pork, not very good, or at least not what he had expected. He was used to the spicier Mexican food of California and, because the people were Hispanic, had thought this would be the same. They ate quietly, and he studied the turn of her cheek, the slight blush of rouge on her dark skin, near the scar. On one hand, he wanted the meal over as soon as possible—it was too hot here and he had little appetite—but on the other hand, he wanted to stretch it out. He did not look forward to spending the evening in his impossibly warm hotel. He asked her how Randy Gutierrez had come to tell her about the fires. She passed over the question. She leaned back in the booth, putting her hands underneath her legs and rocking herself, incongruously, in a way that reminded you of a teenage girl. She told him the neighborhood they were in had not always been Puerto Rican. Ten, fifteen years ago, it had been inhabited by Irish, Polish, a few Portuguese.
    â€œMy father would walk us down here sometimes, me and my brother, back when this place belonged to some Poles. My father was in the restaurant