The Spoiler by Domenic Stansberry Page B

thin, painful smile was probably because he knew how people hated him, and he probably hated himself, at least a little bit anyway. Tony Liuzza had attended private school, Amanti explained between sips from her water glass, and Amanti’s mother had wanted to send her children, particularly her son, to such schools. The best Amanti’s father could afford was the local Catholic schools, so the boy went there. He went wild anyway. He hung around with the kids from the tenements. Then one day her brother got too drunk, took out the family car, and lost control on an ice-slick curve; the car hit the guardrail once, then a second time, and flipped over into the ravine below. Six months later Amanti’s father died, too, a heart attack. “After that Uncle Liuzza loosened up with his money—enough so my mother could close down the restaurant and send me off to college in Boston. But that stopped a couple years back. My uncle doesn’t approve of the way I live these days. Neither does my mother.” Amanti gave him a shy, evocative look that seemed to hide some deeper embarrassment. “My mother has what she wants, though. My uncle and aunt let her move into their house, gave her a bedroom all her own—Cousin Tony’s old room.”
    Amanti had stopped rocking. She did not look like a little girl anymore. Neither of them spoke for a while. Lofton listened to the slow whirring of the ceiling fan overhead. He still needed to know why she was sending him to talk to Randy Gutierrez. Had the shortstop confided in Amanti? He also needed to know more about her relationship to Brunner. Tenace had made plenty of insinuations, but the scorer, Lofton knew, had a mind that ran down a one-track road to the garbage dump. Lofton was about to ask her some questions, but Amanti broke the silence first. Her voice had a whole new tone.
    â€œWhat do you want in Holyoke?”
    Lofton was taken aback. He had no answer ready.
    â€œThis is where my car ran out of gas,” he said, and felt a thin, clever smile crease his face. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling.
    â€œThat’s baloney.”
    She was right, of course. He could try to tell her the truth, he supposed. He could tell her that he had been on the verge of the good, happy life when something that resembled the big black shadow of death had fallen across his bed one night. (He might be dying, he might not, but that wasn’t the point; even the doctor had been clever enough to see that.) The shadow had whispered to him in a voice that was seductive all right, sweet as failure, and he had gotten in the car so he wouldn’t have to listen, so he could go for a long drive in which he was nobody, just a pair of headlights in a great big fog. The only trouble was that sooner or later you had to stop, and then you were somebody again, and the voice started up all over. He could have told Amanti this, he guessed, if he could find the words, but there’s no way to tell people such things. Instead, he got clever again. “I’d been driving all night, and I saw a sign that read: ‘Journalist wanted. Fame and fortune next three exits.’ I thought there might be something to it.… So you tell me. What do you want?”
    She regarded him for a long moment. Her eyes were darkened with some sort of liner. Behind the darkness, though, the eyes glittered. The glittering eyes admired his cleverness but at the same time told him she knew it was still baloney.
    â€œBeen married?” he asked.
    â€œNo,” she said. “I haven’t had that pleasure.” He heard irony in her last remark, and—though she tried to keep it out—some resentment. He could not say why, but he felt a sudden surge of affection for Amanti.
    After the meal he walked Amanti to her car, parked in a municipal lot off High Street. Outside, a man on the sidewalk behind them let out a high whistle and a shout. Lofton turned, but the man was not concerned