This 1987 crime classic, now in paperback for the first time, brings to light the gritty underside of minor league baseball in a way that few books have, in any genre. Nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award in the year it was published, the reputation of this novel has only increased over the years, and it is now regarded by many as one of the best sports mysteries ever written, and one of the best books about baseball.It tells the story of Frank Lofton, an itinerant reporter obsessed with a minor league team in a Massachusetts mill town. The town is plagued by arson, and with the burning city as a backdrop, Lofton follows his obsession, leading him from the mysterious death of a struggling ballplayer, to the owner's beautiful mistress, into an underworld of corruption and deceit.

THE SPOILER
A NOVEL OF BASEBALL AND MURDER
By Domenic Stansberry

THE PERMANENT PRESS

Copyright © 1987 Domenic Stansberry.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1-57962-049-3

Chapter One

Below him, in the dirt beneath the third base bleachers, a gang of kids played flip for quarters. When the game got slow, Lofton looked down past his feet, through the planks, and watched them. They played two at a time, first scratching a cross in the dirt, then sketching a circle around it. They flipped their knives through the air, seeing who could come closest, point first, to dead center.

    When a fire truck took a nearby corner, its siren lilting and whirling, echoing through all the neighboring streets at once, the kids stopped playing and pushed toward the left field gate. Frank Lofton watched them jump on their bicycles and give chase. He imagined the warm, damp air rushing by their faces, the sweat on their arms, as they pedaled after the siren, into the old immigrant neighborhood. Closer by, other teenagers leaped over a wire fence, then ran to catch up with the engine.

    Lofton couldn't blame the kids for wanting more action. The game was slow; the Holyoke Redwings were losing. The Redwings' pitcher wiped his brow, stared at the batter, then wiped his brow again. The catcher, his iron mask yanked back over his head, walked out to talk to his battery mate. More fans were moving to the top of the bleachers. They craned to see the fire, but there seemed to be nothing to see. Although fires were a familiar sight in this part of town, this time there were no flames, only the usual smoke rising from the blackened stacks of Holyoke's paper mills.

    The truck had parked nearby on Beech Street, its siren off, its lights still flashing. Two men climbed from the truck and walked to one of the wooden row houses. Lofton pulled out a cigarette. He took a couple of puffs, then felt?or imagined he felt?the familiar ache in his chest. He held the cigarette a little farther from him but did not put it out.

    The two firemen, small and distant in their yellow slickers, walked back to the truck, unable to find the fire. On the field the Redwings' pitcher went into his windup. Lofton stared at the siren lights blinking off and on, red and yellow, over and over. He heard the rumble of traffic. He felt the summer heat on his skin. Hypnotized, as people sometimes are by summer and baseball and evening lights, he let his mind empty. He tried to think about nothing at all. He touched his chest. He let out a deep breath. The doctor was playing games with me. A real joker. A fraud. Even so, Lofton supposed the doctor, despite his unfathomable manner, might be well intentioned.

    Wood snapped against rawhide, like the cracking of bone. The Glens Falls runner rounded third, put his head down, and kept going. A second later he spiked his toe into the heart of home plate, and the Holyoke Redwings trailed by four. Across the way the fire engine switched off its flashing lights and pulled into traffic, headed up the hill toward the freeway and the Old Soldiers' Home, with the kids pedaling behind.

    "False alarm," said a woman in the stands near Lofton, her voice soft and gruff, like that of an unhappy lover. Lofton shared her disappointment. Like the others, he would have liked to see a fire. He took a drag off his cigarette, then put it out against the bleachers.

* * *

    Lofton had learned from Marvin Tenace, the team scorer, that the Holyoke Redwings had never had a winning team here in Massachusetts. The Redwings were a minor league club, operated by the California Blues and franchised out to Massachusetts owners. The names of the local owners changed every few years, but the results were always the same: The Redwings lost a lot of games, and the crowds were small. The problem was not here in Holyoke, Massachusetts, Tenace told Lofton, but on the West Coast. Lofton heard the same from the players, the fans, and the crew in the press box. The California brass spent its money on its big-league talent, buying established stars from other big-league teams. It let its minor league club in Holyoke go its own way, a break-even affair for the local owners, maybe, and a write-off for the California organization, as well as a place for the players to mature.

    "Mature, hell," the center fielder Elvin Banks had told Lofton. "I'm an old man." Banks was twenty-six.

    Lofton, a free-lance writer for the Holyoke Dispatch, had been in town for only a month, since early in July. He had been a reporter for thirteen years, and it had not been too hard talking the Dispatch editors into giving him a few features, though the editors tried to steer him away from ballpark stories and into the city. Still, he spent much of his time at the ballpark. Lofton had played a few years of college ball?a good freshman season, a fair sophomore, a bad junior?but never, except in pure idleness, had he considered going professional. Even so, he was curious about the players. Most of those here were out of California, brought up from the Single A club in Redwood City. Now they found themselves at the other end of the country, in a struggling mill town where the unemployment rate was high and many of the downtown buildings had been burned and gutted by fire. The unmarried players roomed together in pairs. The lucky ones lived in redesigned convenience apartments not far from the ballpark, at the edge of the Puerto Rican neighborhood. The married men, at least those who could afford to bring their wives, lived farther out in places like Chicopee and Westfield and Springfield?anyplace that was not Holyoke.

    Though few players admitted it, most knew they did not have the talent to make the big leagues. In a way, it was worse for those who had talent, or thought they did. Lofton had heard the players gripe. There were no openings at the top, they said, not in sunny California. The big boss, Cowboy, a retired Hollywood singer, liked to hold on to his organization's minor league talent until it was overripe and rotting on the vine. Bruised bones. Broken ribs. Torn cartilage. It was not until you were useless that Cowboy put you on the block. The other clubs had gotten wise. Nobody touched dead meat. They let anyone with Cowboy's brand float off the waiver list and out into the street.

    Lofton did not know how long he would stay in Holyoke. A short, balding man in his late thirties, he had driven out from Colorado in a rusted Plymouth that threw clouds of smoke from its exhaust. While behind the wheel, he'd often looked at himself in the rearview mirror. He did not look like a man who had just left his wife. He did not took like a man who, concerned he might be dying, had slammed out of the doctor's office before getting a diagnosis. (Thinking back, he suspected his behavior that day with the doctor had been a sham; he had other reasons for wanting to run away from his life, from Maureen.) Every time he glanced in the rearview mirror, he looked fine. The police, however, did not care how he looked. They stopped him twice for the Plymouth's black exhaust, once in Nebraska, the other time just outside New York City. The car was in his wife's name, and the tickets would go to her address. Maureen had always written the checks. If she were not thinking?or caught in a moment of tenderness?Maureen might pay for the tickets. She should tear the tickets up, he thought, but he...