Free The Spoiler by Domenic Stansberry

record and clear eyes who worked the college campuses, the immigrant wards of Boston, the parlor halls of the wealthy, all with the same deft skill. Though Sarafis had aged more than a dozen years from the time Lofton had seen him, you couldn’t tell time had touched the man at all from the looks of the picture at the top of the newspaper page. The makeup men, the hair dye specialists, and the tailors conspired to keep him forever young.
    The real focus of the picture, though, was Senator Kelley. He moved with his hand extended—a small man, slightly burly, with his hair vaguely mussed. The camera had caught him in motion, just as his head turned away from Sarafis, so that his expression was disarming. It was Kelley’s eyes. They seemed almost black in the photograph, as if contemplating some inner depths. If you did not know the circumstance of the picture, you would have guessed that the smaller man was the one with the power and that Sarafis, stiff, smiling, practiced, was some kind of plaster dummy set up for show.
    The article said little else of substance, just the usual campaign rhetoric, but there was again brief mention of the renovation project planned for downtown Holyoke. The funding issue was currently being swatted around a committee that Kelley headed: “The Wells people are trying to foul the Holyoke money by attaching unacceptable stipulations. They don’t want it to go through, not unless we award the contracts to their cronies. They’re just daring me to kill it, knowing how much the people in my district need that project. The truth is, their stipulations are unacceptable, and I’ll kill the whole thing before we let them have their way, even if it is an election year. I’m not playing partisan politics.”
    All told, the articles on Brunner and Kelley told Lofton little he had not already learned. Senator Kelley supported the challenger Sarafis. So did Liuzza. Brunner was on the other side with the incumbent Wells. Both groups seemed to want the Holyoke project to go through; they just wanted to make sure their side got the credit and their supporters got the cream.
    As it turned out, the reporter who wrote about the fires in Holyoke was Einstein, the same reporter whose name Tenace had mentioned and who, according to the boys at the Dispatch , had left town without so much as blowing them a kiss good-bye. Lofton came across Einstein’s work often in the paper: “Maria Ramirez, mother of six, her dress torn and soot-smeared, watched as rescuers searched the debris Tuesday for the body of her sister, believed dead in the recent blaze.” In his stories Einstein made a practice of listing the owners of the buildings that burned; not one of the buildings had belonged to Brunner. One anonymous man who’d been burned out of his apartment said all the fires in Holyoke were arson, part of an insurance fraud scheme. A lieutenant on the arson squad said no, the buildings were old, they were fire traps. Sure, some of them were torched, but most went up through carelessness, just like anywhere else.
    Einstein’s most interesting stories, however, were his pieces about the Latinos, the street gang Lofton had learned about from Lou Mendoza. Over the course of several months Einstein had tracked the career of one of the gang’s leaders, and eventually he had written about the young leader’s death.
    The leader of the Latinos had been named Angelo. The pictures showed him to be in his late twenties: a good-looking, dark-skinned man, with thick, full lips and wild black hair. When he talked, he mixed the language of the street with the slogans of the sixties’ left wing, which Angelo was too young to have been part of but which he may have remembered or read about in books. He had been mobilizing the Puerto Rican community in an unusual way, at least for the leader of a street gang: giving speeches on street corners; criticizing the police and the drug