The Spoiler Read Online Free PDF Page B

California, where he’d been working on a story for the San Jose Star , about a city councilman hooked up with the gaming parlors and crack houses downtown—and with other things, too, that reached out in a complicated, tangled web to Las Vegas and to the state legislature in Sacramento. His editor at the Star had been resisting the story the whole way, every column inch. Then, and it had seemed a coincidence at the time, Lofton had gotten a call from Senator Hansen in Washington. The senator wanted Lofton to be his press secretary for the Sacramento office. Lofton was tired of fighting his editor; the story itself had become frightening, maybe dangerous; besides, he liked Senator Hansen, so he took the job. Things had been great for him at first, chumming with Hansen when the senator was in town, drinking with the governor’s boys and their blonde secretaries, but then the whole thing had gone sour in a way he didn’t like to think about anymore. So Lofton had recouped his losses: He walked out of the office and drove to his brother’s house in Colorado.
    When he first saw Maureen, she sat at the kitchen table, her back to the door, while his brother, Joe, chopped salad greens at the counter in front of her.
    â€œFrank,” his brother said, “I have somebody for you.”
    A clumsy introduction, but Joe had always been clumsy. When they were kids, he could not even shag a fly ball. He was afraid and cringed at the last minute. Other times, like running track, he was beautiful.
    At first he’d thought Joe and Maureen were together, considering the familiar way they talked and how, when standing up to help with the plates, Maureen touched his brother on the shoulder. She was the type his brother would dig up, a schoolteacher, never married, a plump, almost pretty woman with pale skin and black hair. Except there was something about her—a fierceness in her eyes, maybe, or a hollow in the cheeks, or a way of turning her head—that made her seem, from certain angles, beautiful and that told him she was not involved with his brother.
    â€œSo how do you know my brother?” he asked when Joe was off in the other room.
    â€œHe dates my cousin, Daisy,” Maureen said. “She’s a writer, too. And a bitch.”
    Lofton liked Maureen. She held her hand to her throat when she talked, and later that night, when she took him for a drive through the empty back streets of Denver, they stopped at a fashionable bar in the warehouse district and sat close to one another, touching and kissing in the gloomy, smoky air. The next morning he looked out the upstairs window of the old house she lived in, bought with the insurance money her father had left when he died. He could see over the rooftops toward the Colorado Rockies: the old brownstones, the tall buildings and steel towers, all converging at the base of the great mountains jutting out of the high plains. As she leaned over him, he noticed fine wrinkles in her face and a clear depth in her eyes. They got married with his brother watching, half smiling in the bright courthouse air.
    After they were married, Lofton decided to stay away from the dailies and work free-lance instead. With Maureen working, and her house paid for except taxes, he had a chance to make the transition. When he did not have an article, which was more often than he cared to admit, he drove down to Mile High Stadium to watch the Bears, a hot Triple A club with players who were going places. Though he enjoyed watching the games, it bothered him that all he could pick up in town were nickel-and-dime features for the local papers. Part of the reason for his difficulty, he grew to suspect, had to do with that Hansen business back in California and the rumors that went along with his sudden departure. He did not tell Maureen about any of this; her goal, it seemed, was to be happy, to be fascinated with the life around her. She was as impressed with the view out an