Hangman's Game

by Bill Syken

  For breakfast I meet my mom and Aaron at Sabrina’s, a funky spot with a goth waitstaff and a menu where even the standard breakfast dishes are tricked out—blue cheese where you might expect cheddar, challah in place of white bread. “I didn’t know Philadelphia had places like this!” my mother says excitedly, after a man with tattooed forearms and six earrings brings our menus. It does. More every week, it seems.

  “Did you have a chance to read that story I sent you the other day?” she asks.

  I think back to what story she is referring to, and then I remember: she e-mailed me an article about a new study detailing the long-term health effects of head injuries on football players. The headline claimed signs of brain trauma were being found in living players in their forties and fifties. I deleted the e-mail without reading it. Studies like this seem to come out weekly now, and my mother forwards me every one she sees. I feel like I can skip reading these stories because I’ve seen plenty of them and I grasped their point a long time ago. Football is bad for you. I know, I get it. But football is my job, and worrying about what damage might be done to my brain—and what damage might have happened already—isn’t going to help me get through my workday. I once saw a study claiming that concussions are more likely to cause long-term brain damage if you have two of them close together, and I choose to keep that factoid at the top of my thoughts, because I’ve only had one serious concussion, and that was back when I was a college quarterback. I haven’t had one since.

  “I don’t want to talk about it right now, if you don’t mind,” I say.

  “I understand,” my mother says softly. She has been on this campaign for a year now, trying to get me to quit football, suggesting one day that I could go to law school, another day into real estate, throwing out career possibilities as if I were an unfocused wastrel.

  In search of a more pleasant topic, I ask my mom what is going on around my hometown of Waverly—she still works at her old salon there, though she lives in Elmira. She begins by reporting that Charlie Wentz, my dad’s old offensive coordinator, is doing well in his recovery from prostate cancer. Grace Albini, a girl from across the street who is a few years younger than me, just moved to Namibia to work for a nonprofit group treating women with HIV—despite her parents’ best efforts to talk her out of it. The big scandal in town: my old high school teammate Robby Polchuk, who I will always remember as the guy who caught my first touchdown pass, was just arrested and charged with seventeen counts of insurance fraud.

  “Really?” I say. Robby has always been a knucklehead, but not a particularly malevolent one, and he never struck me as the criminal type.

  “It’s the craziest thing,” she says. “Robby would stop short so drivers would crash into him. He did it a couple of times a month. He had claims going against all these different insurance companies. It’s a wonder he didn’t get himself killed.”

  “What an idiot,” I say. The funny thing is that Polchuk always avoided contact when he was running routes over the middle. I guess you can become pretty desperate in ten years.

  “Scams like that are more common than you’d think,” chips in Aaron, turning toward me.

  “And this you won’t believe,” my mom says, cradling an oversized coffee mug in both hands, her eyes lighting up. “Anna is getting married.”

  This is Anna Vilius, the woman who, my mother once believed, should have been my bride. Anna was my girlfriend for my junior and senior years of high school, and my mother to this day keeps our prom photo on her mantel. The one time I asked her to remove it she declined, saying, “It’s one of the few pictures I have of you smiling.” The photo shows Anna in a strapless white gown, with long blond hair and tan shoulders gleaming, and me in a complementary white tuxedo she had picked out. We looked completely goofy, which was the idea at the time. After high school Anna went off to Michigan—her dad’s school—while I stayed in New York for college, going to Hudson Valley State. She and I made what was in retrospect an obviously doomed run at staying together despite the distance, and that lasted only to Thanksgiving break, when she informed me that she had met another guy in Ann Arbor. (That relationship did not even last to winter break, by which time I had taken up with a girl from the Hudson State volleyball team.) Even though it was Anna who had left me, my mother would often look at our prom photo and murmur the same wistful sentiment. In the olden days, she would have worn your ring.

  “She’s not marrying that same guy, is she?” I speak with forced disinterest, because I can feel my mother studying my face for signs of disappointment.

  “No, thank God,” my mother says. “She finally wised up on the rock star.” The guy we are talking about is a musician Anna had begun dating after she returned home from college with a sociology degree. He and Anna broke up and got back together again several times—even after she had, unbelievably, born this bum a son, whom she ended up raising on her own.

  “Who is it, then?” I ask.

  “Richard Wibb,” she says, giddy with her surprise.

  “Wibb? Really?”

  “Yes. Isn’t it amazing?”

  Richard Wibb was in my high school class, but I barely knew him. I remember him taking all the top-track classes, and also being very skinny and intensely shy. I never saw him out anywhere, at the diner or a football game or even the prom. I couldn’t remember seeing he and Anna talk to each other, though I think they both took French.

  “Apparently he wrote Anna a note on that Facebook site,” my mother says. “They started seeing each other, now she and her boy are moving to New York City to live with him. Isn’t that something?”

  “What’s he do in New York?”

  “He’s a lawyer,” my mother says. “A very successful one, from what I hear. And I’m told that Richard just dotes on the boy. Would you have ever guessed back in high school that those two would end up together? How many times have I said it to you, Nicky—there’s a lid for every a pot.”

  As she says this last part she casts a warm glance at Aaron and takes his hand underneath the table.

  Poor Dad.

  “Tell me, Aaron,” I say. “Any thoughts about the murder?”

  Aaron, after pulling his hand back from my mother’s, offers a long series of qualifications, which establish that he is only engaging in speculation based on second-hand information. But then he says that he understands why the police are looking hard at Jai Carson. If this were his case, Jai would be his prime target.

  “This crime feels like an angry one,” Aaron says. “A drive-by shooting, with two other people around—it’s just not smart. Wouldn’t it be better to go after your victim when he’s alone? And why leave a witness?”

  “So if the killer knew what he was doing, I’d be dead?” I say.

  “Well,” says Aaron, blinking a couple of times. “Yes.”

  I am being a smart-ass, and I take no actual offense at Aaron’s analysis. His point is a good one. But still, I let my question hang there until it becomes uncomfortable.

  I plow through my breakfast, a spinach-and-egg-white omelet, and before too long I have Aaron and my mother on the road back upstate with a pledge that I will visit them some time after minicamp.

  * * *

  Soon after I am back at the Jefferson, I receive a text from an unexpected correspondent:

  Some guys are working out at my house today. Come on by!—JC

  My first question: how did Jai get my number? Then I remember the team distributes a contact list. I imagine Jai sitting with a newspaper in one hand, the phone list in the other, matching up my name and dialing the number.

  I guess he knows who I am now. And I can imagine why he wants me to come on by.

  According to the news, Jai was interviewed by police for five hours yesterday, then released without being charged. In the worlds of talk radio and online message boards, however, Jai has been all but convicted. The argument between Jai and Samuel is now public knowledge; today’s Inquirer re-creates the scene in startling detail, in a
story that carried the bylines of five reporters.

  Jai’s alibi for the time of the murder is that he lingered with his friends in the Stark’s parking lot, drinking out of his car’s built-in cooler, and then they went to a club for several hours and then out to eat again, and then home, where Jai was collected by police. Jai, however, arrived at the club a decent interval after the shooting, and particularly damning is the fact that the crew traveled in two cars—with Jai and his pastor Cheat Sheet (real name, Lewis Whicks, juvenile arrest record for auto theft) showing up to the club much later than the other guys, and in a sedan. The sedan was black, which means it could have been the one I saw speeding away after Cecil and Samuel were shot.

  Jai’s explanation for his delayed arrival at the club was that after leaving Stark’s he was seized by an irresistible craving for a Four-Dollar Feedbag, a fast-food product of which he is a proud endorser. The Four-Dollar Feedbag consists of two small cheeseburgers, a small fries, and a chocolate-chip-and-peanut-butter cookie. “I’ll be honest with ya,” Jai says in his commercials, with a wink at the camera. “I’m in it for the cookies.” When police raised the point that on the night of the shooting Jai was coming from just having eaten a steak dinner, he responded by saying, “When I’m hungry, I eat!” It is an alibi designed both to account for his time and to please a sponsor.

  Seeing the details of Jai’s police interview in these news stories, sourced to anonymous figures close to the investigation, makes me feel justified in being circumspect with Rizotti during our questioning. But Jai has to know that I talked to the police, and that I am the only eyewitness. He is asking me over to his house for that one reason—to find out if I am for him, or against him. He wants to look me in the eye.

  I accept his invitation because I want to look back.

  CHAPTER 8

  JAI LIVES IN a gated residential neighborhood in Haddonfield, New Jersey. He resides outside the city for tax reasons. I might be doing that, too, if my superstitions didn’t lash me to the Jefferson.

  Jai’s home is an Etruscan-style mansion on what has to be at least four acres. The house has an electronic gate that opens for me when I arrive; I pull up into a large semicircular drive and park next to a black Mercedes, a white Bentley, a black Cadillac Escalade, a black Range Rover, a dark-green Prius, and, at the end, a true junker—an old boat of a car that looks to be at least fifteen years old and in horrible shape, with one panel of dark maroon, while the rest of the body is baby blue.

  The black Mercedes looks more like the shooter’s car than the Prius, though I find the precise memory of the car is fading quickly. But I look at both cars’ back bumpers, and they are clean. If anyone scraped a sticker off last night, they did a thorough job.

  Jai emerges from the front of his house to greet me. He is shirtless, wearing only black compression pants, casually displaying his broad chest and shoulders. A peacock trails listlessly by his feet.

  “Nick Gallow,” he says with a broad smile. “Welcome, my brother.”

  “So you do know my name,” I say. “The other night at Stark’s I could have sworn you had no idea who I was.”

  “I had no fucking clue,” Jai says, shaking his head and laughing. “But believe me, I know now. I done talked about that bullshit in the restaurant like you wouldn’t believe.”

  Jai says this as if it is amusing—as if one of our teammates isn’t dead, as if he isn’t at the center of a murder investigation, and certainly as if I have no right to be offended at not being recognized by a teammate of five years.

  After a pause I change the subject. “So you have a peacock.”

  “This is Peayoncé,” he says, giving the birds a gentle pat on the head. The bird bobs back and wanly ruffles her tail feathers.

  “She looks a little sad,” I say.

  “Yeah, she’s a smart gal,” Jai says, looking down at her admiringly. “She knows there’s some shit going down.”

  At least someone in the household is concerned.

  “Whose car is that?” I ask, pointing at the older one with the rust spots.

  “That’s mine, man,” Jai says. “One of mine, anyway. I call it my crunk-mobile. You recognize it?”

  “Should I?”

  “You ever see the movie Hustle & Flow?”

  “Yes,” I say. “It was great.” The movie is best known for the Oscar-winning rap “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp.” And now that Jai mentions it, the car is beginning to look familiar.

  “That’s from the movie,” Jai says. “This is the car the pimp and his girl worked out of.”

  “How’d you get it?” It is an odd piece of film memorabilia—not exactly an Aston Martin from a James Bond movie.

  “They were selling it at auction,” Jai says. “Pretty sure it was a benefit or something.”

  “How much did it run you?” Without the movie association, the beater wouldn’t have been worth $300.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “I just told my guy, get me that car, and here it is.” Jai then starts singing a song about popping his collar, and he mimes popping his collar, even though he is shirtless. He waves for me to follow him and we walk inside, him beat-boxing the instrumental notes along the way.

  We walk through the columns of the front porch, past the tall white doors and inside into a wide circular atrium with a high domed ceiling and a marble-tile floor. Inlaid in the floor, in gold script, are the words SWAGGA LIFE.

  That inscription will do wonders for the home’s resale value, no doubt.

  “I hired the same architects who worked on the Bellagio,” Jai says.

  “It shows.”

  “Here, let’s go this way,” he says, pointing through a doorway. “You got to get the tour of the house. Everyone gets the tour.”

  We walk back and to the left, and into a room filled with candy. The shelves hold large glass jars filled with Gummi worms, Tootsie Pops, gumdrops, butterscotches, peppermints, and on and on. He also has racks stocked with M&M’S, Hershey bars, Skittles, Reese’s Pieces, and bubblegum, as if he had walked into a convenience store and bought displays in toto.

  I am quietly stunned. I know that the restrictive diet my father designed for me was atypical, but still, it is shocking to find, in the home of my team’s most decorated player, this monument to everything I couldn’t have.

  “I call this Sugar Mountain,” Jai says, grabbing a pack of Reese’s Pieces. “Want anything, just go ahead and take it.”

  “No thanks,” I say, then ask, “You have kids?”

  “Two,” Jai says. Some might have found that question rude, considering there is no Mrs. Carson, but Jai treats it as normal conversation. “Boy and a girl. They’re great, man. They love this room. When their moms visit, I can’t get those kids out of here.”

  We walk on, through a spacious kitchen with a long dining bar in the middle and a grill and griddle as well as an eight-burner stove against the wall, and into Jai’s trophy room. “This is where I keep all the shit they give me,” he says nonchalantly. While I inspect the hardware, Jai rips open his pack of Reese’s Pieces and pours the candy into this mouth like he is drinking a soda.

  I look for, and find, his Defensive Player of the Year Award, which Jai won in his third season in the league. I was still in college back then, and I can remember watching Jai on television and being in awe—the nasty sacks, the open-field takedowns, the strips on running backs, the leaping interceptions. His opponents looked so overmatched that it hardly seemed fair, these ordinary humans having to suffer an assault from this otherworldly terror.

  Then I met Jai. Five years before he met me.

  We pass through into the next room, which has a flat screen on the wall, fifty inches at least. There are no chairs in this room, just a pair of gigantic mattresses, way beyond king-size. They each look like they could hold six people across, comfortably. The back mattress is elevated a couple feet higher than the front one, and a dozen black pillows line the top of each.

  “This is where I
hold my movie nights,” Jai says, and then he breaks out into a wide smile. “We turn it on in here, you know what I mean?”

  “Where do you get mattresses that big?” I ask.

  “I have them custom-designed,” Jai says. “Same dude who made the mattress for my bedroom.”

  And with this segue that rolls ever-so-naturally off his tongue, we head up the stairs.

  As we hit the landing on the second floor, Jai says, “This is my guys’ floor. Cheat Sheet. Milk Man. Todd. They all got their own rooms.”

  I don’t know Milk Man or Todd by name, but I assume that they, like Cheat Sheet, are friends from Memphis.

  “What are those guys up to today?” I ask.

  “I dunno,” he says. “They’re off somewhere. Doin’ some shit, I guess.”

  “Good guess,” I say.

  Jai laughs and continues on up the stairs. “C’mon, let’s go. My room’s one more up.”

  As we climb the spiral staircase, I cannot help but feel a rising sense of anticipation for what lies ahead. I wonder how many ladies, or pairs of ladies, or bus-sized tour groups of ladies, have made this same journey with rising curiosity and excitement.

  The bedroom is, I have to say, magnificent. First of all, it occupies the entire top floor. You just emerge from the stairs and you are in it, feet sinking into the plush black carpet.

  The bed is in the center of the room, circular, low to the floor, and turquoise. It looks like a huge inflatable pool, except that its sides are curved and made of leather.

  “Did you design that yourself?” I ask.

  “I did,” Jai says. “See the way the sides arch like that? You can get some real good angles.”

  “Angles?”

  “I can demonstrate if you like,” Jai says, taking a step toward the bed.

  “That’s fine,” I say, and wander toward Jai’s dressing area, which is entirely open and in a corner of the room. Racks of suits and dress shirts abut collections of exercise shirts and leisure wear. The shoe rack has to hold at least five dozen pairs.