Hangman's Game

by Bill Syken

  I study the painting on the wall opposite my chair. It is one of Jessica’s, and it is, by her design, impossible to describe. It looks like there might be a wooden table in the foreground. Below the “table” is what I believe to be a human arm—but I am just guessing, and that is the point. Jessica wants her paintings to instill uncertainty. You can see that some sort of figurative action going on, but it is impossible to identify, because she has made the point of view so close. You would need to zoom out by a few factors to take in the full scene. “That’s how most people live their lives,” she once explained, tiredly, when I pressed her. “They can’t see what’s right in front of their faces. Because they’re too close to it.” At the time I took her answer as a jibe at her husband; now I wonder if she hadn’t been talking about me as well.

  I hear a flush, and then Jessica returns, striding swiftly. She repositions herself from the sofa to the purple chair opposite mine, and she sits straight up, legs crossed in those billowy paisley pants, retrenched and ready for battle.

  “So this is how it is,” she says. “For three years, we never talk about anything more personal than the ingredients in your smoothies. And now you want to unearth the secrets of Jessica’s cold, dark soul?”

  She is talking about herself in the third person. Never a good sign.

  “That doesn’t answer my question,” I say.

  “You’re not thinking that it’s because of you, are you?” she says. “That I haven’t had a child with Dan because I’m holding out hope that we can have little baby punters? Is that what you want to hear?”

  “No,” I say. “It’s the last thing I want to hear, actually.”

  “Fine,” she says. She places her hands on her knees, and holds her head high. “Here’s the truth. I don’t want to have children because I want to put an end to it all. I just don’t want things to continue. This is my gift to the world. I am putting an end to it all, or at least I am clipping off my personal branch of the tree. Think globally, act locally…”

  “What are you talking about?” I say. “What is it that you don’t want to continue?”

  She shakes her head. “I promised to answer one question,” she says. “That’s a second, and a third. Please, Nick, for the sake of all that is good and holy, in the name of God and football, let’s respect the rules of the game.”

  She picks up her wine again and resumes drinking, all the while staring me down.

  Either Jessica’s reason is a dark and difficult one, or she is just being melodramatic and she knows it: she doesn’t want to say out loud whatever she is thinking and hear how self-pitying she sounds. She does not want to find out that what she really lacks is not a solution, but courage.

  This, after all, is a woman who never attempts to sell her paintings, lest she subject herself to the indignities of the marketplace.

  “When is Dan coming home?” I ask, changing tack. Yet another question, but this one she answers.

  “Not for a couple days,” she says. “He sent me an iPhone photo last night of himself with some minister from Portugal. Want to see?”

  She offers the phone but I decline with a wave.

  “My idiot husband, he’s figuring out a way to save the European economy,” she says with a forced smile. “Meanwhile, he doesn’t have a clue that I’ve been taking birth control pills for the past four years.”

  “He sent me another message today,” I say. “I think he’s figured out about us.”

  Jessica shakes her head in disgust. “He hasn’t figured anything out, trust me.” She unfolds her legs and sips her wine.

  “Can we talk about my apartment?” I ask, with almost academic detachment.

  “Oh, the apartment,” she answers. “I hope you didn’t mind.” She adds a naughty smirk, as if all she has done is play a prank on me.

  “How did you get in?” I say. “I bet it is those damn swipe cards, isn’t it?”

  She nods. “What else would it have been?” she says. “I’m not the crowbar type. I had an old Jefferson card in my handbag.”

  “So you go to the front desk…”

  “… in a low-cut top with no bra and tell them that my card has been demagnetized. I’ve been in and out enough.…”

  “… that they just assume I gave you one. Very smart.”

  “Thank you,” Jessica says triumphantly. “If you lived in a regular apartment with a lock and key, this never would have happened.” I imagine her in my apartment, tossing my clothes, rooting through my refrigerator for bottles to overturn. I wonder if she let her anger show on her face then, if her eyes were aflame, if her movements were suddenly spastic and haphazard rather than graceful and assured.

  “How about another favor?” I say.

  “What’d you have in mind, Troy?” she says, raising her eyebrows.

  In her inviting eyes I see that in spite of what she has done, and all the tension of this evening, we can pick up again right there, just as if nothing has changed, and her vandalism would be shoved away into its compartment, and our clothes would be off in seconds. This episode wouldn’t matter at all, except to give fresh confirmation of how little anything matters.

  Which sounds good, now that I mention it.

  I rise from my chair, walk over to Jessica, remove the wineglass from her hand, and set it on the table. Then I lean down over her chair, slide my index finger gently under her chin, prompting her head to tilt her head back, and I kiss her. Before long I slide my left arm underneath her legs and my right arm around her waist. When I have her secured, I squat down and lift her up. She throws her arms around my neck, and it feels as if the whole of her body is curled into my chest.

  I carry her upstairs. It feels like this was my purpose for coming here tonight, I just didn’t know it. We arrive at the bedroom and I set her down on top of her crimson comforter. For the first time all night, Jessica’s dark eyes relax.

  I pull her top off, and then she and I race to remove her bottoms. We remove them together, the pants and her pink cotton panties coming off in one bunch. She falls backward, nude, throwing her arms overhead, waiting for me to settle in on top of her. But I stand up and close the bedroom door. Then I go to the wall switch and flick off the bedroom lights.

  From that distance I take in the sight of her lean and shadowy figure. She is lying on her side, the lines of her thin hips and shoulders caught in the dim illumination of the light from the hall seeping under the doorway.

  “Get over here,” she breathes. “Now.”

  * * *

  It is nearly 2:00 A.M. and we are still awake. Jessica lies on her stomach, head turned and resting on her hands, as I sit beside her and run my index and middle fingers slowly up and down her spine. My touch begins as a caress but turns into more of a massage as Jessica urges me to press harder. I groove more deeply with each pass from the top of her neck to the softness of her bottom. Jessica once declared to me, “I want my ass to be as tight as a Coen brothers’ movie. Not one of their comedies either. My ass is going to be like No Country for Old Men.” Jessica goes to the gym at least five times a week, taking yoga, Pilates, kickboxing, Zumba, and whatever else the teachers roll out. And while her bottom is shapely and firm as a result, it is not quite No Country for Old Men. Only in a movie can you actually edit out all the looseness.

  She closes her eyes. “Have I ever told you about my grandmother?” she asks quietly.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I don’t even know why I asked you that,” she says. “Of course I haven’t. You would remember if I told you about her. Or at least, I would remember.”

  “Tell me now,” I say. “If you’d like.”

  Her eyes pop open for a moment and then close again. “Her name is Grace. She’s in a home.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Eighty-three. But it’s not an old folks’ home, it’s an institution. She’s been in this place for nearly half a century.”

  “How come?” I stop with the rubbing.

 
; “Don’t stop, keep going,” she says, and I begin with my fingers again, pressing hard as I trace her vertebrae. “She attempted suicide when she was younger. Several times. She would swallow things—detergents, ointments, paints—and then she’d have to be rushed to the hospital. She needed to be watched, and she couldn’t be responsible for taking care of a child. My mom was six years old at the time. She had to go live with her aunt and uncle.”

  She says this quietly, without any great emotion, as if she is telling me that she has a dentist appointment tomorrow.

  “She’s getting the best care. New England’s finest families send all their crazies there. I go up every year with my mom and dad for Christmas, and on Grace’s birthday in April. It’s in western Massachusetts, on a beautiful piece of real estate—seventy acres, and with a wooded walking path and a stream. For her birthday, if the weather’s right, we’ll do a picnic and pass around bread and jams and cheeses. If you saw a picture of it, you’d have no idea anything is wrong with any of us.”

  “Sounds like a nice place,” I say. “If you’re going to be somewhere like that.”

  “You’ve seen it, sort of. That cluster of paintings in the downstairs hallway, they were all done on the property.”

  Jessica is referring to four small paintings that hang together in a grid. The paintings depict the same view of a path leading into the woods, in the four seasons of the year, all with wild and intense color. The winter view uses vivid whites and blues and blacks to impart a feeling of violent chill. In spring, the budding trees are cut through with a harsh sunrise. Summer is an overripe, suffocating green. In the fall, the leaves have gone red and orange and yellow; the forest looks as if it is on fire.

  “You did those?” I ask with surprise. The paintings are very good, but not in her style. I wonder if she painted them when she was younger and didn’t have such an aversion to straightforward representation.

  “They’re not mine. Grace did those,” Jessica says, and lifts her head up briefly to turn to the other side. “She’s a painter, too.”

  Right then I see it—not just what Jessica wanted to put an end to, but why Jessica and I have been together so long, why we fit so well together. We are more than just two underutilized people with plenty of free time.

  I have told Jessica that my father has died in a car crash, but I never told her that I believe, to some degree at least, he died by choice.

  I let a good five minutes pass in silence, trying to select a place to begin, before I realize that Jessica has fallen asleep.

  I slowly lift my left knee across her body and ease myself down on the other side of the bed. In three years we have never actually spent an overnight together. Most often we see each other in the afternoon. But if it is at night, one of us always goes home.

  Tonight I slide under the sheets, turn on my side, facing away from her, and I pass out within minutes.

  CHAPTER 27

  THE NEXT MORNING, there we are. Jessica and I sit at an antique wooden breakfast table stationed by a window looking out on her small but densely planted backyard flower garden. We eat bowls of bran flakes with slices of banana, like we are the most normal couple in the world. Still, though, I have not said anything to Jessica about what I began thinking of before I fell asleep. My hesitation now, in the cool light of day, is that if I explain to her exactly how much we have in common, it might deepen our relationship in a way that will lead to trouble. Because if she and I take a giant step forward together, we will bump into her husband. And what then?

  “Can I tell you something funny?” Jessica says, setting her spoon down in her bowl.

  “You’ve done it before.”

  “A couple days ago I was visited by a police detective—this tawdry lump of a man…”

  “Rizotti?”

  “Yes!”

  I wipe a dribble of soy milk from the corner of my mouth. “He’s the clod who questioned me the night of the shooting.”

  “Isn’t he something?” she says, spooning honey into her tea. “I still think you can see the stains on the carpet from where he drooled when he was pretending not to ogle me. Anyway, he has printouts of all your text messages.…”

  “Fuck,” I say.

  “Fuck indeed,” Jessica says. “So naturally he wanted to know all about our relationship.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That I met you a few years ago, and that you pose for me as a model every now and then,” she says. This is true. “I even showed him the drawings. I have to tell you, Nick…”

  “Yes?”

  “He looked at them rather longingly.” She smiles, delighted, as she cradles her mug.

  “Oh my,” I say. “I’m surprised this hasn’t ended up in the papers.”

  “I told the good detective what my dear old hubby does for a living, how closely he works with the Treasury Department—which includes the FBI,” Jessica says. “I suggested to him that his discretion would be appreciated. And his indiscretion would most certainly not be.”

  “I wonder how many people have seen those messages,” I say. Even if Rizotti hasn’t leaked them to the press, they are surely floating around the police department. And the district attorney’s office.

  And Jai’s defense team would have access to them as well. Which means Freddie is seeing them. I can imagine him sitting at a desk, mouth full of cruller, calling in anyone who passes by his door to come check out my texts. Hey, I know this guy!

  Of course, if Freddie has access to my phone records, he would also have access to everyone else’s involved in the case.

  I shoot Freddie a note.

  Do you guys have the same phone records the police have?

  We do. Reams of them.

  Can you e-mail them to me?

  “Who are you texting?” Jessica says.

  “Freddie,” I tell her.

  “The drug addict?” Jessica says. Apparently the stories I’ve told her about Freddie haven’t left a great impression. “What’s he up to now?”

  “Did I ever tell you he has a law degree? He’s working with the Jai Carson defense team.”

  “That’s weird,” she says. She rises and takes her bowl to the sink, her bare feet scuffling along the floor tile.

  Freddie replies.

  Check your e-mail. 512 pages of phone records. Enjoy your vacation.

  “So I think I’m going to go to the gym,” Jessica says as my prompt to leave.

  “Do you mind if I hang out here and use your computer?” I ask.

  She turns, looking as if I’d just asked her to do long division in her head.

  “Dan’s still away, right?” I ask.

  “Sure,” she says, a small smile forming. “Hang out as long as you like.” She walks up behind me, places her thin hands on my shoulders and kisses my ear. “I’ll probably go to Whole Foods after the gym. Text me if there’s anything you want.”

  Jessica sets me up in the bedroom and logs me into her laptop. She leaves for the gym and I poke around the documents Freddie has sent.

  My first thought at reviewing these phone records is that it’s frightening how deeply law enforcement can delve into people’s lives. My call and text records are there, as are Jai’s, as are Cheat Sheet’s and Too Big’s. They have also collected the phone and text records of several Stark’s employees—including “Melody,” aka Alice.

  I can’t help but start with Alice’s records. I look at the date of the shootings, beginning at around 8:15 P.M., the time that Samuel and Cecil and I arrived at Stark’s. She sent a text to a number with an area code 240 that she hadn’t called at any time prior to that. Here now. This must be the text she has told me about, the one that alerted that homeless-looking man about Samuel’s arrival at Stark’s.

  She called the same 240 number the next morning. According to her story, this was when she tried to reach him and his number wasn’t working.

  Except they talked for eleven minutes.

  Then she called the 240 number again l
ater that afternoon, for three minutes. I take out my phone and pull up my call log and see that Alice dialed that number just before she texted me to set up our champagne picnic. She called the 240 number again early that same evening, after I dropped her off at home. That call lasted six minutes.

  She called again the day Jai was arrested, at around 3:30 in the afternoon. I go onto Jai’s Twitter account and trail back in the posts. Her last call to the number was just after Jai tweeted his dinner plans. Just in case the killer hadn’t seen already.

  I dial the mystery 240 number.

  Beep-beep-beeeeep. This number is no longer in service.

  I Google the 240 area code and find that it serves central and western Maryland. I find another page that lists the towns covered by the area code. One of the towns is Hartsburg, which clicks with a tab in my memory. I have seen the name Hartsburg recently, I am sure of it.

  I search for “Hartsburg” and scan the results. Hartsburg Chamber of Commerce, Hartsburg High School, Hartsburg Historical District, Hartsburg Police Department, Hartsburg Airport, State Farm Insurance of Hartsburg, Hartsburg Hyenas.

  The Hartsburg Hyenas. Luke Reckherd’s last team.

  I click on the Hyenas link and up comes their Web page.

  At the top of the page is the team logo: a small hyena, howling up at the moon. A giant, grinning quarter moon.

  CHAPTER 28

  FROM THE GRINNING moon, the same one I saw on the bumper sticker on the back of the shooter’s car, my mind bounces to another image: Luke Reckherd at Samuel’s funeral, in his white suit and shaved head, bobbing in prayer.

  I text Aaron, asking him to run a search on Luke Reckherd to see if he has any criminal history. He answers my text with a phone call.

  “So you don’t think Jai Carson is the killer,” Aaron says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can Google, too,” he says. “I saw that Luke Reckherd was one of the guys injured by Samuel Sault. And that his whereabouts on the night of the killing were unaccounted for, at least according to one hastily written news story. What are you up to, Nick? Forget that question—I know what you’re up to. Tell me, if you discover anything about the shooter, what are you going to do about it?”