Hangman's Game (10 page)

“It's okay, Mom,” I say, stepping back after a moment. “They didn't get me.” I hold my arms out. “See, no holes.” She tries to smile, though I can see tears well in her eyes. “Hello, Aaron,” I say as he sidles forward to stand beside my mother.

“That has to have been a horrible thing to witness,” Aaron says. He has a black roller bag at his side.

“It was.” Even after all this time, and in these strange circumstances, I do not find it natural to make chitchat with this man. I can't help but wonder what my dad would say if he saw us talking like family.

“Come on in,” I say.

“Apologies for our appearance,” Aaron says as they enter. He deposits his roller bag by the door. “We're still in our country outfits.”

“No worries,” I say.

“How is Cecil doing?” my mother asks as she takes a seat in the armchair, while Aaron goes to the sofa.

“Could be worse,” I say.

“Is Vicki with Cecil?”

“She's here,” I say. “The girls, too. They flew in from Ohio this morning.”

My mother smiles stiffly. I can see she feels guilty. Vicki was at Cecil's side before my mother even knew what was going on.

“How have the police been with you?” asks Aaron.

“About what I'd expect. Just doing their job.”

“If anything is going on that you think isn't right, let me know,” he says. “I used to be on the force.…”

“Yes, I know,” I say. “You used to be on the force.”

I avoided any obvious disdain, but Aaron catches it anyway, this reference to his having quit his policeman's job.

“Yes, I used to be on the force,” Aaron says patiently. “And I've been training officers for more than a decade now, and I know men and women in just about every department in the Northeast. If you feel like something's going on that isn't right, just give me a call.”

“He wants to help, Nicky,” my mother says.

“I appreciate that,” I say. “I really do.”

“This has to have been a great mental strain on you,” Aaron says. “Your mother and I wondered if you might want to come to our cabin for a few days. You'd have your own bedroom. There are hiking trails nearby. Couldn't be more peaceful. We could leave now if you wanted, you could sleep in the back of the car.…”

“I can't go anywhere right now,” I say.

“How come?” Aaron says, concerned. “Did the police tell you not to leave town?”

“No, it's not that. I have minicamp in a few days. Not a good time for me to go away.”

“Oh,” my mother sighs, as for the thousandth time, football takes priority.

“Surely with all that's happened,” says Aaron, “the team will understand if you ask for some time off.…”

“Surely they won't,” I say flatly.

“But…” my mother begins.

“The beat goes on,” I say, rubbing my eyes and leaning against a wall. “And on and on and on. It's been a long day, Mom.”

“I know it has,” my mother says.

It is then that I think of Aaron's black roller bag by the door. “Where are you guys staying?” I ask. My apartment has one bedroom.

My mother and Aaron look at each other. I sense they haven't planned out their lodgings for the night.

“You guys are welcome to crash here,” I say, but with something less than pure enthusiasm. “I'll be fine on the sofa.”

There is an awkward pause.

“Let's find a hotel,” Aaron says to my mother.

“There's plenty of good ones nearby,” I say.

While Aaron steps to the kitchen and punches around on his phone to see what's available, my mother and I talk some more, though she shifts the topic of conversation to my furnishings, and how they might be rearranged. Soon Aaron reports that he has made a reservation at a Sheraton a few blocks north, near the city's museum row.

“That's perfect,” I say. “There's a good breakfast spot around the corner. Let's meet there tomorrow. Nine thirty.” That is later than I normally eat breakfast, but it will give some time for the business crowd to clear out.

After I close the door behind them, I lie back down on the sofa. I wish my dad were alive. I wonder what advice he would have for me. Probably that he is sorry that I had witnessed a tragedy, but we all experience awful things if we live long enough. The only thing we can do is to keep fighting. Keep fighting—that was always his message.

Right until he drove himself into a tree.

 

CHAPTER 7

I
PLAY THE
rest of the Irma Thomas record and I end up falling asleep on the sofa. At five in the morning I wake from a nightmare. The details evaporate immediately, but I know I had been talking to my dad. In the weeks after his crash he visited my dreams nightly, to the point to where I considered believing in ghosts. Now he rarely comes by. In this dream he and I were on a boat, and he was wearing a plaid bathing suit, like the kind he used to wear on our annual family vacation at Cayuga Lake. He was fishing, and he caught a big one. He always said that he would be embarrassed to come home from a fishing trip without having caught anything. Everything else I forget.

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.