Hangman's Game (11 page)

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

J
AI 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.

There is a neon sign on the wall that reads, in scripted red letters,
YES
.

“You want to see the coup de grâce?” Jai says.

He pulls back the curtains on a door to a terrace that runs nearly the length of the bedroom. The balcony has a kingly white balustrade that is open at the far right end. The opening accommodates a white slide that curls around in a wide loop and drops into the backyard swimming pool. There is no ladder back up.

“You probably know this from the show,” Jai says.

“The show?” I ask.

“
Give It Up for JC,
” he says. Of course. This is the name of Jai's reality dating show, which I managed to avoid watching. The show was modeled after
The Bachelor,
except that all of the female contestants competing for Jai's favor were allegedly virgins. After the basic cable series ended, JC and the lucky winner then filmed an NC-17-rated “deflowering” episode that was available only on pay-per-view. I place the word “deflowering” in quotes because those who saw the special—for example, Freddie—questioned whether the woman was a virgin to the porn industry, much less to sex itself.

“I'm afraid I missed it,” I say.

Jai has been the jolly tour guide up to this point, but with this remark his smile flatlines. “Time to get our workout on,” he says. “The guys are already out by the hill.”

I look to the far back of the property, where eight shirtless men are stretched out and talking to one another among a collection of sandbags and weight vests piled on the lawn. In this tony suburban development, they seemed to be doing their best to create the atmosphere of a prison yard. The guys are all linebackers, lean and powerful, some new to the team. The math dictates that two and probably three of the guys here today will not make the final roster.

“Is Too Big showing up?” I ask.

“Nah,” Jai says. “If that fat fuck tried to keep up with what we're doing today, he'd have a heart attack.”

We gather in the grassy space between Jai's pool and the tree line at the back of his property, and I quickly introduce myself to the guys, a couple of whom are fresh out of college. At six four, I am taller than all of them. At 225 pounds. I am within their range of weight. I could pass for one of them, physically.

Jai begins the workout by marching us back and forth across the lawn in a sequence of increasingly complex lunges. The sun's glare is such that I am sweating two minutes in. After about ten minutes of that we do squats while holding twenty-pound sandbags chest-high. The sandbags are loosely packed, and we have to squeeze in at the elbows to hold them steady. “No sag, punter, no sag!” Jai shouts at me when I let mine dip. Then we place the bags to the side and drop down while Jai leads us through an increasingly difficult series of planks—the last one is a killer, with our arms spread wide and our bodies just a couple inches off the ground. We hold that for a full minute. A couple of the other guys indulge in what I call exercise tourettes, grunting out “son of a bitch” or “motherfucker!”

After the planks we pick up the sandbags again and line up on the ground, facing each other, soles together, for pairs sit-ups—at the top of our raises we pass the sandbag to the player opposite us. My crunch partner is Qadra Ndukwe, a rookie wearing only black nylon shorts and white Jordan basketball shoes. Qadra's eyes are fierce at the top of each lift as he snaps the sandbag to me with a vocal exhale. As we approach fifty reps his breaths become grunts, as do mine. On the last lift I actually moan “Christ!” into the suburban afternoon.

“Liquid time,” Jai says. Lying on the lawn is a case of orange Gatorade, the bottles still on a cardboard tray with the plastic ripped open. “Drink up, y'all. We're about to start the real workout.”

The real workout is the hill, a fifteen-foot climb at the back of Jai's property, toward the tree line. It is steep and has a dirt path worn up the middle. We are to run up to the top of the hill, curl around to the left, and run down a path that is a little less steep, and then come back and do it again.

As I suck down my Gatorade, I assess the hill with confidence. My home workouts include running seventeen flights of steps up to my Jefferson apartment, usually at least twice per session. I feel confident I can handle this dirt path.

We form a line and begin our ascents. We are to do twenty climbs, in formation. The incline is steep enough to test my balance, but the biggest challenge is coping with Jai's chatter, which is nonstop. He is last in line and ostensibly talking to Qadra about the fraternity brand etched onto his right bicep. But it is closer to the truth to say that Jai is talking and Qadra happens to be nearby.