Hangman's Game (16 page)

“I'm okay,” I say. “Thank you.” I rise and sniffle again and pull four twenties from my wallet and hand them to her. She steps to her desk and tucks the money into a paisley purse. Then she returns her attention to me, looking at me warmly, head tilted.

“You sure you're all right?” she asks.

“I'm disappointed we didn't get the license plate,” I say, and then add, “But I know you did your best.”

“So did you,” she says, and then steps forward and hugs me, the lightness of her limbs accentuating the heaviness of my own. She holds on longer than I would have expected, before letting go and stepping back.

“Take care of yourself, Nick,” she says.

“You too, Corina.”

“Thank you,” she says. “And remember, you have more choices than you think you do.”

I walk back down the narrow stairs, speeding up as I descend, and wondering exactly what I might have said while I was under to make her tell me that.

*   *   *

After the session, I return to the Jefferson. I have a task awaiting me there, one that is refreshingly simple: I need to clean up the mess in my apartment. The odors from my splattered food have only become more acrid after a night of neglect. But at least there are no insects. I expected that they might feast on the syrup or the almond butter or the yogurt or the pomegranate preserves, but pestilence hasn't risen up to the seventeenth floor yet. This is one of the benefits of living in a high-rise in which most residents come and go so quickly. While I do my own housecleaning as part of my deal, the building's other units are thoroughly cleaned when tenants turn over.

Revving up Eddie Floyd's album
Rare Stamps
from the digital files on my computer, I begin by sorting through my soiled clothes, with the initial thought that I will create two piles: one for items that can be salvaged and another that will go straight to the garbage. But I soon decide that the right move is to trash everything. I can pilfer new athletic gear from the facility, and my civilian wardrobe is in need of an update anyway.

As I stuff the old mess into garbage bags, I notice that there is a pattern to the vandalism. Everything that has been destroyed—the socks and the CDs and the food—has something in common: it is all mine. Anything provided by the Jefferson had been left alone. None of their plates has been shattered, none of their drinking glasses broken, no stuffing has been ripped from the sofa.

The attack was made exclusively on that which belongs to me.

 

CHAPTER 13

I
SPEND THE
rest of the evening at my laptop, studying Footballmania's murder blog. The first stories I read intently, but soon I turn to skimming, and then to clicking the computer's power button and letting the screen go black. The more I read of these stories, the more they distill to one essential fact: Rizotti is getting nowhere. A killer is getting away with it.

My sleep is no more restful than it was the night before. I rise at six, and after a shower and a bowl of steel-cut oatmeal, I power up my laptop and log onto Footballmania again, hoping for some new development, perhaps even an arrest. Again I am disappointed.

A new story, though, catches my eye. Its headline is “Bonus Baby: Woman Carrying Sault's Child Claims Guaranteed Millions.” The picture shows a young white woman, pregnant and blond, staring directly at the camera. She is rosy-cheeked, but her blue eyes are expressionless.

Her name is Kaylee Wise, the story says. Kaylee is only nineteen years old, and, like Samuel, she has lived in Vickers, Alabama, her entire life. Unfortunately, she is not quoted in the story. She is spoken for by her attorney, Fred Wilde, who is also credited with taking her photo. It seems like Mr. Wilde has a real full-service operation.

The story leaves me wanting to know more about this young woman hiding behind her lawyer—if she is the girlfriend Tanner mentioned, and what she understood her relationship with him to be. I am also curious to know what Kaylee's family thought of Samuel, and what his family thought of her. If Vickers is as behind-the-times as Cecil described it, I can imagine that an interracial relationship might not have had universal approval.

I pick up my phone and dial Freddie.

“Mmph,” Freddie says, answering on the sixth ring.

“Wake up, sunshine,” I say.

“Hangman?” he says, his throat thick. “What the shit? It's not even eight o'clock.”

“I wanted to catch you before you go.”

“Go? Go where?”

“The funeral? You're flying to Alabama today, right?”

After a long silence, Freddie says, “Fuck.”

I hear sheets rustling, then a thud, and the sound of a glass breaking. Then a weak fart, and a muttering of curse words.

To think, that before too many hours has passed, this man would be consoling a grieving family.

“My question for you: can I come?”

“What?”

“I'd like to come to the funeral. Is there a seat on the plane for me?”

“It's my fucking plane,” Freddie grumbles. “If you want a seat, it's yours.”

“Charter terminal at nine thirty, right?”

“If you say so,” he says, and hangs up.

I wonder if Freddie can make it on time. The drive from his place to the airport takes more than an hour. If I hadn't thought to call him, he probably would have missed the trip entirely.

*   *   *

I dress for the funeral in, for lack of other options, the suit jacket and pants from the night of the murder. The pants were pushed to the side of my closet with my collared shirts, and they escaped the attention of the vandal. I have yet to replace the black shoes that became blood-soaked on the night of the shooting, so I wear my brown pair, hoping that no one will be too perturbed at the fashion breach.

When I arrive at the charter terminal, the other members of the traveling party are already assembled. Tanner is there, as well as our team's general manager, Clint Udall. Broad-backed and with a thick neck, Udall was a fullback for Dallas in the 1980s. He is bald and has a bushy brown mustache. Both Udall and Tanner, I notice, have laptop bags slung over their shoulders. Publicists O'Dwyer and Cordero are also on hand, a reminder that Samuel's funeral will draw national media attention. The only person missing: Freddie, of course.

“Gallow,” Udall says. “I'm surprised to see you here.”

“Freddie mentioned that the team was sending a delegation,” I say.

“Glad you're joining in,” Udall says. “What's the latest on Cecil?”

“They're hoping that he will be going home tomorrow or the day after.” Vicki had reported this morning that Cecil had eaten something close to a meal last night for the first time. It was just a matter of that meal passing through him with flying colors, so to speak.

“I like Cecil a lot,” Udall says. “Sometimes I call him just to see what he thinks about a player we're interested in. It's amazing how many small conferences and arena leagues he keeps up with.”

Udall begins talking about the talents that you can find these days in arena leagues, and he speculates about how an arena-league champ could probably beat a big-time college team. As he chatters on, I feel like he is doing what so many men do, clinging to sports talk to keep from discussing more difficult subjects.

Meanwhile I notice Tanner, standing off on his own, wearing a trim black suit and a plain black tie, repeatedly looking at his watch. It is now 9:40, ten minutes past the assigned time, and Freddie is still not here. Tanner fines players for showing up even a minute late for a meeting; this has to be verging on a capital offense. We would likely have left Freddie behind if he wasn't the owner's son.

At 9:46, Freddie strolls into the waiting area. The rest of us are in our funeral clothes, but he is wearing tan cargo shorts and a black T-shirt with orange lettering that reads
I HATE HIPSTERS
. Purple-tinted Oakley sunglasses complete the ensemble. He has a garment bag slung over one shoulder.

“Let's get this bullshit on the road,” he declares energetically, as if we have been waiting not for his arrival, but his leadership. As he passes me he looks down at my feet and snickers. “Nice shoes.”

We march across the tarmac to the Gladstone family jet. Inside the cabin I settle into a cream-colored leather seat that draws me down and envelops me. Freddie takes the seat next to mine, and immediately pops an Ambien. Tanner and Udall settle into the row in front of me.

After we take off, Tanner pulls out his laptop and begins reviewing video of defensive ends. Across the aisle I can see Udall looking at footage on his laptop, too.

Udall is scouting linebackers. The team is preparing to replace Jai.

Turning my eyes from this aloof piece of personnel management, I look out the window as we fly—it's funny how from high altitude, athletic fields are the most identifiable manmade elements of the landscape—and I think about all the people I might meet today. Not just Kaylee Wise, but also Samuel's parents, his friends and neighbors, coaches and teammates. I wonder what the chances are that the killer will be there, in my sights, maybe even looking me in the eye and shaking my hand.

At my dad's funeral, I learned a defining detail about his death, but that happened simply because I had my eyes open, and I knew the attendees so well. The man who gave my father his fatal nudge, it turned out, had been coming to our house my whole life.

My dad died in a crash on Marker's Hollow Road, not too far from our house. The road winds through an unpopulated valley, and has a posted speed limit of twenty-five miles per hour, reduced to fifteen along its most treacherous curves. Sometimes when we were kids and we had been out to a family dinner, my dad would drive down Marker's Hollow before heading home. He would usually do this in the fall or winter, when the trees were bare. If the moon was full, he might turn off the car's headlights to increase the spook factor. Swooping up and to the left, down and to the right, the drive felt like a roller-coaster ride. Doug and I would accentuate every hard turn with a cry that was a mix of fright and exhilaration. Sometimes my dad would hit the gas as we came over a crest and the car would take a little air, and then we'd really whoop. My mother was the only one who didn't get in on the fun. “Enough!” she would screech. Her yelling would sometimes continue long after we had pulled into the driveway, safe at home.

Looking back now, I could see that my mom's fretful shrieks were as much the point for my dad as our gleeful screams. There was plenty that my mom was afraid of and my dad wasn't, and he liked to get that on the record.

Even now, knowing how he met his end, those drives did not seem reckless. My dad lived in the area his whole life and knew every curve on Marker's Hollow. None of its bends could take him by surprise. Driving that road was like reciting the ABCs.

On the night he died, he had been drinking at Liston's, a tavern that he had frequented often enough that they kept a mug with his initials on it behind the bar. Posthumous blood alcohol tests indicated he was within the legal limits, corroborating what friends said, which is that he'd had only a couple of light beers. But the other impairment, the one that wouldn't show up in any blood alcohol tests, was the one I learned about at his funeral: my dad had been in a fight at Liston's before storming out. And when my dad became angry, he did not settle down easily. Calming him down was like trying to get lava back in the volcano.

The funeral was on a punishingly cold day, with the temperature in single digits. I remember the browned grass at the cemetery crunching beneath my shoes. Still, the skies were clear and hundreds of people crowded the graveside service. My uncle Rory, my dad's brother, showed up drunk, and in a tie that only went halfway down his belly. Among the mourners were my dad's current crop of high school players. The team arrived together on a school bus, wearing their green-and-white football uniforms over their long underwear. One-by-one they marched to where my mother and Doug and I sat and they all shook our hands. I had met many of these kids before, as my dad liked to bring me around to practice and show me off as an example of what they could achieve, if they only listened to him. At these practices it was plain to see that many of those kids loathed my dad. My dad knew this, too, but he didn't care. His argument was that the players would appreciate his hard ways when they were older and had children of their own.

My dad's point seemed validated at his funeral, because at least a couple hundred of his former players were there, many of them so crestfallen one might imagine it was their own father who had died. The tears were many, the flower arrangements bountiful.

The tribute that caught my eye, though, was sent by a friend of my dad's named George Chamberlain. The assemblage of white blossoms was towering; you would think my father had just won the Triple Crown. And while George had known my father nearly all his life, sometimes coming by on Sundays to watch the games with the neighborhood guys, they were not each other's favorite people. From what I knew of George's finances, the floral display was beyond his means. His son Gary, who was in my class, wore the same winter coat all through high school, even after it became too tight and short on him. Over the years I had heard more than once that George had been laid off from some low-level managerial position. Dad would recount George's career failings, if not with glee exactly, then at least with an absence of sympathy.

So when I saw George's giant wreath, I wondered if I was missing something.

After the service I asked Charlie Wentz about it. Charlie was my dad's offensive coordinator and his closest friend. He is also a bachelor; he had dinner over at the house at least once a week. And he was part of my dad's drinking crew at Liston's, as was George Chamberlain.

“That's some display George sent,” I said to Charlie.