“It’s Jimmy’s fault? Is that how you see it?” Delia glided into the room, stripping off her gloves and tossing them on the desk in a gesture that rang with such ease I knew she’d done it countless times before.
Da moved into the room and stood beside me. “Why did you come here?” he said in an anguished whisper to me. I could see his problem. He couldn’t send me out there, out into the streets of Federal Hill, where a killer might be waiting. But he didn’t want me here, either.
Nate was still staring at Delia. “How did you get in?”
“Through the kitchen door,” Delia said. “The key you gave me so long ago. Did you forget? You should have changed the locks.”
“I don’t want to see you again. Haven’t I endured enough on this day?”
“I want to make a deal,” Delia said.
“I thought we were done with deals.” Delia crossed in front of me. She stood, blocking me slightly, facing Nate. “I’m sorry about Billy.” Nate said nothing.
“There is nothing else on earth worse than what you’re feeling,” Delia said. “What I don’t know is why you would get pleasure out of giving that pain to someone else.”
“Not pleasure,” Nate said. “Satisfaction.”
“You take satisfaction in killing? Is that what you’ve become?”
“What does it matter what I’ve become —”
“It’s what I was always afraid of in you, this… hardness. Billy was coming to see me that day. Why don’t you blame me?”
“Maybe I do,” Nate said. “Maybe you’re not safe anymore, either.”
“Did you tell him where I lived?”
“Of course not. But he worked in the office in the summers. He must have seen a check, an address.”
“So he knew you paid off your mistress. The three of us were locked in a lie, weren’t we?” Delia took another step toward Nate. “You buried him today. Hundreds of mourners were there to bury William Benedict, soldier, scholar, hero. Not the killer of his cousin who lived with that lie—”
Nate took a step toward her and stopped.
“Do you want to bury him a hero or a killer?”
“He is a hero!”
“He was a poor boy who lost his head one night and crashed a car. A boy was thrown from the car into a tree. Was it Billy’s fault? Yes. You told him that night that it wasn’t. That was one lie he couldn’t live with. You told him it was your fault. You told him you’d never see me again.
You told him that you could make it all go away. That was the second lie. Was that the right thing to do, Nate?”
“He couldn’t have lived with it.”
“He did!” Delia shouted. “He lived with it every day!”
Nate sat down, as though his legs couldn’t support him.
“I know you’re afraid I’ll be getting a subpoena from Kefauver,” Delia said. “That’s why you sent someone out to check up on me a few weeks ago, isn’t it?”
He didn’t answer.
“I figure I owe you this — telling you to your face that I’ll testify. I’ll spill every detail if you don’t call this off.”
“You’ve got nothing to say that would hurt me.”
“You’d like to believe that, but it’s not true,” she said quietly. “Let’s start with obstruction of justice when it came to the death of your nephew. I don’t blame Billy — he was just a kid. But you should’ve known better.”
Nate laughed, a mirthless bark. “You’ve got to be kidding me. You think you can threaten me? You think I’m going to back down? You don’t have one shred of evidence that Billy was driving that car.”
“I have a police report.”
Nate was silent, and I looked at Delia. She didn’t look triumphant, she just looked sad.
“Remember, you took Billy home and you said, ‘I’ll be back.’ You left me here. And I waited for you. A bottle of wine was delivered from the police commissioner. Wrapped around it was the original police report. The one the patrolman wrote that said Billy was at the wheel. You must have paid him well. It was a very nice bottle of wine. I drank all of it.”
The air in the room seemed to compress and flatten, making it hard to breathe. Nate stood up. He was very still, but I knew from dance how stillness could explode into movement.
“So what do you say, Nate?” Da asked. “Why don’t you let us walk out of here, free and clear? Why don’t we just end things here?”