Strings Attached

by Judy Blundell

  Instead, I carefully returned the papers and put the files back. I opened the next drawer and flipped through.

  I hadn’t heard a thing, not even the front door, so I was taken completely by surprise when Nate opened the door and switched on the light.

  We stared at each other for a moment. Never have I seen grief mark a man like it marked Nate. He looked like a ruin, like his clothes should be smoking. He didn’t say a word but crossed to the phone and dialed a number.

  “I found her. I’m at the office.” He paused. “Do that.” He hung up the phone but kept his hand on it, his back to me. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but you can’t change anything. And if you think I keep anything here that could incriminate me, you really are a dumb kid.”

  “Da had nothing to do with Billy’s death,” I said. “Neither did I. But did you ever think that you did?”

  He whipped his head around. “What are you saying?”

  “That morning Billy said he just wanted truth. That he was going to stop everything. I think he meant he was going to stop you, somehow. Didn’t you ever think of why he was on that train?”

  “He was lost, he got on the wrong train….”

  “Billy didn’t get lost! Don’t you know where that train was going? It was going to Babylon. He was going to see Delia. Why?”

  I’d succeeded in rocking him. “I don’t know.” He crossed to the window and pulled back the curtain.

  From behind him, I could see a man across the street standing underneath a streetlamp. The same man who’d been on the trolley.

  “It’s time for us to go,” he said. “What does any of it matter now?”

  “I’m not going out there,” I said. “You’ll have to drag me out.”

  “I can do that.”

  “Why do you hate us so much?” I whispered. We heard a noise and turned to see Delia and Da in the doorway.

  “He doesn’t hate you. He hates me,” Delia said.

  “Dee,” Nate said. “What are you doing here?” His face flushed red, but whether from anger or emotion, I didn’t know.

  “I called Mac last night,” Delia said. “He told me what you said. Is it true, Nate? You want to kill one of my family? A child?”

  “They aren’t children,” Nate said. “Do you understand? My heart was cut out! He has to pay!”

  “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?”

  “Sure,” Nate said. “But we’ll end them my way.”

  Delia casually took off her coat and draped it over the couch. She pushed up the sleeves of her sweater. “That night you told me to wait? I was used to waiting for you, so I waited a long time. I was wearing a gold jacket you’d given me. I tried to get the blood out. There was no soap up here in the bathroom, so do you know what I did?” Nate stared at Delia, a puzzled look on his face. She had his attention now. “I went downstairs to Billy’s darkroom. I found the soap. I couldn’t resist looking at his photographs. Maybe a little bit of torture — to look at Christmas pictures of you and Angela and Billy, that sort of thing. Clues to see if you loved her. I found something else.” Delia reached into the pocket of her pants and handed a small snapshot over to Nate. “Do you know what you’re looking at?”

  “A bad photograph of a car.”

  “Bad because of the angle? Do you notice the license plate? Because I think that’s the point of the photo. There were others like this. They’re all dated. Photographs of cars, of men meeting in a secluded house… taken by a boy who was supposed to wait in the car. That’s what I’m betting anyway. That meeting that the Kefauver Committee is so interested in — the one in 1945? The me
rging of the Boston mob and the Providence mob — these are the photographs.”

  “Why would Billy —”

  “He followed you, Nate. He followed you around and took photographs. And I took them all that night, to protect you. Poor scared Billy knew it, of course, but he wasn’t about to ask for them back. Until a few nights ago, when he got fed up with the lies. I think I know what he was going to do with them. Don’t you?”

  I took a sharp breath. “He was going to testify against you,” I said to Nate.

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Is it?” Delia asked. “I think back then, when he took them, he had some sort of crazy scheme in his head — he was going to blackmail you with them — but only so you’d go straight. Blackmail with an innocent heart. He just wanted you to stop. Then one day, while he was following you, he found me.”

  Nate suddenly put his hands over his face.

  “Why was he here that night with Michael? They were close, like brothers. I guess he just wanted to show off. And here we were… together, and they saw it. I don’t know what all the pictures prove. Maybe nothing. Maybe you’ll skate away on taking the Fifth. But the fact that these photographs exist… friends of yours aren’t going to like that.”

  “And the commission might not like knowing you were involved in a certain murder at a certain nightclub,” I added. “I may not have been your moll, but I was your spy. It’s not enough to convict you, I’m sure, but it will sure make you uncomfortable. And Mr. Costello won’t be happy, either.”

  Delia waited for Nate to speak, but he didn’t. She pointed to the phone.

  “So. Call off the hit man. Leave my family alone. The photographs are in a safe-deposit box. I’ll mail one a year to you if you stay away from Mac. And Kit. And Jamie. And Muddie.”

  “And Hank Greeley, too,” I said. “Stay away from him and his family.”

  “Do it, Nate,” Da said. “Or by God I’ll kill you myself if you harm my children.”

  But Nate ignored him and just looked at Delia. “Dee. Is this what’s become of us, threatening each other like this? The day of my son’s burial?”

  “I’m doing this for Billy, too,” Delia said. “I’m just carrying on what he planned.”

  For a moment I thought Nate was going to hit her. The heavy threat of violence had been in the room with us but now the air was alive with it.

  “You don’t know anything about my son.” The words were forced through his teeth. I could feel my father tense next to me, ready to spring at Nate if he had to. “It makes me sick to hear you even say his name.”

  Delia didn’t flinch. “I know you, though. I know you, Nate. And I have nothing to lose.”

  She picked up the receiver and held it out.

  Nobody moved or breathed. It seemed to take a lifetime before Nate took the receiver from her hand. He dialed a number. “Call it off. Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. Not just for tonight, for good. Yeah. Tell him to get lost fast.”

  As soon as he hung up, Delia said, “You were never a killer, Nate. I think I just did you a favor.”

  He didn’t answer. He gave her a look of such hate that this time she turned away.

  We waited, not speaking, until the soft sound of a car came from the street. Nate went to the window and looked out behind the curtain. We heard a car door slam.

  “He’s gone,” he said.

  Delia went to the window and looked out. Then she picked up her coat and brought it to me. “It’s cold,” she murmured. “Take this — your jacket isn’t warm enough.” She felt me shaking and so she did the buttons herself, like she used to when I was a kid. Then she put on my jacket.

  “Ready, Jimmy?”

  “Ready.”

  “We’re going home now,” she said. “Good-bye, Nate.”

  Nate sat at the desk, looking down at his hands.

  Delia led the way to the door. She shoved her hands in my jacket pocket and took out Muddie’s beret. She pulled it on. She turned slightly and smiled at me, a smile I didn’t understand.

  She opened the door and went out first.

  I heard a sound like a branch snapping, and then another, and at the same time Delia must have missed a step on the stairs to the walkway, because she stumbled. She went down on one knee. One arm outstretched back toward me, as if for help.

  A man in a dark overcoat hurried by, his hat pulled low, his collar up.

  I caught the outstretched hand. I dropped to the ground in time to catch Delia, to cradle her head in my lap.

  Da cried her name and fell to his knees. “No!” he said. “No.”

  Delia looked up at me, her eyes green and clear.

  “I figured I could trust him,” she said. “I just wasn’t sure.”

  Thirty-five

  Providence, Rhode Island

  December 1950

  We really hadn’t expected anyone to show up at the funeral. But people came, people I hadn’t seen in years, people who I’d never met, Delia’s old bosses, Mr. Loge and Mr. Rosemont, and their wives. Helen Rosemont hugged me and told me how after her son had been lost in the war Delia had stopped in every day on her way to work to bring her the newspaper. Peter Arnot had said she’d given him a lecture when she caught him lounging on Wickenden Street, telling him if he didn’t use his brains he was stupid, and now he was the first in his family to go to college. Story after story, not so much of her incredible kindness, because it wasn’t that, it was that she said her piece and moved on, but it was a choice piece. Or she noticed if someone needed an extra hand. Flowers came from Long Island, too, from the library where she worked, from a neighbor, from the man who ran the bookstore, from a man down the street because Delia walked his dog for him.

  Was she trying to make up for her secret life? Did it matter? We didn’t discuss it any more than we discussed how she’d died, how she’d taken the bullet meant for me.

  I didn’t know if Nate had tricked us, if he’d wanted one last revenge. We didn’t know if it had just been a mistake. Nate was in seclusion somewhere and scheduled to testify in New York.

  Everyone was back in their houses. Everyone had breakfast in the morning and dinner at night. The moon rose, and the stars came out, and the milkman delivered the milk in the morning. And Billy and Delia were dead.

  The day after Delia’s funeral, an envelope arrived at the house on Hope and Transit addressed to me. It was large and thick, and whoever had sent it had taped the back shut.

  I put it on the kitchen table. The family sat and stared at it.

  “Delia’s handwriting,” Da said.

  “Postmarked the day she died,” Jamie said.

  I slit it open with a knife. Photos tumbled out, pictures of men laughing, holding cigarettes, men leaning forward in conversation, a man leaving a car, cars pulled up into a driveway, their license plates visible. Nate Benedict, walking down a snowy driveway, smiling at the boy who held the camera.

  Da didn’t have a TV, so we went down to the bar on Wickenden to watch the hearings in New York. Thirty million Americans watched, too. Movie theaters in New York showed them, and people dropped in and out during the day, whenever they could. Every television, it seemed, was tuned in. When Frank Costello testified, he wouldn’t let them show his face, so the cameras focused on his hands. They never stopped moving, and people watched, fascinated, hearing the voice and seeing the nervous hands. That was enough to tell a story.

  Virginia Hill came in her mink stole and picture hat and told the committee that sure, she got presents and cash from men, and what of it? On the way out, she slugged a woman reporter.

  Nate invoked the Fifth Amendment twenty-seven times, plus attorney-client privilege. He wasn’t a crook, he said, just an honest attorney. And he had no personal knowledge of Miss Delia Corrigan, who lost her life so tragically on Atwells Avenue.

  Billy stayed a hero.

  The day after Nate’s testimony, I called the number on the card the man had given me outside the apartment in New York. I realiz
ed now that it hadn’t been about the Greeleys; he was trying to warn me about Nate. He told me what to do, and so I took the trolley downtown and personally delivered the photographs to the office of the FBI.

  Time passed, but not enough. Muddie fed me soup and pudding and her terrible stews, Jamie took me to the movies, Da bought me records, and I was grateful for every scrap of their caring, even though it didn’t quiet the howl of grief inside me. I couldn’t imagine going back to school, and Da didn’t suggest it. I visited Madame Flo, but I didn’t take a class. I couldn’t even walk into the diner on South Main without seeing Billy at the table, his head bent over his books. Every day I would decide to look for a job, and every day, I would walk the streets instead. I couldn’t find a way to return to my life. I couldn’t find my way anywhere good, and panic was beginning to alternate with grief.

  When you learn to sing, you learn to keep a reserve of breath in your lungs. It’s there when you need it, at the end of a phrase, to hold the note strong and clear. Did I still have a reserve somewhere deep inside? Would I ever find it?

  An evening came when Da looked at me across the kitchen table and shook his head sadly.

  “It’s time, darlin’,” he said. That night, he took my suitcase out of the closet, and left it in my room.

  The second time I left Providence for New York City, my family took me to the station. Da hugged me, and Muddie did, too. When Jamie hugged me, I whispered, “Come live in New York, I need you there.” When I pulled away, he nodded.

  “First I have to finish high school,” he said. “One of us should get a decent education.”

  “You’ll get settled in your new place?” Da said.

  “Daisy will be waiting for me. She’s says the residential hotel is a safe place — lots of dancers and actresses live there. All girls,” I added, smiling. “No men after ten o’clock.”

  “No men, period, is more like it,” Da said. “A nice boy now and then, maybe.”