The Confession of Joe Cullen

by Howard Fast

  Ramos shook his head.

  “We’re divorced over a year, and I still try to date her. You ever date your ex-wife?”

  “I hate her guts, Lieutenant,” Ramos said. “I want to know what you’re thinking about Cullen.”

  Freedman took out a nail clipper and tried to smooth a ragged edge. “You believe him?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe. What the hell does maybe signify?”

  “I think he told it the way he sees it. Maybe it’s different the way somebody else sees it. Do you believe him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Just like that?”

  “This Cullen,” Freedman said, “is locked into himself. I know what that’s like. I got a wife locked into herself. Cullen sees a priest killed, a fucken lousy way to die, so goddamn awful that even a priest who believes in God screams in terror as he falls through the air — and that explodes something in Cullen. Cullen really believes he murdered the priest. When we were married, I’d talk to Sheila, I’d plead with her — I couldn’t get through. O’Healey got through to Cullen. Look, Ramos, the fact that we both believe him makes a point. I’m going to send the tape downtown to the DA. Let them bust their heads over it. If anything comes of it, we’re on page one. That can’t hurt the house. We might get a new paint job out of it.”

  Freedman gave instructions to send the tape downtown to the district attorney, and then, their shift being over, he and Ramos left. Freedman was almost six feet, but Ramos loomed over him, at least four inches taller, stooped, his black mustache drooping. Freedman covered his red hair with a soft Irish hat, and both men wore raincoats. It was about six o’clock, and the bright day had given way to a cold November rain. They turned up their coat collars and hunched over as they walked toward Eighth Avenue.

  “Lousy night,” Ramos said. “Hungry, boss?”

  “When I was a kid, I was hungry. Now I’m never hungry. I eat the goddamn junk food all day, I swear to God it’s going to kill me. You know how much cholesterol there is in a ham and cheese or a corned beef on rye? I got high blood pressure and I eat those damn pickles that are soaked with salt. I go to a doctor and I pay him forty bucks to tell me not to eat junk food.”

  “When I was a kid,” Ramos said, “you called a doctor and it was five dollars. And they came.”

  “Dreams. We could go to a movie now and eat later. Unless you got a date?”

  “Tell me something,” Ramos asked. “Why do you always try to date your ex-wife?”

  “Because she interests me. She’s sexy. She’s smart. Other women bore me.”

  “So why’d you divorce her?”

  “Because mostly we just ripped each other up. If I’d stayed married, either she’d have killed me or I’d have killed her.”

  “Yeah — yeah. Let’s eat now. I’m hungry.”

  Freedman nodded. He didn’t want to be alone tonight. If Ramos wanted to eat, he’d eat. They went to Tony Polito’s place on Eighth Avenue. It was only half-past six, and except for another occupied table, the restaurant was empty. Tony had strong mob connections, such as the mortgage to his place, and therefore was overly polite to cops. “You come early, good. My house is your house. You’re not hungry, Lieutenant. I make you a beautiful little salad of arugula, a little olive oil and vinegar, a little spaghetti—”

  “How the hell do you know that I’m not hungry?”

  “You’re never hungry, Lieutenant.”

  Ramos burst out laughing. Tony brought them a bottle of wine, white Sicilian wine, which, he explained, was the best white wine in the world.

  “This is a new line for the mob,” Ramos said. “They’re building it slow but very serious in the wine business.”

  “I’ll have a beer,” Freedman said.

  “That’s a mistake,” Ramos said, tasting the wine.

  “I’ll risk it.”

  “You’re not a very pleasant person tonight,” Ramos observed. “You’re ripping up everyone you talk to. All because your ex-wife won’t give you a date. You know what I think? I think you ought to marry her again.”

  “You think she’d be stupid enough to marry me? Forget it, and you’re wrong. I gave up on Sheila — for tonight. On the other hand, consider this. Six cops have been shot to death in the last few months by drug dealers, the city is riddled with the stuff, it’s fucken ruining the city and the country, and every time we walk through a door, we could be dead on the other side of it, and you and me sit here and stuff our mouths.”

  “What do you want me to do, Lieutenant? Eat standing up?”

  “What the hell is with you, Ramos? Doesn’t anything get to you? We just listened to Cullen’s story about the biggest drug operation maybe in the world, and cocaine coming in like it owned every seat on its own airline—”

  “So what, goddamn it, so what?”

  “Like that?”

  “Holy Mother of God, Lieutenant,” Ramos burst out. “There’s army and CIA and the State Department, not to mention the administration itself, mixed up in this business, and we’re a couple of cops from a precinct out of Lost Horizons …” His voice trailed off.

  “Yeah?”

  “Oh, shit!”

  Freedman nodded. “OK, I’m sorry. I’m pissed off. I don’t know why the hell I’m dumping on you.”

  “If you got a date with Sheila, you’d dump on her.”

  “Maybe you’re right.” Freedman wasn’t hungry, but he ate his spaghetti hungrily. He’d feel sick later, and he realized this and pushed the plate away from him, half eaten. He sat for a little while in silence, observing Ramos, who was devouring all of his food with gusto. Freedman had an ulcer and he began to feel it now, the initial thread of fire creeping up his gullet.

  “It’s the lousy food you eat.”

  “You’re eating the same lousy food.”

  “No, sir, Lieutenant. This is not lousy food. It’s the pastrami and corned beef that’s putting you under. Myself, I grew up with brown rice and beans. Never had a gut ache—”

  “Leave it alone,” Freedman growled. “I am sick of that miserable stomach of yours.” He called Tony to bring him a glass of milk.

  The milk came and Freedman drained the glass and then burst out, “It’s a goddamn farce. The whole thing’s a joke. A man tells us about a murder and a drug business that could put this whole city on crazy street, and there’s not one fucken thing we can do with it, and the whole damn world’s coming apart, and you sit there and give me a lecture on Puerto Rican food.”

  “It still don’t hurt as much as your ulcer. Let the DA worry about it.”

  “I’m going over there,” Freedman said.

  “Look, Lieutenant,” Ramos said, “they got Casablanca playing down on Fourteenth Street. We can sit down and relax.”

  “I saw it six times,” Freedman said.

  “So what? It’s got to be the best picture in the world. So you see it a seventh time.”

  Freedman shook his head. “I’m going over there, and if she doesn’t want to see me, she don’t open the door. I’m not going to break it down.”

  “Suppose she’s got a guy there? It’s legal. She’s not your wife now.”

  Outside, Ramos watched him walk away, a big, shambling man, stooped, depressed. Ramos never understood why anyone wanted to be a cop. He didn’t understand why he was a cop.

  It was a dozen blocks to the brownstone where Sheila lived in their old floor-through apartment, three flights up with no elevator. After the divorce Freedman had begged her to move to one of the new high-rises, with a doorman to see who goes in and who goes out, but she preferred her privacy and she wasn’t afraid of anything, including Freedman, who had slapped her once and in return received an iron frying pan on his skull.

  He opened the street door with his key, walked up the three flights, and then resisted the temptation to turn around and walk out of the place. If he pressed the buzzer and she didn’t open the door, he’d be even more miserable than he was right now, and if he did not press it,
at least he would avoid rejection.

  He pressed the buzzer. Suppose she had a date. Suppose she wasn’t home. There was no reason that she should sit at home. Whatever anyone said about Sheila, no one ever denied her beauty. She was a tall, black-haired, dark-eyed woman, half Irish, half Italian, and according to Freedman’s mother, not the kind of girl a Jewish boy should marry.

  “Who is it?” Sheila asked. “I ordered nothing and nothing’s coming and you didn’t ring downstairs, so if it’s not the Pope, fuck off.”

  “It’s me,” Freedman said.

  “Oh, God — you.”

  “Me — just me,” Freedman said, feeling that even the three words could be interpreted as a softening of the initial harsh response. “Please, I need to see you, Sheila — please. I’m not drunk — one beer, I’m not looking for trouble — please—”

  “Is that Puerto Rican bum you hang out with standing next to you?”

  “Ramos? Why would I bring Ramos here?”

  “Good question. Why did you bring him around every other day when we were together? Oh, shit—” She opened the door. “Come on in. I’m probably as miserable and lonely as you are.”

  “Thank you,” reminding her of a large, awkward, redheaded dog wagging his tail. She had never been able to explain, even to herself, why she had married Freedman. Maybe it was her Italian grandmother, who told her to marry a Jewish boy who would never beat up on her, just because he was a Jewish boy, which was absolutely not true, as she learned. Maybe it was his curious gentleness most of the time, except when wild anger took over, and his love of poetry. She had never met anyone else who was content to sit facing her and read poetry. Had she fallen in love with Freedman or the sonnets of Shakespeare and Keats, or the bemusing wonder of the Rubáiyát, or the love songs of Carew and Herrick? And this coming from a policeman, who spoke the language of the streets of New York, had shattered her resistance.

  “Why the hell can’t you stay away?” she asked him. “Why can’t you give me a break and not make me crazy? That’s all I ever asked from you. I didn’t ask for money. I never asked for anything.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re always sorry. OK, come in. Sit down.”

  He dropped into one of the armchairs. The big, square room was tastefully furnished, overstuffed pieces with wonderful fabrics, a colorful hand-woven Portuguese rug, long white curtains on the high windows — all of it making him wonder, as it always had, how a woman almost uneducated could have such good taste. She was a model at Cornich Dresses, in-house and photographed as well, and very decently paid — more so than any cop short of the commissioner.

  Sheila dropped into a chair facing him and asked, “What can I give you, Mel? A drink, sandwich?”

  “Nothing. I just ate.”

  “Hard day? Don’t answer. I don’t want to listen to another cop’s day.”

  “This one was different.”

  “They’re all different. Mother of God, you wallow in dung all day — you can’t wash it off.”

  “Beautiful. I need that.”

  “There we go again,” Sheila said. “No. I want to hear about today. Honestly, truly. It did something to you, something deep and a little scary. Forgive me. We won’t fight tonight. Tell me about today — please.”

  “A man walked into the house and told us he had murdered a priest.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Yeah, just like that.” And then he went on and told her all of it, and when he had finished, Sheila stared at him without commenting, and he stared back and wondered what was going on in that lovely head of hers. She broke the silence.

  “What got to you?” she wondered. “You’ve seen it all — all the blood and guts and garbage.”

  “Something shattered,” Freedman said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t get the image out of my head, the priest flung out of the plane and falling and screaming.”

  “I wish I understood you,” Sheila said. “I don’t think we would have made it anyway, because someone like me could never make it with a cop, not in a thousand years, but I’d feel better if I knew how it goes inside of you.”

  “Any more than I know what goes inside of you?” Freedman asked bleakly. “I’d quit the cops if I could have you back, but then what would I do? Who’d pay me? And for what? All I know is to rut in garbage.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Sheila said. “Nobody goes back. Come on, Mel. Take off your clothes and take a shower and we’ll crawl into bed and weep for each other.”

  Francis Luke O’Healey

  CULLEN REMEMBERED, from his very young schooldays, the apple that sat on the teacher’s desk. The custom is gone and forgotten, but in that long ago it was still observed. The apple was anonymous, a shining red object that stood there in full view of all the class, and all the class knew that whoever put it there would somehow make himself or herself known to the teacher. But then, in that long ago before a school was a battlefield, the class awaited the teacher’s response — although it was always the same and although they knew it as well as the teacher. “Indeed!” the teacher would say, picking up the apple and turning it over, and then continuing, “I see we have an apple polisher in attendance. But they do say that an apple a day keeps the doctor away, and I am sure we shall have no need of a doctor here.”

  The memory brought a smile to Cullen’s face. He had one of those broad, flat Irish faces, and its very flatness and impassiveness made his smile a total transformation. He had a wonderful smile — a good set of teeth and a smile that welcomed the world. Father O’Healey had said to him, “Joseph, you have a unique smile, and when I see it, I think of the moment God smiled. Perhaps you heard the story when you were a kid?”

  Embarrassed, Cullen shook his head.

  “An old legend. As God smiled, the smile turned into a thousand cherubim.”

  Perhaps the nicest thing that had ever been said to Cullen, and he thought of it now as he entered the shed where Father O’Healey was kept prisoner. There were two guards now on duty. They knew Cullen and made no effort to stop him, and they were not without a thread of reverence for the priest, even though he had been designated as el diablo, abogado del diablo, not to mention el comunista. They were very poor and very ordinary campesinos, and though O’Healey was of the devil, he was still a priest. Standing in front of the shed in their ill-fitting, American-made uniforms, with their old Springfield rifles — the automatic weapons were reserved for the regular army — they struck Cullen as being more comic than dangerous; and as for guarding, they hardly expected a manacled priest to walk off into the jungle. They passed Cullen through without even asking to see the contents of the brown paper bag he carried.

  Father O’Healey watched him spread the contents of the brown bag, and not without a certain amount of awe. Cullen arranged the stuff on a crate: two cans of Norwegian sardines, King Oscar brand — “The very best, for more reasons than one,” Cullen said — a package of imported Finn Crisp, ajar of Chivers dark marmalade, made of bitter Seville oranges, a Sara Lee cake with chocolate frosting, and a huge California orange.

  “You are a man of miracles,” O’Healey whispered.

  “If these are miracles, they come cheap, Father. Those local mothers live like kings. The bastards even got a freezer. That’s where the cake comes from and by now it’s defrosted. The sardines are important, being the whole fish. You got your calcium there and you got your vitamins from the orange and you got your roughage out of the Finn Crisp. You can’t live on beans alone.”

  “I have. But this? Cullen, where did you get all this nutrition stuff?”

  “You mean the food? These mothers got a generator and they order anything they want from the States.”

  “No, I don’t mean the food, Cullen. I mean the nutritional talk.”

  “Oh, that.”

  “Right. Oh, I’m grateful. Thank you, Cullen, but one thing. If you call them mothers out of respect for me, don’t.”

&n
bsp; “Motherfuckers?”

  “I heard the word before. I survived. May I have the orange first? Or does a menu come with it?”

  “You’re putting me on, Father.”

  “A little. Tell me about nutrition.”

  “I dated this army nutritionist in Nam. All she talked about was nutrition.”

  “Wonderful. You pick up things, Cullen. You see things. You remember things. That’s a gift.”

  Cullen regarded O’Healey suspiciously, but the priest’s attention was on the orange, which, although handcuffed, he was slowly and carefully peeling. “Cullen,” he said, choosing his words precisely, “doesn’t it trouble you, flying the guns down here and taking the dope back?”

  “I was afraid you’d ask me that. I was hoping you wouldn’t.”

  “Oh?”

  “Damn it, it gets tangled when a priest asks you a question like that.”

  “No priest. Same question. Oscar is asking.”

  “That son of a bitch Kovach got me the job. Why would he ask me? Father, does it bug you when I swear? I do it without thinking.”

  “I know all the words. It doesn’t bug me.”

  “All right. Kovach asks me, but he knows the answer. If I don’t, someone else will do it.”

  “Except that you’ve never committed a crime. This is criminal — if not the guns then surely the dope.”

  “I don’t know what’s a crime,” Cullen replied uneasily. “I never said this to anyone else, Father, but the way we did it in Nam, putting a gunship down on a village and raking it, so that every man, woman, and child there was shot to pieces — wasn’t that a crime?”

  “Yes.”

  “And a mortal sin?”

  “I would say yes, a mortal sin.”

  “Well, there you are.”

  “In Nam,” the priest said, “you followed orders.”

  “Does that make it different?”

  “I don’t think so, but it might make a difference in your own soul, at least the sense that you felt you were doing what’s right.”

  “I don’t know what’s right. I don’t believe I have a soul. I watched our kids being shot to pieces. I watched the VC kids being shot to pieces. Did they have souls? Maybe we were doing good, sending all those souls up to heaven. Father, it’s such bullshit. Tell me I’m crazy. Tell me it ain’t bullshit.”