The Confession of Joe Cullen

by Howard Fast

  It was all right for the moment. The streets were filled with people. But later on, as the streets emptied, that refuge would disappear. To be alone on the streets was to be marked, and sooner or later a prowl car would find him. There were places by the river where he once could have found an empty shipping carton to crawl into, but now they were the homes of the homeless. Cullen was of the company. He could never return to his apartment. Whatever it might be to others, to him it was his cave, his shelter against the world. It was barred to him forever. He had almost six hundred in cash in his pocket. It was his whole resource; he could not cash a check or go to the bank. He kept asking himself, “What do I do? Where do I go?”

  He kept walking, grateful that the rain had stopped and that the night was not too cold. He had left his apartment dressed in old flannel trousers, a sports jacket, and a London Fog raincoat. Decently dressed; there were hundreds and hundreds of men passing by dressed no different than he.

  He was at Forty-fifth Street and Seventh Avenue when the idea occurred to him, a place of refuge, at least for a few hours, that could not be connected. He went into a huge, garish drug store and began to thumb through the Manhattan directory, through the S pages. What had she said her name was? S, he knew, S-E-L, possibly, telling himself, “Cool, Cullen, cool and think. You’re in trouble over Kansas, you sort out the possible fields, you always keep a place in mind if you have to come down, come down as best you can, but cool.” Of course: Selby. She hadn’t spelled it for him, but how else could it be spelled? Ah, there, his finger on it: V. Selby. That’s what a woman did who lived alone, and she, being a DA, should have had more sense. It’s a giveaway, but people fall into a pattern, and she’d probably listed it that way since she first had a phone of her own.

  He punched out the number, and a woman’s voice answered.

  “Miss Selby? Is this Virginia Selby?”

  Doubtfully: “Yes?”

  “Miss Selby, this is Joe Cullen.”

  A long pause at the other end. He could almost feel her breath being drawn in, and then her words came slowly and carefully: “Mr. Cullen, where are you?”

  “I’m in a telephone booth in midtown, and if you don’t know, I’m wanted by the cops for a killing and I’m also wanted by the crowd that moves the dope.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s not the cops, it’s the other crowd. I think they want to kill me. I’m tired, I’m frightened, and a man tried to kill me tonight, and I swear to God I have no place to go, and if you’ll only let me have an hour of your time — after that, you can turn me over to the cops.”

  “Can you get here, to my apartment?” she asked.

  “If you want to turn me in, that’s up to you.”

  A long silence now, and then she asked, “Are you armed, Cullen?”

  “No.”

  “All right, I’m on West Eleventh Street.” She spelled out the number slowly and carefully, only two digits, but slowly and carefully. “That’s between Fifth and Sixth Avenue. Now I want you to understand this, Cullen: after we’ve talked, I will have to turn you over to the police. But I want very much to talk to you. Is it too far to walk?”

  “No, I can walk.”

  “Yes, that would be better.” She hesitated, then, “Cullen, we’re being ridiculous. Walk over to Fifth Avenue and take the bus. It should be perfectly safe. No cabs.”

  “I’d rather walk,” he said.

  “All right, if you’re not too tired.”

  He was too tired, terribly tired, but as he walked on down-town, he felt a little better. A door had opened up, a slim, precarious door, but a door nevertheless, and a few minutes ago there had been no door at all. He had no feeling about Virginia Selby that he could express: he didn’t like her, he didn’t dislike her; he had been suspicious of her and suspicious of her motives in approaching him, because as far as he could see, her motives made no sense. Yet, desperate, he had turned to her.

  He remembered that he had once been part of a family, a father and a mother, an only child — odd in an Irish family — uncles, an Uncle Henry, Uncle Bert, Aunt Mary — there were cousins once, a grandmother — and now it was gone and all the connections were gone and he could hardly remember their names, and suppose he called one of them and said, This is Joseph. I’ve just killed a man and left his body in my apartment, and I need a place to hide and rest, a hole to go to ground — then what would be the response? Not hard to imagine: We know no Joseph, we’ll call the cops, leave us alone.

  The hell with it, he told himself, because everything had been turned on its head, and let’s see what happens, and if I had any sense, I’d walk over to the precinct and turn myself in to Freedman, and in the end she’ll do it for me.

  It was one flight up in an old Village brownstone, and as she opened the door and ushered him in, he was taken aback by the bright, colorful, feminine quality of the room. As in many of the old brownstones, the main room was large and square, facing the street in this case, eighteen by eighteen feet, with a twelve-foot-high ceiling and beautiful old plaster molding, all of it painted white, as were the walls, and the main furniture being two large couches upholstered in bright flowered chintz on a yellow rug, and on each of two facing walls, large nonobjective paintings. There was color all over the room, and it held him, and to Virginia Selby there was something totally childlike in the manner of his standing inside the doorway, entranced by the room itself.

  She said, “Sit down. You must be very tired.”

  “Yes, now that I’ve stopped moving.”

  She had a drink prepared. He took off his raincoat.

  “Just drop it on the chair there.”

  He sat on another chair, not on one of the couches.

  “This is brandy,” she said. “I have coffee on the stove. Are you hungry?”

  He shook his head. She handed him the glass of brandy and he tossed it down, choking a bit over the raw fire in his throat. Virginia went into her kitchen — in the passageway between front room and back room — and came back with a tray loaded with coffeepot, cream, cups, and a plate of cake. She set it down on a table near one of the couches.

  “Sit here,” she said, indicating the couch. He rose and moved slowly. She poured the coffee and then seated herself opposite him.

  Cullen looked at the poured coffee and shook his head.

  “I have beer. Would you rather have beer?”

  He nodded, and she went into her kitchen and returned with an opened bottle and a glass. He poured the beer himself, with Virginia Selby sitting quietly and watching.

  “You’re not afraid of anything,” he said, a note of respect in his voice.

  “I’m afraid. But I’m not afraid of you, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Do you think I should be afraid of you?” she asked gently.

  Instead of replying to that, Cullen said, “What can a DA do? I mean, can you arrest me?”

  “I suppose I could. As a matter of fact, anyone can make a citizen’s arrest. I’m not going to arrest you or call the cops.”

  “You said you might.”

  “That’s what I said. I’ve changed my mind.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Can’t you just accept the fact that I’ve changed my mind?”

  “Sure. But I don’t want to accept anything anymore. I’m on their list, but until they get to me—”

  “All right. I’ll tell you why I changed my mind, Cullen. I’m at a point where nothing makes sense anymore and the shit is up to my ears. I’ve wanted to talk to you — no holds barred — since I saw the tape. Talk — and only to me, no tapes, no witnesses. I want to talk to you and I want you to talk to me. No holds barred, do you understand?”

  “I’m trying.”

  “Where do you come from?” she asked gently. “I don’t see you pushing dope. Dope is for pigs. You’re not a pig.”

  “Why not? I went to a priest to confess. I’m a fallen Catholic as low as you can fall, an
d this was my first confession in damned many years. I started to confess to Father O’Healey, but in the situation there, it would have been just dumping on him, and it wasn’t so important then, and it only became important after Father O’Healey died. You’re a Catholic, you said?”

  She nodded.

  “You ever think about the saints?”

  She shrugged. “Not enough to write home about, Cullen.”

  “Like me — until I met O’Healey. Then I began to ask myself, is he a saint? Now that’s stupid!” he exclaimed.

  “Not so stupid.”

  “No? Let me tell you something, Miss Selby—”

  “I told you — Ginny.”

  “OK, Ginny, I’m trying to make a point.” His mouth was dry. He took a long drink of the beer. “I’m trying to make this point — that I never talked like this to anyone in my life, and the only reason I do is because if I don’t get this out of my system, I’ll go crazy, because I’m not that different from all the other poor bastards who were in Nam, and I’m not asking for absolution.”

  “Oh, the hell with absolution, Cullen. We’re talking. We’re trying to exchange something.”

  “I know, I know, but I was full of this rotten feeling that I had murdered O’Healey, and you can take a man out of the church, but you don’t take the church out of him, so I walked into Saint Peter’s and tried to confess. There was an old priest in the booth, and I told him that I had murdered a priest—”

  “You told him that?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I told him. I know I told it different on the tape, but in the confession booth, I just said it flat, because that’s the way I felt, and I felt that if I tried to doctor it up or explain the details of what really happened, the confession would become a lie. Do you understand that?”

  “I think I do,” Ginny agreed. “But wasn’t he upset? My God, you tell a priest you murdered a priest—”

  “I know. Yeah. But he was old. It didn’t rattle him. He only wanted to know whether I believed in God, and he said that he couldn’t give me absolution unless I believed in God.”

  “Nothing like the church.”

  “Funny thing, I can’t lie in the confession booth. I can lie anywhere else. But I step in there and that smell hits me, everywhere, it’s always the same smell, it’s a smell as old as time, as old as my time anyway, and I’m not sure how that mixes with the fact that I’m not lying there … Do you believe in God?”

  “Sometimes,” Ginny said, smiling.

  “I did — until Nam. Even in Nam, up to a point. You’re scared enough, you don’t believe in God, you’re just face down in the mud, scrabbling for your mother’s tit and pleading with whatever might be there not to let your ass be cut to shreds by Charlie’s rapid fire — no, you don’t believe or disbelieve, you’re just scared as shit. But we cut up a village with a gunship I was flying, and then we put down there and I walked through the place.”

  She wondered whether he was conscious of the tears on his cheeks. “You don’t have to talk about it. It was a long time ago.”

  “When I dream about it, it’s now.” He spoke slowly, as if he were clutching for each word before he spoke it. “There was nothing left alive in the village, and then I saw a little girl, maybe five or six years old, and I thought she was alive because she had a smile on her face and her eyes were open, but her dress was bloody, and when I lifted it, I saw that the rapid fire had cut her practically in half. You know, I have a daughter,” he went on, flowing one thought into another. “She’s five — I don’t know, I haven’t seen her in two years — God, I don’t even know whether she remembers me or knows who I am.”

  “Lighten up,” Ginny said. “We all have garbage that we carry—”

  “No, no,” he protested. “I’m trying to connect some things, and as much as I try, I get lost.”

  “Well, that happens. How many of us ever try to look inside ourselves and make some sense out of what we are and what we do? It’s not easy.”

  “What I’m trying to say is that after I spoke to the old man at Saint Peter’s — well, the next day I spilled it all out at the precinct house. It had to come out, because after I left the church I went over to Billy Sullivan’s place and I got drunk. I’m not a good drinker. I saw too much Irish drinking when I was a kid to feel good about it, and after I finished air force training and became a pilot, I never touched the stuff. But I got awful damn drunk at Billy Sullivan’s, and the same thing happened to me that always happens when I drink too much. I fell asleep and then I woke up and my stomach felt like the pit of hell and I vomited. And then I crawled out of the bathroom and I must have been totally zonked, because there was God or Jesus or something looking at me, and He said, “Report!” not angry but very firmly. So I said that I killed people. I went to a place that I had never been to or heard about even, and they put me into a gunship and I killed. I can’t even count how many I killed and mostly they were village people in these lousy little hutches, women and kids and old people, and it was a lead-pipe cinch to knock them over, and there was always some stinking, motherfucken officer screaming at me to give him a good body count, and I don’t give a fuck, he’d tell me, whether it’s six days old or a hundred years old, you put it in the fucken body count. And that’s how I came to go to the precinct house the next day and make the tape.”

  They sat in silence after that for a minute or so. Ginny felt as close to Cullen as if she had known him a lifetime. She wondered if he had that kind of a feeling about her.

  “You don’t have to cry,” he said.

  She hadn’t realized that her eyes were heavy with tears. Cullen’s remark was so gentle that she had to tell herself specifically that this heavy, powerful man, with his thick sloping shoulders and his thick neck — a football player’s neck in her book — was neither a brute nor a fool, but a human being wounded so deeply, so terribly, that for him there could be no absolution or peace ever.

  She shook her head. She hadn’t realized, and now she went for a box of tissues.

  Wiping her eyes, she tried to explain her tears, but did it poorly. “I’m supposed to be a hard-nosed DA,” she said, “and I’m sitting here like a sentimental schoolgirl.” She tried to change her approach. “Is the tape the truth?”

  “Most of it. Captain Sanchez — he was on the chopper with me — he pushed the priest out, and then I shot him—”

  “They let you have a gun?”

  “Oscar carried the gun. No one knew he had it — except me.”

  “All right,” Ginny said, “let’s go on to another point. According to the evening news, you killed Kovach, called Lieutenant Freedman, and then fled the scene. I want to know what happened.”

  “I had a feeling about things, and I was scared — I mean, I had a sense that they would try to come after me.” He told her about Sylvia Mendoza and Father Immelman.

  “And you seriously think that they were killed because they knew about you and Father O’Healey?”

  “And the dope. Maybe.”

  “But the tape. The cops saw the tape. I saw it. The DA saw it — OK, we pass that. Where did you get the gun that killed Kovach?”

  “I can’t tell you that. Anyway, it was a floater. You can pick up a floater any time you need a gun.”

  “All right, tell me about Kovach.”

  “There’s nothing to tell. He came into my place and pulled his gun. I threw a beer bottle at him as he got off his first shot. He flinched, and the bullet seared my ribs. He threw two more shots at me as I ducked behind a chair, and then I got a clear shot with the Saturday night special, and I killed him. I didn’t want to kill him. Oh, Christ, I never liked Oscar; he was a louse; but I didn’t want to kill him. I never wanted to kill anyone — even in Nam. I killed, but I didn’t want to.”

  “And what about the wound?”

  “Nothing. I cleaned it and put a heavy bandage on it, and then I changed my shirt.”

  “Why didn’t you wait for Freedman? The wound would help in a sel
f-defense plea.”

  “Ah, come on, lady,” Cullen said hopelessly, “an illegal gun … Who’s to say who fired first?”

  “Ah, Cullen, use your head,” she begged him. “If your gun fired once and his gun fired three times —”

  Cullen shrugged.

  “You’re giving up your life. Why? Right now, from what you tell me, there’s only one safe place for you, and that’s in jail. Do you have any money?”

  “In the bank — yeah, enough.”

  “But you can’t touch it, because the moment you do they pick you up. By now, they’ve covered the banks, and by nine in the morning they’ll know where your money is. Cullen, Cullen, believe me.”

  “Why?” he wondered. “Why you — why anyone? Oh, Jesus, I’m so tired.” He rolled over and stretched out on the couch, and she noticed how he winced with pain as he changed his position. “Lady,” he said sleepily, “you’re beautiful and I’m too damn tired to get up and kiss you. Thank you.” A moment later, he was asleep.

  She glowed with that, telling herself that no one had ever said a nicer thing to her; but that thought was concocted out of the same romantic illusion that had prompted her to put her job, her career, and her future on the line to help Cullen. After all, what did she know about Cullen? Or, for that matter, what did Cullen know about Cullen? He was still struggling out of the morass of war’s stupidity, the idiocy of spending a million dollars on a trial to establish the guilt or innocence of a single killer, and then sending an army to kill a nation so that the body count could be measured against the body bags covered with the Stars and Stripes, which so proudly we hail at the twilight’s last gleaming.

  On the other hand, there was Father O’Healey, who had been thrown out of a helicopter, and was he now a saint in heaven, provided you believed in heaven, which Virginia Selby certainly did not? And what had it meant to a man like Cullen, who had slaughtered with professional ardor, to meet O’Healey, wearing sandals and a homespun robe, and ministering to the poorest of the poor, like a veritable Saint Francis, laying them to rest and closing their eyes after they had been mercilessly slain by clients of the U.S.A., armed with guns from the U.S.A. and an ideology from the land of the free and the home of the brave? Had something exploded in Cullen’s mind? Or was it actually Jesus Christ, Son of the Lord God of Hosts, who had shared a living room with Cullen and had said to him, “Explain.”