The Confession of Joe Cullen

by Howard Fast

  Ramos drove them to the morgue. The first gray hint of morning was in the air. The rain had stopped and the clouds were breaking up. It would be a cold, clean November day, with blue sky overhead.

  But not for Cullen, Freedman thought.

  “I swear I do not know what the hell we’re doing here. I hate morgues.”

  “I want to see him.”

  “OK, OK, you want to see him. You know, Mel, you’re crazy, I’m crazy. Every cop in this city is crazy. You want to see a dead man. Say hello for me.”

  “You’re in a sweet mood.”

  “They woke me at four. What kind of mood do you want?”

  The people at the morgue were not happy either. It was the end of the night shift at a place where nobody laughed very much. “I thought he belonged to Manhattan South,” the morgue attendant said as he pulled out the locker.

  “We own a little piece of him.”

  “Funny,” the morgue attendant said. He uncovered the body.

  “Forty-five,” Ramos said. “Not nice.”

  Freedman turned away after a single look. Cullen’s head was open from the heavy forty-five-caliber impact. It had been taped together for cosmetic purposes. His face, thankfully, as Freedman thought, was uninjured. His eyes were closed, his skin white as a cotton sheet.

  “Seen enough?” Ramos asked.

  “I bet there’s no claim on the body,” Freedman said once they were back on the street. “Did he have any relatives? Did he say? Jesus, what a fucked-up society we are! No families anymore, just bits of flesh floating around.”

  “Lovely. You’re a prince of good cheer. Do you know something? Next week is Thanksgiving.”

  “Yeah. Let’s have some coffee. I’m cold. I rushed out without a coat. I don’t know. Did I leave it at Sheila’s?”

  They went into a lunchroom for coffee and Danish, and Freedman called Sheila. It was seven forty-five now, and Freedman thought surely Sheila would be dressing to go to work. “What time is it?” she asked sleepily.

  “Honey, did I wake you? It’s almost eight.”

  “Drop dead,” she said tiredly, and cut the connection.

  “I’m no good,” Freedman said to Ramos. “I’m so tired I can’t think straight. Drive me home and I’ll get an hour of sleep before I hit the house. How about you?”

  “I’m all right.”

  In his furnished room, Freedman set the alarm for an hour, kicked off his shoes, and fell face down on the bed, fully clothed. He was asleep in a moment, and it felt like an instant later when the alarm went off. He showered and shaved, put on a fresh pair of gray flannels, shook out his brown tweed jacket in which he had just fallen asleep, and donned a fresh blue Oxford shirt and knitted tie. He was neither original nor creative in his choice of wardrobe. It was nine-thirty when he arrived at the precinct house, and he was properly chilled.

  Virginia Selby was waiting in his office, and he nodded and said, “Morning, Ginny.” He was not crazy about the district attorney’s end of law and order, nor about the personnel who ran it.

  “Joe Cullen’s dead,” she said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Last night?” trying to keep her voice even.

  “Like four o’clock in the morning.”

  “Were you there?”

  “After it happened. All we can make out of it is that they had the church staked out, and when he turned up, they killed him. Four shots, three in the body, one in the head. The priest in the rectory was awakened by the shots and he ran to the front of the church in time to see the car driving away. To make the time fit, it meant they got out of the car to leave one in his head. That’s professional. Also to clinch the ID, and that’s also very professional. I don’t know what pros are in town because I just got to my office. With things like this, they usually bring in someone from outside.” Freedman studied her narrowly. “What’s your interest? Did Timberman send you up to talk to me?”

  “I saw the tape, Lieutenant. Timberman played it for me and Morty Cohen.”

  Freedman nodded and waited. He had long ago discovered that when someone is uncertain whether or not to speak, silence is most effective.

  Finally, Ginny said, “He went to the church because he had no other place to go. He couldn’t go home after he killed Kovach. Do you believe his story about Kovach?”

  Shrugging: “What difference does it make now?”

  It made a difference to Virginia Selby. She closed her eyes for a moment, searching in her mind, trying to make a connection with the Church of Saint Peter the Rock. “But why did he go to the church? I mean that church.”

  Freedman spelled it out, the confession and Father White’s theory that Immelman had been murdered. Virginia listened, and when he had finished, she sat in silence.

  And Freedman waited. He had work to do, cases that were overdue, assignments to give out, and still he waited.

  Softly, Ginny asked him, “Can they hear us?” nodding at the detectives in the squad room.

  “If we talk loud enough.”

  Even more softly, “Mr. Timberman didn’t send me. I came here on my own.”

  “Yes?”

  “Aren’t you going to ask me why?”

  “You’re an important DA, Ginny. Someday you’ll have Timberman’s job.”

  “You think so?”

  “A lot of people think so.” Their eyes met. “So you’d better consider carefully whatever you were going to tell me.”

  “All right.” She closed her eyes tightly and remained that way, with her eyes closed, for a few seconds. Then she said bluntly, “I felt something for Joe Cullen. Do you understand?”

  Freedman waited.

  “Nothing that he knew or returned. I just felt something for him, and when I heard this morning that he had been killed, I wept.”

  Freedman wondered whether in all the world anyone else wept for Joe Cullen.

  “That’s all,” Ginny said, deciding that it was enough and that there was no need to speak of their two meetings. He was dead; it simply did not matter. There was no way in the world that she could explain to Freedman or anyone else that her heart went out to him as it had not gone out to any other man. She could not explain it to herself. Love is something not easily explained on any level, and if Virginia Selby had tried to define the bit of unrequited light that had entered into the world of horrors where she made her life and living, she would have made a total fool out of herself — which, she told herself, she truly was.

  “You’re wondering why I came here?”

  “Sort of — yes.”

  “I have a lot of respect for you, Lieutenant. I think you’re smart and decent and sensitive.”

  “Flattery will get you everywhere,” Freedman said, smiling.

  He had a nice smile, Ginny decided, not like Cullen’s, but then she had never met a man whose smile danced all over his face, as Cullen’s smile did.

  “I’ll tell you why I came here. Very simple, Lieutenant. I want you to get the man who killed Cullen. I want you to bring him in, and you and I will make one of those unbreakable cases, and I swear on my mother’s grave that I’ll put him away.”

  The swivel chair Freedman sat in was one of his precious possessions. He swiveled around now to look directly into the squad room, and then he swiveled back to face Virginia Selby. He had once had a fantasy that if he and Sheila ever had a kid — a little girl, preferably — he would bring her here and spin her in his desk chair. He was sure she would love it.

  “That’s what you want,” he said.

  “You can do it.”

  “Ginny, no one man killed Cullen. You’re not only asking for the impossible, you’re asking me to go where angels fear to tread.”

  “You’re not an angel, Mel.”

  “You’d better believe it. I’m a New York City cop, and if I even look the wrong way or even push one of the scumbags we get in here, I got the zone commander up here beating my ear off.”

  “My heart doesn’t bleed for you.”r />
  Freedman grinned. “If I could make miracles and find this gang of high-class thugs who are bringing in the cocaine with Washington’s blessing, what on earth makes you think you could prosecute them?”

  “Find them and bring me some evidence, and if I can’t get a conviction I’ll throw in the towel.”

  “That’s dumb. Look, I felt something about Cullen. I’ve been trying to figure out that whole act — Cullen and Father O’Healey and the peons and the dope and whatever lot of bastards in our government are running the act, the CIA, the White House, the Justice Department, the army, or some bunch of demented mavericks — but whoever it is, it’s not one man.”

  “Then get them all, Mel.”

  “Bless your heart,” Freedman said. “Who knows!”

  She left, and Ramos came in and asked him, “What did she want?”

  “Miracles. She wants me to bring in Cullen’s killers. She’s determined.”

  “Why?”

  “God only knows. I will tell you something, Hosea: this is not only a world I never knew, but one that I have little desire to know. It is not good for a cop, who is told to wear his uniform so that he can show up at one of those fancy funerals they give a cop who is shot by some crazed drug dealer, to know that his own sweet government blesses the drugs and the dealers.”

  “Right on. But what makes it personal with her?”

  “I’m not sure I understand that end of it. She had something for Cullen.”

  “She never knew Cullen — or did she?”

  “God knows.” He glanced into the squad room. It was empty now.

  “They’re all out,” Ramos said.

  “Did you write up last night?”

  “I’ll do it now.”

  “Good. Meanwhile, I’ll think.”

  At noon, Freedman was still thinking, and Ramos had finished his report, interviewed a hysterical woman who claimed her cat had been stolen, and restrained himself from killing a dealer who had sold crack to a ten-year-old black kid, who had gone into convulsions and died. “Put this scum into the number one cell, and take off his shoes and socks and belt and strip him to the waist, and write him down as suicidal,” Ramos told the cops who had brought him in. The number one cell in the basement had not been used in years. It was icy cold, rat-infested, with at least an inch of filthy water on the sunken floor. Since it was never used, it had no cot.

  Freedman, meanwhile, was thinking about how this country, his country, used to be. His father would tell him stories about New York in those days, in the 1920s, when the population of the United States was about seventy million, when a drug was medicine, and when kids could walk the streets at three o’clock in the morning without fear. New York, in his father’s memories, was as close to paradise as a city could be. Freedman didn’t trust memories. He had heard too many witnesses remember things that never were. Yet like his father, he remembered a New York of his childhood, when he was a kid in the ’fifties. Was it as bad as now? And what of the next ten years — the ’nineties?

  Meanwhile, the simple lunatic day-to-day routine of a small, unimportant Lower West Side police precinct had been interrupted by the high forces of the nation. When a crime happened on the street, and the cops looked for witness, the almost universal response was “I don’t want to get involved.” Was that the way he felt? Freedman wondered. What do I love, aside from Sheila, who regards me as an unreconstructed pain in the ass. “I love my country” is what they all say. But define it: a cop treads a turf made of feces; that would have to be extracted from what you love. Consider the South Bronx or Bedford-Stuyvesant or Hell’s Kitchen, where few enough sing “My country, ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty,” or consider Los Angeles, where there are at least five thousand doped-up gang members ready to do mayhem, or consider my own little island in the universe, where an old priest could be smothered to death, or a hooker stitched all over with an ice pick.

  Yes, a tall, good-looking lady named Sylvia Mendoza, who made men happy for a few minutes or at least released them from the quiet misery of their daily lives.

  Sylvia Mendoza. He was thinking about her, a slight smile on his lips, when Ramos looked into his office and suggested that since Jones and Leary were back at their desks, Freedman and Rainos could go to lunch.

  “And no garbage. I am sick to death of the garbage we eat,” Ramos said. “They brought in that bastard who sold the crack to the kid who died. I put him in number one.”

  “Number one?”

  “Don’t bleed for him,” Ramos said. “You bleed to much for the garbage we collect.”

  “It’s a hell of a world you paint. We eat garbage, we collect garbage, and the mayor sits and worries about how to get rid of the garbage of eight million people. It’s the age of garbage. A ten-year-old kid buys crack and dies. When I was a cop in uniform, I was assigned to cover one of those diplomatic affairs that come out of the UN, and this Central American diplomat walks by, and believe me, I knew the face, and he’s under suspicion of murder and drug trafficking and we can’t touch him—”

  “I think a cop goes crazy enough without trying to figure it out, so let’s go to lunch, Lieutenant, and eat some decent Italian food at Marco’s.”

  “Diplomatic immunity — what happened to the tape?” Freedman demanded as he put on his jacket. “Here’s the biggest goddamn story of the year, and it disappears into thin air, and we got three murders right on the doorstep of our lousy little house, and nobody wants them solved and nobody gives a damn.”

  Ramos shrugged. “Nobody gives a damn about anything.”

  “Yeah. Let’s eat.”

  At Marco’s, on Fourteenth Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues, Marco himself took them to a quiet table in a corner of the room. He liked having the detectives eat at his place. He had come from Milan, and not only did he serve northern Italian food, but he was not connected in any way, and the presence of the cops eased his nerves.

  They ate without saying much, except for Freedman ticking off the cases that might as well be closed, including Cullen, since Manhattan South would be following up on that, and then they discussed, somewhat hopelessly, the air conditioner that had been promised to them every fall during the past four years. “The trouble is,” Ramos reminded Freedman, who was thinking of a petition from the entire force, “that every time they send an engineer around, he goes back with a recommendation that the whole building should be torn down and it’s not worth air conditioning.”

  “Another year, another engineer,” Freedman said. He was facing the front of the restaurant, and now he saw a man come into the place and speak to Marco, most likely asking a question. Marco’s answer was to point to their table. The man was tall and good-looking, gray tweed coat with an English cut, no hat, but soft blond hair and a blond mustache, a little white in the hair, wide mouth, striped shirt, and dark tie. His eyes were a very pale and striking blue. He walked to their table, and said, “Forgive me for intruding. My name is Dumont Robertson, but I am better known to my friends as Monty. Perhaps Joe Cullen mentioned me to you.”

  The two detectives stared at him in silence. Ramos left the initiative to Freedman, and Freedman took no initiative.

  “May I sit down?”

  Freedman glanced at the two empty chairs at the square table, but still said nothing. Monty moved around the table and seated himself.

  Freedman turned to Ramos and said slowly, deliberately, “This sleazy son of a bitch had a tail on us.” Then he turned to Monty and continued, “I’ll push it a bit and charge you with loitering, being a public nuisance, and a general disturber of the peace. I think I can get you at least thirty days. Read him his rights, Sergeant.”

  “This shithead isn’t worth the trouble,” Ramos said. “Do you want any dessert, Lieutenant? They got the best zabaglione in the city right here.”

  “Why not? It rips the fat off you. Marco!” he called. The owner came to the table. “Two espresso, two zabaglione.”

  Marco looked questionin
gly at Monty.

  “He’s not eating!” Freedman said.

  Marco turned away from the table, and Monty said, “We could talk more easily without the name calling.”

  Freedman said nothing. Ramos said nothing.

  “I stopped in to tell you it’s over,” Monty said.

  The two detectives said nothing.

  “There was no tape,” Monty said pleasantly. “Father O’Healey died in a plane crash in the mountains of Durango. The Mexican government was kind enough to conduct a wide search for the wreckage, but the body was not found until three weeks had passed. Understandably, the good father was buried in a sealed coffin. The burial took place only this morning. The bishop will be writing to you to tell you the details, and there will be at least a small acknowledgment of this in the back pages of the New York Times. A number of policemen in your precinct house may have heard Joe Cullen’s confession, and I am sure that you will pass on to them the fact that the entire confession was a fabrication, a desire on the part of Mr. Cullen to get back at the small airline that had fired him. A little research on your part, no more than a few telephone calls, will convince you that West Texas Carriers had ample reason to fire him. As for the fecundity of Mr. Cullen’s imagination, well, he was a cocaine user, and that should explain things. He did some small smuggling himself, but the amount was insignificant.”

  Monty rose from his seat at the table, looked from one man to the other, and nodded. “The main point is that it’s over. What had to be done was done, and that’s the end of it. Meanwhile, thank you for your courtesy in listening to me; I wish it would extend to our breaking bread together, but since that is impossible, I bid you goodbye.” And with that, he walked out of the restaurant.

  For a few seconds, Freedman and Ramos sat in silence, looking at each other. Then Freedman said, “That’s not the end of it.”

  “No, I don’t think it is.”

  “I’m going to get him,” Freedman said. “I swear to God, I am going to get him.”