by Howard Fast
The Harvard Club
“I HAVE some plain pound cake. Is that all right, Lieutenant?”
He said it was all right. “Ginny, you don’t have to feed me,” he said.
“I don’t have any liquor — except some brandy. But you don’t want brandy. I don’t drink.” She did not add that men who wanted to drink did not come to her apartment, and that Cullen was the first man that she had asked to this apartment; but Freedman did not know that she had seen Cullen twice, nor would he ever know. That was her thing, and it would be kept as her thing.
Freedman tried to put her in a framework and then gave it up. Nothing fitted. He had watched her in court and had seen her tear a witness to shreds. She was an unremitting prosecutor, and yet this apartment, her refuge, her secret — he guessed that — was filled with light and color. But was there actually any separation? There was nothing feminine here, the lemon-yellow rug, the Chinese designs on the chintz-covered couches, the nonobjective paintings on the walls — well, perhaps feminine enough to someone else, but he made his comparisons with Sheila, the silks and the laces and the pastel colors that she loved so much. But Ginny was not Sheila, and Freedman really had little idea what she was or who she was, except that something connected her to Cullen.
She brought him tea. He had asked for tea. “The damn coffee’s worse than smoking. It took me five years to kick cigarettes.”
She sat facing him, intense. “You said a miracle would be needed to get them. What miracle? What changed?”
“Did you ever talk to Timberman about Tony Carlione?”
“Of course I did.”
“About the possibility of prosecuting him?”
“Lieutenant, there’s no evidence, not a shred of evidence that he killed Sylvia Mendoza. Twelve stab wounds — means nothing. If you had him cuffed over at your precinct house, I’d still say forget it.”
“He killed her.”
“Oh, come on.”
“You ever feel something in your bones? I feel this in my bones. Tony Carlione killed her on a contract, and Dumont Robertson, our friend Monty, put out the contract. You want Cullen’s killer — it’s the same son of a bitch, Dumont Robertson, whether he pulled the trigger himself or whether he farmed it out.”
“I’m listening,” Ginny said.
“If you had a witness, say Carlione, to testify that Monty bought the contract, would you prosecute?”
“Oh, the whole thing’s smoke. You know that, Lieutenant. Carlione was relocated. There’s no way to find him, and if you found him, there’s no way to get him to testify.”
“You’re wrong; he can be found and he can be made to testify.”
“Yes, and pigs have wings. He’s relocated. Don’t you understand what that means? The Feds put their reputation on the line with their relocation program. That’s how they get witnesses. There’s no way into it.”
“Who runs it? Not the Justice Department, but inside the department, who runs it?”
“They have a department for it.”
“And who knows? You people used him. He was your witness, and you made the arrangements with the Feds. Someone in your outfit has to know where Carlione is.”
She was silent now, thinking about it.
“Let me tell you something about Cullen,” Freedman said. “He was a Catholic. I suppose you know that.”
“I know.”
“He wanted to confess to killing Father O’Healey.”
“He didn’t kill O’Healey.”
“Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. We’ll never know for sure, but I’m with you. I don’t think he killed the priest, but neither do I believe his story is entirely true. What the hell, nobody tells the truth, if there is such a thing. You’re a Catholic, aren’t you?”
“That’s right, Lieutenant,” she answered stiffly. “And what has that got to do with it?”
“Everything or maybe nothing. In El Salvador, not too many years ago, there was a demented murderer of nuns and Catholic lay workers, women raped and murdered because they ministered to the poor. Then a bishop in San Salvador was murdered, because he took the side of the poor. A priest in El Salvador was shot to death because he was giving last rites to a woman a soldier had murdered, and in Nicaragua, the contras tortured a priest to death. I get all this out of reading the New York Times, so when Cullen told what had happened to Father O’Healey, I wasn’t particularly surprised. Puzzled, yes, but not surprised. Me, I’m Jewish, and I learned street fighting from the Catholic kids who told me I had killed their God, which made no more sense than the stuff Hitler said, and then I grew up and did a turn in Vietnam and married a Catholic lady and became a cop, and found that practically everyone around me was Catholic if he wasn’t Jewish or black, and then Father O’Healey entered my life and Cullen decided to confess to a priest in a church in my precinct.”
“And what does all that add up to?” Ginny asked.
“I’m not sure it adds up to anything. Cops get sour, which is not unreasonable. You bring in a dope peddler and the next day he walks. I’m not blaming you or your crowd. I’m not blaming anyone, I’m just stating the fact. I’m forty-one years old and I don’t see anything in my life that means a lot. Don’t get impatient with me, Ginny. I’m trying to say something.”
“I don’t know what you’re trying to say.”
“Well,” Freedman said, “I’ll try. I want to bring Dumont Robertson in and I want to book him and I want you to prosecute him. This is something I have to do. Now, I started to tell you before that Cullen wanted to confess. He had to confess — I mean, that from what I’ve been able to put together, there was a force in him that drove him to confess. So he went up to this Church of Saint Peter the Rock, as I said in our precinct—”
“I know where the church is.”
“Right. Now an old priest there, Father Immelman, hears his confession. Cullen wants absolution. The priest can only give him absolution if he states his belief in God, and Cullen, who is so desperate for this absolution, will not admit to a belief in God. That’s one thing. On the other hand, Cullen has confessed to the priest, and in his covering of tracks, Monty has the priest murdered.”
“What! Do you have proof?”
“No.” Freedman held up his hand. “Hold on. Let me try to deal with this. I’m open with you, I want you to be honest with me. Cullen was here, wasn’t he?”
“You know that’s a lie, Lieutenant, and a rotten provocation!”
Freedman said harshly, “Cut out the crap, Ginny. When Timberman’s right-hand lady, the smartest DA in the pack, and even money everywhere to run for Timberman’s job when he retires, well, when she comes to a lousy little West Side precinct that doesn’t rate high enough to investigate its own killings, and tells me to get Monty and his crew and make something out of Cullen’s death, she is involved. You are involved, Miss Selby, damned involved. I don’t know what puts you together with Cullen, but something does, and there’s no other explanation for it except that Cullen, on the run after he killed Kovach, came here and you gave him shelter. You had to be face to face with Cullen; you had to see him in the flesh; otherwise, your involvement is senseless.”
She shrugged. “So. What do you intend to do with it, Lieutenant?”
“The relationship puzzles me — to risk your whole career that way, to put yourself in an absolutely untenable position. Why?”
“I don’t have to explain.”
“All right. This dies with me. I give you my word of honor — no one will ever know. It’s over, done with, finished.”
“Thank you,” she said softly.
“You see, something happened to me since Cullen made that tape in our squad room. I could use your words — I don’t have to explain — but that’s because I can’t explain. Like Cullen, I don’t believe very much in God, but I accept the fact that I don’t know one damn thing about God, and the Pope in Rome and the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem don’t know one damn thing about God, except that their livelihood is bullshit and
mine is being a cop. But I was brought up Jewish, and Jewish kids get stuff put on them, like any other kids, and some of the stuff that was put on me stayed with me. There’s a Jewish legend about the Lamed Vav — that means thirty-six. The legend says that always, in every generation, there exist in the world thirty-six righteous, good, and just men, and on their existence the existence of the world depends. They could be Jewish or Christian or Hindu or whatever, and no one of them ever knows in his lifetime that he is a Lamed Vav.”
Ginny was crying. “What are you talking about?” she blurted through her tears. “He killed people, he was in Vietnam, he was — he was—”
“What was he, Ginny? Go on. You tell me. I think he was just a man, a poor bastard who swallowed the shit we all swallow—”
“No!” she said fiercely.
“Then what was he, Ginny?”
“God help me, I don’t know.” She wiped away her tears, rose, and went into her bedroom to fix her face. She came back into the living room and said, “Let’s stop cutting away at each other and admit that we’re in this together.”
“Good.”
“Now tell me why you’re here, Freedman, and cut the shit. We’ve talked enough nonsense.”
“Yes. I’m here because I want to get Monty. Men like Monty have been selling their line of goods for a long time. Nobody gets any of them. I want to change that.” He said it lightly, almost with indifference.
“How?”
“I told you before. I want to find out where Tony Carlione has been relocated to. Then I will go there and convince him to testify against Monty, and bring him back here, and you will prosecute him.”
“Just like that?”
“More or less.”
“It’s a dream, Freedman. You know that. You don’t arrest people like Dumont Robertson. They go on doing what they’re doing.”
Freedman shook his head.
“And who knows where the relocation is?” she cried. “Who can find out? The damn Feds guard these places like the gold in Fort Knox.”
“Timberman knows.”
She hadn’t expected that. She considered it for a few moments, and then she said, “Most likely. I imagine Timberman knows. Now how do I get him to tell me? Hit him over the head? Feed him a truth serum? Do you know what it would mean to get something like this out of Timberman?”
“I know,” Freedman agreed. “I don’t expect you to get it out of him. I’ll take care of that. I just want you to set it up for me. I want you to persuade Timberman to see me. Alone and not in his office.”
“And why not in his office?”
“Because his office is bugged.”
“Oh, no.” She shook her head. “No way.” Her voice sharpened. “How the hell do you know it’s bugged?”
“It would be a loose end. I’ve decided that Monty doesn’t leave loose ends.”
Hopelessly, she muttered, “Of all the damn things. I swear I don’t know what to make of you, Freedman. Why don’t you make this appointment with Timberman yourself?”
“Sure. I can see that. Freedman, who works in a third-rate West Side precinct, wants to meet the district attorney of New York County on a park bench in Battery Park. And why, Lieutenant? To get him to reveal the safe place where the Feds put Twelve-tone Carlione.”
Ginny burst out laughing. It was the first time she had laughed that evening, or smiled, for that matter, and she was quite attractive when she laughed.
“But I convinced him,” she said.
“He leans on you. Everyone knows that. You’re the best he has; you’re sensible and you’re dependable. All you have to do is persuade him that a cop called Freedman—”
“Come on, Lieutenant, he knows who you are. Don’t downgrade yourself.”
“All right. Thank you. Don’t tell him what I want. Tell him I’m paranoid and I think his office is bugged.”
“What about a restaurant? I don’t want to tell him you’re paranoid, even if you are, and maybe you are, for all I know.”
“A restaurant is fine, as long as we’re not sitting cheek by jowl with strangers.”
“You won’t be,” Ginny assured him. “It will probably be at the Harvard Club. All right — I think your whole shtick is hopeless, but I’ll convince him to have lunch with you.”
The next day, in the afternoon, Virginia Selby called Freedman and informed him that a lunch appointment for the following day had been arranged at the Harvard Club. When he told Ramos about it, the sergeant said, “There you are, Mel, lunch at the Harvard Club. Never happened to me, but it shows that cops are coming up in the world. I have something to look forward to.”
Freedman had never lunched at the Harvard Club either, and when he told Sheila about it that evening, she informed him that she had dined there three times.
“That puts me in my place. How come?”
“Buyers who went to Harvard. It’s a new world, Mel, and Seventh Avenue changes with the world. Come on, don’t be angry.”
He wasn’t angry. The world changes, but cops are not exactly in the world. They look at it sidewise. They’re moralists without morality. “Have you ever thought of marrying me again?” he asked her.
“I’ve thought about it. What are you wearing tomorrow?”
“Gray flannels, blue blazer, and a white shirt.”
“Nice. And a quiet striped tie.”
“Fuck what I’m wearing tomorrow!”
“You’re pissed off, sweetheart, because I go to lunch with buyers at the Harvard Club,” Sheila said gently. “If we were still married, this would grow into a real brouhaha, and that always scared the shit out of me because I was living with a man who carried a gun. Now you’re a pussycat. It’s only a week since our first date after the divorce, and it’s been wonderful. I love you. I love to sleep with you. We cry a little, we laugh a little. I think we ought to leave it this way.”
“Honey, are you afraid of my gun? I been a cop twelve years and I never shot anyone. Have I ever raised a hand to you?”
“No. But when you used to be a few hours late, I died. Each time I died.”
He had never given that much thought; there were many things he had never given much thought to. “I’ll be away a couple of days,” he said.
“I’ll miss you, Mel.”
When he left the following morning, he said to Sheila, “It’s not an absolute professional affliction. I know cops married twenty, twenty-five years, and they manage. They even like each other.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said, smiling.
But even with his gray flannels and blue blazer and two-dollar shoeshine, the Harvard Club dining room intimidated him. It was filled with well-dressed people eating away under the great beamed ceiling, and Timberman welcomed him without pleasure and with only the minimum required politeness. Freedman wondered what possible ruses and devices Ginny had used to get him into this position. As if he read Freedman’s mind, Timberman said, “I am here only because I have obligations to a wonderful woman who has worked with me for many years. I think the notion that my office is bugged is both presumptuous and outrageous, and I trust that if you have any evidence to back that up, you will present it.”
“Have you had a debugger in recently, sir?” Freedman asked.
“I have not.”
“There’s a man on my squad, George Jones by name, who is as good as they come. May I send him around?” Freedman realized that Timberman’s act of opening his mouth and then closing it sharply meant that he was about to say, No, you may not. He didn’t say it, gave the question a long moment, and then nodded.
“If you wish,” Timberman said. “I would appreciate it.”
“He’ll come by this afternoon.”
“Then let us get into it. You wanted to see me. Why?”
“About the tape that Joe Cullen made in my precinct—”
“I will not discuss that tape,” the district attorney said flatly.
It set Freedman back. All morning he had rehearsed what he i
ntended to be his arguments. He had conversations with himself and Timberman, internal conversations that concluded with Freedman making his point. Those internal conversations were simple and direct, convincing Timberman that we were a community of law, and that naturally the tape Cullen had made was central to the discussion. Now he saw himself as he imagined Timberman saw him, an odd Jewish cop, a person of no importance whatsoever, clownish, with outdated notions of law and order.
“If that is all you wish to discuss, then this luncheon was a mistake,” Timberman said with some irritation. “I allowed Miss Selby to persuade me, and that was also a mistake.”
Freedman, trying to control the nugget of anger building up in his stomach, said coldly, “I will be happy not to talk about the tape. Evidently it’s too damn hot and frightening even to discuss. That’s all right with me. But you invited me to lunch, and I intend to say my piece. You can leave the table or you can have them throw me out. Or you can be a gentleman and listen for five minutes, after which I will be happy to go.”
If Freedman’s tone was cold, Timberman’s face was frozen. “Go ahead, Lieutenant,” he said in hardly more than a whisper. “I am listening.”
“My father grew up during the Great Depression,” Freed-man said. “His father, my grandfather, worked in a garment factory — when he worked. When there was no work, my father did odd jobs and brought in a few dollars and the family survived on that. Nobody locked their doors, nobody was mugged, and nobody made ten million dollars out of peddling inside information. They were very hard times, but from the stories my father told me, they were also good times. There was something clean and decent about the country, and people had a passionate love for a thing called America—”
At this point, Timberman began to show signs of impatience and opened his mouth to interrupt. Freedman stopped him with “Please, sir, allow me to say my piece.”
Timberman sighed and nodded.
“You see, sir, any sensible person wonders what is meant by loving your country — what do you love, mountains, rivers, a house? It’s a crazy concept, because none of it means a damn thing, and the only thing to love in any country is the things people do and what they believe in, and through my father’s eyes, I saw a country you could love. Destitute, desperate, tragic — all those things. But it was also something real. Well, my father enlisted. He was a rifleman, and he went through it all, from Normandy to Berlin, and I figured if he could do it, I could do it, and I went to Vietnam, but everything had turned to shit and I came back to a country where law was a farce, where greed had become a national religion, where the kids had sold their lives for crack, and where priests who were trying to believe in something were murdered in Central America, and where a man sits in my precinct house and tells me that people in our government, paid with taxpayers’ money, are flooding this country with cocaine, and the operation is run by a son of a bitch named Dumont Robertson, a rich upstanding white Anglo-Saxon son of a bitch, and then this same malignant bastard comes into my precinct and murders a prostitute and an old priest and Joe Cullen, and you tell me I’m not to talk about the tape. Beautiful, sir — just beautiful, Mr. District Attorney. Thank you for listening!” With his last few words, Freedman’s anger exploded and he pushed back his chair and stood up.