The Confession of Joe Cullen (11 page)

“At our age, not many are.”

That surprised him. He was sixty, his wife ten years his junior. She rarely mentioned age. He was somewhat distracted when she asked him what was on the tape.

“I really don't know. I would have shunted it off on one of my bureau chiefs, but I remember Freedman. He got Carlione to become our witness, and he busted the whole Zambino family. He said personal.”

He rather regretted that later. One of the guests at the dinner table was Professor Ralph Cibrini of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, professor of economics and one of the nation's leading authorities on the drug crisis. He was a small, cheerful man, with a halo of white hair and piercing blue eyes. After dinner, with the coffee and brandy, the conversation focused on Professor Cibrini. Another guest, the editor of a very successful magazine, was condemning Cibrini's use of economic determinism. “It always reminds me of the hopeless rigidity of Marxism,” the editor said. “Life doesn't function that way.”

“It troubles your illusions,” Cibrini said, “You want a world of pure free will. No way. And to think that you can fight this drug disease with guns and the U.S. Army on our borders is one very dangerous illusion. It happens that life does function that way. The moving force in our society is money, and it just happens, quite naturally, that the people with the most money set up a variety of institutions for the single purpose of convincing millions of citizens that money is not the moving force. Yet it is, believe me. So long as drugs are the source of vast wealth for the importers and the dealers, the drug trade will only grow. That's an irresistible force. In Asia and South America, whole communities exist on the production of drugs, and it's been that way for hundreds of years. It cannot be changed.”

“Then what can be changed?” Sally Timberman asked.

“The law and the approach. Legalize the drugs and then wage an enormous campaign against the use of drugs. It's like working with tobacco, which has an agricultural and regional base of production here. Drugs don't have that, so it's a better shot.”

“It couldn't be worse,” Timberman agreed.

Nevertheless, at ten o'clock, the guests still involved in a fascinating discussion, Timberman excused himself and went into his study to play the tape that Freedman had sent him. He watched and listened to the tape with unswerving attention, and when the interview was over, he reversed the tape, took it out of the VCR, and then dropped into a chair and sat there, staring at the tape.

His wife came into the study and told him that the guests had departed. “What on earth could have been so important?” she wondered.

“More important than I imagined.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“I'm not sure that I do,” Timberman said slowly.

“Oh? That's new. I've been a sounding board long enough to feel hurt. I hear the president keeps nothing from Nancy.”

“I'm not the president.”

“I wish you were. I'd sleep better. So I don't get to know what you have on that tape?”

“Not right now. Not because I don't trust you in the matter of confidentiality—”

“Oh, thank you, sir. I love lawyer talk.”

“— but because I don't want to listen to any opinion until I've slept on it and brooded over it.”

“Your mind to you a kingdom is, which is OK with me. I'm going to bed.”

In the morning, he greeted his wife cheerfully and, between sips of his orange juice, said to her, “Suppose you had a notion that the CIA was flooding the country with thousands of pounds of cocaine?”

“Is that on the tape? Are you going to trust your wife with a spot of confidentiality?”

“Answer the question, please, Sally.”

“You came off with a
suppose
question. Suppose they are. Nothing surprises me anymore.”

“What would you do if you thought this could be happening?”

“If I were you? Or if I were me?”

“If you were me.”

“Good. Now we have it straight.” She leaned back and closed her eyes for a long moment. Then she attacked her plate of scrambled eggs.

“Well?”

“Yes — yes. You don't really want me to answer that question?”

“I certainly do,” Timberman said with irritation.

“I don't have your sense of public duty, and I also don't like to squabble with you at breakfast. On the other hand, I have three children and five grandchildren, and I would not like to wake up some morning and find that I'm dead, or that one of the kids is dead.”

“You're not serious. That's hogwash, and you know it. The CIA does not go around killing people.”

“Oh? Then they run all that dope, and they never have to kill anyone? That is absolutely marvelous.”

“Bad movies and bad TV and bad books. Why do you accept that garbage?”

“Because it scares me to death, and anyone who is not scared to death in this year of 1987 is either a total numskull or sound asleep.”

“I am not scared to death.”

“You're a lawyer.”

“And what does that mean?”

“It means that I won't squabble over breakfast, and if you want to show me that tape, I'd like to see it, and if you don't, then let's forget it.”

He did not play it for her, deciding that instead he would come home in the evening with a box of a dozen and a half long-stemmed roses. His chauffeur-driven limo was sitting on Park Avenue in front of the building and thereby in front of the eight-room apartment which he owned. Although he was a fanatically honest man, he was also in the circumstance of being born very rich, a position he tried earnestly to consider and understand. In the morning coolness and unclutteredness of Park Avenue, he made a construct in his mind of his country, the United States, and his city, New York, being torn apart and turned into a jungle through the sale and use of cocaine and heroin. For this, men robbed and murdered to feed a habit, and having fed the habit, then frequently turned to madness and killed wife, mother, child, making a history of murder horrible and inhuman such as the planet had never seen before. None of this changed the broad, clean avenue on which his car traveled downtown, and if the people who lived in the high cliffs of apartments that lined this avenue desired cocaine, they did not have to rob or kill, but bought it at a high price from those who did rob and kill. All of this was stuff he had considered before, indeed many times as the endless procession of the killers and thieves marched in and out of the courts, prosecuted by one or another of the hundreds of assistant district attorneys under his command. He lived at the center of the vortex where life was so cheap that the city morgue lacked room for the bodies and where the rewards to the dealers and importers were so large that they could be counted in the billions.

All of this, and the tape.

Once in his office, he put the tape into the VCR that had become a usual part of the furnishings for such an office, but did not play it at the moment. Instead, he asked two of his bureau chiefs to join him in his office. Virginia Selby — Ginny to those who knew her — tall, skinny, good features under black hair, and long legs, thirty-two years old, was the youngest bureau chief. She had come out of Columbia Law; she was New York poor and streetwise, and Timberman considered her the smartest lawyer, man or woman, in his organization. Morty Cohen, fat, smoking two packs a day in yellow fingers, fifty-one years old, tired and cynical, was almost as smart. He regarded the small plaque on Timberman's desk, which said
NO SMOKING,
sourly. He had seen it many times before, and it made any meeting in this room an ordeal.

“Sit down,” Timberman said to them. “Make yourselves comfortable. If you want to smoke, Morty, one cigarette. It's a gesture of humanity on my part. Please save it until you begin to twitch.”

“Thank you, kind sir.”

“Duly noted. Now, I am going to run a video of a curious confession that took place up in Chelsea.”

“The West Side precinct?” Cohen asked.

“Right. That little hole in the wall where nothing happens.”

“Why there?”

“The confessor lives near there. Now suppose you just watch and listen.”

Timberman then ran the tape that constituted Cullen's confession. Both of his bureau chiefs watched and listened intensely, nor did Cohen light a cigarette until the tape was finished. Then silence prevailed. Timberman watched his two bureau chiefs as the seconds ticked by.

“Cat got your tongues?”

Cohen puffed deeply and gratefully and said, “Well, if they were to delegalize tobacco, as they seem intent on doing, it might come to the same thing. What the hell — I don't know. I don't know anything anymore. If the Pentagon could corner the whole dope market, they wouldn't have to ask for taxes.”

“Do you think this Cullen character is telling the truth?” Virginia Selby asked Timberman.

“Do you?”

“I think I do — mostly. I'm Catholic, so I can sort of sense what got into him. O'Healey must have made one hell of an impression on him.”

“And saved his soul and turned him around and led the sinner to grace,” Cohen said. “Ginny, I'd sure have to be Catholic to believe that. I remember reading about the O'Healey case, and I'm ready to accept the fact that he was killed in Honduras, murdered or otherwise, but as a confession this is worthless. How come if Cullen witnessed this, he got out of Honduras alive? Do you believe that cock-and-bull story he gave the detectives?”

Ginny shook her head. “No, he fiddled with that and I suppose he fudged a lot of his story. But he's not one of those nuts who parade in every time we have a fancy murder. What do you think, sir?” she asked Timberman.

“I want more of what you think.”

“I can't see any reason to arrest Cullen,” Cohen decided. “Even if it happened the way he tells it, he's not involved. Anyway, there's no proof of the priest's death. We have no body, we have no jurisdiction, we have no complaint — and as for Cullen, well, we're not in the absolution business. Let him find a Catholic church and get it out of his system.”

“You know what he can't get out of his system?” Ginny asked.

“What's that?”

“The fact that some part of the government of this country is neck-deep in the business of bringing in cocaine.”

Cohen snorted. “What else is new?”

“And what does that mean?”

“Come on, Ginny. Anyone who's looked at a newspaper over the past twenty years knows that the CIA has long fingers. They fight wars and they move drugs. They did it in the Golden Triangle and they did it in Afghanistan, and you don't think they could have set up this neat little war of theirs in Honduras and Nicaragua and put together a parcel of bums like the contras without a payoff in drugs.”

Still Timberman listened without offering any comment of his own thinking.

“What goes around,” Ginny said seriously, “is one thing. What we saw on that tape is something else. Here's a man who ferried the drugs and witnessed — again, according to the tape — the involvement of men in uniform. I know that's no hard evidence, but put him in front of a congressional committee and you'd have something.”

“He has a terminal disease,” Cohen said. “He knows too much.”

“Come on, Morty, who do you think is moving the drugs?”

“That's it. We don't know whether anyone is moving the drugs you refer to. We don't know one damn thing about this Joe Cullen — not one damn thing. We could run an investigation. There are plenty of ways to go: find this Oscar Kovach, ask around the saloon — I know the place — question Cullen, send someone down to Salsaville, track down this feller who, according to Cullen, runs the operation at Salsaville. It's all there, but we also got a docket bigger than anything we ever had before, and all this
maybe
stuff is none of our business, because we have no crime on our turf and no real reason to try to invent one.”

“You don't have to invent a crime, Morty. What we do have on our turf is a man self-confessed to one of the biggest drug operations I ever heard of. And if that doesn't involve us, I'm crazy.”

“How? What do we charge Cullen with? If the boss here wants to order an operation big enough to find evidence against Cullen — and he's just a small cog, even if there's substance to his story — by what right do we move? Where's our jurisdiction? You want to go down to Salsaville and stir up the county law, which is probably some slow-moving reasonably corrupt sheriff? Damnit, we got our hands full when we step into the Bronx or Brooklyn.”

Virginia Selby sighed and shook her head and then turned to Timberman.

“Nothing else, Ginny?”

“I'm just disturbed as hell.”

“So am I,” Timberman said, “but Morty's right. I guess I'll send the tape down to Washington and let the FBI break their heads over it.”

“And what happens to Cullen?”

Timberman shook his head. He was already putting together in his mind what he would and would not tell his wife. Not physically, but in some ways his wife was not unlike Virginia Selby. If he kept the contents of the tape from Sally, she would worry about it and make his life miserable for at least a week. On the other hand, if he told her the story, it would result in the incipience of a new crusade on Sally's part. Somehow, he had to deal with this.

“Ginny,” Cohen said, “men like Cullen don't grow old. He doesn't have much of a future, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it.”

Timberman thanked them both, told Ginny that she could go, and asked Cohen to remain a moment. After Ginny had left his office, Timberman asked Cohen whether he saw any alternative.

“You could dump the whole thing. File the tape. We don't have to go out looking for work.”

“Would you do that, Morty?”

“No,” Cohen admitted. “I'm a coward and I love my kids and I'm used to my wife, so I remain impeccably honest. Aside from that, I'm not a Catholic. I'm Jewish, so I'm a little uneasy about accepting the sinner's return to grace. Anyone who pushed a helicopter in Vietnam has enough killing on his conscience to make this latest caper of small consequence.”