The Confession of Joe Cullen (16 page)

Poetic, Freedman reflected, and who would have thought it from this hard-assed Puerto Rican? And aloud, he added his reassurances. “Just a few questions, Mrs. Dougherty.”

“But the poor old man died of a heart attack.”

“Yes, we know that. Yet a few days ago he heard the confession of a strange man, I mean someone who wasn't a regular here.” Freedman was uncertain as to whether membership was a practice in a Catholic church.

“Yes?”

“Did you see this man — the man who confessed?”

“There was only one I didn't know. I never saw him before.”

“But you saw him when he came to confess?”

“Sure and I did, Officer.” Then she added, “It was I that directed him to the confessional. He sat down in the booth, and then I went for the good father, may he rest in peace.”

“Good. What did he look like? A tall man?”

“That he was, tall and built strong and Irish.”

“How do you know he was Irish? Did he tell you his name or talk about being Irish?”

“Would I need his name to know a lad's Irish? Black Irish, with the blue skin and the dark hair.”

Ramos and Freedman exchanged glances.

“Did he smile, Mother?” Ramos asked suddenly.

“No.” She shook her head. “He had too much sorrow.”

“Well, thank you, Mrs. Dougherty. You've been most helpful.”

“I have no wish to hurt him. He did not have the look of a bad man.”

Outside, on the steps of the church, Father White said, “You both know something, don't you?”

“Not really.”

“You don't want to talk about it?”

“I wish,” Freedman said, “that I could ask Father Immelman who came here and asked him about the confession.”

“I know of no one—”

“Of course you don't.”

“And my suspicions?”

Freedman shrugged.

“Did someone kill him?” the priest insisted.

“I'm not sure.”

“Is one ever to know?”

“In time. These things tend to iron themselves out in their own good time.”

They walked down the street, leaving the priest standing somewhat forlornly on the steps of the church. The weather had turned colder. Ramos shivered and suggested that they stop for a cup of coffee, and neither of them said anything until they were seated in an old German bakery on Eighth Avenue, drinking coffee and eating apple crumb cake.

“You put your finger on it,” Ramos said. “Someone came into the church and talked to the priest.”

“Where was Mrs. Dougherty? Where was Father White?”

“Mostly you walk into a church daytime, it's empty. He could have been there alone.”

“And what led him to the church? Do you know what kind of a witches' brew we're cooking here? The hell with it. The old man died of a heart attack. Old men do.”

“He wasn't so old,” Ramos said. “Seventy-three isn't old.”

“It's a goddamn lot older than you or I will be if what we're thinking is so.”

“The man who confessed was Cullen,” Ramos noted. Freedman nodded. “That's what the old man asked White about.”

“I suppose so,” Freedman agreed. “I hate a situation where people know things they're not supposed to know.”

“Why don't we talk to Cullen?”

“I had that in mind,” Freedman said. “But goddamnit, why would Cullen kill him?”

“Why would someone else kill him? You know we got nothing. So let's push it.”

They walked to Cullen's apartment on Eighteenth Street, and Freedman considered how it was with a cop. You didn't phone ahead or announce your coming. You just walked in, and right now, when Ramos persisted, “You think he did it?” Freedman turned on him angrily and snapped, “No, I don't think he did it, and it's a fucken piece of insanity.”

“All right. Don't bite my head off. I only asked.”

“We'll ask him.”

Cullen was at home. He buzzed them in and opened the apartment door for them without hesitation. He was in his undershirt, smoking a cigar, and had been watching the six o'clock news on his TV. A bottle and a glass half full of beer stood on the end table near where he had been sitting. He turned off the television and motioned for them to sit down.

“Beer?” he asked them. “It's all I got.”

Freedman felt a sense of warmth in the room, the striped covering of the couch, a day bed with pillows and a flowered spread, a bookcase with three shelves of books, and on the floor a rug with a design of an American eagle. Freedman often regretted that he had no measures of taste. He liked certain things. He liked the pictures on the walls of Cullen's room, even though he recognized them as the kind you buy in stores that sell cheap oil paintings. Cullen had been well paid and he had money, but Freedman couldn't blame him for hanging on to his money. He was at the end of a road, and maybe there was a turning point and maybe there wasn't.

Ramos shook his head to the suggestion of beer. Ramos was angry, and Freedman was intrigued by the reaction of these two men to the murder of a priest. In fact, Cullen had not murdered the priest, and Immelman might not have been murdered at all. The younger priest, Father White, was also angry and felt betrayed by Immelman's death. Perhaps he loved Immelman more than he realized or perhaps he was frightened by the prospect of being alone in the church. All of these were surmises; this was not Freedman's place or background. How would he have felt about the murder of a rabbi?

“Sit down,” Cullen said. He was not impatient or troubled; he had made his peace with these two men.

In the ordinary course of things, there would be a line of questioning. Where were you at the time of Immelman's death? What did you say to Immelman that differed from what you said to us? Why did you go to the Rock to confess? Wasn't there a church you went to when you went to church — which you must have done at one time?

But this wasn't the ordinary course of things, and Freedman said bluntly, “Father Immelman is dead. We think he may have been murdered. We want to know whether you had anything to do with it. You don't have to answer any questions and we got nothing to make an arrest. We're just asking you.”

Ramos was furious. He felt it was the wrong line and a lousy line to take, and as always, when anger arose between him and the lieutenant, he told himself, “That damn Jew doesn't know where he's coming from,” and Freedman became a Jew. A few minutes later, Freedman the Jew disappeared and Freedman his friend who had saved his life twice returned, but Freedman sensed the content of the anger and bore it bitterly.

Cullen's response was unexpected. He stared at them a long moment before answering, and then he said, “Who the hell is Immelman?” Yet he had heard the name, and it lay uneasily at the bottom of his memory, and as he sought for it, he remembered how the old lady in the church had asked him to wait. Was it Immelman? Did she say Immelman?

Ramos had swallowed his anger. The two detectives remained silent and watched Cullen.

“Give me that name again,” Cullen said.

“Immelman.” Freedman spelled it out.

“Is that the old priest at the church on Twenty-first?”

“You got it.”

“He's dead?”

“You got it again,” Ramos said nastily. “He's dead.”

“Murdered?”

The two detectives said nothing.

“He was an old man. Who the hell would shoot him? This city is crazy.”

The detectives exchanged glances in spite of themselves.

Ramos said, “You said you saw it done.”

“Hell, man, yes! But not here. That's a jungle down there. That's the asshole of creation. This is New York City. What the hell is this? Are you both nuts? You think I did it? You think I went back there and shot the old man?”

“No, I don't think you did it,” Freedman said, pressing Ramos's arm in a gesture that said, “Trust me.” Cullen was on his feet. “Sit down,” Freedman said. “You, too, Ramos. The old man wasn't shot, he was smothered, and sure you could have faked that, Cullen, and that would make you either a great actor or a brilliant poker player, but in my book you don't rate twenty cents as a poker player. What kind of a cigar is that you're smoking?”

“A Nicaraguan Royal.”

“Is it any good?”

“Not as good as a Cuban. Try one.”

He offered cigars. Freedman shook his head. Ramos accepted and lit up. Ramos softened and admitted that this was a very good cigar, and Freedman told Cullen about Father White and his suspicions. It gave Freedman a peculiar feeling to sit here and talk like this to a man who had been part of what may have been the biggest cocaine-smuggling operation in the history of drugs, and if he could have made a case, he would have put the cuffs on Cullen and brought him in. But others had said to keep his hands off, and he had no case for drugs. Murder in his own precinct, on the other hand, was something else. He had a feeling that Cullen's time would come, and he was content to wait. But murder?

“I don't know,” Cullen said. “You think someone put a pillow over his face and smothered him—”

“Was he a big man?” Ramos asked.

“No, a skinny little fellow. You could knock him over with an electric fan. But there's got to be a reason.”

“There is,” Freedman said. “He heard your confession.”

“Come on, come on,” Cullen said. “That's crazy. You're telling me he was maybe killed because he heard my confession?”

“What did you tell him?” Ramos asked.

“What I told you. Only, part. Goddamnit, that's none of your fucken business, what's between me and a priest.”

“It is now,” Freedman said. “Who else did you tell your story to?”

“Nobody.”

“Nobody? Come on, Cullen — you were exploding with it. You were in Sullivan's place the other day before you came to us, weren't you?” It was a shot in the dark. Freedman couldn't remember whether Cullen had mentioned being in Sullivan's place except when he met Kovach.

“Yeah,” Cullen admitted.

“Who did you talk to there?”

“I talked to Sullivan, but not about Father O'Healey. I never — what in hell are you after?”

“You might say nothing at all,” Freedman answered sourly. “You come in off the street and tell us that you watched a priest thrown out of a helicopter in Honduras and that you were part of the biggest drug operation in history and that you were working for the CIA or something or some part of the goddamn army, and it was all legal and set up in Washington or wherever in hell they set these things up, and you ask us what we're after? Let me tell you something, Cullen. I don't like you, I don't believe you, and most of all I don't like priests being murdered, and sure as hell one day I'll get to the bottom of this, because this old man wasn't knocked over in Honduras but right here on my turf.”

He finished, and then the three men were silent as the minutes ticked by. The room thickened with smoke. Ramos puffed on his cigar.

“One other person,” Cullen said finally. “She's a hooker, name of Sylvia.”

“Sylvia who?”

“She said her name was Sylvia Mendoza.”

“And what did you tell her?”

Cullen sighed and shook his head and said, “One day you look at yourself and you realize how stupid you are. God Almighty.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I killed the priest. I told her I killed Father O'Healey.”

Freedman shook his head and looked at Ramos, who was staring at Cullen as if he had never seen him before.

“Just this hooker? No one else?”

“No one else.”

“You really think you killed that priest — I mean Father O'Healey? You really think you killed him? You see, I want to know what you are. Are you crazy? Or were you on crack? Because if you think you killed him, maybe you did kill him, and all the rest of what you tell us is pure, unadulterated horseshit.”

“I'm not crazy,” Cullen said stubbornly. “I could have stopped it. I had control of the chopper. But I didn't, and I don't do dope, so just drop that angle.”

“All right.” Freedman spread his hands. “Maybe yes, maybe no. Meanwhile, where does this Sylvia live?”

“Not far from here. Couple of blocks, not far.”

Ramos took a long pull on the cigar, admitting to himself that it was a very good cigar, at least two dollars, which was more than he could afford for cigars. He took out his notebook and asked Cullen for Sylvia Mendoza's address.

“I don't remember. I can take you there.”

“Good. I was beginning to think you should. It's just after five, which is a good time to find a lady at home.”

Cullen put on a jacket, and then the three men walked to the apartment house. They went up to the seventeenth floor, a detail Cullen remembered, after the doorman had assured them that Miss Mendoza was home, with a grin that was a snicker and that made Freedman calculate how much she had to pay the doorman. Freedman hated the process of payoff, everyone paying off someone else, and all of it hanging over the city like a sickness.

At the apartment, they pressed the door button and heard the chimes tinkle inside. Ramos pressed it again and again, but no one came to open the door and there was no movement or sound from inside. Freedman told Ramos to go down and get a passkey from either the doorman or the super, and if anyone got snotty about a search warrant, to tell him that they had probable cause to believe that a crime had been committed in the apartment. As he said that, Freedman felt a tickle of goose-flesh across his body. With Ramos gone, he said to Cullen, “You haven't seen her since then?”

“No.”

“Did she turn tricks here?”

“She said I Was an exception. I felt like shit warmed over, and she must have responded to it and felt sorry for me. She said she never took anyone upstairs—”

Which would be a dumb thing for him to say, Freedman realized, if he'd had anything to do with what might or might not be inside.