The Confession of Joe Cullen (20 page)

“Goddamnit, Freedman, this is a murder case.”

“Yes.”

“And it connects with the murder of Sylvia Mendoza.”

“That could be.”

“And you have pertinent information that you refuse to share with us.”

“No! Absolutely not! You call the DA and get his agreement, and I'll give you everything I got. Meanwhile, I am following orders given to me by a superior.”

“I will do that.”

“Fine. And now Sergeant Ramos and I will go about our business. I'm finished for tonight, but I'll be at the house in the morning. You can reach me there.”

Going downstairs, Ramos remarked that there were no media on the scene.

“There will be, but what's the difference. They won't print anything.”

“Why?”

“Come on, Hosea, what are they going to print? That a pilot for a gang of drug importers who are highly connected took a contract to waste another pilot for the same company who got pissed off because some Honduran thug threw a priest out of a helicopter? God Almighty, Hosea, we got an army of four thousand men down there in Honduras, and the whole shtick is to keep the contras going so that the arms-dope combine can stay in business. You want the
New York Times
to print that — a nice headline like this, for example: Two murders and one attempted murder organized by General Carl Swedenham, so that the profits of his drug operation can be maintained. Come on, come on, this stuff doesn't go in the media.”

“Where does it go, Lieutenant?”

“Damned if I know.”

“You believe Cullen?”

“Don't you?”

Ramos shrugged. “I don't make sense of it — not your way, Lieutenant. To my way of thinking, the old priest could have died of a heart attack, and hookers get snuffed every day. It goes with the business. I can't believe that someone is knocking off people to cover their operation. You just said it. They don't have to cover their operation. Everyone knows and nobody knows. That Golden Triangle affair came off years ago, and nobody even got a wrist slapped.”

“And Kovach?”

“The way Cullen told it, he hated Kovach and Kovach hated him. How much Kovach hated him, we don't know.”

“Or how much Cullen hated Kovach.”

“Right.”

They were outside now, and a cold, thin rain was falling. Ramos hunched his shoulders and shook his head. “Ever been to Puerto Rico, Lieutenant?”

“Not yet.”

“Warm. Sweet. One of the sweetest places on earth. The sun shines. The people are nice. Gentle, sweet, nice people, not like the bums who infest this place. Why the hell my father had to leave the place and come here, I'll never know.”

“You can go back.”

“You can't go back. You never go back. Could you go back to wherever your people came from?”

“No way. So you figure maybe Cullen evened up some old grudges?”

“It could be.”

“No, no way,” Freedman said. “You can knock off, Sergeant. We're on overtime.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I think Cullen went over to Sullivan's place. I think he's there right now. You know, a man like Cullen, he doesn't lie much. They come off either as saints or dumbbells, but they're not saints and they're not dumbbells. They're simple.”

“I'll hang in with you tonight,” Ramos said, trying to sort out what Freedman had said and see whether he could make some sense out of it. “Should we get a cab?”

“It's only a few blocks. We'll walk — what the hell, it's not much of a rain.”

“Yeah, they're simple. Do you know much about the saints?”

“Not your saints. Hell, a saint's a saint. Where did you go to school, Hosea?”

“I came down from East Harlem to Eighty-fourth Street to go to a Jesuit school.”

“Smart cookies.”

“You can say that again. What do we do, arrest Cullen?”

“He shot someone. They tell me that's against the law.”

“Jesus, I am confused,” Ramos said. “I been confused before, but this is real high-class confusion.”

“So is life,” Freedman said.

Working people in the neighborhood would eat Billy Sullivan's hamburgers and fried potatoes for lunch, but the dinner hour was flat, and aside from a couple of men at the bar, the place was empty. Billy recognized Freedman and Ramos. Sullivan's had been robbed three times in the past few years, and both detectives had been at the place.

“Can I give you something?” Billy asked them. “On the house.”

“Behave,” Freedman said.

“It's after hours.”

“So it is, so it is. The sergeant and I are working overtime, and you wouldn't want it to get around that we could be humanized by a couple of free beers.”

“Not me, Lieutenant,” Sullivan said.

“We're looking for Joe Cullen.”

“Who?”

“Joe Cullen. You don't know him.”

“I'm trying to recall the name,” Sullivan said.

“Try harder,” Freedman said. “You're in the way of being a public servant, Billy, and how in hell could you be a public servant without a liquor license?”

“Are you threatening me, Lieutenant?”

“Naw. Would I threaten you? But let me tell you this, Billy: it would be a lot friendlier to let us poke around the place than to wake up some mean judge for a search warrant, which would make us a lot meaner than we are.”

“Poke around the place.” He seemed to be listening. “Well, sure. I got nothing to hide. Come along.” At the end of the bar, a door led to the area behind it. There was a small office with a desk and a metal file cabinet, the kitchen, inhabited now by one old man who was cleaning pots — pots, dishes, and a stove and refrigerator — and a door that led to the bathroom. The bathroom window was wide open, a cold wind blowing through the kitchen.

“I told you to keep this door closed,” Billy Sullivan said to the old man. “I got to get back to the bar,” he told the detectives.

Freedman and Ramos went to an Italian place on the next block, where Ramos ordered fried red snapper while Freedman settled for linguini, with garlic and cheese.

“You eat too much pasta,” Ramos said.

“Why? What difference does it make?”

“You need protein,” Ramos said.

Benny Contina, their waiter, said, “I'm sorry, Sergeant, but that's not what they say today.”

“What do they say today?” Ramos asked sourly.

“Protein. You got enough of it.”

“And how do you know that?”

“I read it. Maybe I heard it on television.”

“Will you bring him the damn red snapper?” Freedman said.

Contina said, “You're sore at me?”

“We love you,” Ramos said.

“Can I talk to you?”

“As long as we can eat.”

The waiter pulled up a chair. “I got a sister — ah, you don't want to hear it.”

“Tell us,” Ramos said more gently.

“She married a bum.” He paused. A long pause.

“It happens,” Freedman said. “My wife could say the same thing.”

“I don't mean it's a guy who fools around or drinks or don't bring home a paycheck. A real bum. He beats up on her and twice she had to go to the hospital, and it's bad for the kids to have to see. So I tell her to call the cops. She calls the cops, and they come and tell her there's nothing they can do, it's a family matter.”

“Yeah, that's what a lot of them say.”

“So what do I do? Wait until this bastard beats my sister to death?”

“Where do you live?” Freedman asked him. “What's the precinct number there? Do you know?”

“It's the Ninth — you know, down on Fifth Street.”

“Yeah. All right, I know McCormick, he runs the squad there. I'll call him, and maybe he can put the squeeze on the crumb.”

“I don't know how to thank you, Lieutenant.”

Freedman made a notation in his book. “Forget it.
De nada.
”

When he left to get the food, Ramos said, “McCormick won't lift his ass to help his own mother, and
de nada's
Spanish, not Italian.”

“Aside from learning Italian, what should I do? Tell him to fuck off?”

“You're right. What about Cullen?”

“He'll turn up.”

“Dead or alive?”

“God knows.”

“Do you want to put out a bulletin?”

“They'll do all those good things at Manhattan South. The advantage of being a very small precinct is that while the hot-shots downtown are figuring ways to merge you somewhere else, they take a lot off your hands.”

“Yeah.”

“You're pretty sure they'll try to kill him?”

“Sometimes yes,” Ramos said, “sometimes no. Sometimes I think about it and believe him, sometimes I don't. There's one thing I know.”

“What's that?”

“That no matter how much cocaine we pick up, no matter how many ships we search, no matter how many busts we make, there's always more around than yesterday.”

The food came.

“Eat your fish,” Freedman said.

Between bites, Ramos asked, “Seeing Sheila tonight?”

“Goddamnit, we're divorced!”

“Well, don't bite my head off. I just asked.”

“Sorry.”

“What's with you, Lieutenant? You're full of anger. That's no way for a man to be, not in our job. No, no, a cop should never be angry.”

“My father was always angry,” Freedman said. “You know, he was one of the first Jewish lieutenants on the force. Then he joined up in World War Two — didn't have to, you know, being a cop — and he was shot in the belly and lived in a wheelchair. That's why he was always angry.”

“Poor man,” Ramos said.

“Yeah, you can say that. What are you doing tonight?”

“I figured I'd go down to Fourteenth Street. They got a new Spanish picture there. I like to brush up on my Spanish.”

“Enjoy.”

It was the wrong word. Ramos was the loneliest man Freedman had ever known. He never spoke about his wife, who had taken a year-old little boy to Puerto Rico after the divorce. Ramos had been there twice, and then he stopped going there, and he never spoke about either his wife or his child. He was a very tall, handsome man, well educated and well read. After dinner, the two men parted, Ramos turning downtown while Freedman walked back to the precinct.

Ramos loved women, and women returned the affection. Freedman had seen him talk to women in stores and once on the street, not prostitutes but women about their own business, and the women almost never pulled back or away from him. He was charming in a way that few men are, at least in New York, yet he couldn't make it with his wife, and he was afraid, Freedman felt, to try to make it with another woman — at least to the point of something more than a one-night stand. Well, it was an occupational hazard with cops; Freedman knew that as well as anyone.

At the precinct house, nobody raised an eyebrow at Freedman's appearance. They were used to his turning up at odd hours; but he, in turn, was always surprised at how different things became when another shift took over.

He sat down in his tiny office, put his feet up on the desk, and tried to work out in his mind exactly how he felt about Cullen. There was little doubt that Cullen would be destroyed. Even apart from outside forces, Cullen lived on a route toward destruction. In this case, he wished that he could protect Cullen, but he would have to find him first.

But of course
they
would find him first. A man like Cullen might be very hard to find, unless one was on him all the time, and if they had sent Kovach to kill him, there would have been a backup outside to see what happened, and when Cullen came out of the house instead of Kovach, they would have known what had happened. Cullen had gone straight to Billy Sullivan's saloon, and then out the bathroom window when he and Ramos walked into the bar; but if Cullen had a tail on him, the tail would still be on him.

All of this on Freedman's mind. Why should he want to protect Cullen? Cullen was not simply a criminal — or was he a criminal at all in this strange year of 1987? “I took a job,” he said. “I did what I was told to do. Who doesn't?”

He liked Cullen. He might not be able to put the reason into words, but he liked Cullen. He was intrigued by Cullen. He was intrigued by the idea of a Catholic priest who would go down to Honduras barefoot — his only measure was his vague knowledge of Saint Francis — and cast his lot among the poor peons who were fodder for the murder squads, armed so well and neatly by the United States. He even sort of understood that force which made Cullen confess to a murder he did not commit; for Freedman believed Cullen. Still, he was a smalltime cop and no more than a small-time cop; and in a world where the murder of Father O'Healey could provoke only a few inches of speculation in the
New York Times
and practically no speculation or indignation anywhere else, a small-time cop mattered not at all.

His world had crumbled a long time ago. He was an honest cop, and he ran an honest squad in a world where honesty was a bad joke, and where the dope pushers and the local political leaders occupied adjoining cells, where dollars were no longer counted in millions but in billions and trillions, and where thousands of men and women in the same city that contained the countinghouses slept in the streets, over grates, on the floors of railway stations and armories, in cardboard boxes, and in piles of rags and waste.

“Screw it,” he said, becoming judgmental at last; and then he left the precinct house and walked tiredly to the furnished room he called home.

Virginia Selby