The Confession of Joe Cullen (6 page)

Cullen stopped speaking. He was covered with sweat, his shirt wet under his jacket, the sweat beading his face, his hands trembling. Leary lit a cigarette and handed it to him. He puffed and then drew a deep breath of smoke.

“They let you go?” Freedman said. “Just like that?”

“Sanchez was unconscious,” Cullen answered, speaking with visible effort. “I guess the soldiers didn't want to do anything until someone told them what to do, and Oscar didn't know what the hell was going on. Our plane was fueled. I would have taken off without Oscar if he hadn't come with me. He might have stopped me, but I picked up the pistol Sanchez had dropped and told him I'd kill him if he interfered with the takeoff.”

“And when you got back to the States?”

“I left my car at the airport in Texas. I got into it and drove. No one tried to stop me.”

“So that's it? That's the way it happened?”

“That's it.”

“And nobody stopped you there in Texas? Nobody called the cops?”

“Maybe they didn't know what happened.”

“Didn't Oscar tell them?”

“I suppose he did. You want them to be crazy enough to call the cops?”

“And the pistol?”

“I emptied it and left it with Oscar.”

“Did you tell Oscar what had happened?” Ramos asked.

“I told him.”

“And?”

“He said it was none of my fucken business.”

“Where is he?”

Cullen shrugged. “I suppose he's where I left him.”

Freedman

F
REEDMAN
told the detectives to get back to their cases and Lefty to give him the tape, and then he and Ramos led Cullen into the small office that adjoined the squad room. There were only two chairs in the office. Ramos pulled in another chair, after which there was not much room remaining if someone wanted to switch from one chair to another. The window in this office had not been cleaned in at least thirty years. The desk was vintage 1920s. When it comes to the place they work, New York City is not generous to its police.

Freedman nodded for Cullen to sit down and pushed a box of Kleenex toward him. While Cullen wiped his face, Ramos took out his cigarettes.

“Jesus Christ!” Freedman exploded. “You're not going to smoke those damn things in here. We'll choke.”

“OK, don't blow your top.”

Freedman stared at Cullen for a long moment; then he shook his head and said bleakly, “You're no horse's ass, Cullen. You know which side is up. You're a pilot, you're a college graduate, and you were an officer in the United States Air Force, and if your story is not one crock of shit, you know damn well you didn't commit any crime except running dope. That's a big one, but it's not murder. The way you tell it, you're not even an accessory to a murder. You didn't foresee it, you tried to prevent it, and now you're giving evidence against whoever committed it — if anyone did, if any murder took place. Father Francis Luke O'Healey disappeared. There is no body. As for the dope — we would need evidence and you got no evidence. Do you have any coke on you?”

“I'm not a doper. I hate the stuff.”

“So that's where we are,” Freedman said. “Leave your name, address, telephone number, and walk out of here. We'll follow up on what you gave us, and if anything comes of it, we'll call you as a witness.”

“I'm not a witness,” Cullen said stolidly. “Not the way you mean it. I bear witness differently.”

“Do you know what the hell he's talking about?” Freedman asked Ramos.

“Maybe. There's another way to bear witness. Tell me something, Mr. Cullen. After you met the father, did you suspect they would kill him?”

“Just before we got into the chopper — yes.”

“What could you do?”

The two policemen waited. Through the closed door of the little office, Cullen could hear Jones's voice as he spoke into the telephone. He recalled a story by Edgar Allan Poe that he had read a long, long time ago, where a policeman sat silently waiting for a guilty man to confess. Now the presence of these two silent policemen became intolerable. He had to speak, yet he knew that he was incapable of pulling the thoughts out of his head and turning them into words.

Finally, he said, “It isn't what I could do. I could have done any number of things. I had control of the chopper. If you're as good as I am with a chopper, you can make it teach points to a sparrow. When they opened the door, I could have tossed them out — one of them, anyway. I could have threatened them. I could have spun it — any number of things. The point is that I knew they were going to kill him, yet I did nothing until they started to throw him out, and then it was too late. I never met anyone like O'Healey before. I never believed there was a good man — I never met a good man. All the hours we talked — it was like I had been blind, and here was Saint Francis. My God,” he said to Ramos, pleading, “do you understand what I'm trying to say?”

Freedman watched Ramos, whose black eyes were hooded to slits and who said softly, “I think I do.”

“No one paid him. He went to the Indians because they were the poorest people on earth — Oh, shit! You sit up here in New York and you don't know what the fuck goes on, and I don't know how to spell it out.”

“You spell it out pretty good,” Ramos said. “You did nothing we can arrest you for. We'll look into it.”

“Maybe we can get someone to look for that Honduran officer, Sanchez,” Freedman said.

“Where do you live?” Ramos asked. Cullen gave them the address on West Eighteenth Street.

“Get some rest,” Freedman said. He opened the door of the office and Cullen shambled out.

“Poor bastard,” Ramos said.

Cullen closed the door behind him, and for a few moments the two detectives sat in silence. Then Freedman shook his head. “Fucken strange world. What the hell does he mean with that bearing-witness stuff?”

“I got a notion — sort of, but I can't explain it … I mean, I can't make it make sense to you.”

“Because I'm not Catholic?”

“I don't know.”

Freedman picked up the phone, dialed a number, and then said, “Maybe I can buy you dinner tonight?” He paused, and then, “OK, so it goes. Hell, I understand.” He put down the phone and said to Ramos, “What kind of shmuck am I?”

Ramos shook his head.

“We're divorced over a year, and I still try to date her. You ever date your ex-wife?”

“I hate her guts, Lieutenant,” Ramos said. “I want to know what you're thinking about Cullen.”

Freedman took out a nail clipper and tried to smooth a ragged edge. “You believe him?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe. What the hell does maybe signify?”

“I think he told it the way he sees it. Maybe it's different the way somebody else sees it. Do you believe him?”

“Yes.”

“Just like that?”

“This Cullen,” Freedman said, “is locked into himself. I know what that's like. I got a wife locked into herself. Cullen sees a priest killed, a fucken lousy way to die, so goddamn awful that even a priest who believes in God screams in terror as he falls through the air — and that explodes something in Cullen. Cullen really believes he murdered the priest. When we were married, I'd talk to Sheila, I'd plead with her — I couldn't get through. O'Healey got through to Cullen. Look, Ramos, the fact that we both believe him makes a point. I'm going to send the tape downtown to the DA. Let them bust their heads over it. If anything comes of it, we're on page one. That can't hurt the house. We might get a new paint job out of it.”

Freedman gave instructions to send the tape downtown to the district attorney, and then, their shift being over, he and Ramos left. Freedman was almost six feet, but Ramos loomed over him, at least four inches taller, stooped, his black mustache drooping. Freedman covered his red hair with a soft Irish hat, and both men wore raincoats. It was about six o'clock, and the bright day had given way to a cold November rain. They turned up their coat collars and hunched over as they walked toward Eighth Avenue.

“Lousy night,” Ramos said. “Hungry, boss?”

“When I was a kid, I was hungry. Now I'm never hungry. I eat the goddamn junk food all day, I swear to God it's going to kill me. You know how much cholesterol there is in a ham and cheese or a corned beef on rye? I got high blood pressure and I eat those damn pickles that are soaked with salt. I go to a doctor and I pay him forty bucks to tell me not to eat junk food.”

“When I was a kid,” Ramos said, “you called a doctor and it was five dollars. And they came.”

“Dreams. We could go to a movie now and eat later. Unless you got a date?”

“Tell me something,” Ramos asked. “Why do you always try to date your ex-wife?”

“Because she interests me. She's sexy. She's smart. Other women bore me.”

“So why'd you divorce her?”

“Because mostly we just ripped each other up. If I'd stayed married, either she'd have killed me or I'd have killed her.”

“Yeah — yeah. Let's eat now. I'm hungry.”

Freedman nodded. He didn't want to be alone tonight. If Ramos wanted to eat, he'd eat. They went to Tony Polito's place on Eighth Avenue. It was only half-past six, and except for another occupied table, the restaurant was empty. Tony had strong mob connections, such as the mortgage to his place, and therefore was overly polite to cops. “You come early, good. My house is your house. You're not hungry, Lieutenant. I make you a beautiful little salad of arugula, a little olive oil and vinegar, a little spaghetti—”

“How the hell do you know that I'm not hungry?”

“You're never hungry, Lieutenant.”

Ramos burst out laughing. Tony brought them a bottle of wine, white Sicilian wine, which, he explained, was the best white wine in the world.

“This is a new line for the mob,” Ramos said. “They're building it slow but very serious in the wine business.”

“I'll have a beer,” Freedman said.

“That's a mistake,” Ramos said, tasting the wine.

“I'll risk it.”

“You're not a very pleasant person tonight,” Ramos observed. “You're ripping up everyone you talk to. All because your ex-wife won't give you a date. You know what I think? I think you ought to marry her again.”

“You think she'd be stupid enough to marry me? Forget it, and you're wrong. I gave up on Sheila — for tonight. On the other hand, consider this. Six cops have been shot to death in the last few months by drug dealers, the city is riddled with the stuff, it's fucken ruining the city and the country, and every time we walk through a door, we could be dead on the other side of it, and you and me sit here and stuff our mouths.”

“What do you want me to do, Lieutenant? Eat standing up?”

“What the hell is with you, Ramos? Doesn't anything get to you? We just listened to Cullen's story about the biggest drug operation maybe in the world, and cocaine coming in like it owned every seat on its own airline—”

“So what, goddamn it, so what?”

“Like that?”

“Holy Mother of God, Lieutenant,” Ramos burst out. “There's army and CIA and the State Department, not to mention the administration itself, mixed up in this business, and we're a couple of cops from a precinct out of
Lost Horizons
…” His voice trailed off.

“Yeah?”

“Oh, shit!”

Freedman nodded. “OK, I'm sorry. I'm pissed off. I don't know why the hell I'm dumping on you.”

“If you got a date with Sheila, you'd dump on her.”

“Maybe you're right.” Freedman wasn't hungry, but he ate his spaghetti hungrily. He'd feel sick later, and he realized this and pushed the plate away from him, half eaten. He sat for a little while in silence, observing Ramos, who was devouring all of his food with gusto. Freedman had an ulcer and he began to feel it now, the initial thread of fire creeping up his gullet.

“It's the lousy food you eat.”

“You're eating the same lousy food.”

“No, sir, Lieutenant. This is not lousy food. It's the pastrami and corned beef that's putting you under. Myself, I grew up with brown rice and beans. Never had a gut ache—”

“Leave it alone,” Freedman growled. “I am sick of that miserable stomach of yours.” He called Tony to bring him a glass of milk.

The milk came and Freedman drained the glass and then burst out, “It's a goddamn farce. The whole thing's a joke. A man tells us about a murder and a drug business that could put this whole city on crazy street, and there's not one fucken thing we can do with it, and the whole damn world's coming apart, and you sit there and give me a lecture on Puerto Rican food.”

“It still don't hurt as much as your ulcer. Let the DA worry about it.”

“I'm going over there,” Freedman said.