The Confession of Joe Cullen

by Howard Fast

  “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.”

  “He did his duty,” Timberman said. “Don’t fault him for that.” His sister’s son had died in Vietnam. He had problems of his own dealing with the war.

  “On the other hand, I don’t believe his story of what happened in that helicopter. How in hell did he walk out of there alive and how in hell did he walk out of Texas alive?”

  “We’ll let the FBI worry about it.”

  “You really think they’ll admit what’s happening down there and make the connection public? You know, that’s what they’ll have to do if they take action against Cullen.”

  “It’s their ball.”

  “I know you’re not a betting man, sir, but I’d give you twenty to one that the Feds put it away and bury it.”

  Timberman shrugged and indicated that the interview was over.

  At dinner that evening, just Timberman and his wife at the table, she said to him, “I’ve lost interest, just in case you are consumed with curiosity as to why I don’t ask you about the tape. I’ve decided that it opens up something rotten in Washington or at City Hall, and ever since you told me that two very important New York judges were being paid off by Roy Cohn, you clam up whenever you turn over a particularly disgraceful rock.”

  “You’re usually right,” the district attorney admitted.

  “On the other hand,” Sally said, smiling over her small victory, “if you should wish to run the tape and have ah intelligent point of view to refer to — well, you might persuade me to watch it.”

  “Too late.”

  “What do you mean, too late?”

  “I sent it to Washington.”

  “Without making a copy?” she asked incredulously.

  “Well — I did make a copy—”

  “Then it’s not too late.”

  “Well — yes and no. No means that I intend to have it destroyed tomorrow. I feel I had no right to copy it.”

  “Well,” she said, “well indeed. If you destroy it before you let me see it, I shall never forgive you.”

  They went on with their dinner in silence for a while, and then Timberman said, “I’ll have to think about that, won’t I?”

  “I would think about it,” she agreed.

  Virginia Selby

  BETWEEN her growing up and her professional experience, Ginny Selby could say that if she hadn’t seen all of it, she had certainly touched base with most of it. She was the offspring of an Irish father and a Puerto Rican mother. When she was three, Jack Selby walked out of their tiny apartment on 117th Street, just off Second Avenue, and disappeared. Maria Selby insisted to her dying day that “poor Jack” had been abducted and done away with, but the local cops knew Jack Selby as a bum no one would trouble to do away with, and since he was six feet two inches tall, his body would not be easily disposable. They figured that he simply walked out and took off, and since his brain had been stewed in alcohol for most of his adult life, he could very well have forgotten the way back.

  But somewhere in his genes there was intelligence, and Maria Selby, who, if the truth be told, was happy to be rid of him, was no fool. The tall, long-limbed Ginny inherited brains if nothing else. At age nine, she was helping her mother do sweatshop piecework in their tiny apartment; at age seventeen, she graduated from high school and took advantage of open admissions at Hunter College, meanwhile holding down a job waiting tables in an Italian restaurant on Third Avenue in the Eighties. At twenty-one years, she graduated from Hunter summa cum laude and won a scholarship to Columbia Law School; and at graduation she was offered jobs at two fairly prestigious law firms. She had grown into a fine-looking, slender woman, unaware of her own attractiveness, fluent in Spanish, street-smart, and full of a carefully concealed rage at poverty and the people who impose it. She turned down the prestigious law firms for a job at half the pay in the district attorney’s army of lawyers, determined to carry on her own war against the thugs and hoodlums who preyed on the poor of Spanish Harlem. She had also decided that it was a good road toward political office, something she had placed in her future. Now, eight years later, she was a bureau chief at fifty thousand a year, unmarried, discontented, and sick to death of the whole spectrum that was called justice. Three months before, she had broken a relationship with a man whose tenderness and endearing qualities had washed out under a vicious switch of character; and when he struck her, she struck back, and then came to believe that he would have possibly beaten her into unconsciousness or death had not her purse been within reach and thereby the gun it contained. “Just leave,” she had said to him, “and don’t ever come back. I don’t just carry a gun, I know how to use it.”

  In light of that, it was all the more astonishing to her that she couldn’t get the picture of Cullen out of her mind. “Is it,” she asked herself, “that I’m always attracted to these macho bastards because I have a character flaw? Is it my mother’s experience? Is there a gene that says, lady, destroy yourself.” She told herself, concerning Cullen, “He’s a bum like all the rest of them.” Then why the attraction? Then why couldn’t she get him out of her mind; why couldn’t she stop thinking about him? Likely enough, he was a killer. Nobody came out of Vietnam with clean white hands, and his story about the priest was just the kind of a senseless story she had heard a hundred times from perps who were defending themselves and trying to talk their way out.

  But his guilt puzzled her. Nothing Morty Cohen had said went to the question of his guilt and his pleading for some kind of absolution, for forgiveness and punishment. “And the son of a bitch is a dope runner,” she told herself. “No guilt for that — not even a sense that he had done anything wrong.” This was a particular kind of a sociopath, a man whose only remorse could be awakened by the murder of a Catholic priest.

  “You’re
not being fair to him,” she admitted to herself, and then asked herself angrily why in hell she should be fair to him. Whereupon she reached across the desk for her telephone directory. It frequently occurred to her, during the lean nights when she hopelessly resigned herself to the glass tit on which all her countrymen and women sucked, that if the characters engaged in the mindless dramas of violence that television lived by would either call the cops or look in the telephone directory, their problems might be solved immediately. At that point, however, nothing would be left to separate the commercials.

  “Why think?” she wondered. “Few do, and the world goes along.” As it would now, and she brushed aside her reasonably intelligent brain and opened the Manhattan white pages. Under C — and not as many Cullens as she would have expected, no more than sixty of them. Probably all originated in the same bleak and hungry Irish village. Names fascinated Ginny. She had always believed that Selby was an Irish name, and then she ran into someone with the same name who said his people came from Holland, and then someone else who was a Selby and was Jewish.

  And now, here it was, Joseph Cullen, West Eighteenth Street, 555-8721. She said to herself, “I have to know why I am doing this. I will not do it until I know why I am doing it.”

  “Very well,” she replied to herself, “I will tell you, Ginny Selby, why I am doing this. I am not only bored shitless but I want desperately to be with a man and I’m going to meet him and find out what that damn confession means.” And she dialed the number.

  The voice on the tape answered the phone, and even though Ginny had listened to the tape only a short while before, the voice surprised her. This time, of course, she was thinking of the man and, in that sense, listening to the voice differently. His speech was good, well-controlled mid Atlantic, the Rs dulled only slightly in the New York manner.

  “Is this Joseph Cullen?” She had an official voice and tone. You don’t work years at the DA’s office without picking up an official tone.

  “That’s right. I’m Joe Cullen.”

  “My name’s Virginia Selby, and I’m a bureau chief at the Manhattan district attorney’s office. Just a short time ago I finished watching the tape you made at the precinct over on the West Side.”

  She paused, and Cullen said, “What does that mean? Are you going to arrest me?”

  “No. Oh, no.” She took a deep breath, and continued, “It only means that I want to talk to you and clear up some points in your statement.”

  “That’s OK. Do you want me to come downtown?”

  “No. This isn’t that official. It would be simpler for us to have lunch together, and I thought if you’re free today …?”

  “I’m free.”

  “Do you know where Denby’s is, on Fourteenth Street between Seventh and Eighth?”

  “Yeah. I know the place.”

  “Suppose we meet there — at, say, one o’clock.”

  “How will I know you?”

  “I’ll know you. Remember, I’ve just seen the tape of your statement. And understand, the lunch is at my expense. That’s a rule I have to live by.”

  “I understand,” Cullen agreed.

  Actually, the rule referred only to her own lunch, and the whole venture was so out of line that she had to fight to restrain herself from calling Cullen back and canceling the whole foolish gesture. Instead, she underwrote her whole position by assuring herself that she was not going to sit by and ignore one of the biggest drug-running operations ever put in motion. That put her on the side of the good guys at her uneasy forthcoming lunch.

  Cullen was bigger, broader than the TV screen showed him to be, but Ginny had expected that. A TV screen diminishes things. People are always smaller than life on television. But what Ginny had not expected or anticipated was Cullen’s smile. She had marked Cullen as another bum, another Irish bum — as Ginny’s mother had always characterized her father’s friends — a large, brainless man who went where he was led. She should have known better. A man of Cullen’s background doesn’t fight his way through college unless he’s something better than brainless. His smile shattered all her preconceptions, and she tried not to feel that she would trust a man with such an open, delightful, and innocent smile.

  Denby’s was one of those nonethnic restaurants that served ordinary, decent food: roast chicken, roast beef, pot roast, meat loaf, lamb chops, mashed potatoes, spinach, string beans, and one brown gravy for all occasions. Bacon and eggs and omelets were presented almost apologetically, and all the vegetables were overcooked. But lunch could be had for seven or eight dollars, and there were clean tablecloths and good bread. They knew Ginny because it was close to her apartment on Eleventh Street, and they gave her a quiet table in the rear.

  Cullen moved her chair when she sat down. He would have done it anyway, but he had a thing for tall, dark women, and he had a sense, as Ginny had, of another street-smart person. She asked Cullen whether he wanted a drink, and he shook his head. She mentioned that she didn’t drink on duty and she was still on duty. She ordered poached eggs, and Cullen had a roast beef sandwich. Then Cullen asked her what a bureau chief was.

  “Timberman runs a big operation,” she said; “over three hundred district attorneys. We’re divided into bureaus, and a bureau has a bureau chief.”

  “Makes you a cop?”

  “No, just an assistant DA. Look, let me tell you right off, Cullen, that you can walk out of here if you want to. I’m only sticking my nose into this because I watched the tape the cops on the West Side made of your confession. You know that you’re not being arrested or accused of any crime.”

  “I know that. I don’t know why.”

  “There are reasons. For one thing, no body, no witness, no way to know whether you’re telling the truth. For another, this is sticky as hell, and when something gets this sticky, people don’t want to mess with it.”

  “You’re messing with it.”

  “That’s true.” She pointed to his sandwich, which had just arrived. “Eat.”

  He grinned at her.

  “Nothing’s funny, Cullen. I don’t think you know what the hell you’re doing. You’ve turned over the biggest rock I ever heard of, and you don’t seem to have enough brains to be frightened. And don’t think I’m friendly. You’re a dope smuggler, and to me that’s shit.”

  She was fighting his grin. Inside, she was saying, Ginny, you’re so fucked up you could write a book about it.

  “Why should I be frightened?” Cullen asked.

  “What’s with you?” she demanded in a fierce whisper. “What in hell is with you?”

  “Look, lady,” Cullen said, “I don’t owe you one goddamn thing. I don’t even know why I’m sitting here and talking to you, except that I don’t have anything better to do today. I smuggled dope. I helped kill the best man I ever knew. Are you a Catholic, lady?”

  “Call me Ginny. Understand? Ginny? Am I a Catholic? I was born one, and I haven’t set foot in a church in twenty years, and what’s it to you?”

  “Nothing, nothing.” He devoured his sandwich furiously, and asked, through the bites, “You’re not hungry?”

  “How much of that confession was true?”

  He chewed and swallowed what was in his mouth, and then said, “Most of it.”

  “This Sanchez character threw the priest out of the helicopter?”

  “That’s what he did.”

  “And what did you do?”

  “I flew the helicopter back to the strip.”

  “This priest was the best man you ever knew, and you watched Sanchez kill him and you did nothing to Sanchez?”

  “I was piloting the chopper.”

  “And this Sanchez bum let you walk away?”

  Cullen stared at her for a long moment, and then he said, “Lady, what do you want?”

  Ginny sighed and shook her head.

  “I’m not going to call you Ginny, Miss Selby,” Cullen said. “I think you came here to set me up.”

  “You’re wrong!” she ex
claimed.

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Let me tell you something. When I took this job of bringing guns down to the contras, I figured I was doing something with the government behind me. I didn’t know dope was part of it. I’m not very smart, lady. If I was smart, I wouldn’t have been in that crazy Nam killing, and it wouldn’t have taken me so long to learn the kind of shit runs this country. Now let me put it to you straight and neat. I knew that this contra thing was a scam to make money for someone, but I needed the job and I figured it was legal. I am no goddamn moralist. When I learned they were shipping dope, I didn’t fall down surprised to learn that some kind of Feds were involved. What else is new? You want me to smell out a job that’s clean? Lady, I’m a pilot. The only damn thing I know is how to fly a plane. But I was involved. Something happened to me when I met Francis O’Healey. Maybe I felt no damn different than you about the church. I couldn’t call him Father; I called him Padre. I don’t think you know what the hell I’m saying, but listen. You want to separate shit from shit. I can’t do that anymore. The Feds paid me to take a gunship and wipe out Vietnam villages. You ever see a baby child chopped into hamburger by fifty-millimeter shells? You want to separate things and tell me that’s legal and running dope and guns is a crime? No way, sister. You know what O’Healey gave me? He gave me grace. You remember what the nuns used to talk about in school? So now figure it out. Thanks for the lunch.” And with that, Cullen got up and stalked out of the restaurant.

  Ginny fumbled in her purse, found the bills she wanted, dropped them on the table, and then bolted out of the restaurant after Cullen. He was already halfway down the street toward Seventh Avenue, and she had to break into a half run to get close enough to call out to him.

  “Cullen! Cullen!”

  He turned, saw her, and waited while she walked toward him with long, easy strides. “Why?” she demanded as she came face to face with him. “I was trying to help you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I was. I didn’t set you up. Do I look like that to you? It would have been stupid. Do you really think I’m wired?” She opened her purse to show it to him. Her coat and jacket were open, and now she pulled up her blouse to show there was no wire on her waist.