The Confession of Joe Cullen

by Howard Fast

  “No way.” Ramos shook his head. “You could only flush that down the toilet.”

  “All right. She called Cullen at his apartment. Told him she was scared shitless. He tried to call her back. No answer. So he called us.”

  “That might wash,” Ramos admitted.

  Freedman shook his head. “Lives, jobs, pensions—” He whirled on Cullen. “Did you hear that, mister? We are going to cover you with that story. She called you. You called us. You fuck up, so help me God I’ll see you put away for the rest of your life.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Now let’s go over it again.”

  They had it down pat by the time the homicide people arrived, but Freedman had the hopeless, miserable feeling that they were helping to weave a net that would never be untangled.

  “What I don’t understand,” a lieutenant of detectives from Manhattan South said, “is just what your relationship to this broad consists of.”

  “I liked her,” Cullen said. “That’s allowed. Maybe I loved her.”

  “Freedman here tells me she’s a hooker.”

  “You can’t love a hooker?”

  “Sure, sure.”

  “She’s a beauty,” someone else said.

  “Sure, she’s a beauty.”

  “You get a full statement from him,” the lieutenant of detectives said to Freedman. “Who did you say killed her?”

  “Tony Carlione.”

  A younger man from Manhattan South said, “What the hell is it with you guys? You seen it done? What have you got with this Tony Carlione? His calling card.”

  “Johnson, shut up and don’t be an asshole,” the older detective said. And to Freedman, “Are you convinced that you make him?”

  “He was the most important ice pick man in the mob. They used to call him Twelve-tone Tony. It was his style. He was proud of it. The mob used him on the docks over in Brooklyn, and if you want to have a better rundown on him, talk to the Brooklyn guys.”

  “You got any notion how he connects with this woman?”

  Freedman shook his head. Ramos said, “There could have been something. She’s no chicken. She’s got a long past.”

  “Enough to pull him out of the safe harbor the Feds provided for him? Just showing his face in New York could be his ticket out of things.”

  Freedman shrugged. “It’s what he does. He’s a hit man, a professional killer. That’s how he made his points. Maybe somebody bought this hit; maybe it was his own score to settle.”

  “We’ll talk to the Feds,” the lieutenant from Manhattan South said. “They know where Carlione is or where he’s supposed to be.”

  “Good luck.”

  “Maybe you got class,” Ramos said sourly. “It takes class to talk to the Feds and have them talk back.”

  “My guess is,” Freedman said as a parting shot, “that wherever Carlione is, it’s where he’s supposed to be, and he’s got a nice tight alibi to prove it.”

  “We’ll see.”

  Freedman and Ramos and Cullen walked back to the precinct house, where they worked out a statement by Cullen that would satisfy everyone concerned. At least they hoped it would satisfy everyone concerned. Cullen signed it, and then they told him that he could go home.

  “But stay in the city,” Freedman said.

  “You know,” Cullen said, “I told her to call me Culley. I told her that’s what my friends call me. Friends. My God, I got no friends.”

  “Go on home. And lock your doors tonight.”

  “You know,” Cullen said, “I don’t like to appear dumber than I am, but if Father Immelman was murdered, only one thing links him to Sylvia.”

  “We thought of that,” Ramos said.

  “People like Monty and Mr. Lester — they just don’t give a fuck, not one little bit.”

  “Go home, Cullen.”

  He left, and the two men sat for a while in Freedman’s tiny office, the lieutenant behind his desk, Ramos on the single old chair that stood beside the desk, and after a while of silence, they got tired of trying to figure things out. Ramos asked Freedman what he was going to do tonight.

  “I thought I’d call Sheila.”

  “She’s not your wife these days.”

  “Yeah, which seems to make it better.”

  “My friend, Inez, she says she’s got a friend who’s an absolute knockout.”

  “Not tonight.”

  “Yeah. Well, I said I’d meet her at seven. It’s almost seven. You know, they’ll kill Cullen.”

  “You got too much imagination, Ramos.”

  “I wish I didn’t. All they have to do is kill Cullen and burn the tape.”

  “You know,” Freedman said, “if you want to find two here and two there and put them together and do the counting yourself, it always makes four. There isn’t a shred of evidence that the old priest died of anything more than a heart attack, and as for the hooker, who knows? Maybe she was something to Carlione. Maybe he had his own reasons for leaving his safe hole and cutting her up.”

  “It’s like me getting up at five in the morning to be a cop without pay. Contract killers kill for hire.”

  “Go ahead,” Freedman said, standing up. “Knock yourself out. You’ll go nuts.”

  “Yeah. How about you and me and Jones and Leary and Lefty? We all saw the tape. We made the damn tape.”

  Freedman dropped back into his chair and said, “Get out of here, Ramos. Go home. Take a hot shower. I don’t want to think about this.”

  “Could be you’re right.”

  “Leave on that happy thought.”

  Ramos departed, and Freedman dialed the number of Cornich, where Sheila worked, but the place had closed and there was no answer. Freedman thought about the place for a while, the three floors on Seventh Avenue, the glitz and glamour of the showrooms, the little theater where they did their own style shows, the young middle-aged men in their Italian suits, the flow of money charged to the perks, and then he looked through the glass door to the squad room, where the green paint was flaking off the walls and where two dull-eyed detectives sat at ancient desks, typing out reports on twenty-year-old mechanical typewriters.

  He called Sheila at home.

  “I knew you’d call,” she said.

  “All right, you know me. Are you pissed off because I called?”

  “Not right this minute. Come on, Mel, you want to talk, talk sweet.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “OK. Begin again.”

  “Let me take you to dinner — please. I’ll go home and shave and put on a tie. Please. I’ll take you to a good place. I’ll call the Four Seasons. You can always get a reservation there if you’re a cop.”

  “Sure.”

  Just like that. Her response silenced him for a few moments.

  “Mel?”

  “About eight o’clock,” he said weakly.

  “I’ll be ready.”

  Freedman put down the telephone and held out a hand. It was trembling slightly. He was as excited as a kid on his first real date with his first love. He left the precinct house like a somnambulist, his thoughts searching a chest of drawers for a white shirt. He was certain he had a clean white shirt, but he then decided that a striped shirt might be better. He grinned and nodded. The men she knew around Seventh Avenue would wear striped shirts. His own trouble was not that he dressed poorly, but that he simply did not dress at all. As often as not, he didn’t wear a tie. It is true that he had paid three hundred dollars for his sports jacket, but he wore it every day, as he did his gray flannel trousers. Sheila hated the way he dressed, but tonight he turned himself out very well indeed, pale blue striped shirt, dark blue silk knit tie, navy blazer, and gray flannel trousers, not the daily pair, but new ones worn for the first time.

  Sheila smiled and nodded immediate approbation as she opened the door for him; and as for Freedman, he looked at her and melted. She wore a long-sleeved silk-jersey blouse, black, and a long, swirling skirt of heavy black silk, and on the black sil
k of her blouse, the strand of pearls he had given her before they were married. Her black hair was cut shoulder-length and curled inward, and her only makeup light-colored lipstick.

  They were welcomed royally at the restaurant, no new thing when he was with Sheila, and Freedman ordered a dinner of asparagus vinaigrette, sliced white veal rump roast, tiny boiled potatoes, French beans, and fresh raspberries with cream for dessert, and a bottle of the best white Burgundy on the wine list. It was a dinner of the things Sheila liked best, and Freedman couldn’t care less about a check of almost two hundred dollars. Sheila gave him his head, only remarking once that this was not anything a police lieutenant would do every night.

  It was at her suggestion that they went home to her apartment, and it was in a way at her suggestion that they went to bed. And after they made love, since he couldn’t sleep, she made coffee and she took out a box of his old cigars that had sat in the refrigerator for months. They sat in her tiny kitchen while he filled it with cigar smoke. She didn’t complain. She liked the odor of cigar smoke. It was the first cigar Freedman had smoked in months. Well, conditions had changed. Other vows were also broken.

  Freedman thanked her. He groped for words to tell her how he felt. “You been so damned kind. You were the best thing ever happened to me, and I tossed it away.”

  “We’re good, but not with marriage.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you’ve got to see,” Sheila said, “that with all this great night together, you’re still depressed and miserable.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Still the priest in Honduras. You know, Mel, you’re Jewish and that’s why you give this priest so many points. I grew up Catholic, the whole smear, parochial school, priests, nuns — and let me assure you, Mel, I’ve known priests I wouldn’t give you twenty cents for.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s all you got to say, yeah?”

  “Look at it the way I do, Sheil. I’m nobody. I’m just a cop in a mean little precinct. I got no big opinion of myself. Sure I dream that maybe you and me, we’ll get together again, and maybe a couple of kids. But I got enough sense not to push that, and I got enough sense not to lie to myself. All right, like all cops, I live in shit, I work in shit, but no matter how lousy it gets, I tell myself that it’s better than anywhere else, that I live in a country where everyone has a shake. But look at it. I don’t give a damn whether that priest in Honduras was a saint or some worthless bum. The fact of the matter is that he was murdered and nobody did a damn thing about it. I got an eyewitness to the murder, and I’m told to keep hands off him and forget it. I got an eyewitness to the biggest drug operation in history, and I got every reason in the world to believe that it’s carried on by some government bureau in Washington, some part of my government, and I’m told to keep my mouth shut and forget it and leave it alone. The DA tells me that it’s jurisdictional, the chief inspector tells me it’s out of my hands, and now I could have two murders that flow directly from it, and I have to lie to those shitheads at Manhattan South or else get bounced out to Staten Island or Jamaica Bay or some such place, and I got a thick-headed Irishman who’s maybe next on this crazy slaughter list, and I can’t do one damn thing about it.”

  “Mel, for Christ’s sake, let’s go back to bed and sleep,” Sheila begged him. “I’m too tired to think and too old to be scared. And you’re scaring me.”

  Oscar Kovach

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, Harold Timberman, the district attorney, lunched at the Harvard Club with the governor of the state.

  Timberman cautiously raised the question of cocaine, as pertaining to Cullen’s tape. Because he could not plunge right into the pivotal question that the tape raised, he tiptoed around it with talk about the broader drug scene. “Of course, I remember Prohibition,” he said to the governor. “I’m a bit older than you, I think. I was just a kid. Nevertheless, I watched it tear the country to pieces and turn honest men into crooks and rip morality to shreds. That was the real beginning of organized crime.”

  “I guess it was. Do you feel the same process working today?”

  “I do.”

  “As bad?” the governor wondered.

  “Worse — much worse. Now it’s kids, sometimes kids as young as nine or ten years. Crack turns them into lunatics. Two days ago, a ten-year-old murdered his father and mother — shot them, his father’s pistol.”

  “I know. I read the papers.”

  Their talk led to the question that such talk always leads to, with Timberman saying, “There has to be a way to get a handle on this.”

  “So I am told. What else is new?”

  “Tell me something,” Timberman said, feeling that this was the proper moment, “is it thinkable, is it possible, that some part of the government is in this up to the neck and is running drugs?”

  “Possible? Anything is possible.”

  “That’s pretty vague.”

  “So is your question,” the governor said, smiling. “Why don’t you tell me what’s on your mind, Harold?”

  “Do you remember that during the Vietnam War there was talk of the CIA making a deal with the opium lords in the Golden Triangle north of Thailand, and in exchange for bases, buying their drugs and running them into the United States?”

  “During the war you heard all kind of things.”

  “Come on, come on,” Timberman said. “My nose is in court, but you hear things. You must. Now what about this contra thing? Is it guns for drugs?”

  “This is very unlike you, Harold,” the governor said. “Your life is dedicated to proof, hard evidence. You really can’t expect me to feed a rumor mill.”

  At the same time, in Sullivan’s bar, Cullen was saying, “Bobby, you can’t expect me to keep putting out, and whatever I put out goes right up your nose.”

  Bobby was a thin, sickly looking man, yellow skin with a parchment texture, blue bloodshot eyes, a shaking hand that touched Cullen’s arm tentatively.

  “Culley, we were both there,” he said pleadingly.

  “We were — almost twenty years ago.”

  “I’m dying, Culley.”

  “Oh, shit,” Cullen said.

  “If you’re broke, Culley, forget it.”

  “I’m not broke and I can give you the hundred. I could also burn it.”

  Billy Sullivan, listening to them, said, “Bobby, you come in and eat whenever you’re hungry. I never turn you away. I got a place in back where you can crash. If Culley wants to give you the hundred, take it, but don’t piss it away on a trip to Washington. What are you going to find on that goddamn black wall?”

  “Harry Brown, the black guy. He saved my life.”

  “I know. Sure. Harry was a beautiful guy, but you won’t find him on the wall.”

  “Why?”

  “He died last year.”

  He turned to Cullen and said, “Like I’m dying of the Agent Orange shit. I won’t have no name on the wall?”

  “I don’t know, Bobby.” Cullen turned to Sullivan and shook his head slightly. Then he took out his wallet and handed Bobby two fifty-dollar bills. “Take the Washington bus up at Thirty-ninth Street.”

  “God bless you, Culley.”

  When Bobby left, Sullivan said, “He’ll blow it on happy dust. You know that.”

  “Let him have his white soldiers,” Cullen said. “Maybe he’ll go to Washington and cry over the black stone. It makes no damn difference, Billy. He’ll be dead in another few months, the same way Harry Brown died.”

  “They fucked us nicely.”

  “Flag and country. What the hell difference does it make? Sooner or later, they’ll blow us all to hell with atomic bombs.”

  “You’re in a great mood.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Another hamburger?”

  “Why not?”

  He yelled over his shoulder, “Put one on for Culley. Well done and onions. You want tomatoes?” to Cullen, who shook his head.

  “No tomato.”

  The men
who ate lunch at Sullivan’s were an early crowd. Mostly they were men who worked in the neighborhood, an area of a hundred different small industries, or they were construction workers or people from the waterfront. They worked early, ate early, and left early, and now, except for Cullen, Sullivan, the cook, and the girl who waited tables, the bar was empty. “I turn around to the booth over there,” Sullivan said, “and half expect to see Sylvia. She got a bad rap. I liked her.”

  Cullen nodded.

  “She had a kind of class. Did you make out with her?”

  “Not really,” Cullen said. “I didn’t try.”

  Sullivan shook his head. “That was no boat to miss. When I saw you leave with her, I figured it would take your mind off things. And can you imagine — some crazy bastard cutting her with an ice pick twelve times.”

  Cullen was thinking of his wife, Frannie, the thought interlocking with the picture of Sylvia Mendoza lying dead on the floor of her apartment, a beautiful woman. He could have loved her. How desperately he wanted to know a woman he could love. That was the awful hole in his being, lovelessness, emptiness. He could have loved Frannie, but she hated his guts and had grinned with delight when the divorce came through. He never contested anything she said, the lies she told at the custody hearing — which gave her Sarah, their daughter. Sarah was only three then. She’d be five years old now. Who knew whether she remembered him? Frannie had disappeared out to the West Coast.

  Sullivan interrupted his reverie. “Do you know why Bobby wants to go down there and look at the black stone?”

  “Harry Brown?”

  “Yeah, I remember Harry Brown, built like a brick shit-house, but dependable. He carried Bobby, poor bastard. No, it wasn’t him, it was Oscar Kovach.”

  “Kovach? What the hell was he doing here?”

  “Well, he was telling Bobby about the black stone, how he saw it in Washington — but that wasn’t why he came in. He missed you by about thirty minutes. He was looking for you.”

  “Did he say why? What for?”

  “No. He was asking where you lived.”

  “Did you tell him?”

  “Culley, I don’t know where you live, and if I did know, I wouldn’t tell that cocksucker. I remember where you lived when you were together with Frannie. That was a nice place.”