The Confession of Joe Cullen

by Howard Fast

  “She’s gone to the Coast. What else did Kovach say?”

  “He said he had some money that was coming to you.”

  “Yeah, he always was a philanthropist.” Cullen dropped his voice. “Billy, I need a favor.”

  “Just say it.”

  “I need a piece.”

  “Ah, come on, Culley,” Sullivan said. “You don’t want that kind of shit. You need money—”

  “Billy, I don’t need money. I got seven hundred in my pocket and enough in the bank. I’m scared, period. I’m neck-deep in stuff — and I’m scared. I can’t explain it. It’s just too damn complicated.”

  “Tell me about it. Maybe I can help.”

  “Nobody can help. I want to stay alive, that’s all. I need a gun. If you can’t help me—”

  “Did I say that?”

  “I don’t know. If it has a number, then I can’t take it. So maybe the best thing to do is to forget that I asked.”

  “All right. Just listen. I got a big forty-five army issue that I keep under the counter, and that’s registered with a permit. I can’t give you that. But I got one of those little thirty-caliber Saturday night specials, with no number and not registered, and I can give you that. I hate to.”

  “I know.”

  “Jesus, Culley, nobody knows better than us what kind of shit a gun is.”

  “I know.”

  “OK, as long as you know and think about it.” He went into the back room and returned with a small parcel in a paper bag. “It’s fully loaded. I don’t keep extra ammo. I took it in trade from a wino, a guy I used to know. Figured he’d live longer without it. You finish with it, chuck it into the river.”

  Culley thanked him. “I won’t forget, Billy.”

  “Forget it. This is something I don’t want either of us to remember. If you got a brain in your head, you’d throw it into the river right now.”

  Cullen shrugged. But he didn’t throw it into the river, and at home that evening he examined it carefully, unloaded it, tried the action, and then reloaded it carefully. He had a tremendous respect for weapons, along with hatred, along with compassion for the ground soldiers in Vietnam who’d had to use the weapons, the marines and the other enlisted personnel who had been combat foot soldiers. Too many of them ended up with one sickness or another, and he had no delusions about what would have been his own fate if he had been among them. He was crazy enough just looking down from a helicopter.

  He slipped the little gun into his pocket and he considered the possibility of going out for his dinner. He couldn’t face the thought of another Billy Sullivan hamburger. He didn’t want to drink, and he hated to eat alone in a restaurant quite as much as he hated the food served at the small bars and hamburger joints. A cafeteria filled him with a special kind of lonely misery; it was not the process of eating or the food, but the loneliness, the sense of being unnoticed and totally uncared for. He decided on a bottle of beer from his refrigerator and the remaining half of a ham and cheese sandwich he had bought three days ago, and he turned on his television set and watched the six o’clock news as he munched the dry bread of the sandwich. He was prepared for the doorbell to ring, and when it did, he turned off the TV and opened the door without asking who was there. That it should be Oscar Kovach was no surprise to him.

  He motioned for Kovach to enter, closed the door behind him, and then went into the kitchen, calling back, “Sit down, Oscar. I got cold beer. No liquor in the house.”

  “Beer’s fine,” Kovach said.

  Cullen came out of the kitchen with a bottle of beer in his left hand. His right hand was in his pocket, grasping the handle of the Saturday night special. Kovach was standing at the doorway, an automatic pistol, silencer attached, in his hand; and in the fraction of a second it took Cullen to see and respond, Cullen flung the beer bottle at Kovach and Kovach flinched enough to sear Cullen’s side as the bullet tore through his shirt. Cullen dived behind a big armchair and Kovach delivered his second and third shots into the chair. Cullen had the gun out, and he shot Kovach as Kovach took two strides to get around the chair. The bullet struck Kovach in the chest. He dropped his big pistol, fell on the floor, rolled over, and then sat up, a bewildered expression on his face, and he managed to say, “I think you killed me, Culley. I got a hole in my chest.” Then he fell back.

  Cullen shook him. “Come on, Oscar, come on! What did you want to shoot me for? For what? For who? Come on — was it Monty? Or that son of a bitch Fred Lester? Tell me!”

  Then Cullen realized that Kovach was dead, and that he would tell nothing to anyone ever again. His eyes were wide open and staring, and when Cullen felt for a pulse, he found none.

  “You son of a bitch,” Cullen said. “You killed me too. I’m sitting on a murder rap.”

  For once, Cullen regretted that he did not keep a bottle of booze on hand, for he desperately wanted a drink. He had never been classified as alcoholic, as so many of his buddies had been, and he could forgo hard liquor. He had a real need for it only in the small hours of the night, when terror would come whispering to him; and he felt that way now as he stared at Oscar Kovach’s body. He had fired only one shot, and the Saturday night special was not loud. Probably it had not been heard. The old brownstone he lived in had one apartment on a floor, and at this hour most of the other tenants might well be out.

  He sat down on the couch and stared at Kovach. If only he had not met him; if only he had not been in Billy Sullivan’s saloon when Kovach appeared and offered the job. Eventually, he would have gotten a job. If only he had told Kovach to go to hell. Now he had killed him. Self-defense? Try to prove that in a city court. Then what do you do? Call Freedman?

  No, no — no way.

  Dump the body? Get rid of it?

  Impossible. Totally impossible. He didn’t have a car. After he had driven from Texas to New York, his car was burning a quart of oil every two hundred miles. The car was seven years old and not worth the price of a New York garage. Cullen had sold it for five hundred dollars. What was he to do? Hail a taxi and ask him to drive him to the river to dump a body? Or walk the body a quarter of a mile to the river. Nothing made any sense, except that he was in a trap with apparently no way out.

  He thought about the guns. He could tell a straight story: Kovach had come here to kill him. He had fired once and seared Cullen’s side — and the reminder brought pain there. His shirt was sticky with blood. He went into the bathroom, thinking that he could show the two — or was it three? — bullet holes in the chair. But who was to say that the heavy automatic belonged to Kovach or that Kovach had come there armed? He had his shirt off now. The wound looked and felt as if someone had dragged a rough file across his ribs. It was only a surface wound, the blood oozing out of it, but it was painful. He took a clean handkerchief, saturated it with rubbing alcohol, and swabbed out the wound. He had a kit of bandages, and the largest in the kit just covered the wound. Not much of a wound and nothing to worry about. He had had worse in Vietnam without being pulled off his chopper. He rolled the shirt into a ball, put it in a plastic bag without cleaning it, and squeezed it onto a shelf in his medicine cabinet. It was the only evidence he had that Kovach had fired at him, but it was no evidence at all as to who had fired first. He could have put the shots into the chair himself.

  He put on a clean shirt and then went back into the living room and sat down, trying to think the things through. It was not likely, he realized, that the bullet had gone entirely through Kovach’s body, so possibly there was no blood on the floor — although what difference that would make he couldn’t imagine. He kept thinking that this apartment was his home, but it was no longer his home. He contemplated taking both guns to the river and throwing them in, but after a little thought, that seemed senseless. What difference could it make if he disposed of the guns? But he did have his wound; and what difference did that make? It could have been self-inflicted. It could have been the result of both of them firing at once. The more he thought about it, the mo
re hopeless it appeared. He was cold, tired, and miserable. He thought a cigar might help, and he went into the kitchen to the refrigerator, where he kept his cigars. There were three there, three of the fine Cubans that Fred Lester handed out at the Salsaville strip. He pinched the end off one and lit it as he went back into the living room, and then he said to himself, “I’m crazy, sitting here like some stupid asshole, smoking a cigar and staring at Oscar Kovach’s body.”

  He took another puff on the cigar, and then he placed it in an ashtray, picked up his telephone, asked Information for the number of the precinct house, and then punched it out. A voice on the other end responded, and Cullen asked for Lieutenant Freedman.

  “Freedman.”

  “Lieutenant, this is Joe Cullen.”

  “Yeah. Cullen. What can I do for you?”

  “About a half hour ago, my doorbell rang. When I answered it, it was Oscar Kovach. You remember the name.”

  “I remember the name.”

  “The same guy that flew with me to Honduras.”

  “Yeah. Go on.”

  “The moment the door was closed behind him, he pulled out a forty-five with a silencer attached and began to shoot at me.”

  “What? Say that again, clearly.”

  “He pulled out a gun,” Cullen said slowly, “and began to shoot at me.”

  “Were you hit?”

  “In the side. Just a scratch. He grazed me.”

  “Where’s Kovach now?”

  “He’s here.”

  “What do you mean, here?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “You’re telling me that Kovach is dead — in your apartment?”

  “I’m looking at him right now,” Cullen said miserably.

  “Are you sure he’s dead? I can have an ambulance there in ten minutes.”

  “Lieutenant, I was in Nam. I know dead.”

  “OK. Now listen to me. Just stay right there, and don’t open the door to anyone but me. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

  “That’s no good. Listen to me, Lieutenant. There’s no way I can prove that Oscar attacked me and that I shot him in self-defense. I called you because you been decent to me and I didn’t want to leave a stiff here on my living room floor. But I’m not going to jail for this one. That son of a bitch walked in here to execute me.”

  “I believe you. Will you listen to me, Cullen! I believe you. I don’t want you to run.”

  “Lieutenant,” Cullen cried, his voice rising, “I got to run! I’m in something up to my neck, and I don’t think my life is worth two cents. Look at it, I’m a drug runner and a murderer—”

  Now Ramos, sitting in the squad room, picked up his phone and switched in. Freedman’s voice carried.

  “What the hell is that?” Cullen demanded.

  “Sergeant Ramos switched onto the line. We’re both listening but that makes no damn difference. Now listen to me, Cullen, and for once in your life do yourself a favor. Don’t run! Don’t be a horse’s ass. Just do as I say. Lock the door and wait for us to get there.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You damn well can!” Freedman shouted.

  “No, I can’t.”

  Freedman slammed down the telephone, grabbed his jacket and coat, and bolted out of the office, calling Ramos to follow him.

  Kovach Dead

  THE TYPE OF converted brownstone that contained Cullen’s apartment usually has a front door controlled by a spring lock, which in turn is activated electronically from the various apartments. Such houses for the most part do not have resident superintendents. In some cases, there’s a superintendent for a number of such buildings, three or four; in other cases, a landlord lives on one of the floors and rents out the others, and himself acts as superintendent. But at Cullen’s address there was no apartment number marked SUPERINTENDENT. With a choice between ringing the bells of other tenants until he got a buzz, indicating that the door lock was open, or picking the lock, Freedman chose to pick the lock — a task he allocated to Ramos.

  “Do the Jimmy Valentine,” he said to Ramos.

  Ramos, who had never read O. Henry, would not give Freedman the satisfaction of being asked who in hell was Jimmy Valentine; he simply took out his ring of picks and went to work. Meanwhile, Freedman was pressing Cullen’s call bell in the vague hope that Cullen had listened and had not run.

  It took Ramos about thirty seconds to pick the lock. “Upstairs will be harder. A kid could spring these buzzer locks.”

  Upstairs, after they had climbed three flights of stairs, was harder. There were two locks, and one was a Segal, which, as Ramos pointed out, was one of the very best.

  It took him about five minutes to spring the locks, and then they went into the apartment and saw Oscar Kovach’s body. Cullen had left the lights on, and he had not altered anything that had happened in the living room. The body lay as it had been, eyes open. A small chair was overturned, and a beer bottle lay in a wet puddle on the rug, the smell of spilled beer heavy in the air. Two guns were on the floor, not moved since Cullen had fired and dropped his. Freedman stopped at the door, closing it gently behind him and then standing silently, studying the room, while Ramos prowled through the bedroom and the kitchen.

  “Nothing,” he said, looking into the fridge.

  Freedman had noticed before that the place was decently furnished — a couch, day beds, a television set with a twenty-one-inch screen, a good rug. In one corner, leaning against the wall, was a banjo. An odd instrument for a man like Cullen. Few men understood the possibilities of a banjo, of a technique like Scruggs’s picking, and Freedman wondered about the relationship of a man like Cullen to the instrument: chords that he could sing to? Or the mercilessly difficult process of using it as a complete instrument?

  “Odd,” he said.

  Ramos was bending, as if to pick up the guns, and Freedman warned him off. “Leave it the way it is. Let the hotshots at Manhattan South mess with it.”

  “Oh?”

  Freedman walked to Kovach and touched his face. “Cold as a flounder. Cullen got him in the heart. One shot.”

  Ramos was examining the chair. “Bullets went through. That son of a bitch is a heavy weapon.” He looked behind the chair and found a bullet.

  “Let it lay,” Freedman said.

  “You believe him?” Ramos wanted to know.

  “Sure I believe him. Why not? He doesn’t have the mentality to set anything up. He’s not a criminal or a killer. He’s a poor stupid bastard who believed that even shipping white shit was all right as long as those pisspots in Washington were involved. He got involved with a set of murderous lunatics and never had the brains to know it until it was too late.”

  “Maybe. Why the confessions?”

  “That’s your line. I’m not Catholic. Ask me about Jewish guilt and I can tell you something. Catholic guilt is not my line.”

  “And what do we tell the homicide boys when they come?”

  Freedman laughed. “I don’t know what to tell myself, Ramos. So help me God, I don’t know what to tell myself. Off the top of my head, I have to think that those tinhorn lunatics running the guns and dope are sending us a message. Forget the tape. Cullen is dead, the priest is dead, the hooker is dead — now forget about the tape. It doesn’t exist. It never existed.”

  “Cullen’s alive.”

  “Yeah. He has a problem.”

  “And the scenario makes no sense — you, me, Jones, Leary, Lefty, not to mention that the story’s all over the place. What do they do? Kill everyone?”

  “No — just enough to send up a message. What the hell, stories like this have been all over the place for years. Back during Nam, there were stories about the CIA running dope out of the Golden Triangle, and there are stories going around that the government has been working hand in glove with a bum called Noriega, paying him off with guns and running a steady stream of dope into this country, with the excuse that Panama has to be kept quiet, and you don’t see nobody waving the flag and yellin
g that this has to stop.”

  “They killed two cops last week,” Ramos said. “This city is a battlefield and there are more dopers and they’re a lot better armed than we are. I still don’t know what we tell the homicide guys.”

  “We tell them that Cullen telephoned with a story, and we hotfooted it over here and here we are.”

  “What story?”

  “Kovach came to the door and tried to shoot him.”

  “Why?”

  “How the hell do we know why?” Freedman said.

  “Same guy mixed up in the murder of the hooker.”

  “So?”

  “Jesus God, Lieutenant, they only have to talk to some uniform at the precinct house to hear about the tape — if they don’t know about it already.”

  “So they know about it.”

  “And what the hell do we say?” Ramos demanded.

  “We tell them to talk to the DA. The DA said to forget about the tape. It was sent to Washington.”

  “And what was on it?”

  “Ask Timberman.”

  “How many years did you say you had to your pension?”

  “I didn’t say. I got years. I’d like to make captain.”

  “I’d like to make lieutenant,” Ramos said.

  “All right, there you are. We can call ourselves typical samples of the American drive toward upward mobility — or some such shit — and meanwhile, watch our step. I’ll do the talking if you want me to.” Then Freedman picked up the telephone and called Manhattan South.

  It was the night shift, and the man in charge was Lieutenant Brady, a tall, thin-faced, good-looking man who had been told on numerous occasions that he looked like Clint Eastwood. Before that, he had switched to Marlboro cigarettes because he had been told that he looked like the cowboy in the advertisements, but lately he was smoking Camels once again.

  But not now. Now he stood in Cullen’s apartment, his notebook out, staring sourly at Freedman. “So you think it was self-defense?” he said to Freedman, not asking a question but denying a statement.