The Confession of Joe Cullen (21 page)

C
ULLEN
knew that he was being followed. He suffered from the Vietnam syndrome, not as much as his friends, some of whom had the sensitivity of hummingbirds, an awareness so sharp and agonizing that it was the edge of madness, but he had part of it. The world was a place of death, any moment, any hour, any day. You walked like a hunted animal, watching, listening. He was a pilot. A tired, begrimed, and wretched rifleman might say to him, as many had, “Man, you got it made up there in your lousy chopper”; but the chopper would come down, and when it did, it was his turn.

He walked quickly, slowed up, turned corners, and then decided that there were two of them. He signaled a cab on Sixth Avenue and told the driver to head uptown. They had not ignored that possibility. A car took its position behind them.

“Where to?” the driver wanted to know.

“The Hilton. On Fifty-fourth Street.”

“They haven't moved it.”

As they slowed to turn into the driveway of the Hilton, Cullen gave the driver a five-dollar bill, stepped out of the cab, and bolted into the hotel. He didn't turn to see what had happened to the other car, but strode quickly through the hotel, out through the garage exit, north on Seventh Avenue to Fifty-seventh Street, and then into a cab that was just pulling up to discharge a fare at Carnegie Hall.

“Madison Avenue and Seventieth,” one place being as good as another. He paid the cab at Seventieth, looked around for a tracking car, found nothing that he could put a finger on, and then walked west on Seventieth Street to Fifth Avenue.

When he reached Fifth Avenue, Seventieth was empty behind him. He drew a slower, easier breath as he walked downtown; and a block downtown, looking back, he saw the corner still empty. So much for tracking a man in New York City; yet his heart was still pounding and he was filled with fear. They wanted him dead. He didn't worry about the cops, and when he had crawled out of the bathroom window in the rear of Billy Sullivan's saloon, warned as the cops came through the doorway, his terror was that someone who wasn't a cop would be watching the back of the place. He got through a maze of back yards and fences without seeing anyone, but when he emerged, a man was waiting, and then he knew that they were on to him and had picked him up once more. Not too mysterious; they had had Sullivan's place spotted from the front and from the rear.

But it was New York, and you can't hold on to someone in New York, not with twenty operatives, not if the victim knows the city.

No cabs now; he decided to walk and to pick up nothing that could be a lead to him, and so he walked on, down Fifth Avenue, across Fifty-seventh Street, and down Seventh Avenue, all the time racking his brains for a plan, a direction, a place. By now a bulletin would have been put out, all media, all points, a man wanted for the killing of Oscar Kovach. Between the city police and the nameless group that desired him even more fervently, there was no rest, no refuge, no hole to crawl into. Every hotel would be covered, every bus station, every airfield. He thought of the subways, but he would still be in the city, and the thought of being trapped underground chilled his blood.

It was all right for the moment. The streets were filled with people. But later on, as the streets emptied, that refuge would disappear. To be alone on the streets was to be marked, and sooner or later a prowl car would find him. There were places by the river where he once could have found an empty shipping carton to crawl into, but now they were the homes of the homeless. Cullen was of the company. He could never return to his apartment. Whatever it might be to others, to him it was his cave, his shelter against the world. It was barred to him forever. He had almost six hundred in cash in his pocket. It was his whole resource; he could not cash a check or go to the bank. He kept asking himself, “What do I do? Where do I go?”

He kept walking, grateful that the rain had stopped and that the night was not too cold. He had left his apartment dressed in old flannel trousers, a sports jacket, and a London Fog raincoat. Decently dressed; there were hundreds and hundreds of men passing by dressed no different than he.

He was at Forty-fifth Street and Seventh Avenue when the idea occurred to him, a place of refuge, at least for a few hours, that could not be connected. He went into a huge, garish drug store and began to thumb through the Manhattan directory, through the S pages. What had she said her name was? S, he knew, S-E-L, possibly, telling himself, “Cool, Cullen, cool and think. You're in trouble over Kansas, you sort out the possible fields, you always keep a place in mind if you have to come down, come down as best you can, but cool.” Of course: Selby. She hadn't spelled it for him, but how else could it be spelled? Ah, there, his finger on it: V. Selby. That's what a woman did who lived alone, and she, being a DA, should have had more sense. It's a giveaway, but people fall into a pattern, and she'd probably listed it that way since she first had a phone of her own.

He punched out the number, and a woman's voice answered.

“Miss Selby? Is this Virginia Selby?”

Doubtfully: “Yes?”

“Miss Selby, this is Joe Cullen.”

A long pause at the other end. He could almost feel her breath being drawn in, and then her words came slowly and carefully: “Mr. Cullen, where are you?”

“I'm in a telephone booth in midtown, and if you don't know, I'm wanted by the cops for a killing and I'm also wanted by the crowd that moves the dope.”

“I know.”

“It's not the cops, it's the other crowd. I think they want to kill me. I'm tired, I'm frightened, and a man tried to kill me tonight, and I swear to God I have no place to go, and if you'll only let me have an hour of your time — after that, you can turn me over to the cops.”

“Can you get here, to my apartment?” she asked.

“If you want to turn me in, that's up to you.”

A long silence now, and then she asked, “Are you armed, Cullen?”

“No.”

“All right, I'm on West Eleventh Street.” She spelled out the number slowly and carefully, only two digits, but slowly and carefully. “That's between Fifth and Sixth Avenue. Now I want you to understand this, Cullen: after we've talked, I will have to turn you over to the police. But I want very much to talk to you. Is it too far to walk?”

“No, I can walk.”

“Yes, that would be better.” She hesitated, then, “Cullen, we're being ridiculous. Walk over to Fifth Avenue and take the bus. It should be perfectly safe. No cabs.”

“I'd rather walk,” he said.

“All right, if you're not too tired.”

He was too tired, terribly tired, but as he walked on down-town, he felt a little better. A door had opened up, a slim, precarious door, but a door nevertheless, and a few minutes ago there had been no door at all. He had no feeling about Virginia Selby that he could express: he didn't like her, he didn't dislike her; he had been suspicious of her and suspicious of her motives in approaching him, because as far as he could see, her motives made no sense. Yet, desperate, he had turned to her.

He remembered that he had once been part of a family, a father and a mother, an only child — odd in an Irish family — uncles, an Uncle Henry, Uncle Bert, Aunt Mary — there were cousins once, a grandmother — and now it was gone and all the connections were gone and he could hardly remember their names, and suppose he called one of them and said, This is Joseph. I've just killed a man and left his body in my apartment, and I need a place to hide and rest, a hole to go to ground — then what would be the response? Not hard to imagine: We know no Joseph, we'll call the cops, leave us alone.

The hell with it, he told himself, because everything had been turned on its head, and let's see what happens, and if I had any sense, I'd walk over to the precinct and turn myself in to Freedman, and in the end she'll do it for me.

It was one flight up in an old Village brownstone, and as she opened the door and ushered him in, he was taken aback by the bright, colorful, feminine quality of the room. As in many of the old brownstones, the main room was large and square, facing the street in this case, eighteen by eighteen feet, with a twelve-foot-high ceiling and beautiful old plaster molding, all of it painted white, as were the walls, and the main furniture being two large couches upholstered in bright flowered chintz on a yellow rug, and on each of two facing walls, large nonobjective paintings. There was color all over the room, and it held him, and to Virginia Selby there was something totally childlike in the manner of his standing inside the doorway, entranced by the room itself.

She said, “Sit down. You must be very tired.”

“Yes, now that I've stopped moving.”

She had a drink prepared. He took off his raincoat.

“Just drop it on the chair there.”

He sat on another chair, not on one of the couches.

“This is brandy,” she said. “I have coffee on the stove. Are you hungry?”

He shook his head. She handed him the glass of brandy and he tossed it down, choking a bit over the raw fire in his throat. Virginia went into her kitchen — in the passageway between front room and back room — and came back with a tray loaded with coffeepot, cream, cups, and a plate of cake. She set it down on a table near one of the couches.

“Sit here,” she said, indicating the couch. He rose and moved slowly. She poured the coffee and then seated herself opposite him.

Cullen looked at the poured coffee and shook his head.

“I have beer. Would you rather have beer?”

He nodded, and she went into her kitchen and returned with an opened bottle and a glass. He poured the beer himself, with Virginia Selby sitting quietly and watching.

“You're not afraid of anything,” he said, a note of respect in his voice.

“I'm afraid. But I'm not afraid of you, if that's what you mean.”

“I guess so.”

“Do you think I should be afraid of you?” she asked gently.

Instead of replying to that, Cullen said, “What can a DA do? I mean, can you arrest me?”

“I suppose I could. As a matter of fact, anyone can make a citizen's arrest. I'm not going to arrest you or call the cops.”

“You said you might.”

“That's what I said. I've changed my mind.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Can't you just accept the fact that I've changed my mind?”

“Sure. But I don't want to accept anything anymore. I'm on their list, but until they get to me—”

“All right. I'll tell you why I changed my mind, Cullen. I'm at a point where nothing makes sense anymore and the shit is up to my ears. I've wanted to talk to you — no holds barred — since I saw the tape. Talk — and only to me, no tapes, no witnesses. I want to talk to you and I want you to talk to me. No holds barred, do you understand?”

“I'm trying.”

“Where do you come from?” she asked gently. “I don't see you pushing dope. Dope is for pigs. You're not a pig.”

“Why not? I went to a priest to confess. I'm a fallen Catholic as low as you can fall, and this was my first confession in damned many years. I started to confess to Father O'Healey, but in the situation there, it would have been just dumping on him, and it wasn't so important then, and it only became important after Father O'Healey died. You're a Catholic, you said?”

She nodded.

“You ever think about the saints?”

She shrugged. “Not enough to write home about, Cullen.”

“Like me — until I met O'Healey. Then I began to ask myself, is he a saint? Now that's stupid!” he exclaimed.

“Not so stupid.”

“No? Let me tell you something, Miss Selby—”

“I told you — Ginny.”

“OK, Ginny, I'm trying to make a point.” His mouth was dry. He took a long drink of the beer. “I'm trying to make this point — that I never talked like this to anyone in my life, and the only reason I do is because if I don't get this out of my system, I'll go crazy, because I'm not that different from all the other poor bastards who were in Nam, and I'm not asking for absolution.”

“Oh, the hell with absolution, Cullen. We're talking. We're trying to exchange something.”

“I know, I know, but I was full of this rotten feeling that I had murdered O'Healey, and you can take a man out of the church, but you don't take the church out of him, so I walked into Saint Peter's and tried to confess. There was an old priest in the booth, and I told him that I had murdered a priest—”

“You told him that?”

“Yeah, that's what I told him. I know I told it different on the tape, but in the confession booth, I just said it flat, because that's the way I felt, and I felt that if I tried to doctor it up or explain the details of what really happened, the confession would become a lie. Do you understand that?”

“I think I do,” Ginny agreed. “But wasn't he upset? My God, you tell a priest you murdered a priest—”

“I know. Yeah. But he was old. It didn't rattle him. He only wanted to know whether I believed in God, and he said that he couldn't give me absolution unless I believed in God.”

“Nothing like the church.”

“Funny thing, I can't lie in the confession booth. I can lie anywhere else. But I step in there and that smell hits me, everywhere, it's always the same smell, it's a smell as old as time, as old as my time anyway, and I'm not sure how that mixes with the fact that I'm not lying there … Do you believe in God?”

“Sometimes,” Ginny said, smiling.

“I did — until Nam. Even in Nam, up to a point. You're scared enough, you don't believe in God, you're just face down in the mud, scrabbling for your mother's tit and pleading with whatever might be there not to let your ass be cut to shreds by Charlie's rapid fire — no, you don't believe or disbelieve, you're just scared as shit. But we cut up a village with a gunship I was flying, and then we put down there and I walked through the place.”