The Confession of Joe Cullen (29 page)

On the other hand, that too was a presumption. What does a killer do on relocation? Obviously, he avoids anything that smacks of the mob, because even if the mob is another family in another city, they all share a dislike of informers. What then? Does he open a shop, or does he stay at home and grow flowers? But since less than a year had passed since Tony was relocated, he might well be resting and enjoying the very nice pension the government provided.

Freedman had never been to Los Angeles, his return from Vietnam having been by plane through Europe and to the East Coast, but he had supplied himself with maps of the Los Angeles area and the thruway system. San Fernando was not a very long or difficult drive. He had very specifically not gotten in touch with the local cops. He didn't want them interfering or cramping his approach, and he expected few difficulties with Carlione. He felt certain that he could convince Carlione that the only alternative to his coming east with him was an executioner's bullet in San Fernando.

But this line of thought led him to wonder what he would do if Carlione refused to come east with him. He could make threats, but that's all, and the most direct threat would be to let the mob know where Carlione had been relocated. On the other hand, Carlione could call the Feds and demand another protective location.

Freedman shrugged it off. There was really no use trying to plan a line of approach before the fact. Somehow or other, he would work it out and bring Carlione home with him.

He wondered whether he had made a mistake in going alone. He had vacation days coming to him, and there was no one on the squad except Ramos that he wanted or would have wanted to be with him. It was a strange friendship that had grown between himself and Hosea Ramos. Ramos was an interior person, walled in completely, leaving no opening for a joke or a barb. He had fought his way through life with grim determination. Freedman joked about being chief of detectives someday, just as most lieutenants did; Ramos never spoke about it, but Freedman knew that one day it would be Ramos, not himself, never himself.

Well, his own ambitions were more easily achieved. He wanted to bring back Carlione. He wanted to arrest Dumont Robertson. He wanted to sit in a witness box and give evidence against him, and above all, he wanted to marry his ex-wife.

Well, perhaps, he thought. That should not be too hard.

Time passed. Freedman looked down at the great bowl of houses and streets that made up Los Angeles, and then the plane was dropping across the freeways and down onto the landing strip.

At the car rental, a pretty girl gave him papers to sign and informed him that there would be a Ford Escort waiting for him at the rental station.

“Just cross the street to the island, and the company bus will be by.”

But first he went to the baggage return to pick up his suitcase, which contained his gun and extra shells. He had always thought it stupid of the airlines not to screen the baggage as well as the travelers and the carry-on items, but now it worked to his advantage. He then left the baggage area and walked outside to the concrete island where the bus to the car-rental station would pick him up.

He stood in the blazing sunshine, trying to fit this warm, hazy climate into the end of November, into the thin, cold rain that had accompanied him to Kennedy Airport just a few hours ago, and then the bus came to take him to the rental station.

“No way you can go wrong,” the car attendant assured him. “Turn right when you leave here, and then left on Century Boulevard. Left lane, and you'll see the sign for the San Diego Freeway north. Oh, I'd guess about twenty-five, twenty-six miles north, you come on the San Fernando Mission Boulevard sign, and you exit there, and a few miles up the boulevard, you're in San Fernando.”

There were no problems as Freedman drove the twenty-five miles. He was intrigued by the signs he passed — Wilshire Boulevard, Sunset Boulevard, Sepulveda Canyon — names that would be very exciting to Sheila. It was not simply a case of proposing marriage, but of breaking out of a frozen life style. He'd bring her back here — maybe drive the whole length of California, or take a cruise ship to the Hawaiian Islands. Even the flat, dull streets of the San Fernando Valley impressed him, roses blooming in November, lawns covered with giant Moroccan ivy, palm trees — all the things that made the valley the butt of a thousand snide jokes were seen with a sort of lonely pleasure by this policeman who had come to manhood in the Bronx.

At the same time, his nervousness increased. The signs of tension were always the same, and he had experienced them enough times in the past to recognize them: a flushed face, a tightening sensation in his heart.

San Fernando Mission Boulevard. He turned east, and at the first available roadside space he pulled over and examined his street map, and switched his gun from bag to pocket. He was determined that no one should see him, that he would speak to no one, ask no questions, and find 123 Custer by himself. That was not difficult. He located it on the map and then placed himself in relation to it. No more than a mile and on the edge of the main center, a drab street with half a dozen old-fashioned California bungalows stretched on one side of the street and a single bungalow across the street facing them. The first bungalow, he noted driving through the street, was number 100. The single facing bungalow, across the street, was number 123.

It was now a quarter after two in the afternoon, hot, windless, a faint yellow smog beginning to tinge the air, making it even more unbreathable than the heavy heat. Nothing moved. No sign of life or of sound disturbed the totally surrealist street, and Freedman reflected that this was a place he would never bring Sheila to. He parked his car around the corner, and then he walked back to Custer Street and slowly and unhurriedly along the street to number 123.

The typical California bungalow of the period when these were built was a rectangle, a tile roof, stucco walls, and a small front porch, about three feet deep and stretching across the whole front of the building. Two wooden steps led up to the porch and the door. Freedman could see that the door was slightly open, no more than half an inch, but still open. Well, why not? Who would threaten the Carliones here? He could simply walk in. But did he want to? He did not want a confrontation with a gun in his hand; indeed, he believed profoundly that no one should ever have a gun in his hand unless he intended to use it. If he needed his gun, he could draw it and use it, but this was not a situation in which a gun would be helpful.

He did not draw his gun. He walked up the steps and pressed a white button that set off a musical clatter of chimes inside the house.

No one appeared. He sounded the chimes again. Still no one appeared at the door.

Freedman opened the door and entered. A shaded room, the blinds drawn, yet with the fierce sun giving it a sort of half light; and in front of Freedman, on the floor, arms outstretched, Tony Carlione, blood still oozing out of three bullet holes in his chest. And sprawled on the couch, just glimpsed by Freedman's side vision, eyes opened wide and a red hole in the center of her forehead, Tony's wife, Maria. All of it was peripheral; at the center of his vision, facing him, standing just behind the body of Tony Carlione, Freedman saw Dumont Robertson, gun in hand, silencer on gun, smiling, blond hair in a graceful wave, blue eyes encased in wrinkles of confident mirth.

“My dear Lieutenant Freedman,” he said. He was wearing knife-edge-creased, fawn-colored twill trousers, two-hundred-dollar English shoes, a blue double-breasted blazer, white shirt, and a striped tie that undoubtedly contained the colors of his college.

“Please raise your hands — carefully,” he said.

Freedman raised his hands.

“You know,” Monty went on, “I was thinking of you as a stupid little Jew, but we think in cliches. You're not small at all, but you are very stupid. How could you imagine that I would not think of Tony Carlione? Did I strike you as either a stupid or an indifferent man? Before I pull this trigger, I want you to know that the things we do are not unlawful, but rather the privilege of those who created this country, who made it what it is today, and who intend to guide it in the future. It has always been that way, Lieutenant—”

It was at that moment that Tony Carlione convulsively grabbed Dumont Robertson's ankle, throwing him off balance, so that the two shots he managed to get off as he struggled to release his foot went wild, and as his third shot nicked the sleeve of Freedman's jacket, Freedman shot him in the head, just under his eye. He dropped to the floor and was trying to speak as Freedman approached him. He died as Freedman bent over him.

Tony Carlione was still alive, and he whispered a question to Freedman about his wife. But he died before Freedman could answer him. Freedman closed his eyes and his wife's eyes, but he could not bring himself to touch Monty's face. He found Monty's wallet in his jacket breast pocket, and he went through it for any mention of himself. There was no such mention, only seven credit cards, eleven hundred dollars in fifty-dollar bills, a driver's license, a pilot's license, and a gun license. There were no names, either there or in his other pockets, only keys, a clip of bullets in his jacket pocket, and eighteen dollars in small bills in his trouser pocket. He returned the money and cards to the wallet, and the wallet to Monty's pocket.

Freedman wiped clean everything of Robertson's that might register a print. He was still shaking, his heart racing, his hands trembling. The room looked like a charnel house, and it was entirely possible that someone had heard the shots and called the local police — possible but not too likely. He closed the door behind him, wiped the knob clean, and walked down the street and around the corner to where he had left his car. Still, there was no sign of human presence; the street lay quiet and silent under the yellow smog.

As he drove away, the problem of the gun remained. They would find the bullet, photograph it, enlarge the photograph, turn its shape and grooves into computer information, and begin a search. It would be a very thorough search, since Monty was apparently an important person.

Freedman's gun was not police issue, but the second gun that almost every policeman keeps — in Freedman's case, his third gun, since he had given his reserve gun to Sheila. He wiped it clean, removed the bullets and the firing pin. He had parked alongside a tangle of heavy brush, and now he flung the gun into it. If someone found it, they would have to find a firing pin to fit it, and in all probability it would be rusty and useless by then. They might, as a very long shot, connect it with Dumont Robertson's death. They could not conceivably connect it with him.

It wasn't until he was on the plane back to New York, on the redeye, having turned in the second ticket meant for Tony Carlione, that it came home to him that he had killed a man. In Vietnam, he had been a medic. He had never killed a man before.

You Pay Your Money—

F
REEDMAN
managed a few hours of sleep on the redeye out of Los Angeles and back to New York. The plane landed at six-five
A.M.
, and Freedman shelled out thirty dollars for a ride to his room in Manhattan. He took a shower, put on fresh clothes, buckled on his regulation revolver, and then walked over to the precinct house. The men on the squad were not sure whether he had called in sick or taken vacation leave the day before; anyway, he had been gone for only a day, and that attracted hardly any attention. Only Ramos raised a questioning brow.

“Let's you and me take a walk,” Freedman said.

Out on the stoop of the old building, with the uniformed patrolmen clustered up for the changing of the shift, Ramos asked, “Which way?”

“The river.”

It was a lovely day, one of those rare, pure days that come close to Thanksgiving, and the two men were aware of the day and embraced it as they walked west from Tenth Avenue. Ramos took the opportunity to light a cigar, and he drew on it with pleasure as they walked.

“Your damn patience gets to me,” Freedman said. “Ask me something.”

“I can wait.”

“I thought it through on the plane,” Freedman said. “You and Sheila are the only ones I ever tell this story to.”

“Are you certain you want to? Nobody's twisting your arm.”

They reached an old pier before Freedman spoke. They sat in the sun and watched the golden glitter across the Hudson River, the slow-moving barges, and the circling gulls; and Ramos smoked his cigar and listened while Freedman told him what had happened in California.

“It's over,” Ramos said. “No witness, no hit man, no case.”

“Except that I killed Dumont Robertson.”

“It was a just shooting,” Ramos said.

“And how do I go about proving that it was a just shooting?”

“Who else knows?” Ramos asked.

“Only you.”

“Then you put your life in my hands,” Ramos said, in a manner that was almost courtly. “I would never betray you, Mel. We are friends. I am honored, and we are friends. But for God's sake, let it die with the two of us. Did anyone see you on that street?”