The Confession of Joe Cullen (5 page)

“You had no trouble — walking into a 727?” Freedman wondered.

“I can fly anything. So can Oscar — well, he's not as good in a helicopter as I am, but there's a kind of pilot — I don't know exactly how to put it. I read a book of Faulkner's called
Pylon
. Faulkner understood it.”

Freedman, who had been studying Cullen thoughtfully, was taken aback by the reference to Faulkner. He had not known that Faulkner wrote a book called
Pylon
. Cullen had not struck him as either very literate or introverted, but simply as a heavy-set roughneck with enough of the Catholic locked into him to recoil from the murder of a priest. Nor did Freedman know, at this point, how it had come about. All that in good time. No need to hurry it.

“Just like that” — Freedman nodded — “you waft into Honduras and unload your guns. How do you get there? You and this Oscar guy — who was your navigator? And where? From what I hear about Honduras, it's a stinking pesthole with a couple of million people who are mostly engaged in killing each other.”

“No,” Cullen said. “No, Lieutenant, it don't work two ways. The army does the killing, the poor people die.”

“What about the airfield? Where is it? How did you get there?”

“The airfield's down by the Patuca River — Rio Patuca, not too far from Nicaragua. Oscar and me, we can both navigate. The airfield's pretty good, better than what they have in Texas, because this field was put down by army engineers.”

“What army?” Leary demanded.

“What other army? You don't think those clowns down there can build a first-rate modern field.”

“And that's what it is?” Freedman asked. “A first-rate modern field?”

“You bet your sweet ass.”

“And tell us, was there army personnel there?”

“Not in uniform, except once or twice when a Jeep would pull up for some kind of conference, and then there'd be some uniforms, and they'd stay for maybe an hour or two and then take off. But there were three or four men in civilian clothes, and sure as hell, they were army.”

“How do you know?” Ramos asked. “Did they speak English or Spanish? Do you speak Spanish?”

“Four years of high school Spanish, which is not much. I can make out with it. These guys spoke English. Maybe a little Spanish. There was Honduran army personnel all over the place. Also, you don't have to be a genius to spot army, the way their hair is cut, the way they stand, the way they talk.”

Freedman began to speak. Lefty, running the camera, cut the lights, interrupting Freedman's train of thought. Ramos stood up and pointed to the office. Once he and Freedman were in the tiny office, the door closed behind them, Ramos said, “You know what we're getting into, Lieutenant?”

Freedman was calling the desk and asking them to pass any waiting calls up to the squad room, not the office. When he put down the telephone, he regarded Ramos bleakly and said, “There's the kind of thing that happens and then you lose your common sense and remember that when you were a kid they still sang ‘America the Beautiful.' Did he kill the priest? Or is he some kind of nut?”

“Maybe he's some kind of nut, but he's telling the truth. You're Jewish, Lieutenant. You can't crawl into the soul of someone put together by the church. I can. I look at that man and I can go inside his head. Ask him what he takes back with him into Texas.”

“You know, Sarge, you and me, we're — honest cops. That's right. At least we got only a minimum of glue on our hands, but God Almighty, that's all we are, a couple of cops in a tiny third-rate precinct house that's so old and rotten it would fall down if somebody coughed too loud. Ten months now I been writing letters pleading with them to paint the place.”

“I know,” Ramos said.

“I wonder what the vintner buys, one half so precious as he sells.”

“Poetry?”

“Sort of. Ah, fuck it! Let's go ask him.”

They returned to the squad room. The detectives were on their phones, catching up on the calls that were on hold. Lefty said that he was ready to go. Cullen asked to go to a john, and Ramos went with him. When the calls had been handled and Leary had taken off with something that couldn't wait, Lefty turned up the lights and started his camera again. Cullen took his place in the same chair.

“I'm going to ask you about this murder you say you did,” Freedman said, “but before I do I want to be very clear about one or two things. First: how many flights did you make, round trips?”

“Twelve.”

“Give me some dates.”

“I started at the end of June and I made my last flight on September twenty-third.”

“All right. You went down with guns — every time?”

For the first time, Cullen hesitated, looking from face to face before he spoke. He knew what was coming. It was, strangely enough, more difficult to talk about than murder.

“No. Twice we went down empty.”

“Empty? Why?”

Cullen looking at Cullen was at the edge of despair. The peace and relief that had pervaded him were suddenly tied into knots, and for a long moment he sat with his eyes closed, seeking himself desperately in the darkness. He felt tears in his eyes, but whether they were for the dead priest or the live killer or the answer to the question, he did not know, and perhaps they were for none of those but only for himself, Cullen, whoever Cullen was.

“Let me suggest it,” Freedman said gently. “You went down with guns and you came back with cocaine.”

Cullen nodded.

“You went down empty to bring back cocaine.”

“That's right,” Cullen said.

“You brought back cocaine on every trip?”

“Yes.”

“How much on each trip?”

“It varied. Sometimes as little as forty pounds. Once, two hundred pounds.”

Jones let out his breath in a long whistle. Ramos whispered, “Mother of God.” Freedman said, “They didn't need guns. For that kind of money they could buy the Pentagon.” Jones said, “You brought it in on every trip?”

Cullen nodded. Murder did not put their backs up like this. Murder was normal in this precinct. Why, Cullen wondered, did he feel defensive about this when he had put aside all his defenses in the matter of Father O'Healey?

“You knew what you were carrying?” Freedman demanded.

“I knew because everyone knew,” Cullen said. “I wasn't supposed to know. There was no white powder floating around. The stuff came baled up in heavy sacking. But Oscar knew and he put me onto it, and others knew — but, Jesus God, as far as I knew, I was working for the government. The army was in it and the CIA built the damned airstrip, and maybe two, three times, Oscar would introduce me to some clown, and then tell me he was CIA, and there were two Sikorsky S76S parked there—”

“You're telling me,” Freedman interrupted, “that you're so fucken stupid that you figured the government is running in its own cocaine?” It was the first time he had raised his voice.

“What would you think? You just heard it. I lived with it. I come into a situation where the set-up costs millions. Maybe I'm stupid but not so stupid I don't know who's running the contras. Who the fuck knows what a war is or where it's coming from? Did I know it in Nam? Like hell I did.”

Freedman nodded. He understood that. He had been in Vietnam. “All right, Cullen. Suppose you tell us about the priest.”

It came together for Cullen, simply and directly, another small piece, and his heart hammered less violently. “We had a three-day layover,” Cullen said. He paused and drew a long breath. Jones picked up the pack of cigarettes on Leary's desk, selected one, took cigarette and matches to Cullen, and then lit the cigarette for him. If someone had asked Jones why he did this, he might have answered that he wanted to cool the situation, but the truth went deeper. Something in him went out to the big, deflated Irishman, a recognition of mystery like the mystery in himself. Cullen thanked him, nodding his shaggy head.

Ramos, scribbling on a scrap of paper, looked up and said, “Maybe ten million a week, give or take. That's nice money.”

“Tell us about the priest,” Freedman said again.

“They brought him in by car,” Cullen said, speaking very slowly. “There was a lousy little road to the airstrip, and they drove up in one of those big six-wheelers that we build for the army. He came with two Honduran army officers and he was cuffed. He wore a black cassock, and he had red hair and bright blue eyes. I noticed the eyes. They protruded, if you know what I mean. He had a round, chunky face with a pink complexion that was sunburned to high color. They walked him past where I was standing and watching, and he grinned at me. I guess he was about my age …”

Cullen's voice dropped away. The words impinged on his memory, and with his eyes half closed, he was back there in that strange tropical place that always reminded him of Vietnam, the air not clean and clear, like northern air, but heavy and scented with all the strange scents of the jungle, his shirt wet with sweat, his tongue dry and thirsty.

“They put him in one of the supply sheds,” Cullen said. “They didn't lock him in. There was no door to the shed, just a big opening the size of a pair of doors, and there was always a guard with one of those damn flat poker faces. The guard knew me and let me walk past him into the shed. Maybe if it wasn't a priest he wouldn't have done it, but he let me. Maybe he remembered. Maybe he remembered a priest he knew when he was a kid. So I walked in there and the priest was on his knees praying, and he must have heard my footsteps but he didn't move. So I sat down on one of the crates in there and waited. I must have waited about ten minutes before he moved, and then he got up and turned around because when he was praying his back was to the entrance, and he squinted at me, and then he asked me who I was.

“I told him my name and how I happened to be there and then I asked him what dumb son of a bitch put the gyves on him? He burst out laughing, and he says to me, ‘Wherever did you find that name for a pair of handcuffs?' So I tell him that when we were kids on our block, that's what we called them, and then he said something about the persistence of words, and, well — well, that was how I met Father O'Healey.”

They waited. Leary returned with a six-pack of soda, fell into the moment of silence, and passed around the soda. Cullen nodded and drank eagerly. He rubbed his forehead. Suddenly, he was confused.

“Take it easy,” Freedman said.

“I don't know how to tell it. I could just tell you about the killing, but then it makes no sense.”

“Tell it the way you want to tell it. We'll listen,” Freedman said.

“All right, I was raised a Catholic. I saw a lot of priests in my time, but I never really talked to one. Like I told you, I had a layover at the strip, and I guess I must have sat and talked but mostly listened to Father O'Healey for maybe fifteen, twenty hours. The day after I met him, we talked until maybe midnight. When I wondered why he'd waste the time on a bum like myself, he said he thought he might save my soul, and when I told him I didn't have any soul to bother about and that I had stopped believing in God, he just shrugged it off and said that nobody has much authority over his own soul. He told me how he had come down to Honduras eight years before and he was supposed to stay for only a few weeks because the priest at the Church of the Blessed Apostles had died and he was to take over temporarily, and that was up in the mountains, just poor Indians and peasants. He told me how they were victimized by the government and the soldiers, robbed, beaten, murdered like they were so many dogs, and how finally they organized a guerrilla movement to fight against the soldiers. We talked a lot about right and wrong. I never gave much thought to things like that. I got through college because I had to for being a pilot, but I took what I was given and I went where they sent me, and it made no damn difference to me whether we had any right to be in Nam or not, and the truth was that I didn't give a fuck as long as I could fly and draw my pay. But O'Healey stood it all on its head, because he turned all my thinking upside down—”

Freedman interrupted him now. It was getting too deep and murky and political, and what Freedman wanted to know was why O'Healey had been there in cuffs.

“Just for what he was doing, being with the guerrillas and being a priest to them and to the Indians. They captured him, and the word was that they were going to send him stateside and that we would carry him in our plane. But a few hours before we were supposed to take off, they got some change of orders and I was told that they were going to fly the priest down to the contra main base. I guess I had shot off my mouth about being a class chopper pilot, so this Honduran officer there — his name is Sanchez — he tells me to pick up one of the helicopters and fly the priest there. So like the asshole I am, I did it, and a soldier brought O'Healey into the helicopter, and Sanchez comes with us and tells me to lift off.”

“In Spanish?” Ramos wanted to know.

“In Spanish. My Spanish isn't the worst, but he had a mouthful of marbles and was hard to understand. I ask him where we were going. He says first we take the Christo home, so we go to the mountains.”

“Mother of God,” Ramos said.

“I should have known, but until O'Healey yells to me, ‘Cullen, they're going to kill me,' I don't know, and then Sanchez tries to shut him up, struggling with him, and meanwhile he opens the door of the chopper and I start down. We are up maybe eight, nine hundred feet and Sanchez and the guard throw Father O'Healey out of the copter, and with all the noise I hear his scream as he falls.”

“You saw his body?”

“I saw it,” Cullen said. “I tried to get down. I guess I was half crazy, calling those bastards everything rotten I could think of and ready to dive and smash the plane and die with those bastards, and then Sanchez points the muzzle of his pistol at me, and maybe I could die in a crash, which was the way I always expected to go, but I couldn't deal with the thought of a bullet smashing my head, so I brought the Sikorsky back and landed it as hard as I could, knocking Sanchez off his feet, and then I began to kick him, landing a few good ones, and then the soldiers pulled me off, and I wrenched myself out of their grip. Oscar was standing, watching, and I yelled to Oscar, ‘We are getting to hell out of here, now! Fucken now!'”