The Confession of Joe Cullen (18 page)

“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

T
HE 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.”

“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.