The Confession of Joe Cullen (27 page)

“What! Do you have proof?”

“No.” Freedman held up his hand. “Hold on. Let me try to deal with this. I'm open with you, I want you to be honest with me. Cullen was here, wasn't he?”

“You know that's a lie, Lieutenant, and a rotten provocation!”

Freedman said harshly, “Cut out the crap, Ginny. When Timberman's right-hand lady, the smartest DA in the pack, and even money everywhere to run for Timberman's job when he retires, well, when she comes to a lousy little West Side precinct that doesn't rate high enough to investigate its own killings, and tells me to get Monty and his crew and make something out of Cullen's death, she is involved. You are involved, Miss Selby, damned involved. I don't know what puts you together with Cullen, but something does, and there's no other explanation for it except that Cullen, on the run after he killed Kovach, came here and you gave him shelter. You had to be face to face with Cullen; you had to see him in the flesh; otherwise, your involvement is senseless.”

She shrugged. “So. What do you intend to do with it, Lieutenant?”

“The relationship puzzles me — to risk your whole career that way, to put yourself in an absolutely untenable position. Why?”

“I don't have to explain.”

“All right. This dies with me. I give you my word of honor — no one will ever know. It's over, done with, finished.”

“Thank you,” she said softly.

“You see, something happened to me since Cullen made that tape in our squad room. I could use your words — I don't have to explain — but that's because I can't explain. Like Cullen, I don't believe very much in God, but I accept the fact that I don't know one damn thing about God, and the Pope in Rome and the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem don't know one damn thing about God, except that their livelihood is bullshit and mine is being a cop. But I was brought up Jewish, and Jewish kids get stuff put on them, like any other kids, and some of the stuff that was put on me stayed with me. There's a Jewish legend about the Lamed Vav — that means thirty-six. The legend says that always, in every generation, there exist in the world thirty-six righteous, good, and just men, and on their existence the existence of the world depends. They could be Jewish or Christian or Hindu or whatever, and no one of them ever knows in his lifetime that he is a Lamed Vav.”

Ginny was crying. “What are you talking about?” she blurted through her tears. “He killed people, he was in Vietnam, he was — he was—”

“What was he, Ginny? Go on. You tell me. I think he was just a man, a poor bastard who swallowed the shit we all swallow—”

“No!” she said fiercely.

“Then what was he, Ginny?”

“God help me, I don't know.” She wiped away her tears, rose, and went into her bedroom to fix her face. She came back into the living room and said, “Let's stop cutting away at each other and admit that we're in this together.”

“Good.”

“Now tell me why you're here, Freedman, and cut the shit. We've talked enough nonsense.”

“Yes. I'm here because I want to get Monty. Men like Monty have been selling their line of goods for a long time. Nobody gets any of them. I want to change that.” He said it lightly, almost with indifference.

“How?”

“I told you before. I want to find out where Tony Carlione has been relocated to. Then I will go there and convince him to testify against Monty, and bring him back here, and you will prosecute him.”

“Just like that?”

“More or less.”

“It's a dream, Freedman. You know that. You don't arrest people like Dumont Robertson. They go on doing what they're doing.”

Freedman shook his head.

“And who knows where the relocation is?” she cried. “Who can find out? The damn Feds guard these places like the gold in Fort Knox.”

“Timberman knows.”

She hadn't expected that. She considered it for a few moments, and then she said, “Most likely. I imagine Timberman knows. Now how do I get him to tell me? Hit him over the head? Feed him a truth serum? Do you know what it would mean to get something like this out of Timberman?”

“I know,” Freedman agreed. “I don't expect you to get it out of him. I'll take care of that. I just want you to set it up for me. I want you to persuade Timberman to see me. Alone and not in his office.”

“And why not in his office?”

“Because his office is bugged.”

“Oh, no.” She shook her head. “No way.” Her voice sharpened. “How the hell do you know it's bugged?”

“It would be a loose end. I've decided that Monty doesn't leave loose ends.”

Hopelessly, she muttered, “Of all the damn things. I swear I don't know what to make of you, Freedman. Why don't you make this appointment with Timberman yourself?”

“Sure. I can see that. Freedman, who works in a third-rate West Side precinct, wants to meet the district attorney of New York County on a park bench in Battery Park. And why, Lieutenant? To get him to reveal the safe place where the Feds put Twelve-tone Carlione.”

Ginny burst out laughing. It was the first time she had laughed that evening, or smiled, for that matter, and she was quite attractive when she laughed.

“But I convinced him,” she said.

“He leans on you. Everyone knows that. You're the best he has; you're sensible and you're dependable. All you have to do is persuade him that a cop called Freedman—”

“Come on, Lieutenant, he knows who you are. Don't downgrade yourself.”

“All right. Thank you. Don't tell him what I want. Tell him I'm paranoid and I think his office is bugged.”

“What about a restaurant? I don't want to tell him you're paranoid, even if you are, and maybe you are, for all I know.”

“A restaurant is fine, as long as we're not sitting cheek by jowl with strangers.”

“You won't be,” Ginny assured him. “It will probably be at the Harvard Club. All right — I think your whole shtick is hopeless, but I'll convince him to have lunch with you.”

The next day, in the afternoon, Virginia Selby called Freedman and informed him that a lunch appointment for the following day had been arranged at the Harvard Club. When he told Ramos about it, the sergeant said, “There you are, Mel, lunch at the Harvard Club. Never happened to me, but it shows that cops are coming up in the world. I have something to look forward to.”

Freedman had never lunched at the Harvard Club either, and when he told Sheila about it that evening, she informed him that she had dined there three times.

“That puts me in my place. How come?”

“Buyers who went to Harvard. It's a new world, Mel, and Seventh Avenue changes with the world. Come on, don't be angry.”

He wasn't angry. The world changes, but cops are not exactly in the world. They look at it sidewise. They're moralists without morality. “Have you ever thought of marrying me again?” he asked her.

“I've thought about it. What are you wearing tomorrow?”

“Gray flannels, blue blazer, and a white shirt.”

“Nice. And a quiet striped tie.”

“Fuck what I'm wearing tomorrow!”

“You're pissed off, sweetheart, because I go to lunch with buyers at the Harvard Club,” Sheila said gently. “If we were still married, this would grow into a real brouhaha, and that always scared the shit out of me because I was living with a man who carried a gun. Now you're a pussycat. It's only a week since our first date after the divorce, and it's been wonderful. I love you. I love to sleep with you. We cry a little, we laugh a little. I think we ought to leave it this way.”

“Honey, are you afraid of my gun? I been a cop twelve years and I never shot anyone. Have I ever raised a hand to you?”

“No. But when you used to be a few hours late, I died. Each time I died.”

He had never given that much thought; there were many things he had never given much thought to. “I'll be away a couple of days,” he said.

“I'll miss you, Mel.”

When he left the following morning, he said to Sheila, “It's not an absolute professional affliction. I know cops married twenty, twenty-five years, and they manage. They even like each other.”

“I'll keep that in mind,” she said, smiling.

But even with his gray flannels and blue blazer and two-dollar shoeshine, the Harvard Club dining room intimidated him. It was filled with well-dressed people eating away under the great beamed ceiling, and Timberman welcomed him without pleasure and with only the minimum required politeness. Freedman wondered what possible ruses and devices Ginny had used to get him into this position. As if he read Freedman's mind, Timberman said, “I am here only because I have obligations to a wonderful woman who has worked with me for many years. I think the notion that my office is bugged is both presumptuous and outrageous, and I trust that if you have any evidence to back that up, you will present it.”

“Have you had a debugger in recently, sir?” Freedman asked.

“I have not.”

“There's a man on my squad, George Jones by name, who is as good as they come. May I send him around?” Freedman realized that Timberman's act of opening his mouth and then closing it sharply meant that he was about to say, No, you may not. He didn't say it, gave the question a long moment, and then nodded.

“If you wish,” Timberman said. “I would appreciate it.”

“He'll come by this afternoon.”

“Then let us get into it. You wanted to see me. Why?”

“About the tape that Joe Cullen made in my precinct—”

“I will not discuss that tape,” the district attorney said flatly.

It set Freedman back. All morning he had rehearsed what he intended to be his arguments. He had conversations with himself and Timberman, internal conversations that concluded with Freedman making his point. Those internal conversations were simple and direct, convincing Timberman that we were a community of law, and that naturally the tape Cullen had made was central to the discussion. Now he saw himself as he imagined Timberman saw him, an odd Jewish cop, a person of no importance whatsoever, clownish, with outdated notions of law and order.

“If that is all you wish to discuss, then this luncheon was a mistake,” Timberman said with some irritation. “I allowed Miss Selby to persuade me, and that was also a mistake.”

Freedman, trying to control the nugget of anger building up in his stomach, said coldly, “I will be happy not to talk about the tape. Evidently it's too damn hot and frightening even to discuss. That's all right with me. But you invited me to lunch, and I intend to say my piece. You can leave the table or you can have them throw me out. Or you can be a gentleman and listen for five minutes, after which I will be happy to go.”

If Freedman's tone was cold, Timberman's face was frozen. “Go ahead, Lieutenant,” he said in hardly more than a whisper. “I am listening.”

“My father grew up during the Great Depression,” Freed-man said. “His father, my grandfather, worked in a garment factory — when he worked. When there was no work, my father did odd jobs and brought in a few dollars and the family survived on that. Nobody locked their doors, nobody was mugged, and nobody made ten million dollars out of peddling inside information. They were very hard times, but from the stories my father told me, they were also good times. There was something clean and decent about the country, and people had a passionate love for a thing called America—”

At this point, Timberman began to show signs of impatience and opened his mouth to interrupt. Freedman stopped him with “Please, sir, allow me to say my piece.”

Timberman sighed and nodded.

“You see, sir, any sensible person wonders what is meant by loving your country — what do you love, mountains, rivers, a house? It's a crazy concept, because none of it means a damn thing, and the only thing to love in any country is the things people do and what they believe in, and through my father's eyes, I saw a country you could love. Destitute, desperate, tragic — all those things. But it was also something real. Well, my father enlisted. He was a rifleman, and he went through it all, from Normandy to Berlin, and I figured if he could do it, I could do it, and I went to Vietnam, but everything had turned to shit and I came back to a country where law was a farce, where greed had become a national religion, where the kids had sold their lives for crack, and where priests who were trying to believe in something were murdered in Central America, and where a man sits in my precinct house and tells me that people in our government, paid with taxpayers' money, are flooding this country with cocaine, and the operation is run by a son of a bitch named Dumont Robertson, a rich upstanding white Anglo-Saxon son of a bitch, and then this same malignant bastard comes into my precinct and murders a prostitute and an old priest and Joe Cullen, and you tell me I'm not to talk about the tape. Beautiful, sir — just beautiful, Mr. District Attorney. Thank you for listening!” With his last few words, Freedman's anger exploded and he pushed back his chair and stood up.

“Sit down, Lieutenant!” Timberman snapped.

“I'm leaving.”

“You haven't had your lunch. You will god damn well sit down!”

The waiter, who had just approached the table with menus, now dropped the menus on the table and walked away. He had no desire to ask whether two men facing each other like angry wolves wanted to order drinks.

Freedman sat down.

“We'll both try to be civilized,” Timberman said. “Do you want a drink?”

“I'm on duty,” Freedman muttered.

“Yes, of course. Now suppose you tell me what you want of me, Lieutenant.”

“I want to know where Tony Carlione has been relocated to.”

Freedman was surprised that Timberman did not immediately reject the notion. Instead, he said, “You know what relocation means?”