The Confession of Joe Cullen (4 page)

Lieutenant Freedman said to the cop with the camera, “Hold on, Lefty, until I give you the nod. I want a few words with him before we start recording.”

Lefty nodded, and Freedman said to Cullen, “You come in here and confess to the murder of a Catholic priest, name of O'Healey. There was a piece in the
New York Times
, maybe two, three weeks ago, about the disappearance of Father O'Healey.” He turned to Jones. “George, get the
Times
and find out what O'Healey's first name was and what they can tell us about him. I'm pretty sure it was O'Healey, but if it wasn't, find out what they got about a Catholic priest disappearing in Honduras.” Jones went into the little office, and Freedman said to Cullen, “When did it happen?”

“On September twenty-third,” Cullen said.

“Do you also remember what day of the week it was?”

“Wednesday. I'm not some nut coming in here to plead for attention. I know what I did.”

“You're a Catholic?”

“I was born one and I was raised that way. What I am now, God only knows.”

“If it wasn't a priest, would you be here confessing?”

“I don't know,” Cullen answered slowly. “Maybe not.”

Freedman said, “All right, Lefty, start recording.” And then to Cullen, “Take it from the top. We'll begin with your name.”

Cullen repeated the information he had already given them, and then Freedman said, “You say you were in the air force — what rank?”

“Lieutenant.”

“And you were in Vietnam?”

“Three tours,” Cullen said. “I was trained as a regular pilot. Then they sent me back for helicopter training. I spent nine months in Nam flying helicopters. I was damn good.” He didn't know why he said that, but he felt that the five policemen were putting him down, degrading him as just another killer. He wasn't just another killer. “Goddamnit,” he said to himself, “I'm Joe Cullen, I'm not dirt. You don't take that away from me.”

“Honorable discharge?”

“I'm in the reserve. That's honorable enough.”

Freedman was watching him, measuring him, trying to crawl into his mind. Freedman was in no hurry to get the confession over with. He sensed that he was touching something explosive and dangerous, and he wanted to move into it slowly and thoroughly.

“After Vietnam?”

“There were a couple of years just getting my head together, which wasn't so uncommon with the guys from Nam. I had enough back pay to drink too much and be stupid. I got a job in Utah, flying with a tiny commuter line, and they washed out bankrupt, and then I got another job with West Texas Carriers, but they were picked up by Unity, and the big carrier fired all the pilots. I came east, and I got a pretty good job with Cayuga Mohawk, and I got married, but Cayuga Mohawk couldn't make it in Reagan's big push for deregulation, and they folded. My wife left me, and for the next year I didn't do much of anything until I met Oscar Kovach and got into this Honduras thing.”

“OK,” Freedman said. “You're doing fine.”

The telephone in the office was ringing. Leary went in to answer it, and returned and said, “That was the
Times
. They ran the story on November ninth, and what they had came over the wire from Reuters in London, which is kind of strange, and the priest's name was Father Francis Luke O'Healey, a missionary priest out of San Francisco. The only thing they got to add to this is that according to their inquiry at the time this Father O'Healey was ‘solemnly professed,' and I got a vague notion of what that means. I think vows of poverty or something like that.”

“Total poverty, total renunciation of ambition,” Ramos said.

“Should I stop the camera?” Lefty wanted to know.

“No,” Freedman replied. “Keep it rolling.” And to Cullen, “You say this man Oscar Kovach got you into the Honduras thing?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tell us about it and how it happened.”

Not as easy as the question sounded. Cullen recalled how he had felt that day, a hot, miserable day. He was washed out, tired, his head bursting with pain, still hung over from the day before, and thinking how good it would be to sit right now in the cockpit of a plane and put on the oxygen mask and let the cool flow of oxygen wash away his pain. How to spell out his condition, how to make them understand his mood of defeat and hopelessness that day, the mood of a man who all his life truly desired only one thing, to fly, to experience the sheer ecstasy of flying, to have it day after day — and then to find every door closed to him.

“You see,” he explained, “there were enough younger pilots who had not been in Nam. They never felt easy about us. Sure, we could get a job in the 'seventies, but then a whole new generation of pilots was on line, pushing for jobs.”

They were listening, waiting. He expected them to come up with a question, but Freedman simply nodded, waiting for him to continue.

“I had eighteen dollars in my pocket. The way it is now, with the inflation, eighteen dollars is worth about twenty cents.”

“Was that when you made your Honduras connection?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You don't have to apologize for what you did. Just tell it plain and directly. We know what it is to be broke.”

There was no anger in Freedman's voice. He spoke gently, encouragingly. The others, too, regarded him without malice. No one walking in on the scene would have suspected that they were talking to a self-confessed murderer.

“I went into Billy Sullivan's saloon over on Ninth Avenue. You know the place?”

They knew the place. It was right around the corner. How could they not know the place?

“Billy's a vet, so the vets feel comfortable there. You want to meet someone who was in Nam, you'll find him if he's in New York. Just wait long enough. That's how I ran into Oscar Kovach. He was standing at the bar, and when he saw me, he waved me over and bought me a beer. I hadn't seen him for years. We flew together with West Texas, I mean we both had jobs there, and he was no great friend of mine, but you know, you see a guy you haven't seen for a long time — well — and he looked good, good clothes, a big grin and a big handshake. He tells me how glad he is to see me.”

When Cullen paused, Freedman asked, “Does he figure importantly in this — Oscar Kovach?”

“Yes.”

“Tell us about him.”

“I guess you want the spelling. Oscar K-O-V-A-C-H. Lieutenant in the air force, told me he did a tour in Nam, but we never met there. I guess he's maybe a year or two younger than I am, early forties. Also in the reserve. He's a good enough pilot.”

“Do you have an address for him?”

“No, not a street. He lives in Ridgefield in Connecticut. A lot of pilots live there because it puts them just outside emergency jobs at Kennedy and LaGuardia. You could probably find him in the phone book.”

“Go on then. You met him at Sullivan's. What happened then?”

Once, in Vietnam, a little drunk, Cullen got into a discussion with another pilot, who put forth the proposition that birds lived in a perpetual high. It didn't matter, this pilot insisted, that they had practically no brains and that their lives were short; the high of flight made up for that, and however brief their time on earth, it was damn wonderful. He asked Cullen whether he understood, and Cullen had said, Sort of. It's something only a pilot can understand, I guess. Well, how do you tell a bunch of cops what you felt like when Kovach offered you a chance to fly? How do you tell anything the way it happened.

“He asked me whether I was working,” Cullen said. “Well, I wasn't working. I had eighteen bucks between me and hard diet, and I guess at that moment I would have given damn near anything to sit in a cockpit again. So I told him how it was with me, and he said, ‘Great. I got a job for you.' Well, you can imagine how I felt, and then when he tells me it's five grand for a flight, I'm ready to kiss his ass.”

“Five thousand dollars a flight?”

“That's right.”

“And it never occurred to you,” Freedman said, “that only dope gets flown at that kind of price?”

“Sure it occurred to me. But you're wrong, Lieutenant. It ain't only dope that gets transportation at that price.”

“What else?”

“Guns. You see, that's what he told me. He told me he was working for an outfit that flew guns and ammo into Honduras for the contras. I didn't see anything wrong with that. The president was dumping on the commies and the secretary of state was dumping on them, and I figured that anything to help the contras couldn't get me into too much trouble.”

“Where did this operation take place?”

“In Texas, at a place called Salsaville.”

Freedman looked at the others. They shrugged. “Where the hell is Salsaville?”

“Western Texas, in the White Mountains, which is just about as far from anyone and anything as you can get. It's an old mining town, with a population of maybe two hundred people — if that. It's no place. It's like one of those godawful places you see in the movies, with sheds to keep off the sun and a few rotting buildings.”

Freedman said, “Leary, go downstairs and see if you can hustle a map of Texas. We had a stack of maps in a shelf behind the booking desk.” Then to Cullen, “Go on. Tell us about these people. Who are they and what have they got there at Salsaville? Salsaville? How do you spell that?”

Cullen spelled it.

“Go on. The people?”

“They come and go. Two of them are there every time we hit the place. One's a retired general, name of Swedenham — mostly they just call him General.”

“Does he have a first name? Give me both names when you mention someone. What kind of a general? Does he wear a uniform?”

“No. No uniform. The colonel's retired too. His name is Yancy. I don't know his first name. They call him Colonel or Yancy. They're both West Pointers, I think.”

“Why? Why do you think?”

“Because when I told them I wasn't, they dropped the nice-guy treatment, and I became a hired hand, like the rest of the pilots. Not that I gave a damn. I was flying and I was being paid. There was a guy there. Everyone brown-nosed him.”

Leary came back into the room with an open map, a big folded sheet that he was studying as he walked. Freedmah told Lefty to cut the lights and the camera, and then they all crowded around the map.

“I think I got it. Right here.”

“Looks like fly shit,” Ramos said. “If they were flying into Honduras, why weren't they close to the border?”

“OK, Lefty,” Freedman said, and Lefty started the camera.

“Because the landing strip at Salsaville was three thousand feet above sea level,” Cullen said. “We were flying 727s, and we crossed the border at twenty-five thousand feet.”

“Come on,” Jones said. “We could pick a plane out of the sky at that altitude.”

“Only if you want to.”

“Tell us some more about Salsaville. You say they had an airstrip big enough for 727s. Was it tarmac?”

“No, dirt. But hard and even. It doesn't rain much there, and they have a pair of bulldozers keeps the ground smooth.”

“What else do they have there?”

“They got a three-thousand-gallon gas storage tank, a couple of Quonset huts where they store the guns and ammo, and a couple of tents if you have to spend the night. They have a food truck with a stove and a water tower that they rigged. The guns were trucked there by big Mercedes truck rigs. Everything was top dollar.”

“And where did all of these top dollars come from?”

“Mostly they came from a millionaire type, name of Fred Lester. Should I spell it?”

Freedman shook his head.

“Maybe he was just a funnel. Oscar figured he was the source, but he took orders and sometimes crap from another man, name of Monty — M-O-N-T-Y. No other name.”

“Oscar? That's Oscar Kovach, the guy who steered you to the job?”

“That's right.”

“OK,” Freedman said. “Let's go back a piece and see what we have. This guy, Oscar Kovach, picks you up in Sullivan's saloon. He's a vet, you're a vet. He needs a pilot — wait a minute. He doesn't do the hiring for the outfit?”

“No, but his copilot had a heart attack and was hospitalized. They told him to find a pilot he could trust and someone who could navigate decently. He needs a pilot, I need a job.”

“Go on. You meet him. What then?”

“He pitches the job. I tell him yes, and he gives me a couple of hundred for some tropical clothes and a flying jacket, and I meet him the next day and we take a plane to El Paso. Out of El Paso, we take an eight-seater commuter job to Salsaville, and the day after that, Oscar and me, we're flying an overloaded 727 down to Honduras, where we unload carbines, hand grenades, mortars, heavy antitank stuff, and missiles and ammo, and I'm five thousand dollars richer.”

Cullen felt better than he had for weeks; his head was clearer, the tension that lived at the base of his neck and around his shoulders had eased off. He had just begun to think of what the consequences would be — ten, fifteen, twenty years in prison, or a lifetime in prison — and they didn't matter. Something inside him had changed, snapped, released him from himself. If he could have thought it through and put it into words, he might have said that he was free for the first time in his life, not only free from a father who beat him unmercifully, a mother who was an alcoholic and another subject for his father's beatings, a father who hated his education, who drove him out of the house when he began his freshman year at City College, but free from savage, semidemented drill instructors, free from hardly-more-sane senior officers, free from the lunatic horror dreams that were with him in Vietnam, free from the contempt and the lack of interest of a country in the men who fought in Vietnam — a freedom that he had tasted only in the air, high, high in the air. But this was more than a taste. He was released. The cops stood and sat around him not like inquisitors, but in his mind at the moment like priests hearing his confession.