The Confession of Joe Cullen by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online Page B

detectives to get back to their cases and Lefty to give him the tape, and then he and Ramos led Cullen into the small office that adjoined the squad room. There were only two chairs in the office. Ramos pulled in another chair, after which there was not much room remaining if someone wanted to switch from one chair to another. The window in this office had not been cleaned in at least thirty years. The desk was vintage 1920s. When it comes to the place they work, New York City is not generous to its police.
    Freedman nodded for Cullen to sit down and pushed a box of Kleenex toward him. While Cullen wiped his face, Ramos took out his cigarettes.
    â€œJesus Christ!” Freedman exploded. “You’re not going to smoke those damn things in here. We’ll choke.”
    â€œOK, don’t blow your top.”
    Freedman stared at Cullen for a long moment; then he shook his head and said bleakly, “You’re no horse’s ass, Cullen. You know which side is up. You’re a pilot, you’re a college graduate, and you were an officer in the United States Air Force, and if your story is not one crock of shit, you know damn well you didn’t commit any crime except running dope. That’s a big one, but it’s not murder. The way you tell it, you’re not even an accessory to a murder. You didn’t foresee it, you tried to prevent it, and now you’re giving evidence against whoever committed it — if anyone did, if any murder took place. Father Francis Luke O’Healey disappeared. There is no body. As for the dope — we would need evidence and you got no evidence. Do you have any coke on you?”
    â€œI’m not a doper. I hate the stuff.”
    â€œSo that’s where we are,” Freedman said. “Leave your name, address, telephone number, and walk out of here. We’ll follow up on what you gave us, and if anything comes of it, we’ll call you as a witness.”
    â€œI’m not a witness,” Cullen said stolidly. “Not the way you mean it. I bear witness differently.”
    â€œDo you know what the hell he’s talking about?” Freedman asked Ramos.
    â€œMaybe. There’s another way to bear witness. Tell me something, Mr. Cullen. After you met the father, did you suspect they would kill him?”
    â€œJust before we got into the chopper — yes.”
    â€œWhat could you do?”
    The two policemen waited. Through the closed door of the little office, Cullen could hear Jones’s voice as he spoke into the telephone. He recalled a story by Edgar Allan Poe that he had read a long, long time ago, where a policeman sat silently waiting for a guilty man to confess. Now the presence of these two silent policemen became intolerable. He had to speak, yet he knew that he was incapable of pulling the thoughts out of his head and turning them into words.
    Finally, he said, “It isn’t what I could do. I could have done any number of things. I had control of the chopper. If you’re as good as I am with a chopper, you can make it teach points to a sparrow. When they opened the door, I could have tossed them out — one of them, anyway. I could have threatened them. I could have spun it — any number of things. The point is that I knew they were going to kill him, yet I did nothing until they started to throw him out, and then it was too late. I never met anyone like O’Healey before. I never believed there was a good man — I never met a good man. All the hours we talked — it was like I had been blind, and here was Saint Francis. My God,” he said to Ramos, pleading, “do you understand what I’m trying to say?”
    Freedman watched Ramos, whose black eyes were hooded to slits and who said softly, “I think I do.”
    â€œNo one paid him. He went to the Indians because they were the poorest people on earth — Oh, shit! You sit up here in New York and you don’t know what the