The Confession of Joe Cullen Read online

  His eyes focused now. The only light in the church came from a few candles and the glow from the stained glass windows, and in this dim light an old woman was straightening out the hymnals on the backs of the pews. Cullen took a few steps and then stood in the aisle, watching the old woman approach him. All unconscious of his presence, intent on her work, she glanced up suddenly and let out a shrill gasp.

  “Please,” Cullen said.

  “Oh, you did startle me, sir.”

  “I didn’t mean to. Is there a priest here now who could hear confession?”

  “Oh, yes. Father Immelman is here, but he’s having his afternoon nap. He’s getting on, you know, and he needs his nap. He’s seventy-three. When you get to that age, you want a nap in the afternoon. Not myself, of course; there’s so much work to be done. Do you come here often?”

  “No.”

  “I should have known. I know all the churchgoers, but my memory’s so poorly these days. What time is it, sir, if I may ask?”

  Cullen looked at his watch. “Ten minutes to three.”

  “Well, there you are. In another ten minutes, he’ll be down. You can sit in the booth — the one over there,” she said, pointing. The moment he comes down, I’ll tell him you’re there.”

  He nodded, mumbled a thank-you, and then went to the confession booth and sat there, breathing the musty air and remembering his childhood without joy. The smell had not changed, and he had a notion that anywhere, in any booth, the smell would be the same.

  The smell was his childhood. He remembered hearing, somewhere, that the deepest memory was odor, the deepest impression, the link of man to an ancient time when he was not man at all, only becoming, and this odor was filled with the fears and frustrations of an adolescent boy. Cullen did not want to remember the adolescent boy. There was a great deal that Cullen didn’t want to remember. There was the odor that came from the body bags, and there was the odor of mud when your face is in the mud, and there was the odor of sheer terror the time he was shot down with VC all around him. He was beginning to sweat, and in another moment he would have leaped out of the confession booth and fled the church.

  Then, on top of that thought, pinning him to his seat, there was the sound of the old priest’s slow steps, and the opening of his door to the booth.

  “My son?”

  Cullen opened his mouth but no sound came from it.

  “My son, you wish to confess? To receive absolution?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long is it since your last confession?”

  Long moments passed before Cullen could count the years.

  “My son?”

  “I’m trying to think about it, Father.” It was before Vietnam. Was it 1970? That would make it seventeen years. Or was it 1968? Nineteen years.

  “I think — nineteen years.”

  From the priest, a long silence — to the point where Cullen had the feeling that he had left the box, and then when he spoke, he asked whether Cullen was still a believer. “You said you were, my son — or that you had been in the past. You have not put the church out of your life, have you?”

  “Things happened, Father. I was in Vietnam.”

  “And that kept you from confession?”

  Cullen was not used to self-examination. It was only recently that he had begun to look into himself, trying desperately to find motives and see himself as another might see him.

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “I’m not sure. In some way, it made it too hard to confess.”

  “Yes.” The old priest’s voice was without rancor. He had lived a long time and heard too many confessions ever to be surprised. When he asked Cullen what he had done that brought him here today, after so many years, he could almost have anticipated a tragedy of some sort.

  “I murdered a priest,” Cullen replied, each word torn out of his gut.

  “You murdered a priest? Is that what you said? My hearing is not of the best.” There was not surprise nor anger nor horror in the old man’s voice.

  “Yes, Father,” Cullen whispered.

  “A little louder, please, my son.”

  “Yes, Father. I said that I had murdered a priest.”

  “I see.” Then silence, silence. Cullen heard the old man’s breathing, his own breathing. Then the old man asked, his voice unshaken, “Were you conscious of what you were doing?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “And tell me, how do you feel about what you have done?”

  “Terrible.”

  “And sorry? Contrite?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Tell me, my son, do you believe in God?”

  Cullen’s hesitation was so long that the priest asked his question again. “My son, I asked you whether you believed in God. Can you answer that question?”

  “I don’t know,” Cullen said finally.

  “That is not an answer, and you know that, my son. Look into your heart, and then tell me what you believe or disbelieve.”

  “I was in Vietnam,” Cullen said forlornly. “How can I tell you that I believe in God?”

  “You saw what man does and not what God does. Can you accept that?”

  “No,” Cullen whispered.

  “Please, louder, my son.”

  “No. No, I can’t accept that what man does isn’t what God does — I mean, I guess I want to. I can’t.”

  “Then I must ask you again — do you believe in God?”

  “Father, I want to.”

  “But do you?”

  Cullen felt every muscle in his body tighten. He knew what the priest’s question meant, and as much as he wanted to lie, he couldn’t.

  “No,” Cullen said.

  He heard the priest sigh; there was such sorrow in that sigh that Cullen’s eyes were wet with tears.

  “Then why are you here in God’s house?” the old priest asked gently.

  “I don’t know. I had nowhere else to go.”

  “Don’t you know, my son, that murder is an offense against God, a terrible offense against God?”

  “I have guilt,” Cullen managed to say. “I’m filled with guilt, Father. I can’t sleep, I can’t rest. It’s not like Nam. It never happened to me that way in Nam. This is something else. I’m sick with what I have done. I thought — if you could forgive me, if you could give me some kind of absolution?”

  “How can I, my son? When you say you are filled with revulsion at what you have done, I believe you. But what can I do? A pagan can come to me with guilt, with conscience, with revulsion, but I cannot give him absolution. He must understand that his offense, his sin, is against God, not against man. It is the same in your case. You don’t believe in God, so there is no absolution, no forgiveness.”

  “Why? Why are you turning me away?” He was a little boy again, pleading.

  “I am not turning you away, and even if I spoke words of absolution, they would be meaningless. Pray, pray, and seek inside yourself, and when you have found God, come back here and I will give you absolution.”

  “Junk in every size,” Cullen muttered miserably, and then, louder, said, “Thank you, Father.”

  From the church, Cullen walked west, remembering that once an elevated highway had nestled alongside the river and the piers until it bore witness to the municipal crooks who had built it so poorly that in time it came tumbling down. Well, if a murderer like himself could walk around in the city, with nobody giving two damns about it or what he had done, then why bother with common crooks? Nothing was as it had been once, and nobody really gave a damn about anything, and the old priest would have been happy to give him absolution if only he had stood up and said forthrightly that he believed in God. He should have lied, and he was not sure but that everyone lied.

  He walked on alongside the river, and then out onto an ancient pier. He sat down on a pile of wooden planks and lit a cigarette and thought about things. In time, he came to two conclusions: one, that he would never sleep again or be able to face himself unless he confes
sed to what he had done; two, that the only confession that mattered was one with chapter and verse underlined.

  The Third Confession

  THE PRECINCT HOUSE was an old building on an old street. It had been built at the turn of the century, and the street had not changed very much since then. The precinct house had a front of gray stone, and on the arch over the doorway the word POLICE was engraved, and on either side of this simple word two iron sconces held blue light globes. Most of the streets in the West Twenties had not been subjected to the city’s penchant for tearing down old buildings with character and replacing them with new buildings that had no character at all; the nod to modest antiquity was most evident west of Eighth Avenue. The buildings along the street were each of them close to a hundred years old, loft buildings now turned into warehouses, garages, film-processing labs, computer companies, software houses, and at least fifty other kinds of modern production that happens in New York. But the face of these grimy buildings had not changed, and as Joe Cullen walked down the street, east to west, he experienced at least a trace of the comfort that familiarity brings. The dirty gray front of the old precinct house reminded him of the Carnegie libraries he had haunted in his childhood.

  There were kids in the gang he ran with who never set foot in a library. His dreams had been different. His retreat into the wonderland of books was secret. Drunk once, his father asked him where he had been. When he replied that he had been in the public library, his father belted him across the face and sent him reeling. He never mentioned the library to anyone again.

  The police station was something else. The only time he had ever been in this particular police station was when his father, drunk again, got into a fight at a bar, and the man he picked the fight with hit him across the side of his head with a heavy beer mug. Cullen was then living uptown near City College, a place he fought his way through because he had only one dream, to be an airplane pilot; and to have the air force train him for that, he needed a college degree. His mother telephoned him at that time, and he came down to this police station to hear what they could tell him about his father. They told him that his father had been taken to Bellevue, but when Cullen got there, his father was already dead.

  Thoughts are quick. On the steps of the precinct house, Cullen paused, the image of his dead father, almost twenty-five years in the past, so clear in his mind that it might have been a photograph hanging in front of him. The face, forever angry and hate-filled, was now relaxed and peaceful, the eyes closed, the mouth without bitterness. Death purified him, and Cullen, who had hated and feared him and wanted so desperately to love him, found his eyes moist, even as they had been twenty-five years ago.

  Cullen went on into the precinct house. The public room was small, crowded with cops, since it was the moment the shift was changing, among them at least four women, a dozen cops in the room and no one paying any attention to Cullen. A heavyset sergeant behind the long high desk, wearing a gold badge, tried to talk on the telephone, vent his anger at one of the cops, and pay attention to the desk at the same time. The cops were horsing around and laughing, the female cops quite pretty as they laughed and tossed their heads — all of them so very young to Cullen, like the kids in the infantry. But it was a beautiful November afternoon, the kind of cool fine weather that would make most people feel good, and even Cullen was able to shake off some of his depression and despair.

  A fat old woman in front of the desk was weeping. The sergeant slammed down the telephone and snapped at her, “He’s not dead. No way. You understand me?”

  Her weeping was not interrupted. The sergeant turned to Cullen and said, “I’m listening.”

  “I murdered a man,” Cullen said clearly.

  The instant quiet in the room was like the sound turned down on a television set. The picture continued, but suddenly the talk and laughter were gone, and Cullen felt himself gripped from behind, hands passed around his body and up and down his legs.

  “He’s clean, Sarge.”

  The desk sergeant nodded, his gaze fixed on Cullen. The room was quiet and interested.

  “What’s your name, mister?” the sergeant asked.

  “Joseph Cullen.”

  “And who did you kill, Mr. Cullen?”

  “Father Francis O’Healey.”

  “You mean a priest? Father O’Healey, a priest?”

  “That’s right.”

  The sergeant rubbed his chin and stared at Cullen thoughtfully. Then he said to a cop who was standing behind Cullen, “Take him upstairs to the squad room, Harry.”

  Harry was tall, skinny, and young. He looked at the sergeant, who shrugged. Cullen held out his hands, an indifferent gesture. “We ain’t going to cuff you, Mr. Cullen,” Harry said.

  “You’re not going to arrest me?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what you done yet. Talk to the detectives.”

  Harry led him through to the back and up a staircase to the squad room — the squad room small, about twelve by twelve, two desks and four chairs, all very old, and a door that led out of it to the lieutenant’s tiny office. The windows were almost opaque with dirt, the wall paint so ancient that the original color could only be surmised. “A shithole,” Cullen said to himself, wondering why the cops put up with it. If it had been the army, everything would be spanking clean, the furniture new, the desks polished and clean instead of being piled up with filing forms. But in the army, without a war, there wasn’t much to do except to keep things clean and fancy and order something new the moment the old thing showed a scratch.

  Evidently the desk sergeant had phoned up, because the very tall man who came out of the tiny office explained that he was in charge, Detective Sergeant Hosea Ramos. “This is Detective Leary,” Ramos said, nodding at a heavyset detective with a bulging waistline, “and this is Detective Jones.”

  Jones, a good-looking black man of about thirty, pushed a chair toward Cullen and told him to sit down. He had just confessed downstairs to murdering someone, but nobody here appeared annoyed or troubled. Leary sat down behind his desk. Jones leaned against another desk, and Ramos, slender and handsome, black hair, mustache, started to say something and then heard the phone in the office and went in there to answer it, closing the door behind him. While he was there, the two detectives said nothing, simply studying Cullen amiably.

  “You want a butt?” Leary asked, lighting his own cigarette. Cullen nodded, and Leary rose, handed him a cigarette, and then leaned forward to light it. Ramos came out of his office.

  “Joe Cullen?” Ramos said.

  Jones sat down behind his desk and picked up a pencil and a pad. “C-U-L-L-E-N?” he asked.

  “Right.”

  “Joseph — got a middle name?”

  “Patrick. I don’t use it, even on my Social Security card.”

  Ramos said, “We got no reason to search you, Mr. Cullen, but we’d like to see identification — if you don’t mind?”

  Cullen opened his wallet and began to lay out his cards. “I don’t mind,” he said as he put down driver’s license, pilot’s license, air force reserve ID, Social Security card, MasterCard, and American Express. The three men crowded around to look at the identification, and then Ramos told him to put it all back in his wallet and his pocket.

  “You say you killed a priest,” Ramos said, “and you want to tell us about it. Is that right?”

  “Yes, sir,” Cullen agreed

  “Have you any objections to having your confession put on videotape?”

  “No, sir.”

  At that moment, a uniformed policeman came into the room, his arms loaded with a portable video camera, spotlights, wires, aluminum light stands, and spare tapes. He began setting up his equipment immediately.

  The telephone in Ramos’s office rang again, and the sergeant went to answer it. Jones said, “We might as well get a few facts about you, Mr. Cullen. To begin, how old are you?”

  “Forty-four.”

  “Born in 1943?”

 
“July tenth.”

  “Place?”

  “Broad Channel.”

  “Where the hell’s that? South Bronx?”

  “Queens,” Leary said, “although why anyone lives there, God only knows.”

  “You can say that,” Cullen agreed. “We moved to New York when I was a kid.”

  Ramos came out of his office and asked about the video.

  “Whenever you’re ready.”

  “OK.” He turned to Jones and asked him to run through it again. “And try to grab the pertinent points so we don’t have to run the whole tape. I want it typed out tonight,” he said to the cop who was handling the video.

  “Sergeant, I’m off duty at five.”

  “Now you’ll do overtime.” And to Jones, “Go ahead. Start taping. Give it to him again.”

  Jones repeated the questions he had already asked Cullen, and while he did so, Leary whispered to Ramos, “What do you think? Is he for real?”

  “He’s a lieutenant in the air force reserve.” He turned to Cullen. “Mr. Cullen, when did this killing take place?”

  Jones let him take over the questioning.

  “Where? In Honduras.”

  “I asked you when?”

  “On September twenty-third,” Cullen said.

  Ramos waved to the cop with the video. “Cut it! And cut those damn lights for a minute.” He pulled up a chair and sat down, facing Cullen. His telephone was ringing again. “Leary,” he said, “will you tell Conway to hold those damn calls? If they’re serious, switch them to Manhattan South. Call Manhattan South and tell them we need an hour of peace.”