The Confession of Joe Cullen by Howard Fast Page A

Tegucigalpa. The chopper’s back. Who’s going to worry about Sanchez? The guards hate his guts and are scared shitless of him. So nobody’s going to call Texas, even if they know how to get through to Texas, which I don’t think they do. I think all the connections are made in Tegucigalpa, maybe in the embassy there for all I know. So just work easy.”
    Cullen was correct in his predictions. Three and a half hours later, they touched down at Salsaville, and before dark, Cullen had collected his money and was in his car, bound for New York City. In the hours between Texas and New York, he tried to work out the question of his own responsibility in the death of Father O’Healey.
    He came to the decision that he himself was responsible for Father O’Healey’s death.

The District Attorney

B EING INTERVIEWED ONCE, and asked about things that annoyed him, Harold Timberman mentioned that under the pervasive influence of TV and films, millions of people believed that places like New York and Chicago were represented by a single person as district attorney. Timberman, district attorney for Manhattan, had a staff of over three hundred assistant district attorneys working under him. He felt that figure should be known so that the enormous reach of crime in the cities would not be glossed over.
    Timberman took crime and punishment very seriously. He had the reputation of being incorruptible — some of it due to the fact that he came from an enormously wealthy family who for the past hundred and fifty years had dedicated themselves to public service. They were an old German-Jewish family who had changed their name from Timmerman to Timberman — for reasons lost to the present generation.
    Timberman himself was slender, gray-haired, and most elegant in his attire. He had a long narrow head that was usually set erect and aware, a thoughtful face, and dark eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses. He was a serious man of small humor, who thought seriously, moved seriously, and considered matters seriously. He had an astonishing knowledge of the criminal justice system in New York, and he could recall that he had met Lieutenant Mel Freedman somewhere and that Freedman was head of detectives in a small and unimportant precinct on the Lower West Side. Thus, when a TV tape came to him by messenger marked PERSONAL AND IMPORTANT, with Freedman’s name on it, he decided to honor the policeman’s request and view it himself. He had no free time on the day he received the tape, and he took it home with him to view on his own VCR.
    His wife, Sally, had planned a small dinner party, and Timberman convinced her that he could be excused by ten to look at the tape. “They’re not late people,” he said to her.
    â€œAt our age, not many are.”
    That surprised him. He was sixty, his wife ten years his junior. She rarely mentioned age. He was somewhat distracted when she asked him what was on the tape.
    â€œI really don’t know. I would have shunted it off on one of my bureau chiefs, but I remember Freedman. He got Carlione to become our witness, and he busted the whole Zambino family. He said personal.”
    He rather regretted that later. One of the guests at the dinner table was Professor Ralph Cibrini of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, professor of economics and one of the nation’s leading authorities on the drug crisis. He was a small, cheerful man, with a halo of white hair and piercing blue eyes. After dinner, with the coffee and brandy, the conversation focused on Professor Cibrini. Another guest, the editor of a very successful magazine, was condemning Cibrini’s use of economic determinism. “It always reminds me of the hopeless rigidity of Marxism,” the editor said. “Life doesn’t function that way.”
    â€œIt troubles your illusions,” Cibrini said, “You want a world of pure free will. No way. And to think that you can fight this