White Star

by James Thayer

  Coates had another quality Gray valued. He detested gangsters. The detective's loathing of organized crime brought an unbending moral principle to his police work. He hated the mob so much that he could not bring himself to call them hoodlums or gangsters or any other label imparting even a modicum of dignity. Instead Coates usually used the term pukes, and had done so while testifying against Carmine De Sallo, causing defense attorneys to move for a mistrial, which was denied. So Gray gladly put up with Coates and had even become fond of him.

  The detective kicked off a loafer and rubbed the ball of his left foot. "It's good to get off my goddamn feet."

  John gasped at the profanity. The twins tittered and looked knowingly at each other. They were convinced they knew words their father had missed all his life. The kitchen door opened slightly. Mrs. Orlando peered out.

  Coates began, "Owen, you're a cool customer, I got to admit. After the Chinaman went down, you left the scene like you had ice in your veins."

  Gray opened his hands in a vague gesture. Looking back on the scene later that evening, Gray had been vexed and angered at his own dispassion, at his own callousness at the gruesome event at Foley Square. His long journey back to normalcy—for years a day-to-day harrowing struggle that had exhausted and confused him and had cost him dearly—might not have succeeded. A healthy person would have reacted differently, more like Anna Renthal, sick at the abrupt and gory passage from life to death.

  "Owen, you've got a lot of scars, those ones on your arms and legs," Coates said. "But remember that first day when you went to the gym with me and I saw your neck and asked about the scar there? You said you choked on a piece of ham in your dormitory at college and had to have a tracheotomy. Well, I recently was talking to a surgeon friend of mine and he said tracheotomies shouldn't leave much of a scar, not these days. So I got a little curious and did a little digging."

  The children were quiet, peering at the detective.

  "If I showed initiative like this all the time I'd be mayor by now, I'll guarantee you that," Coates said. "Owen, everybody at NYPD thinks you are just a run-of-the-mill prosecutor, a damn good one, but just your average PA making life miserable for us police."

  The twins inched closer.

  Julie needled, "You aren't a run-of-the-mill prosecutor, Dad?"

  Carolyn joined in, "We thought you were."

  Gray cautioned, "I'm good enough to put you two girls in juvie for ragging your father."

  The detective asked, "You got a beer?"

  Gray shook his head.

  John called from his spot, "We got Yoo Hoos in the 'frigerator."

  "Who'd have figured it?" Coates asked. "I read about that scar in your service file an FBI friend sent me. Made me queasy. No beer?"

  "Pete, why were you interested in my service file?"

  Carolyn asked, "Why'd the scar make you queasy? It's not too bad."

  "Just some blue and red and purple skin," Julie chimed in.

  The detective asked, "Your old man ever tell you how he got that scar?"

  "A leech," Julie replied. "Big deal. We Koreans eat them for breakfast."

  "You want that Yoo Hoo, mister?" John asked from his spot.

  Gray said, "My kids know I had an accident."

  "I'll say." Coates put his shoe back on. "One day out in the jungle you picked up your canteen and took a big gulp of water. And you swallowed a leech that had gotten inside your canteen when you were filling it."

  Carolyn made a production of shrugging. "Wouldn't have bothered me."

  "And the damned thing got stuck in your throat where it grabbed on with its little teeth. The leech started swelling with your blood, right there while it was in your throat. Your air was cut off and you started turning blue. Your spotter wasn't nearby, so he was no help."

  "What's a spotter?" Carolyn asked.

  "So you took out your service knife and punched a hole in your own throat, a big ragged hole. Then you cut off a short piece of bamboo and used it as a tube for air."

  John moved quickly from his corner. "I'm going to ask Mrs. Orlando for Yoo Hoos."

  "You got your color back but you couldn't dig out the leech. You were deep behind enemy lines and it took two days to get to an aid station and the leech was in your throat all that time getting fatter and happier."

  The twins beamed.

  Coates turned to the twins. "Girls, I don't know about you, but a leech stuck in my craw could take some of the luster off an otherwise fine day."

  John marched back into the room carrying Yoo Hoos and straws. He handed a carton to the detective and lectured, "You open the flap and stick the straw in."

  Coates did as told. He sipped on the chocolate drink. "It ain't a Guinness, but not bad. What'd you do to your hand, kid?"

  John glanced at his clamp. "I don't remember." He expertly punched a hole into the carton with the tip of the clamp.

  "What's a spotter?" Carolyn asked again.

  "Your dad was with the 1st Battalion, Fourth Marines, in a sniper-scout platoon."

  Gray quickly turned to his children. "Girls, John, I need to talk to Detective Coates privately. Go to your rooms, please."

  They could tell he meant business. They disappeared into their rooms without dawdling or argument.

  The detective emptied the carton with a loud gurgle. "You know, I'd be proud as hell if a rifle range down at Quantico was named after me."

  Gray replied tonelessly, "I don't think you would, actually."

  The detective persisted. "I made a phone call to a gunnery sergeant down there this afternoon. Sergeant Arlen Able, an old friend of yours, turns out. They still talk about you. The sergeant called you a legend."

  Gray rubbed his chin. "Yeah, well, I've left all that behind."

  "After talking to the sergeant, I was hoping to see the Wimbledon Cup on your mantel." The detective scanned the apartment. "But you don't have a mantel. Or even a decent table to put it on."

  He looked back at Gray. "I asked the Marine sergeant over the phone, I says, 'Sergeant, you mean Wimbledon like in tennis?' And he laughs like I'm a pussy and says the Wimbledon Cup is the Thousand-Yard National High-Power Rifle Championship held at Camp Perry, Ohio, and that you won it three years running."

  "I don't talk about it much."

  "You know what my nickname was in the Marines?" Coates asked.

  "I can only imagine."

  "Pogey. That's what Marines working in an office are called. I was a typing instructor for the quartermaster at the Marine Corps Air Station at Cherry Point. Fifteen words a minute and they make me a typing teacher, for Christ sake. I should've had a name like White Star. The chicks loved that nickname, I'll bet?"

  When Gray said nothing, the detective continued, "The sergeant at Quantico told me the Viet Cong and NVA called you White Star due to the little paper star you always left behind."

  In fact, the name had come first, then the paper star. The enemy began calling Gray White Star early in Gray's tour because of the sniper's penchant for using twilight. All Marine snipers knew the sailors' rhyme, altered slightly: Red sky at night, sniper's delight. A lingering pink and red and purple dusk prompts the hunted to leave the safety of the trees or hedges too early. First darkness is an illusion where the near foreground seems darker to the target than it is to a marksman viewing from a distance. During a red twilight the hunted may not suspect he can still be seen in the shooter's crosshairs. Gray's name came from the first heavenly body visible in the sky at twilight, Venus, which westerners call the evening star but which Vietnamese know as the white star.

  Then one day in Vietnam in his blind, waiting, it turned out, thirty-six hours for the shot, Gray had idly begun folding a small piece of paper torn from his sniper's log. He folded, unfolded, and refolded, experimenting with an intricate but random design. Eventually his spotter, Corporal Allen Berkowitz, said, "You've made a star, looks like. Just like your nickname." After the kill, Gray left the star behind. From then on, he left a paper star behin
d at every firing site or, if he could get there, on the corpse.

  Many of history's snipers left a calling card of some sort, Gray discovered later. John Paudash, the Chippewa Indian who fought in the 21st Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force in World War One and who was famous for working alone, left a bird feather at his kills. In the Civil War, Corporal Ben Burton of the 18th North Carolina Regiment was known as the Choirboy because he claimed the pitch of a bullet passing overhead could tell him the precise distance to the enemy rifleman. The Choirboy always left a squirrel's tail. The Viet Minh sniper Vo Li Giap, renowned for firing through airplane windscreens at French pilots trying to take off from the Dien Bien Phu airfield, left braided pieces of twine. One of history's first recorded snipers, Leonardo da Vinci, shot several enemy soldiers while standing on the walls of besieged Florence using a rifle he had designed himself. Whether Leonardo felt compelled to leave a calling card is unknown.

  "And the Viet Cong had a reward for your head, the equivalent of five years' pay for a soldier." Coates gurgled the dregs of the Yoo Hoo again. "The VC blanketed Vietnam with a drawing of your face on a wanted poster. Where'd they get the drawing?"

  Gray was becoming resigned to the conversation. "From a photo of me run in Sea Tiger, the III Marine Amphibious Force's weekly newspaper, is my guess."

  "So how many of the enemy did you whack?"

  Gray glanced at the wall over Coates's head. Several of John's crayon drawings had been taped there. He always painted the sky red. "A few."

  "Christ, I'll say." Coates laughed, a peculiar clatter, like a stick dragged along a picket fence. "Ninety-six is quite a few. It's hard to believe, zotzing ninety-six people. More kills than any other sniper in American military history, the sergeant at Quantico told me. I asked the sergeant why you left the service, but he didn't know or more probably he wouldn't say, and your file wasn't too clear on the subject."

  Gray replied, "Well, my tour was up—"

  "Not quite," the detective cut in. "Your second tour was two months from being up when you flew back to San Diego on a medevac plane."

  John's door opened and the boy walked out, straight for the detective. He had taken a liking to the brusque policeman.

  The boy asked, "Want another Yoo Hoo?"

  "Sure. And add a shot of vodka while you're at it."

  "Yum. I love vodka." John grinned widely. He turned for the kitchen.

  Gray rose from the chair to intercept his son. He gently grabbed the boy's shoulders and turned him. "You better tell me you've never tasted vodka once in your whole life."

  "I put it in my Yoo Hoos all the time just like the detective does."

  "Back to your room with you, you big fibber."

  John laughed in his tinkling way. He hadn't expected his mission to be a success.

  "Nice kid you got there. I see the family resemblance."

  "Why are we honored with your visit tonight, Pete?" Gray asked.

  "We need your expertise," Coates said, crumpling the carton. "De Sallo's killer was an ace with a rifle. And you know more about using a rifle than anyone else we can find. Maybe more than anybody else in history."

  Gray knew it to be true.

  Coates went on: "Carmine De Sallo was killed thirty hours ago and we have only one hard piece of evidence—the bullet that passed through his head and then through Boatman Garbanto's shoulder. And by the way, that puke Boatman will be all right, to my regret. We dug the slug out of the courthouse steps."

  Gray nodded.

  "The lab is looking at its contours and weight," Coates said, "and trying to figure out the number, size, and design of any cannelures. We'll hear from them shortly. And, of course, we also know the bullet came from a westerly direction. The complete absence of other evidence also means something, but we're not sure what."

  Coates leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees. "I mean, we've found utterly nothing other than that slug. My people have talked to thirty-five witnesses to the De Sallo killing. Nobody saw anything. And more puzzling, nobody heard anything. Even in Manhattan's perpetual din the sound of a gunshot should have been noticed. We thought of a silencer." Coates dipped his chin at Gray as if testing him.

  "Silencers louse up the aim," Gray answered. "A rifleman wouldn't use one if he was shooting from any distance."

  "That's what we thought, too."

  "There were television news cameras there," Gray said. "What's on their tapes?"

  "We've got the tapes from all the TV stations. They don't show anything other than a third eye opening up in the Chinaman's head. A fast-thinking WABC cameraman turned his camera around to Foley Square just after the shooting. He did a slow sweep of the buildings. We've studied that tape, looking at all the windows in the Fidelity Building, the U.S. Court for International Trade, Federal Plaza, the State Office Building, every window where a rifleman could have hidden. The tape showed quite a few open windows, and we checked them out. Nothing."

  Owen Gray reached around to an end-table drawer to pull out a map of Manhattan. He unfolded it carefully. Scotch tape held the map together.

  Coates emphasized, "We checked every likely firing position. We came up with zip."

  "You did all this checking since yesterday?" Gray examined the map, first looking at the scale. "That's a lot of potential firing sites."

  "We're damn thorough," Coates said defensively. "You've worked with us long enough to know that."

  "So you looked at every building with a view of the courthouse steps"—Gray traced a circle on the map—"all the way west to Battery City and the Hudson River?"

  Coates ran his tongue along his teeth. "You think we didn't go out from the courthouse far enough?"

  "A talented sniper could have fired from thirteen hundred yards."

  Coates corrected, "Thirteen hundred feet, you mean."

  "Yards. Almost three-quarters of a mile."

  The detective grinned. "I'll bet you've done that yourself to some poor bastard from three-quarters of a mile. Am I right? He was probably squatting there eating some rice, daydreaming of his poontang back home in Hanoi, and you tooted him from another time zone."

  Gray pursed his lips noncommittally.

  "Christ." Coates stared intently at Gray. "You must've been a real shooter."

  Gray studied the map.

  Coates said, "We've got another puzzle, something that's rarely happened before. We haven't heard anything on the street about the Chinaman's killing. Usually when a puke gets thumped, gossip about it gets back to us. That's usually the point of the whole exercise, one puke sending a message."

  Gray had often wondered at the NYPD's inexhaustible supply of synonyms for killed. The cops borrowed from sports ("The guy was dunked," or tagged out, beaned, or called out), the fashion industry (zipped, ironed, hung out to dry), the culinary arts (cored, fried, plucked, basted), pest control (zapped, flicked, swatted), and apparently nursery school (dinked, thwacked, and boinged). There were a hundred others. Gray figured the police had a Department of Slang that issued a new word every few days.

  The detective concluded, "But this time we've heard nothing. Nobody, not even some of the lums we've rolled over, has a hint about who took out De Sallo."

  Lums was short for hoodlums, and rolled over meant making a lum an informer. This was worse than the twins' fake Korean, Gray reflected.

  "Can you give us a hand tomorrow?" Coates asked. "If you can just find his firing station we'll take it from there."

  Gray carefully folded the map. "You've got enough guys to dump on the investigation, Pete."

  "Sure, but you know sniping. You'll save us days, maybe weeks."

  "Yeah, well, I promised to take the kids—"

  "And you might put me back in the good graces of my captain. After the De Sallo acquittal I could use a win."

  Gray wearily rubbed the side of his nose with a finger. "All right, I'll go to Foley Square and look around."

  Coates rose quickly. "Tomorrow, eight in the morning.
I'll meet you there."

  "Bring a spotting scope," Gray said. "A 20-power M49 if you've got one. And a tripod."

  Coates nodded and started for the door. "Thank your boy for the Yoo Hoo. Tell him I'll buy him a beer someday. A rice beer if he wants." He laughed and started down the stairs.

  Gray closed and bolted the door. Mrs. Orlando immediately appeared from the kitchen.

  "You've got calluses on your ear from the door, Mrs. Orlando," Gray chided.

  "You told me you were trying to leave all that behind you," she whispered, glancing at a bedroom door, expecting the children to appear. Faint Nintendo sounds came from John's room.

  Except for his ex-wife and his psychiatrists, Mrs. Orlando was the only person in two decades Gray had spoken to about his Vietnam tours. More a confession. She had been a steady and devoted source of strength.

  "Now you're going to bring it all back," she scolded. "All those bad memories." She opened the door to John's room.

  "Just helping out a friend for a few hours." Gray pulled his tie out and unbuttoned the top of his shirt. The skin below his Adam's apple was discolored and misshapen, resembling a dried fruit. Gray knew it was useless to try to hide anything from Mrs. Orlando, but he did not want to admit that during his conversation with Pete Coates, Gray's mouth had dried up and his chest had become tight. She would know these things anyway, always able to read him as if his mental state were written in red ink on his forehead.

  She clucked her tongue. "You know what we say in my country?"

  "Yeah." Gray smiled at her. "You say, 'Get me the hell out of this stinking place.'"

  She said over her shoulder as she went into his room, "He who lies down with dogs gets up with fleas."