by James Thayer
Gray pulled a coffee-table book from the couch stand. The book was entitled Manhattan On High and contained aerial photographs of the island. He sank into the chair and began leafing through the volume, studying SoHo, Little Italy, Chinatown, and other neighborhoods near Foley Square. Again his hands started to quiver.
Ten minutes later Gray said to himself in a falsely composed voice, "That guy was a passable marksman, I'll say that much for him."
CHAPTER THREE
"The Chinaman's killer must've been in one of those trees was our first thought." Pete Coates pointed to the scraggly elms in the Foley Square traffic divider. The trees were thirty feet high and were sagging and broken, struggling for survival in the city. "But nobody was up there. We couldn't have missed him."
He and Gray were standing on the courthouse steps on the precise spot where Carmine De Sallo had met his maker. Gray was staring across Centre Street into the trees. He was carrying a spotting scope aluminum case. Coates held a collapsible tripod.
"The killer wouldn't have been able to see through the elm leaves," the detective said, pointing west down Duane Street. He was wearing the same gray suit as the day before and it looked as if he had slept in it. "So we could rule out some of the distant buildings due west as his firing site."
"That was your first mistake," Gray replied. "The farther a rifleman is from foliage the easier he can see through it."
Coates asked, "What sense does that make?"
"I don't know the physics of it, but take my word for it. The killer probably could see through those sparse leaves to De Sallo even though we can't see in the other direction." Gray turned to the steps, running his eyes left and right. "There's his zero shot, that fracture in the riser of that step."
The stone riser had a pocket dug out of it. A few chips of stone and concrete lay along the tread below the gouge.
"What's a zero shot?" Coates asked.
"The rifleman sighted his weapon and scope by firing a practice round sometime before he let loose at the Chinaman." Gray bent to the cracked riser to stick his finger into the hole. "The bullet isn't here. Probably bounced out and was kicked away by a pedestrian or swept up by the grounds crew."
Gray led the detective away from the steps, between several parked cars, and across Centre Street toward the Court for International Trade. They walked west along Duane Street. A man wearing a black leather coat, open in front with no shirt underneath, handed Gray a leaflet that read, "Beautiful Girls, All Nationalities, A Unique Concept, No Hidden Charges Whatsoever." Gray wadded it up and pushed it into his pants pocket. He slowed his pace and looked skyward, up the side of the twelve-story Mardin Building. He narrowed his eyes, studying cornices several floors above the street. He saw nothing of interest and moved along the sidewalk.
"You looking for the sniper's window?" Coates asked. "These windows don't even face the courthouse."
Gray was silent, intent on a light pole.
The detective walked beside him, his hands jammed into his pockets. "You know, I would've made a pretty good sniper."
Still looking skyward, this time toward a lamp fixture attached to the front of the next building, Gray said, "Sure, and I could've played center field for the Mets."
He stopped at another light pole on which was a tattered poster reading "Awake! Cruelties Go Unchecked in Malawi." He stared above him at the light bracket for a moment, then walked on.
"Son of a bitch!" Coates exclaimed. Trying to follow Gray's gaze, the detective had stepped on a discarded soiled Pampers. He tried to scrape it off his shoe, but the diaper's adhesive strip clung to him and he kicked several times before he could dislodge it. He caught up with Gray. "I'm serious, Owen. I'm pretty damn good at the NYPD firing range. I could've been a sniper."
They approached Broadway and the sound of a conga band. Gray was still peering skyward. He said absently, "You wouldn't have had a chance to become a sniper, Pete."
"Hell yes, I would have." Coates's face lengthened. "What do you mean?"
"You wear eyeglasses. The Marines don't let you become a sniper if you need spectacles."
Coates argued, "A lot of good Marine marksmen wear glasses."
"Yes, but they aren't allowed to become snipers. The reflection off the glasses makes it too dangerous in the field." Gray looked at a power pole, then at the brackets holding a sign that said "Pal's Loans."
The detective said, "Well, assuming I didn't wear glasses, I would've made a great sniper."
"Not at all." Gray's eyes were still skyward. His gaze moved in a measured grid pattern. He had done nothing like this with his eyes for over two decades. A steady clicking—right, right, right, then back again, right, right, right, like a typewriter carriage, and shifting focus near to far, near to far. The small skill had not been forgotten. "You are left-handed. Lefties aren't allowed to become snipers because the additional movement required to operate the bolt over the top of the scope escalates the risk of detection."
At the corner of Broadway and Duane they stepped around a band of street musicians playing a maraca, a cowbell, a conga drum, and a percussion instrument made of four crushed beer cans. Their only audience was a transient with a full white beard and a red cap, eerily resembling Santa Claus, carrying a bottle of cheap port and sticking out his tongue through blackened teeth at the conga player. The hat on the ground in front of the band contained two dimes.
Gray's eyes scanned iron mounts attached to a building on the corner, perhaps once used to hold flowerpots. They crossed Broadway. A vendor had spread out several dozen wigs on a blanket on the sidewalk. The hairpieces were neon red, steel blue, and eggshell white. He was haggling with a woman in five-inch heels whose skirt had less fabric than most belts. Gray stepped around the display, veered through the stream of people walking along Broadway, and continued west along Duane Street, the detective in tow.
Gray's eyes were again turned skyward. He almost bumped into a woman in a Burberry plaid skirt who was stooped over trying to shove a newspaper under her squatting poodle. The dog preferred the cement and kept inching forward, so the woman had to scoot the newspaper after the poodle, saying again and again, "Do your duty, Pumpkin. Do your duty."
Coates tried again. "Well, if I didn't wear glasses and wasn't left-handed, I would've made a great sniper."
"Not even then, Pete." Gray stopped abruptly at the Winlox Building, a gray fifteen-story 1940s structure notable only for its refusal to leave an impression. Six stories up the side of the building a flagpole was attached to a column between windows.
Eyeing the pole, Gray said, "You need to have been a hunter or a tracker or a wilderness guide to get into the sniper program. You've only left New York City a couple of times in your entire life, and couldn't follow a bleeding coyote across fresh snow."
"Well, hell—"
"And even if you weren't a nearsighted citified leftie, you couldn't have become a sniper because they don't allow horses' butts into the program."
Coates laughed. "That last qualification would have sunk me for sure."
Gray pointed to the flagpole. "Your killer left some tracks. Take a look."
"I don't see anything."
"About halfway out the pole, there's a red streamer, cloth of some sort."
"So?"
"It's his wind telltale, like on a sailboat. A sniper usually uses a strip of red cloth two feet long."
"That could be just a piece of trash hanging there. Lots of crap hangs from flagpoles and signposts and power poles in this city."
Gray opened the spotting scope case. "I know a telltale when I see one. Set up the tripod, will you?"
"How'd he get it out there?"
"The window near the pole is probably in a lavatory or an empty office that he got into."
An elderly woman wearing a coat and a hand-knitted scarf despite the day's heat paused to say, "If you're looking for a peregrine falcon, there's a nest on the Wexler Building. Saw him snatch a pigeon right out of the air."
"Thank you, ma'am." Gray smiled. "We'll go there next."
"I'd have to be pretty hungry to eat a pigeon," she added as she shuffled on.
When the detective fumbled with the tripod, Gray tugged it out of his hands. The tripod was a government-issue Ml5. Gray pulled it open and locked the leg nuts, then withdrew the scope from its case. He attached the scope to the stand and removed the eyepiece cover and objective lens cover. The scope's lenses were coated with a hard film of magnesium fluoride to enhance light transmission. Bending over the eyepiece, he altered the focusing sleeve. Without looking up, he adjusted the azimuth with the screw clamps on the tripod shaft, and the elevating thumbscrew on the lens cradle.
He said, "If the sniper could see that telltale we might be able to see his firing site from here."
For twenty minutes Gray leaned over the scope, frequently looking up to relieve eyestrain. During that time Coates kept a running count of the passersby he chased away. "Eight palmers, six jackets, five prunes, and one mattress," meaning panhandlers, mental cases, senior citizens, and a hooker.
Finally Gray straightened himself to stare at an apartment building, two blocks in the distance. He blinked deliberately several times, then lowered himself again to the scope. "I've found it."
Coates excitedly nudged Gray away from the scope, but after a moment of squinting into the eyepiece, he said, "Goddamnit, what am I looking for?"
"A hole in that window. On the twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth floor."
"I see it."
"Your sniper was up there."
Coates raised himself. He pulled back his jacket and appeared to be reaching for his pistol. For an instant Gray thought the detective was going to crazily fire his handgun at the distant window.
Instead, Coates pulled out a cellular phone. "I'm going to call the crime-scene people." He hesitated, scratching his chin. He looked skeptically at Gray. "You positive that's his firing site?"
"It's where I would have fired from."
"We searched our asses off and missed this place," Pete Coates said as he followed the building superintendent down the hallway. The detective was moving quickly, almost running up the super's legs. "Makes us look like morons, I'll guarantee you that."
Gray was carrying the spotting scope and the compressed tripod.
As they hurried down the hall, Coates jabbed the super's shoulder with a finger. "You're telling me you thought this guy was into orgies?"
"Yes, sir." The super wore a blue blazer, washed-out jeans, and ankle-top Reeboks. His hair was tied with a rubber band in a short ponytail. He carried fifty or so keys on a ring. He ran his tongue over his lips. "What else was I to think? He had those mattresses delivered two and three at a time. Too many to sleep on, so I figure he's having a bunch of people over to get naked."
"You ever see the guy?" Coates asked.
"It was just a month sublease. I handled the paperwork. Did it through the mail. He paid up front."
Coates brushed by the superintendent and drew a .38 Smith and Wesson revolver from inside his jacket as they neared the end of the hall.
The superintendent found the right keys. "I'm paid to keep the halls clean and the furnace running. Guy wants to have a Crisco party with all his friends, it's all right by me."
Coates stepped to the other side of the door frame, under the exit sign.
Owen Gray stayed well back. "The chance of this guy being in there is nil."
"Then you stand with your belly in front of the door. Not me."
The detective held his revolver near his chin. He reached across to the door and hammered on it. After a moment he tried again.
"I don't hear anything." Coates jerked a thumb at the superintendent. "You open the door."
"I don't plan on dying in a burst of gunfire." The super tried to give the key ring to Gray.
Gray refused to take it. "That's one of my main principles, too."
The detective took the keys, gingerly inserted one into the dead bolt, and turned it. Then the doorknob key.
Coates lunged against the door. His bulk should have snapped it open. It gave only a few inches and he rebounded back into the hall. He charged again. The door moved slightly, grudgingly.
"What in hell? He got some furniture against the door?" The detective called, "Open up. Police."
He shoved again. With a soft scraping the door slowly opened.
Both hands on his revolver, Coates rushed into the apartment. The room was dim, with little daylight entering. The detective flicked on an overhead light.
"I'll be damned," Coates said. "Place looks like a drunk tank." His pistol still in front of him, he walked through a door into a bedroom.
As he stepped into the apartment, Gray almost tripped on the first mattress. The room's floor was covered with them, as were the walls. A mattress had also been secured to the inside of the door. The only furniture in the room was a cane chair and a folding table. Stacked on the table were several bulky books next to a Sony television set with a five-inch screen.
Coates returned from the bedroom, moving unsteadily over the mattresses. "Smell anything?"
Gray looked at him.
"Got to get the smell first," Coates said. "It dissipates fast once the doors are open. CSI will ask us about it. Put your hands in your pockets, will you, Owen."
"I'm not going to muck up your crime scene."
"Not on purpose. But you might pick your nose, get a dried flake of mucus under your fingernail, and later it might fall to the floor. Then CSI would find it, pick it up with tweezers, put it into a Baggie, and take it to the lab for analysis. They don't get the kick out of that you might imagine."
Gray lowered his scope and tripod to a mattress, then shoved his hands into his pockets.
The detective added, "Don't flush the toilet. Don't run water into a sink. Don't breathe on any surface. Don't pick your teeth. Don't scratch your head. Don't do anything."
Gray glanced above him. "He's even got mattresses on the ceiling." A bulb on a wire hung between two mattresses. "Twelve inch screws, right through the mattresses into the ceiling. Probably had to use plaster screw casings."
The living-room windows looked east down Duane Street. Mattresses leaned against the windows, blocking out the light. Only one window in the room had any exposed glass, an aperture a foot square, bordered on all sides by mattresses.
Coates asked, "Why did he bother with the mattresses? He could've fired, then raced out of the building."
"Yes, if he was only going to fire once. But he wanted the zero shot, which he probably did an hour or two before the reporters arrived, maybe a day or two. He didn't want a lot of sound because he was going to hang around after the first shot."
A circular hole had been cut into the glass. The opening was ten inches in diameter.
"The killer traced a pattern, maybe around a plate, with a glass cutter," Coates explained. "He used masking or duct tape to make sure the circle of glass didn't fall outside. He was here awhile and kept himself company with that television set."
Gray shook his head. "The TV means he was probably working alone and didn't have a spotter."
Coates looked at him.
"A rifleman can seldom see whether he hits his target," Gray went on. "The rifle kicks up and he can't quickly find the bull again. Sometimes dirt blows up at the target and other times there's a lot of confusion in the target area like there was on the courthouse steps."
"So what about the TV?"
"One of a spotter's jobs is to see if the target went down. The De Sallo courthouse steps interview was run live on the local TV stations, and the sniper would have known it. He fired the shot, then watched the results on his TV. Let me cross the room to the window to set up the tripod."
The detective nodded at Gray. "Watch your feet."
Gray gingerly moved to the window, sinking into the mattresses with each step. The opening in the window between mattresses was at Gray's chest level.
As he set up the tripod and attached t
he scope, Gray said, "He sat at the table and balanced the rifle on the books. He fired with the rifle's barrel well inside the room. The mattresses muffled the noise of the shot in all directions. Very little sound would have escaped out this hole in the glass. And we're on the twenty-fifth floor. No sound got down to the street."
"How do you know the barrel was inside the room?" Coates asked.
"There are powder particles on the window around the hole. Those crusty specks. You can see them without a microscope."
Coates ordered, "Don't touch the GSR." When Gray looked at him, he added, "Gunshot residue particles." He high-stepped over a mattress to the spotting scope. "So you can see De Sallo's position on the courthouse steps through the scope?"
"Take a look."
Coates lowered his head to the eyepiece. "I see mostly green. A lot of leaves."
"When the wind moves the leaves, you'll see the steps right where De Sallo stood."
"He was firing between moving leaves?" the detective asked. "You're right. I can see the steps."
Gray resumed his position behind the spotting scope. He loosened the clamping screw and rotated the telescope a fraction of an inch. After a moment he said, "Take another look. Don't jostle the scope."
The detective again replaced Gray behind the telescope. "I don't see anything interesting. A fire escape." Coates raised his head to peer out the window. He scratched his cheek. "The fire escape is on the Atonio Building three blocks toward Foley Square. What am I looking for?"
"Another piece of red cloth."
He went back to the eyepiece. "Yeah, I see it."
"De Sallo's killer tied the cloth strip to the fire escape to judge windage, same as he did on that flagpole. There are probably a few more telltales along the twelve hundred fifty yards of Duane Street between here and the courthouse. And he also had the Foley Square trees as a telltale. Let me see the printout we looked at earlier."
Coates lifted from his suit pocket a folded fax from the National Weather Service and passed it to Gray.
As he looked down a column of dot-matrix numbers, Gray said, "At noon that day the wind was blowing a fairly steady twelve miles an hour out of the south."