White Star

by James Thayer

  "From your sniping days?"

  The telephone rang in Sam Owl's office, a cubbyhole near the locker room. Curled photographs of Owl and his fighters covered the office's walls. Owl walked across a mat toward the phone.

  "I was up and down, a little wild maybe," Gray replied. "She thought it was an echo from the sniping. But she wasn't a psychiatrist, I told her."

  "You've been divorced ten years, but it doesn't sound like you've worked her out of your system."

  "Pete, if I want counseling I'll go back to the Veterans Hospital."

  "I quit," Coates said, lowering his gloves. He slipped through the ropes. "Looks like I win again. Do you still love her?"

  Gray smiled wanly, stepping through the ropes. "They don't teach questions like that at the NYPD detective school."

  "One friend asking another."

  "I did when she left, but that didn't stop her from leaving. Couple years ago Cathryn married a pediatrician and lives in the East Eighties. Has a maid. Probably belongs to a couple nice clubs. Has a weekend house in the Hamptons."

  "Ever hear from her?"

  "Not in years."

  Gray pulled off his gloves and grabbed a towel from a table. He wiped his face. Coates pushed his glasses onto his face. They sat on a bench watching Joe Leonard shadowbox.

  Gray draped the towel over his shoulder, then added, "I haven't even bumped into her on the street. But I've worked it out now. I've got a family. Three kids and Mrs. Orlando."

  Coates laughed. "I'll bet those kids scare off your girlfriends."

  "Yeah, something like that."

  "You got a girlfriend?" Coates asked bluntly. He took out his mouthguard.

  Gray raised an eyebrow. "You're not going to try to set me up with your sister, are you? I've met her and she looks too much like Casey Stengel for my tastes."

  Coates went on. "I never heard you talk about anybody, no woman anxiously waiting for you while we were putting in those late nights on the Chinaman's case."

  "I'll go out and find somebody today if that'll make you happy."

  "Just trying to fill in my file on you." Coates stared at Gray a moment before changing the subject. "The lab report. The color on the red cartridge was indeed fingernail polish, manufactured by Maybelline. No help there."

  Gray wiped his face again.

  "And no fingerprints on the television or in the john or anywhere else." Coates pulled off his training shoes and rubbed his feet. "But the CSI guys found another shell in the sniper's apartment, the killer cartridge. It was against a seam of the mattress nearest the north wall, and was identical to the red shell but without the paint. Why would someone as talented as our sniper do something as stupid as leaving his spent cartridge behind?"

  "Don't know."

  "You leave yours, Owen?"

  "When I didn't have time to look for them. Otherwise I always cleaned up."

  "The spent cartridge was informative," Coates said. "In its computers the lab has the characteristic markings from over three thousand makes and models of firearms, markings from the mechanical action of loading, chambering, and firing the round and from extracting and ejecting the casing."

  "And?"

  "The lab looked at the number and direction of twist and the measurements of land and groove markings."

  "Out with it," Gray demanded. "What kind of weapon?"

  "An M1891/30 Mosin-Nagant."

  "A Soviet sniper rifle." Gray moved his mouth as if tasting the information. "Why would the sniper use an inferior rifle when he could buy better equipment in any American gun shop?"

  "Maybe he's a Russian and he likes his old rifle."

  "Why would a Russian kill an American gangster?" Gray asked.

  "Maybe with Afghanistan and the Cold War over, he's freelancing. I've got no better guess, but I've been charged with finding out."

  "Keep me posted," Gray said. "And during your investigation don't get your sniper pissed off at you. It wouldn't be too healthy."

  Sam Owl called from his office, "Bennie can't make it today. Some problem with his mother getting a chicken bone stuck in her throat, or so he says, the lazy bum."

  Joe Leonard climbed into the ring and pointed a glove at Gray and Coates. "One of you pasty guys want to spar?"

  Gray answered, "You must think Dalton and Ruth Gray raised a complete idiot, Joe."

  "I'll take it easy. Pull my punches."

  "No way," Coates said.

  Leonard leaned against the ropes. "Owen, someday you'll be able to tell your boy—what's his name? John?—that you were in the ring with the future middleweight champ."

  Gray stared balefully at the fighter.

  "You'll be able to tell him you actually got in a few pops at the legendary fighter. And you need a boxing lesson, I'll swear to that."

  Gray jumped up from the seat and shoved his hands back into the gloves.

  "That nice tie you been wearing lately, Owen?" the detective asked. "The blue with the red birds in it? Will you leave that to me?"

  Leonard laughed evilly. The bridge of his nose had a lump the size of a marble. Scar tissue had begun closing his left ear. He shaved his head every morning. He looked as hard as a fireplug. He widely gestured Gray into the ring like he was gathering sheaves.

  Gray slipped through the ropes, raised his hands, and squared himself to the middleweight.

  Leonard lowered himself to a stance and danced toward Gray, lecturing importantly, "Now the first lesson to learn about boxing is not to get hit."

  His left hand exploded forward, landing like a hammer on Gray's nose. Gray staggered, then collapsed to a sitting position, his legs splayed out. He held a glove over his nose, which began squirting blood.

  "Goddamnit, Joe, that hurt." Gray's voice wavered. "That really hurt."

  "Hey, man don't want to be hit, he takes up bobsledding."

  Gray struggled to his feet. Blood dribbled around his mouth and dropped from his chin.

  "And that was just my pretend punch," the middleweight said. "That's the punch I give my kid brother to thank him for bringing me a Pepsi from the refrigerator."

  Gray gamely held up his hands again.

  Coates yelled from the bench, "Owen, you're a slower learner than I thought."

  Leonard came on, speaking from behind his gloves. "Now the second lesson is, Don't ever forget the first lesson, the one about not getting hit."

  Leonard feinted with his left and threw his right, a rocket that landed on Gray's nose and blew him off his feet to bounce against the ropes. Again he slid to a sitting position. He shook his head and leaned almost to the mat.

  Coates stepped to the ring. "You okay, Owen?"

  Gray managed to focus his eyes. He blinked and nodded.

  "Your face has lost that little bit of color it had," Leonard said as he helped Gray up. He passed him through the ropes to Coates.

  Gray spit out his mouthpiece and wiped away blood with a towel Sam Owl handed him. Owl clucked with disapproval at the spectacle.

  "Goddamnit." A moment passed before Gray could pluck another thought from the cotton in his head. "I'm going to sue your ass for something, Joe, as soon as I figure out what."

  Leonard laughed again and resumed his shadowboxing. "Pete's going to arrest me. You're going to sue me. I'm in a world of trouble now."

  Weaving slightly, Gray followed the detective toward the shower.

  Coates said over his shoulder, "You looked goofy in that ring, to put it charitably."

  Gray managed, "Not as goofy as you're going to look, you don't find the Chinaman's killer."

  Forty minutes later Gray met defense attorney Phil Hampton at the federal courthouse's alley door, where prisoners brought from Manhattan jails entered the building for court dates.

  Hampton's first words were "Frank Luca didn't waste any time, did he?"

  Gray gave him a pained expression, not far from how he felt. His nose still smarted.

  "One day you've got the hottest case in America and the next
day you're prosecuting one of my grubby clients." Hampton laughed. "The mighty have done some serious falling."

  "Speculating on my career is something I can handle without your help, Phil."

  "What happened to your nose? Looks like your girlfriend crossed her legs."

  "Let's do some business, Phil."

  "My guy is just so much chaff for your office, Owen. You don't need to stick him, do you?"

  Phil Hampton rarely practiced before the federal bar. Most of his clients were B&Es, car thieves, snatch-and-grabs, and muggers, all brought up on state charges. Hampton's brother owned Bob's Bonds near the Tombs. On Bob's window: "Let Bob Be Your Ace in the Hole." The brothers fed each other clients.

  Hampton resembled a pile of dirty laundry. His coat was askew on his shoulders. His tie was pulled to one side and had a splat of mustard near the knot. His shoes had been scuffed to the leather. His mustache was a haphazard collection of stray hairs. Eager to cut someone off, he worked his mouth even when not speaking.

  "I haven't studied the record yet, Phil." Gray had not even looked at the file. He opened it. "Donald Bledsoe. A counterfeiter, it seems."

  "Nothing of the sort." Hampton was carrying a battered briefcase. "He's just an alleged passer. Hell, the cops found four bad bills on my guy. Just four bad hundreds."

  "We've got the change of plea in five minutes. I need a proffer."

  At a change-of-plea hearing the accused usually switched his plea from not guilty to guilty under the terms of a deal with the prosecutor.

  "What can I tell you, Owen? Mike Olander is my client's brother-in-law. Bledsoe can't really turn on him."

  Olander was a co-defendant. He owned the suspect copy machine.

  Gray flipped to the second page—the last page—of the file. "Detective Ames says Bledsoe is going to clam up. I'm not going to do a plea unless I get a proffer."

  A Dodge van turned into the alley and approached slowly. A marshal was visible through the windshield and behind him a cage. Buildings on both sides of the alley blocked the daylight.

  Hampton said, "My client is afraid of a snitch-jacket."

  "I hear that every day. I want the proffer before we get to the change of plea. Tell me all he knows about Olander or I'm going to recommend the charts."

  The van stopped in front of Gray. A deputy U.S. marshal climbed down from the passenger side. He wore a ring made of an unmilled nugget of gold, a brown suit with a bulge under his arm, and bell-bottom pants. He was chewing a toothpick. His nose was bent twenty degrees out of alignment, making him look as if he were about to walk off in another direction. He nodded to Gray and stepped toward the rear of the van.

  "Can you get him protective custody?" Hampton asked.

  "For a lousy paper passer? I'll consider asking the court for something below the sentencing guidelines but only after I've heard what he has to say."

  "Jesus, can't you give me anything up front?"

  "Phil, you're whining. Give me the proffer first."

  The deputy marshal opened the van's rear door and pulled Donald Bledsoe from the cage, then righted him and pushed him toward the alley door.

  Bledsoe had spent fifteen of his forty years on this earth in assorted jails and prisons. He stole a car low on fuel. He burgled the house of a man who kept a pistol collection in his bedroom. He robbed a bank, then attempted his escape by running through the bank's closed glass door, knocking himself senseless. And now, hundred-dollar bills that felt like fax paper. He had not once in his entire life as a criminal gotten anything right.

  Bledsoe ducked his head as if a flock of photographers had descended on him. Then he braved a look. He appeared only slightly relieved to see his attorney. His hands were cuffed and secured to a chain belt around his waist. Bledsoe had stopped shaving at his arrest and now wore a dark shadow across his face. His hair was tossed and oily.

  "What'm I going to do, Phil?" The prisoner's voice was fogged with self-pity.

  Hampton put a hand on his client's shoulder. "We don't know yet."

  Bledsoe glanced at Owen Gray, then back at his lawyer. "What'd this guy say, Phil? You cut a deal?"

  Hampton stepped toward the door, moving his client along with him. The marshal had one of Bledsoe's elbows.

  Two steps from the door, the marshal said, "Goddamn rain. Goddamn New York weather."

  There was not a cloud in the sky. Holding Donald Bledsoe by the arm, the deputy was abruptly pulled off balance as the paper passer collapsed to the concrete. The deputy had been dappled with Bledsoe's blood and brains, not rainwater. The side of Bledsoe's head was a mash of gray and red pulp.

  Owen Gray ducked behind the van, pulling the defense attorney after him. The marshal lunged for the protection of the courthouse door, drawing his pistol.

  "What in hell happened?" the deputy yelled around his toothpick. He was breathing stertorously as if someone had yanked his tie tight. "You see anybody?"

  A still moment passed. The distant babel of traffic reached them.

  "Son of a bitch," the deputy cried, brushing the pith of Bledsoe's head from his jacket. "Look at my new suit."

  Holding the van's door handle, Gray rose unsteadily. He levered his head left and right. The streets on both ends of the alley were artificially bright in contrast to the shaded alley. Delivery trucks and taxis passed at the ends of the alley. The chirp of an auto alarm sounded from somewhere. He stepped into the alley and pushed Bledsoe's shoulder with his foot to roll him over. A hole had been punched into an ear.

  The deputy made a show of calmly squaring his coat. "He looks a little late for CPR, don't you think, Counselor?"

  Gray was silent, so the deputy added, "Who'd want to gun down a zero like Donald Bledsoe?" The marshal spat out his toothpick and pulled another from his coat pocket. "Stupid errand boy was all he was."

  Phil Hampton had crawled under the front axle and showed no inclination to reappear. Bledsoe's blood snaked across the cement toward the defense attorney. Hampton's briefcase was lying in a pile of unidentifiable brown sludge at the edge of the alley.

  The deputy said, "Man, the paperwork on this is going to kill me."

  Gray rubbed his temple, staring down the alley. There would be a window in a building—a sniper's hide—in the deep distance amid many other buildings and among the countless windows, but the day was too brilliant and the window too far to guess where. Gray's hand on his head was trembling and he lowered it quickly. He had to work to swallow.

  He whispered to that distant window, to whoever might be peering back through a scope, "Tell me who you are."

  CHAPTER FIVE

  From any distance the shooter resembled a clump of dried weeds, nothing but a mound of dusty vegetation wilting in the Virginia heat, attended only by two dragonflies who flashed iridescence as they darted among the leaves. But from the weeds protruded a rifle barrel, its unyielding horizontal plane at odds with the wafting thistle and burr and crabgrass from which the barrel seemed to have grown. A gust of wind tossed the weeds, rolling them flat in a wave. Then the breeze stilled.

  The rifle barked, a flat crack that dissipated quickly across the terrain. A handkerchief-sized piece of canvas on the ground below the muzzle prevented a dust signature. A smoking brass casing was ejected.

  "It's a flyer." The voice came from another cluster of weeds, this one nudged up against a tripod-mounted spotting scope.

  "Missed entirely?" the shooter asked. "Goddamnit. You swagging me?" Swag was short for a scientific wild-ass guess.

  "This time I picked up the course of the bullet in my scope. No chance you hit target."

  "My problem is I can't get my pulse rhythm," the shooter complained.

  "Yeah, right." The spotter laughed. "Your problem is that your finger twitches like an old man's. You got to squeeze the trigger like you would a woman's nipple."

  "As if you know anything about a woman's nipple, Bobby."

  The spotter leered. "Ask your sister what I know about nipples."

&nb
sp; "No talking about nipples on the firing line, goddamnit," bayed Gunnery Sergeant Arlen Able from his position behind the sniper team. "How many times I got to tell you? You get a hard pecker, you won't be able to feel your pulse in your arms and neck, and you'll be shooting on the beat rather than between it."

  Down-range a circular disc on a pole waved for five seconds, indicating the bullet had missed the target. The pole was held by a Marine in the concrete butt below ground level.

  The marksman and his spotter were dressed in Ghilli suits, an invention of ancient Scottish gamekeepers that had been adopted by Britain's Royal Marines during World War One. Long strips of tan, olive, and brown burlap were attached to the team's uniforms and field hats. The Ghillis broke up the Marines' outlines. With their shifting, variegated suits and faces painted olive and brown, the shooter and spotter resembled earthen berms.

  Sergeant Able called from behind the line, "I can see your problem from here, Paley." He spoke with an East Texas piney woods accent.

  The sergeant walked to the two weed clumps, then bent to a knee. He tapped the shooter's hand and said, "Part of your trigger finger is touching the side of the stock as you pull back, causing side pressure, rather than getting a straight front-to-rear movement. You're going to bust a flyer every time."

  "Okay, Gunnery Sergeant."

  "You're at a thousand yards. The smallest finger juke is going to be exaggerated by the distance."

  "Okay, Gunnery Sergeant."

  Calling Arlen Able just "Sergeant" would have sufficed, but the students always tacked on "Gunnery" as a mark of respect for their instructor, a compliment each time they addressed him. They knew Abie's record. Sergeant Abie's face was tanned dirt brown and was lined like a cracked window. His eyes were canted as if always amused. He was a small man and graveyard thin, with abrupt movements that broadcast an enormous energy, a terrier of a man. He was wearing field khaki with a whistle around his neck and a two-way radio on his belt.

  "Trigger control is the hardest shooting skill to master, Paley. You got a ways to go and I want you to keep at it."

  The shooter nodded, wiggling the camouflage tassels hanging from his field cap. In his scope a thousand yards down-range was a twenty-inch ring target made watery by heat waves. On three poles—at the firing line, halfway down the range, and near the target butt—were red streamers, always displayed during live-fire daylight exercises.