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."
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."