"In fact, we hung around specifically to hear what he was going to say because we were right here on this side of the street when it all went down.""Hold on," Matty cut him off, then pointed out Oh in the crowd. "Tommy, can you get him over here?"

Daley made his way through the crowd as Matty rested his hand on the redhead's arm to keep him quiet until Bobby could come over and they could separate the couple. The kid seemed jagged with the hour but sober, his girlfriend a little jittery but clear-eyed too.

A moment later Matty was walking the kid around the corner, his girlfriend looking over her shoulder at him as Oh swept her along in the opposite direction.

"OK," Matty said when they were finally alone in front of a ramshackle shteibel, a Talmudic reading room on Allen. "What's up?"

"Like I said already, my girlfriend and I were right there when it all went down."

"When all what went down."

"The shooting." "OK."

"What that guy said to you about two black guys, Dominican guys, or whatever coming up on them out of the blue?" The kid lit a cigarette, then blew a brisk stream. "He's a fuckin' liar."

At 5:30 a. M. Eric Cash rose stiffly from the back of the squad car and turned to face the Eighth Precinct station house, an octagonal Lindsay-era, siege-mentality fortress set down on razed lung-block acreage like a spiked fist aimed at the surrounding projects-Lemlich, Riis, Wald, Cahan, and Gompers-the rest of the neighborhood squat and dumpy and far east enough to be a world of pre-land-rush lasts: the last Hebrew old-age home, the last bulletproof liquor store, the last Chinese take-out hole in the wall, and the last live-poultry market, everything and everyone cast in permanent gloom beneath the massive stone arches of the Williamsburg Bridge.

As he was being escorted up the short steps to the main entrance, the front doors abruptly flew open, two EMTs luge-racing a gurney directly at him, then at the last moment taking a sharp left to hit the handicapped ramp along the side of the building, Ike's friend Steven Boulware looking up at him with sunken eyes, his head lolling with every bump and jostle. At the same hour two Night Watch detectives crossed the chipped octagonal tile of the front foyer of 27 Eldridge, then began trudging up the saddle-backed marble stairs to the top floor to begin their canvass.

There were three apartments to a floor, each with its own paint-slathered century-old husk of a mezuzah, the front doors painted the same dull carmine as the embossed tin that lined the bottom half of the stairways from lobby to roof.

Each took a door, turning the ancient twist-knob ringers like tweaking a nose, the resulting sound tinny and minute. At first, no one responded on the top floor, but when they were halfway down the stairs to the next level, one of the tenants, a small Asian woman, by what anyone could see of her, peeked out through the crack of her door.

"Excuse me, ma'am?" Kendra Walker trotted back up the stairs, flashing her ID as she came.

It had been a warm night and she carried her sport jacket over her arm, revealing a male name tattooed beneath her fleshy shoulder in a script as jazzy as a team logo.

"Do you speak English?" she asked, talking as if volume enhanced comprehension.

"English?" the woman repeated.

Behind her, the cluttered apartment, lit by a lone overhead fluorescent halo, was not much more than a high-ceilinged single room with attached nooks and crannies.

"No English?"

"No." The woman couldn't take her eyes from Kendra's tattoo.

"That's my son's name," Kendra said, then saw the boy come out of a bathroom. "Hi." She smiled, the kid freezing in midzip. "Do you speak English?"

"Yes," he answered briskly as if a little insulted. He came to the door without prompting.

"Is this your mom?"

"My aunt," he said, then, "Kevin," reading Kendra's arm.

"What's your aunt's name?"

"An Lu.""An Lu." Writing down Lou. "Can you ask her . . ." Kendra hesitated, the boy not more than ten or so. "There was a shooting downstairs a few hours ago. A man was killed." "Killed?" He winced, baring his teeth. "Could you ask your aunt if she saw-" "How was he killed?" the kid asked. An Lu turned from speaker to speaker without blinking. "Like I said, he was shot." "Shot?"

"Yes, shot," she said slowly. "Can you ask your . . ." The kid translated to his aunt, the woman taking it in with a neutral expression, then turning to Kendra, she shook her head no. "OK, can you ask her if maybe she heard anything?" Again the boy translated, this time the woman having something to say.

"She heard people yelling at each other, but she doesn't speak English so . . ."

"These people she heard, what did they sound like, white, black, Spanish . . ."

Another quick exchange, then, "She says American."

"She wouldn't be able to pick out any words, maybe a name."

The kid waved off the question as hopeless. "Why don't you ask me?"

Kendra hesitated, no time for games, but if the kid maybe heard something . .