SHOTS IN THE BALCONY.(shooting of New York City Councilman James Davis)

Last Wednesday at about four o'clock, Ed Kosner, who will be departing as editor of the News in March, was sitting in his office, overlooking the paper's newsroom, and examining a photograph that would become the next day's front page: it showed Councilman James Davis being carried down the steps of City Hall on a stretcher; he was shirtless, and attached to a respirator. Two hours earlier, Davis had been shot in the balcony of the City Council chamber, but little else was known, and the television in Kosner's office, tuned to ABC News, showed portions of lower Manhattan being shut down as the city's emergency plan was put into effect.

"Who is that?" Kosner asked. "That's the dead guy? The City Council guy?"

A photo editor nodded. "There was a bidding game going on," he said. "There was some video of him going into the hospital that went to about four thousand dollars, which we stepped back from. The Sun took the bid."

Kosner leaned back in his chair. "This is a tabloid game," he said. "Tomorrow, we're doing a sixteen-page wraparound edition for this story. It's going to be hard to top that picture of him being brought out of City Hall."

By Thursday morning, all the elements of the classic tabloid drama were in place: a hero named Richie, a victim who went by Rocky, a villain called Othniel Boaz Askew, a mysterious business relationship, backroom politics, a balcony assassination. It was operatic, in a nineteenth-century Tammany way, but also, in a modern sense, sordid, involving a fame-obsessed killer reminiscent of Rupert Pupkin, in "The King of Comedy." By Day 2, the story had abandoned the steps of City Hall and moved to Brooklyn and beyond, where there was sadomasochism, modelling, nude hammer attacks, and other unsavory behavior to uncover.

"That's how the story seems to be evolving now, that this guy is a very interesting, strange character," Kosner said at the end of the week, after the News ran a front-page photo of Askew posing, shirtless, arms and legs spread, in low-rise yellow leather pants. "Two days running, we had the most compelling images about this story," Kosner said, "which is, after all, what it's about."

The day after the tragedy, City Hall began, slowly, to resemble its normal, sleepy summer self. At the guard desk outside Council Speaker Gifford Miller's office, Jerry Staffieri, a Council sergeant at arms, greeted staffers and reporters with a sombre handshake. "Were you upstairs yesterday?" he'd say, almost whispering. "There's trauma people inside who might make you feel a little better."