SEARCH FOR SUSPECTS NARROWS IN FATAL SHOOTING ATOP DELI

Several promising leads have emerged in the police search for the two
men who killed three people and wounded two on Thursday night in an
apartment above the Carnegie Delicatessen in Midtown, officials said
yesterday.

Detectives were working on the theory that the two men, one of whom
was called Sean, went to the four-room railroad flat at 854 Seventh
Avenue intending to rob Jennifer Stahl, 39, an actress and singer who
supported herself with a thriving business in high-grade marijuana,
law enforcement officials said. But moments after the men walked into
the apartment, one shot Ms. Stahl in the head, fatally wounding her.

Within minutes, four other people visiting the sixth-floor apartment
were also shot in the head and the two men were hurrying down the
stairs, past a surveillance camera on the second floor landing and
onto Seventh Avenue, which was crowded with tourists and
theatergoers. Ms. Stahl died a few hours later at New York Weill
Cornell Center. Two of her guests were pronounced dead in the
apartment and two survived.

Early yesterday, officials said that one lead focused on a man whom
narcotics investigators believed resembled one man on the videotape
taken from the surveillance camera and also uses the name Sean. The
man has previous arrests on charges of marijuana and weapons
possession, the officials said.

Detectives also showed the videotape to a caller to the police Crime
Stoppers line, who had information on a man named Sean, a man the
caller believed had been involved in the shooting, one investigator
said. The caller told investigators that the man looked like one of
the men seen fleeing from the apartment on the videotape, the
investigator said. The detectives showed the caller copies of arrest
photographs of four men named Sean, all of whom have the same last
name as the one used by the man known to the caller, and the caller
picked out one of the pictures.

"These are two extremely dangerous people who, based on what they've
done, are capable of great violence," said Assistant Chief Thomas P.
Fahey, a Police Department spokesman.

Narcotics investigators and detectives from the Manhattan South
Homicide Squad and the Midtown North Detective Squad were also
sifting yesterday through records and address books found in Ms.
Stahl's apartment, looking for possible clues to the killers'
identity, officials said.

They believed she did not expect to do business that evening because
she had dismissed her bodyguard, a man who generally protects her
during drug transactions, an investigator said. One official said her
marijuana dealing was controlled and that she did business only by
appointment, with people she knew.

On Thursday, when the two men arrived at the apartment, she was
surprised to see them, saying, "Sean, what are you doing here today?"
according to the account of one survivor.

After she was ushered into another room by the man she called Sean, a
single shot rang out, and the gunman's accomplice asked, "Why did you
have to shoot her?" He added, "Now we have to kill them all."

The other four victims, some of them bound with duct tape, were then
shot in quick succession, the police said. Two of them, Stephen King,
32, who had come to Ms. Stahl's apartment to use a small recording
studio set up in a soundproof room, and Charles Helliwell III, 36,
died instantly.

The others, Ms. Stahl's hairstylist, Anthony Veader, who had gone to
her apartment to cut her hair, and Rosemond Dane, who, officials
said, along with Mr. Helliwell, had come to New York from their home
in the Virgin Islands for a wedding, survived. Ms. Dane was in
serious but stable condition at Bellevue Hospital Center, and Mr.
Veader, 37, was in stable condition at St. Vincent Catholic Medical
Center.

Yesterday, as part of the investigation into the killings, narcotics
detectives were working to find out more about Ms. Stahl's marijuana
business, officials said. In addition to the Seventh Avenue
apartment, she had an apartment on the Upper West Side and homes in
Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and on St. John in the Virgin Islands, the
police said. She also maintained several post office boxes, in
Hawaii, Illinois and other places, officials said.

Crime scene investigators recovered two bullets from the apartment,
but they were too deformed to determine the caliber or type of the
weapons used, the police said.

The police were also examining a blue T-shirt, which bloodhounds
tracking the men from the building found in a garbage can in the West
57th Street subway station, officials said. The men had been seen
walking down the steps into the subway two blocks away.