CHICAGO — For hours, the body lay where it had landed, just steps from the wooden sign someone had put up — a painted gun with a red slash through it.

Inside a nearby house, Lee Baez had heard the gunshots in the darkness and got up to move his car so his fiancée would not have to walk past the body as she left for work before dawn.

Down the block, Sandra Harris rose later to care for her ailing 85-year-old mother and saw the body, by then draped with a sheet.

After the authorities finally carried away Lee Martin, the 43-year-old man who was shot in his head and back and died here on Walnut Street in the middle of an August night, another neighbor emerged to scrub the red streaks off the sidewalk.