But Harlem Hospital didn’t admit Mr. Edmonds, a fact the detective learned the next day when he tried to reach the addict at the hospital. The hospital’s reason, the detective says, was that Mr. Edmonds “wasn’t running a fever.” The hospital refuses to comment.

On the morning of Nov. 14, Detective Bratton caught up with Mr. Edmonds on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and urged him to accompany him to the district attorney’s offices. He says the addict refused, saying, “Man, I’m in bad shape, I can’t go nowhere.” But Mr. Edmonds promised he would testify at the trial the next day.

After Mr. Edmonds’s identity was disclosed in court, prosecutor Saracco and Detective Bratton discussed sending a police car to keep an eye on the witness. But it was decided that this might alert Mr. Edmonds’s enemies. “As soon as the car turned the corner (in Mr. Edmonds’s neighborhood), they’d blow his brains out,” Detective Bratton said in court papers.

Mr. Edmonds was never told that his identity had been released to the defense, according to Justice Altman. Mr. Morgenthau replies: “We tried to get him into a hospital, and we tried to get him into custody. But he wouldn’t go into custody.” Mr. Edmonds’s refusal to accept custody may have stemmed from his knowledge that he would have to forgo heroin while the police guarded him.

In the end, Mr. Sweeper was tried and acquitted of the 1982 killing. But last May a New York grand jury indicted Mr. Sweeper for another murder, to which he has pleaded innocent.

As yet no one has been charged with killing Mr. Edmonds — though Justice Altman has argued in court papers that Mr. Sweeper “was the only one who had anything to gain” from his murder.

His claims are more than empty boasts: Mr. Lehman has pushed the Navy budget just beyond $100 billion from $70.3 billion in fiscal 1980; in the process, he has ensured the vaunted 600-ship fleet initially sought by the Reagan administration and long coveted by the Navy. Currently, 162 new ships, all fully financed by Congress, are slated for delivery by the early 1990s. An expanded network of new or enlarged Navy ports is mapped for a dozen cities around the U.S. And, in the most visible display of U.S. naval power, 15 aircraft-carrier groups are being outfitted, up from 12 in the previous administration.

But the growing fleet appears to be on a collision course with Washington’s changed budget politics. Once in place, the expanded Navy will require hugely expensive care and feeding that Congress is currently unwilling to provide. “The Navy has entered into horrendous mortgages as far as shipbuilding and home-porting, and these will come due just as resources are shrinking,” says former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger. “It will inevitably hobble operations in the last years of the decade.”

Concern is spreading that the Navy will find itself badly overextended — new ships operating with skeleton crews, inadequate supplies of spare parts and less frequent overhauls. “We could very easily have a readiness crisis,” says William Lind, an aide to Democratic Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado. Adds a staffer with the Senate Armed Services Committee: “How will we afford to maintain and operate what’s already been built up? The crunch probably begins next year.”

With the arms buildup slowing, all of the services will find it harder to maintain expanded forces. But the Navy faces the biggest problems. Excepting the strategic nuclear forces, the Navy has got the most from the Reagan buildup. Moreover, the continuous peacetime operations of the growing fleet create huge maintenance costs.