High Voltage Homicide
by Henry Norton
Troubleshooting is a lineman’s job, but Lee Bassler figured murder was too much. Yet live wires and dead men sometimes go together. Take the night of the ice storm — and the incident of the baffling blonde of Barton Street.
Lee Bassler brought his truck to a cautious, sliding stop by the curb. He climbed out of the cab, and stood for a moment braced against the wind, head lowered toward the icy rain that was silver-plating trees and wires and buildings. He squinted an appraising glance at the swaying cables overhead, estimating how much more ice they could bear before they came down. His face was set; he was frowning as he ducked into the lunchroom.
Bert, the sallow-faced counterman, brought coffee in a heavy white mug and put it on the counter in front of Lee. “Nice weather, huh?” he said.
“Nice weather to be inside.”
The coffee stung his mouth pleasantly. It brought a small revival of feeling to his chilled body, so that after a moment he unzipped his heavy jacket and shoved the earmuffed cap back off his forehead. He was bone-tired, and the shift was only two hours old.
Bert leaned his elbows on the counter and watched the rain freeze on the window screen. He said idly: “We don’t hardly ever get through a winter without one of these danged ice storms. ’Member last year?”
“I’ll say I remember!”
One of the worst, last year. An east wind howling down the gorge, freezing onto everything it touched. Electric lines grew from thin strands to great ropes and cables of glittering crystal, pulled crashing down by their own weight. Bassler, and all the repair men of the Midstate Power Company, had worked thirty-six hours without relief. Live wires writhed and sputtered in the city streets — whole sections of town blacked out — transformers and booster stations failed under crushing overloads.
He finished his coffee slowly, refusing to think of the moment when the cup would be empty and he would go back to the truck and open the two-way radio. He did not know what kind of trouble would be waiting for him, but he knew there would be trouble. Three hundred sixty days out of the year he ran into nothing tougher than a burned out stove or a melted fuse box. Then it came up ice, and things went to hell in a hand-basket.
The dispatcher on the radio answered his call with the brisk unconcern of a man who has an indoor job on a bad night.
“Got a soft one for you,” he said. “Juice off at 1010 Barton Street. Customer’s name is Phillips. I haven’t got any other complaints from the neighborhood, so it’s probably a one-house failure. Lead wire down, maybe, or fuse burned out.”
“Quit quarterbacking!” Lee said. “I’ll find out what it is when I get there.”
It was ten blocks to the trouble, and it took him almost ten minutes to make it. The streets were deepening sheets of ice now, and the chains on the emergency truck clattered and whirred on the frozen surface. He put the emergency light to flashing and inched past the two or three cars that appealed for help as he went by. Normally, he’d have time to stop, but tonight he had enough to do on his own job, without taking on more.
He found 1010 Barton, and it looked like more than a one-house job. All the adjoining houses were dark, and he could see no sign of trouble on the lead-in wire. Using a hand flash to pick his way up the icy steps, he punched the doorbell. The door opened at once.
“Power company,” Lee said.
“It’s about time,” said Mr. Phillips. “You’ve been darn near—” He looked at his watch in the light of Lee’s flash. “Well, it seemed long enough!”
“What seems to be wrong?”
“Juice is off, that’s what’s wrong!” Mr. Phillips was a chubby little man, silhouetted in the feeble yellow light of an old-fashioned kerosene lamp. His tone was one of great indignation. “Lights, radio, stove — hey, how come the doorbell rang?”
“Dry cell batteries,” said Lee Bassler, and pushed inside. “Let’s have a look, mister. I’ve got a lot of calls waiting on this one.”
The trouble was not inside, and it wasn’t a one-house job. He found that after he’d donned climbing irons and kicked his way up the ice-sheathed pole across the street to find a burned-out transformer. Some vast drain of power had burned it out, he thought, and the trouble might still exist, but under these conditions, it’d be better to have a new transformer in first. He radioed for a heavier truck, and in a half hour’s time the new transformer was in place and ready. He cut in power, and in a dozen houses across the street light sprang into being.
Bassler was stepping off the pole, and the large truck had reloaded and gone, when the woman ran out of the house across the street. She was slim, apparently young, and she wore only a low-cut evening dress. She ran out into the front yard and stood a moment looking back at the house, while wind and rain tore at her. Lee Bassler started across the street toward her.
It wasn’t the Phillips house, he saw, but the one next door. No lights had come on at the 1010 address, but here where the woman had come running out there was a blaze of light from every window — even the porch light was on, touching the shrubs and trees of the yard with glittering crystal fire.
She saw him as she crossed the street. She turned then and ran back toward the house. Lee followed, impelled now by the oddity of her behavior. He caught up with her on the porch of the house, and she whirled and faced him defiantly.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
“Nothing!”
She was already soaked to the skin, shivering in the icy wind. Under different circumstances she might have been beautiful. Even now, with her hair plastered across her face and her skin glistening and reddened by the lash of the storm, she was not ugly, and her filmy dress clung faithfully to an extraordinarily handsome body.
“Then if nothing’s wrong you’d better get back in the house,” Bassler said. “You aren’t dressed for weather.”
He turned away, regretting the vague impulse that had taken him across the street to her. He had enough to do without trying to help crazy dames. He had taken only a step away when she said: “Please, wait!”
He stopped and looked back at her.
She was shivering, and there was something very close to panic in the set of her mouth and the shine of her eyes. Her lips fumbled unsuccessfully for words.
“Look!” he said. “Get inside! You’ll kill yourself standing around half-dressed!”
He took her arm, and she shook him free in a sudden movement, opened the door and went in. The door came crashing shut behind her. Lee stared at it a moment, and then with a shake of his head he went back to the truck, and the job.
The job grew into a shattering montage of ice and wind and fallen wires, and it was well after midnight before he again had time to stop by Bert’s and gulp down a cup of the man’s bitter, scalding coffee. Then, while he inhaled the steamy, grease-scented warmth of the lunchroom, his mind went back to the baffling blonde of Barton street.
Abruptly he finished the coffee and went out to the truck. He turned the motor over, roaring, and went away from the curb so fast that his wheels skidded crazily and sent him plunging out into the street. For Lee had just remembered something.
It’s hard to burn out a transformer — normally it’s one of the fuse plugs in the house that lets go. But once in a while, when a sudden, tremendous, searing overload hits the wire, the transformer burns out too. And one of the few times Lee could remember such a load coming onto the line was the time an electric heater had fallen into a bathtub and electrocuted a woman.