For what purpose? Carella wondered.
Toward what end?
* * * *
The seventh day of Christmas was New Year’s Eve, a Saturday.
Naturally seven wanted flyers arrived in that morning’s mail.
And naturally there was a power failure at three-thirty that afternoon, fifteen minutes before the eight-to-four was scheduled to be relieved. It would not have been New Year’s Eve unless something happened to prevent the out-going shift from leaving when it was supposed to. The day shift detectives, eager to get the hell out of the squadroom to start the festivities, knew only that somehow the Greater Isola Power & Light Company (formerly the Metropolitan Light & Power Company) had screwed up yet another time, and they would not be able to complete their paperwork before four o’clock. What they did not know was that Greater Isola Power & Light—known to its millions of dissatisfied customers as the Big (for Greater) Ipple (for I. P. L.)—was totally innocent of any malfeasance this time around.
Gopher Nelson had caused the power failure.
The power failure lasted exactly one minute.
Gopher caused it by throwing a switch pinpointed on the ‘Composite Feeder Plate Map’ the Deaf Man had provided. The map was one of four the Deaf Man had given Gopher, explaining that he’d acquired them—along with several others—years ago, when he was planning to place a bomb under the mayor’s bed. Gopher wondered why the Deaf Man planned such peculiar things, but he didn’t ask; the money was good.
The first map was stamped ‘Property of Metropolitan Light & Power Company’ and was titled ‘60-Cycle Network Area Designations and Boundaries Upper Isola.’ It showed the locations of all the area substations in that section of the city. The area in which the 87th Precinct station house was located was designated as ‘Grover North.’ Into this substation ran high-voltage supply cables, also called feeders, from switching stations, elsewhere on the transmission system.
The second map, similarly stamped, was titled ‘System Ties,’ and it was a detailed enlargement of the feeder system supplying any given substation. The substation on the first map had been labeled ‘No. 4 Fuller.’ By locating this on the more detailed map, Gopher and the Deaf Man were able to identify the number designation for the feeder: 85RL9.
Which brought them to the third map, titled simply ‘85RL9’ and subtitled ‘Location Grover North Substation.’ This was a rather long, narrow diagram of the route the feeders, or supply cables, traveled below the city’s streets, with numbers indicating the manholes that provided access to the cables themselves. The cable-carrying manhole closest to the 87th Precinct station house was three blocks way on Grover Avenue and Fuller Street. On the ‘Composite Feeder Plate Map’ it was numbered ‘R2147-120’ESC-CENT.’
The manhole was a hundred and twenty feet east of the southern curb of Fuller in the center of the street—hence the designation ‘120’ESC-CENT’—just opposite the bronze statue of John G. Fuller, the noted balloonist. The cables were five feet below the surface of the street, protected by a three-hundred-pound manhole cover. Gopher set up a Big Ipple manhole stand, raised the manhole cover with a crowbar, went down into the manhole, found the cable switch, opened it, and then closed it a minute later. The lights in the 87th Precinct station house—and indeed in all the surrounding residential houses—were out for only that amount of time. But that was all the time Gopher needed for his purposes.
It was four-fifteen when he arrived at the muster desk, wearing a G. I. P. & L tag pinned to his coveralls. He presented his phony credentials to the desk sergeant and told him he was here to see about the power failure. The sergeant looked across the desk at this little guy with the floppy brown mustache and the blue watch cap and told him there hadn’t been any real power failure, lights just went out for a minute or so, that was all. Gopher said, ‘A minute or so is a power failure to us.’
‘So what do you want to do?’ the sergeant asked. He was thinking that a sergeant from the Eight-Four was having a big bash at his house tonight, and he was hoping it’d still be going strong when he got there. He’d be relieved at a quarter to twelve. Figure fifteen minutes to change in the locker room, another half hour to get crosstown...
‘I gotta put a voltage recorder on the line,’ Gopher said.
‘What’s the big fuss?’ the sergeant said. ‘We got lights, don’t we?’
‘For now? Gopher said. ‘You want them to go out again when you got some big ax murderer in here?’
The desk sergeant didn’t even want them to go out when they had some little numbers runner in here. The desk sergeant was thinking about pulling on a funny hat and blowing a horn.
“That your voltage recorder there?’ he asked, peering over the top of the desk to the wooden box at Gopher’s feet. Gopher hoisted the box onto the desk. It was about the size of a small suitcase. It looked like a larger version of the sort of box one might use to carry roller skates, with metal edges and a handle and clasps to open the lid. But on the lace of the box there was a rectangular dial with a yellow band, a red band, and a green band. The yellow band was marked at the end farthest left with a stamped metal tag reading ‘60 volts.’ The green band was marked at its center point with a similar tag reading ‘120 volts.’ The red band was marked at the end farthest right with a tag reading ‘200 volts.’ A needle was behind the glass covering the dial. Three knobs were under the dial.
‘So what’s that for?’ the sergeant asked.
‘It’s got a tape disc and graph paper inside it,’ Gopher said. ‘It monitors the incoming voltage, lets us know we’re getting any surges or fluctuations in the...’
‘I’m sorry I asked,’ the sergeant said. ‘Go do your thing.’
Gopher started up the iron-runged steps to the squadroom.
There was no graph paper or tape disc inside the wooden box.
The dial was real enough—Gopher had taken it from a genuine voltage recorder—but it was connected to nothing, and the knobs beneath it, used on a genuine recorder to calibrate the meter, had absolutely no function.
Inside the box there was a timer with a seven-day dial. The timer was normally used for programming heating, air-conditioning, and ventilating equipment, as well as lights, pumps, motors, and other single-phase to three-phase loads. Seven sets of trippers, supplied with the timer, enabled its user to set a different on/off program for each day of the week. The timer looked like this: