"The small, limestone building at the back?"
Calder nodded. "From there, electricity feeds out, I think by underground cables, to all the other buildings."
"Transformers in that building? Stepping down the power?"
"I guess."
Though Calder was of little help describing the campus power grid, what he was saying about a concentration of power made sense. Having all the school's current originating from one spot would let campus authorities monitor the school's electrical consumption.
"Well ... that's it, then," Calder said, smiling in the room's faint -- but earthly -- light. "You've solved another problem. No ghost."
"Might have been more interesting to have found one."
"I know. Still, it's been fun clearing up the mystery."
Which was precisely what they hadn't done -- though Z didn't want to make a point of it. Never expecting a ghost in the first place, Z was determined to find the source of the light.
Leaving the room, Z pulling the tower door shut with a click, they passed through the hall and down the stairs, Calder clattering enthusiastically -- with as little care as Tommy Victor used, Z speculated gloomily, when descending what would be his final flight.
Though Z still wanted to find a connection between the Victor murder and the Wednesday "ghost light," it was clear that the good doctor's only thought was to get out of Bateman as soon as possible. A brilliant man in some ways, in others ......
Across the chamber, they buttoned up in the "air lock." Shook hands outside on the porch, glove-to-glove, Z telling a white lie about parking in the lot at the back of the campus.
With that, Calder sauntered off to trot down the right stairs, his cheerful whistle thinning into the whine of the hillside wind.
"Goodbye, Dr. Calder," Big Bob Zapolska whispered to himself. "Hello to some extracurricular investigation of my own!"
* * * * *
Chapter 19
After Big Bob Zapolska locked up Bateman Hall's front door, it didn't take long for him to reach the dilapidated power station at the back of Bateman Hill. No light inside. Nothing to be seen through the dirt-scummed window in the building's decaying door.
For some reason, he hesitated. ... Because he was ... afraid ... of the building?
But ... why?
Since much of his success as a detective came from instinct, he thought it wise to back away; to began circling the power station, finding it nothing but what it seemed: a one-story affair.
The question was, why did Z feel so ... spooky ... about a squatty, rectangular building built of limestone blocks ...?
Then, he knew! The drab little structure reminded of him of the last house he'd lived in with his Mother. The house where his Mother ... died.
His Mother's death had come at the end of a long decline for them both, a downward spiral starting with his father's accident when Bob was in sixth grade, his salesman Father killed instantly in a single-car crash, a freak happenstance the insurance company claimed was deliberate. Since the policy was brand new, using the "suicide escape clause" as an excuse, the company refused to pay on his father's life insurance.
After that, things had been difficult for Bob and his Mother.
First, his Mom had to sell their house to pay off some unforeseen debts his Father had run up.
Then, there were the moves. In the same neighborhood, but to increasingly undesirable apartments, finally, to end up in what could only be described as a one-room, stone shack.
He'd wanted to drop out of high school his junior year to get a job, but his Mother refused to let him. "A little learning is a dangerous thing," she always said.
By the time his Mother got sick in the spring of his senior year, she'd been reduced to taking in wash and doing ironing to get by. After football was over in the fall, he'd planned on getting an afternoon job to help out -- except that his injury was slow to heal.
His Mother's dream for him had always been college, his Mother dying not long after his knee injury ruined all hope of an athletic scholarship. Brain cancer was the diagnosis. Death from bitter disappointment was Z's belief.
Next to his Mother dying there, what Z hated most about that stone house was that it was cheek-to-jowl with a furniture factory, chairs and tables stripped of varnish by being dipped in vats of volatile chemicals. So suffocating was the stench from the plant's solvent that, in time, he'd lost his sense of smell.
Graduation and the first of the lifting jobs got him away from the refinishing plant, his ability to smell returning over time, the restoration of his sense of smell making him unusually appreciative of odors. (Dr. Calder would probably say that being able to smell was symbolic of Z's escape from total poverty.) One thing for certain. After losing it, he would never take smell for granted! (When Z read that a lady in New York's Central Park had lost her ability to smell after being mugged, no one sympathized with her plight more than he!)
Z's teenage review telling him his fear of the power station was irrational, it took only another minute for him to extract the proper picks from his case and open the formidable-looking but simple padlock that "secured" the door's hasp.
Ducking inside, closing the rotted door behind him, he pocketed his picks and gloves before bringing out the penlight, Z reminding himself to take care that the school's guard -- wherever he might be -- didn't see a light shining from this building.
Avoiding all possibility of discovery, Z covered the business end of the light with his hand before switching it on.
Releasing his grip on the bulb so that only a crack of light seeped through his fingers, he gave the walls of the place a dark once-over.
Except for the small window at the top of the door behind him, there seemed to be no other openings through which someone might see his light.
In the days before Old Man Bateman build his college on this hill, had this stone building been some kind of animal shelter? A sheep barn? A place for goats?
Feeling safe to do so, he uncovered the penlight to give the room another quick appraisal.
Whatever the former use of this one-room structure, the sole purpose now was electrical; three old-time humming transformers as tall as a short man but thicker, lined the right wall of the narrow room. On the left wall, a maze of quarter-inch cloth-wrapped cables were tied into several rusted fuse boxes. Large wooden "spools" wrapped with cable had been turned on end and shoved under the boxes.
Taking up most of the space in the room's center was a cobbled-together workbench, assorted electrician's tools scattered on the table's splintered top: needle-nosed pliers, old rolls of black electrical tape, wire cutter, wood-and-plastic-handled screwdrivers -- Phillips and regular. Mixed in with the jumble of tools was a partially used coil of rosin-core solder and an old-fashioned soldering iron.
At the far end of the room near the building's ten-foot ceiling, was an unpainted wooden shelf, on the shelf, what looked like a pile of copper repair wire.
Nothing here to help him pinpoint the origin of the ghost light. ... Not that he couldn't do something.
More minutes of looking around showed Z little more than big wires and little wires -- trailing here and there. Down the walls. Across the ceiling.
What finally caught his interest, were inch-in-diameter, parallel cables that entered the building through the end wall just under the shelf -- clearly the outside power source.
Following these foot-apart heavy-load cables with the thin penlight beam, Z traced them across the ceiling to blue ceramic insulators high on the right wall, the power wires bending down the wall at that point to enter the top of the center transformer.
Other smaller wires then sprouted from that outdated dull-black transformer box to the tops of flanking step-down units.
The thinner wires that led away from these humming metal boxes were pegged up the wall through round, white ceramic insulators, to march across the width of the ceiling and down the opposite wall to a central fuse box.
The rest of the room's
wiring was hooked up in the same fashion to the middle electrical box.
How the power left the building to travel through Calder's underground cables was a mystery.
Z studied the incoming power lines more closely, moving around and along the table to stand under the cables where they entered near the ceiling at room end.
Old, was his first impression, the cables' insulation an early twenty's black cotton wrap.
Looking above the entering leads, he saw he'd been right, that the high shelf over the power lines held copper wire. Coils of it. Also, measured lengths of wire, stacked up on the shelf to make a dull-yellow pyramid.
Looking down, he found that one end of the worktable was positioned near enough to the end of the wall to give him a better look at the feed lines' entry point.
Sweeping back tools and bits of wire to make a place for him, Bob Zapolska sat back on the cold table. Swung his legs up. Rolled over to push with his hands.
Getting his good leg under him, he stood up carefully; found he only had to bend his head a little to keep from brushing the spider-webbed ceiling.
This was the tricky part. Stepping to the end of the table, keeping his head to one side of the lines, he played the flashlight on the cables, found that their cloth insulation was as powdery as the wrapping on Egyptian mummies.
Getting an idea, he squatted again.
Shifting the penlight to his left hand, flashing it along the tabletop, he found what he wanted within easy reach: a large, regular-tip screwdriver, the kind with the yellow plastic handle.
Putting the light down beside the screwdriver, pulling his gloves out of his pockets, he stretched them on -- you couldn't be too careful around electricity.
Picking up the light and the screwdriver, making sure he was holding the screwdriver by the handle so he didn't run a risk of touching its metal shank, standing painfully, he directed his light to the top of the nearest cable, just past its entrance point. Reaching over warily, he touched the tip of the screwdriver to the top of the nearest wire.
No spark.
Shouldn't be, he thought, unless he touched both cables at the same time. Even then, there would be no danger unless both cables were stripped of the last remaining shreds of cloth protection. (Trying to reassure himself like that set his teeth on edge; he'd never felt safe around electricity.)
Forcing himself, he lifted the screwdriver; began scraping the tip of it back and forth along the top of the nearest cable, the cable's crisp cover scratching off to shower down in thin black flakes.
Back and forth until he heard the metallic sound of steel on copper.
Though standing in the stone room's tomb-like cold, the noise of bare-metal made him sweat!
Pulling back the screwdriver with exaggerated care, lifting the penlight, Z saw that the tinny scraping sound had told the truth: a bright red-gold line of new-scratched copper showing along the top of the wire.
Dead slow now, having to reach over the first, infinitely more dangerous uninsulated cable to do it, he raked the cloth off the top of the second power line; checked with the light to make sure the second cable also had a stretch of denuded copper along its top.
Delighted to be able to squat again -- where he was away from those dangerous high-voltage leads -- he played the light up through them, concentrating on the wooden shelf above the cables.
Yes. It was as he'd thought. The shelf was in as bad a shape as the wooden door at the building's entrance. Termite-riddled. Particularly the brace holding the end of the shelf over the power feeds.
Standing, using the light, reaching up carefully, he hooked the screwdriver around and above the bare leads to poke the steel blade into the crumbly looking brace, a shower of rotted wood fragments falling through the light circle to the darkness below.
A good tug and the shelf mounting would give way, an understanding that stopped the world as Bob Zapolska considered what to do next.
Something, he fervently hoped, short of his own electrocution!
What he needed was to be out of the building when the "accident" occurred. But how?
Squatting again, he reviewed the problem. If what he planned went the way it should, the result would be an electrical fire. ..... And that was the answer!
Sitting down on the tabletop, swinging his legs over the side, Z eased himself to the floor, playing the light above his head to see the cables and the shelf brace over them.
Satisfied that what he planned would work, first finding a solid wood box, dragging it over, standing on it, he fumbled his lighter out of his pants pocket with a clumsily gloved hand.
Penlight in one hand, lighter in the other, he flicked the spark wheel of the butane match, the lighter's small quick flame adding significantly to the flashlight's illumination.
Sweating now, using meticulous care, he lifted the flaming lighter above his head; began pushing his lighter-hand up between the dangerous cables, hoping the inch-and-a-half clearance between his fist and the wires to either side was enough to keep the cable's voltage from shorting through his hand. Continued to ease up the cigarette lighter ... higher ... higher, until the tip of the lighter flame touched the bottom of the rotted shelf support.
Shakily, Z held the lighter there until he saw its feeble blaze lick into the porous wood.
Still not out of danger, he eased down the lighter, keeping his hand in the exact center of the wires until hand and lighter were below the hazardous power lines.
Stepping down with relief, he let his thumb off the propane release, the lighter flame winking out, Z allowing the hot, lighter top to cool before returning it to his pocket.
Only then did he use the penlight to back off to the door, the fire near the ceiling at the other end of the room building nicely, tongues of blue-and-yellow flame spreading upward toward the bottom of the shelf.
Turning, he opened the door a crack. Looked out cautiously. To see ... that the way was clear.
And he was out into the wind, closing the door behind him, padlocking the door, and retreating up the walkway that paralleled the side of Bateman Hall. Ten steps. Twenty. Thirty.
At the front of the campus but still within sight of the power building, Z turned to wait and watch in the cold and windy dark.
But not for long.
Without warning, the tiny window in the power house door lit up like a welding torch, the flash followed by an angry sizzle!
Then ... silence. Silence, and "lights out" everywhere on campus.
Though the sun-bright flash was gone, did he see a flicker of light through the distant window? A shelf on fire, perhaps?
The question now was, what would the fire department make of this "accident"? Not much, he thought. The logical thing for the authorities to believe was that a decaying shelf had fallen in the night, the copper wire on top of the ledge sliding off to bridge the incoming power lines. The result? A nasty short because of the cable's rotted insulation.
The shelf fire would be seen as a result of the electric discharge, the fire attributed to the intense electrical flash of melting high-voltage lines that, had the building not shielded the spectacle, would have lit up the Kansas City night!
If the fire department did come to this conclusion, Z speculated, his careful work had done the taxpayers of Kansas City a favor. An accidental interpretation of the Bateman power failure sparing the city the expense of a futile criminal investigation.
Smiling to himself, satisfied with a job well-done, Bob Zapolska finished his leisurely walk to the front of Bateman Hall.
There, ignoring the razor wind that gusted up, he looked down the hill to see ... no campus lights at the hill's base. Even at the perimeter, the college lights had all winked out.
Moving purposely to the northwest side of Bateman Hall once more, he looked up at the third-floor turret.
Surprise!
No "ghost light."
Like other campus illumination, Old Bateman's "ghost" refused to "glow" without electric current.
Sat
isfied at last, Z took the broad walkway to the left front stairs.
Starting his descent -- his underpowered little car waiting patiently for him down there in the dark -- he smiled again.
Assuming something illegal was underway at the other end of the third-floor turret's cold air vent, also speculating that the illicit activity took electric lights, Big Bob Zapolska had just put a stop to it.
If, as Z thought likely, this "ghost light" business was somehow tied to the killings -- including the killer's attempt to murder Z -- it pleased Z to know that, in a small but subtle way, he'd been able to strike back!
* * * * *
Chapter 20
Bob Zapolska had just passed some blood in the motel stool, but not much. As for the small of his back, the bruise was darker (blue-black with lighter greenish-yellow splotches,) but smaller, these health improvements raising his spirits. He was coming back, physically as well as mentally. (His prospect for continued good health had also improved since he'd begun hiding out at the Happy Hollow Inn.)
While dressing in his knotty-pine and plastic room in the Happy Hollow that Thursday morning, he chanced to see the report on the room's black-and-white TV: a one-minute, late-morning spot on the power failure at Bateman College. There had been an electrical short sometime during the night, said the willowy blond news lady with the stiff-perfect hair and starry eyes. No one had noticed the power was out until people began arriving for work that morning. (Z took this to mean that the campus "security" guard had gotten a good night's sleep.) Other than knowing a power failure and small electrical fire had occurred, she continued, officials had yet to determine the cause of the accident. Fortunately, no one had been injured. (She said all this in newscaster-cheery, the sunny tone TV reporters used when rejoicing with million-dollar lottery winners, talking to children in need of adoption, sympathizing with maimed bomb victims, and patronizing starving Africans.) More on the channel's "award-winning news" at five.
Of more importance to Z was awakening with the feeling that the tumbling pieces of the Bateman puzzle were about to settle into place. (Knowing for certain that the recent attempt on his life was from someone other than the Mafia man, had helped.)
Of Mice and Murderers Page 21
