Black Mask Magazine (Vol. 30, No. 2 — July 1947)

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.

He brought the little truck to a sliding stop in front of the house where the girl had come out. His steps crackled across the growing sheet of ice from the sidewalk to the door. There were still lights on inside, and he punched the bell impatiently. He waited only an instant before ringing again, hearing a deep-toned chime from within — confident that no one could sleep through it, and determined that no one should.

It was a man who answered the door — a timid-appearing young man with a wispy moustache and white eyebrows. He wore a smoking jacket belted tightly around his waist, and was yawning hugely as the door opened, although there was no great sleepiness in his pale blue eyes.

“Light company,” Bassler said.

The man said: “What about it?”

“What’s your trouble here?”

“Trouble? What trouble?”

“I got no time to guess with you,” said Lee. “I got a call from the company to come here. They tell me you need a trouble man.”

“We didn’t call anybody.”

Lee Bassler tried to be patient, remembering the frightened face of the girl. “You don’t always have to call,” he explained. “Sometimes the trouble shows on a transformer, or on the area drain at the substation, and then the company sends me out. So I’ll have a look at your house wiring.”

The pretense of sleepiness was gone now, and the man’s eyes were sharp and a little wary. “No dice,” he said shortly. “I ain’t lettin’ anybody in this time of night. We got lights enough to do us.”

“Sure, and your house’ll probably burn down before morning,” Lee said. “Mister, the company sent me out to check your wiring. You wanna get me canned?”

“How do I know they sent you?”

“Here’s my identification,” Lee said. He showed the company folder with his photograph and thumbprint. “Or hell, call the company if you want.”

For one breathless moment the man acted as if were going to act on that suggestion. He turned, and then came back to the door. “Oh, what the hell,” he said. “Only make it snappy, will ya?”

“Won’t take a minute,” Lee promised.

He found the fuse box in the back entryway, and flashed his light on it. Several of the fuses, he saw, were a new type that would accommodate a big overload and not blow out. They were O.K. in some districts, but outlawed in this one. The company was used to that — if a service man got to keep all the, pennies he found screwed in behind fuse plugs, it’d buy him a good many cigars in the course of a year.

“Nothing here,” he said.

He reached for a door and pulled it open. Steps slanted down into darkness, and the soft hum of a furnace came from somewhere below. A three-switch panel was on the wall, and Lee kicked up the center toggle at a guess. Lights came on in the basement.

“New furnace?” Lee asked. Sometimes new furnaces proved too great a load for old wiring. Better to look for the common things first.

“Put in when the house was built,” the man said. “You’re wasting time going down there—”

His voice trailed off, for Lee Bassler was going on down the stairs, making surprisingly little noise on the steps, busy eyes picking up all the details of the house wiring.

The house was modern as most, but there were a few unshielded wires overhead. At first glance nothing was wrong with them. Lee picked out the heavier lines that would be carrying 220 volts for the range and the automatic water heater. Then he saw the severed wire with its bunchy, unprofessional taping job.

“Haywire,” he muttered.

From above, the man said sharply: “Find anything?”

Without answering, Lee went to a door beneath the stairs and shoved it open. The room beyond was dark, but he could see the dim outline of a car. For an instant only his mind played with the idea of reaching, groping for a light switch. Then instead, he pressed the stud of his flashlight. The beam showed him an enclosed basement garage. The car parked in it was quietly expensive, its doors closed and motor off. But there was no time to look at that.

Huddled almost at Bassler’s feet was the dark-clad body of L a man. As Lee bent over, he could catch the faint sickening odor of scorched flesh. He spun the light beam upward, and knew how the man had died.

It was beautifully, dreadfully contrived. One end of the 220-volt line had been cut and brought back so that a shining finger of copper lay across the switch. It was impossible to reach for the toggle without bringing a hand against the bared wire. Lee looked down at the floor. Whether by custom or by plan, a steel drip pan was there, so that anyone reaching for the switch would be reaching for 220 volts of death.

Bassler caught the wire in insulated pliers and bent it up and out of reach. He backed out of the garage and bounded up the basement stairs. He took the lapels of the young man’s smoking jacket in his fist.

“Who is it?” he said. “Who killed him?”

The man’s eyes rolled. His mouth opened convulsively, and his weight sagged against Lee’s arm. Lee shoved him into a chair and was reaching for the phone when the door chime boomed softly.

It was the chubby man from next door, the man named Phillips who stood revealed in the back entryway. Phillips said: “I came over to—” Then he recognized Lee Bassler, and his heavy jaw dropped.

“What are you doing here?” he said suspiciously.

“Man electrocuted in the basement,” Lee said. “Come in and help me with this guy while I call the police.”

“Good Lord,” Phillips said. He came into the kitchen and stopped when he saw the young man. “Connor!” he said. “Then it must be McCready who was—”

“Middle-aged guy, dark overcoat.”

“That’s John McCready, all right,” Phillips said. “I’ve warned him a time or two about monkeying with the wiring. You suppose that’s what burned out the lights a few hours ago?”

Lee Bassler did not answer. He was busy at the phone, turned so that he could watch the man Phillips had called Connor. Rule one for a service man who ran into big trouble, was to call somebody to handle it. If you found a pole down or a transformer burned out, you called a big truck to help. If you found somebody who refused to pay charges, you called the credit office. If you found murder — but that wasn’t on the list! Where in a lineman’s job would you find murder?

You might find an element burned out of a range, or a water heater acting up, or a fuse box scorched, or a pipe conduit smoking. But murder— Well, Bassler, there it was in the basement below you. A death trap that a man who handled hot wire couldn’t miss. And a dead man caught in it. And — take it easy now — a scared girl who’d run out in an ice storm earlier to get away from something in this house!

He said to the phone: “Homicide.”

He said: “Send somebody to 1012 Barton. We got what looks like a murder out here. Me? The power man. Sure, I’ll stick around.”

He replaced the phone, and leaving Phillips with Connor, he began prowling through the house. Lights were on in the most improbable places: closets and halls, the typical trail of someone going through a dark house trying to find a light that worked. He came finally to a door behind which was darkness, but a light came on as soon as he pushed the door open.

“Uncle John? Ray?” said the girl’s voice.

“Ray for what?” asked Bassler.

There was a stifled gasp and she sat up in bed staring at him. Lee had a moment to decide that his judgment about her looks had been O.K., before she clutched the down comforter up around her.

“What are you doing here?” she said angrily.

“Who’s the dead guy in the basement?”

She screamed, then. It was soundless, but if ever a woman screamed with her eyes, with the back of her hand muting her mouth, this one did. Then, like an automaton, she got out of the bed. found a robe and slippers, and came stiffly toward Lee Bassler in the bedroom door. Something about her made Lee suddenly conscious of his heavy jacket, his furred cap, the heavy, dangling tools at his belt.

“Did you say dead?” she asked. Her voice was low, toneless. It was not so much self-possession as a sort of numbness or shock.

“Somebody rigged a switch in the basement,” Lee told her bluntly. “It killed a man in a dark blue overcoat. He’s got gray hair.”

“Uncle John,” she said.

“Who’s Ray? Is that Connor?”

“Ray? What do you know about Ray?”

“You just asked if I was Ray!”

“Ray? Why, he’s my — he’s—”

“Husband?”

“We’re... we were... we’re supposed to be engaged.”

“Looks like it,” Lee Bassler said sourly. “You better get some clothes on, sis. I’ve called the cops.”

There was a Sergeant Fogarty in charge of the squad arrived in a few minutes, a gray, quiet man with even teeth and a soft voice. The others with him accepted Bassler’s warning about the wire, prowled about the house, and finally removed the body.

The body, in Fogarty’s precise notes, became John McCready, who owned a small but very lucrative lumber brokerage. He was uncle to Helen McCready, the lovely who seemed to enjoy running bare-shouldered in ice storms. He was step-father to Ray Connor, who managed McCready’s office and was engaged to McCready’s niece. What Connor was doing in the house in a smoking jacket was something Lee Bassler could figure only too well. Lee didn’t like it much, but the conclusion was inevitable.

“The transformer burned out about three hours ago,” he told Fogarty. “I came out on the call and we fixed up the trouble. Just as I was leaving this girl came out of the house with nothing on.”

Fogarty leaned forward, and Lee said: “Just a dress, I mean — no coat or anything. She was scared, no doubt about that. But I had plenty to do elsewhere, so I didn’t waste any time. But here’s the point — a man getting all that juice in the basement would pull enough current to burn out the transformer. So that must be what happened, and when it happened.”

Fogarty nodded, looking through into the living room where the others waited with a couple of policemen. “It adds up that way,” he said. “That’d explain why she was panicky enough to run outside, too. She’s probably heavy in his will, and wanted the dough. Could she do that wiring job?”

“Anybody could,” Lee said. “But more’n likely this Connor guy was helping her. They’re engaged, not to use a stronger word.”

Fogarty lifted an eyebrow, but Lee sensed that his surprise could be as much at Lee’s vehemence as at the information.

“If he was helping,” the sergeant said, “why would she get scared enough to run away from him out of the house?”

“Ask her.” Lee Bassler was tired — and just now, he had a bad taste in his mouth. He wanted another cup of Bert’s bitter coffee and a good night’s sleep. Maybe that would take his mind off a silken, silvery, slender body in a soaked evening gown.

“I will,” said Fogarty.

Lee stood up and Fogarty flicked a finger at him.

“Stick around,” he said. “I can use you here. Otherwise you’d be out in the storm, so why not get smart and take it easy.”

“I’ll have to call in,” Lee said.

It took quite a bit of explaining to the dispatcher. On a night when every available man had twice as much as he could do, why was Bassler involved in a murder investigation, three hours after his duties in that neighborhood were completed. Lee did a lame job of explaining, and the dispatcher, since he could think of no practical way to call Bassler away, silenced the truck. Bassler turned away from the phone to face a gentle mocking grin from Sergeant Fogarty.

“You don’t mind my eavesdropping on your conversation, do you?” he asked. “Because I was a little puzzled about your being here myself, if your call was three hours ago and all done.”

Lee cursed himself mentally, groping for any logical explanation as they went in to join the others. He stopped Fogarty in the door.

“I came back because it looked queer, the girl running out with no wraps,” he said. “I got to thinking about another time that same transformer burned out, when an electric heater fell in a—”

“Tell them the truth!”

Lee Bassler turned in amazement to look at the girl’s pale face, at the blue eyes with the bright blaze of anger in them.

“This man’s mixed up in Uncle’s death,” she said. “He was hanging around here earlier. I’ll bet Ray hired him to fix that wire. Ray couldn’t do it himself!”

Ray Connor emitted a squawk of indignant protest. He jumped up and marched across the room to stand in front of his fiancee, and the words that tore from his lips were anything but affectionate.

“Try to blame it on me, will you, you tramp!” he said thinly. “You’re the one gets all his money! You’re the one got this jerk to fix up the kill! And I can guess how you coaxed him to do it, too, you little—”

The girl jumped up and slapped him at about the same time Lee Bassler’s fist came sledging against the man’s mouth. Connor sprawled on the floor. There, safe on his back, he went on cursing until Fogarty nudged his ribs with a toe and told him to shut up.

“You gonna let ’em beat me up?” Connor demanded.

“Do it myself, if you don’t watch your talk!”

Fogarty grinned at Lee Bassler. “I don’t know which one of ’em’s right,” he said, “but it looks like you’re a good bet either way.”

“Don’t be silly,” Lee said. “I been on call. I can account for every bit of my time.”

“You’re sure?” asked Fogarty.

And Bassler did not answer, for he knew that the wiring could have been done easily in any five minute period between his other calls. The night that had seemed so busy to him had plenty of holes in it for murder.

“You’ll play hell proving I did it,” he said.

“The boys think it’d take a good electrician to fix up that death trap in the garage,” Fogarty pointed out. “You don’t make so much at your job you couldn’t be hired for a chore like that. Or otherwise persuaded.”

“I knocked Connor kicking for not much more than that remark,” Bassler said quietly.

“Yes, you did,” said Fogarty. “But I got a gun an’ a sap, an’ I’m not paid to let tough guys push me around. So don’t crowd your luck, sonny.”

“I think there’s something here, officer,” said Phillips then. “This is the same man who was out three hours ago to fix the transformer. And I saw his truck in the neighborhood an hour or so before that. So it’s likely he was hired by one or both of these young people to put the fatal wire in place. After all, who would be certain of delivering a killing jolt besides a professional electrician?”

“Damn it, I wasn’t even here!” said Connor. “I didn’t get out here till the lights were back on! Helen had gone to bed, so I put on a smoking jacket and sat down to wait for the old man. I thought he’d gone to a dinner.”

Fogarty said: “How about it, Helen? Is he telling the truth?”

Reluctantly, the girl said: “He wasn’t here. Uncle John started to go to his dinner just before the lights went off. I thought he’d gone. When the lights went out I thought it was a fuse, so I went to the back hall, and then I... I thought I heard something in the basement. I was frightened, but I couldn’t find a candle or a flashlight or anything. Then when the lights came on it startled me so I ran out without even stopping to think.”

“You can do better than that!” Fogarty said.

“I’ve always been afraid of darkness,” she said.

“First I’ve heard of it,” Connor sneered.

Lee was grappling with an idea — something growing so rapidly in his mind that he scarcely heard the girl say: “You’re a filthy liar, Ray. You know I despise you, don’t you? That I’d never have said I’d marry you except Uncle John wanted me to so bad? Now I’d rather die!”

“You’ve got a good chance,” said Connor.

Fogarty said: “The cute part is, neither one of you needed to be here. You simply leave the back door unlocked, and tell Bassler here the time you want that switch rigged up. He can pop in and do it, and nobody’d give it a second thought. Repair trucks, mailmen, milk drivers — they come and go and nobody notices.”

“That’s right, officer,” Phillips said. “And I still think nobody but an electrician would be sure of the killing power of the set-up. And if it failed to kill, it’d be an awful boomerang!”

“Hey. that’s right!” Lee said suddenly. “I just happened to think. This same transformer was burned out a few months ago by an electrocution!”

Fogarty said: “So what?”

“So what Fatso was saying here,” Lee said, and jerked a thumb at Phillips, “Nobody that hadn’t had some experience would know enough to use the 220-volt line and put a ground plate down.”

“You tryin’ to hang yourself?” Fogarty asked.

“Listen,” said Lee. “Anybody that went through that first electrocution — a woman in a bathtub — would know how to rig another. And he’d know the transformer’d go out!”

“I still don’t get it.”

“When we fixed that transformer, I went to the Phillips house next door. He had a kerosene lamp burning — didn’t even have a light switch on so that the light would come on when the current came back.”

Fogarty looked suddenly interested in Bassler’s remarks.

“If the lights went off in your house, where would you find a kerosene lamp?” Bassler demanded. “Hell, like the girl here, most people can’t even find a candle or a flashlight. So who knew the lights were going out? Who rigged McCready’s electrocution?”

“You trying to say I came over here and killed my next door neighbor?” demanded Phillips.

“I’m saying nothing,” Lee said. “But I’m going to call the company and find out if it wasn’t your wife that got electrocuted in the bathtub. Then I’m going to call the paper and see if she didn’t have quite a lot of money.”

Phillips broke then, turning swiftly to the door only to face a broad, blue-clad chest. The chubby little man hid his face in his hands and sank slowly to his knees...

“Sure we found motive,” Fogarty told Lee next day. “You can always find motive when you know who the killer is. Phillips’d lost most of his wife’s money in a lumber deal with McCready, but all McCready had was his verbal agreement. He figured to save several thousand dollars with McCready dead. But you spotted him without knowing that. Too bad there was no reward!”

Lee thought about a girl in a silver evening gown.

“I’ll get my reward,” he said.