“Have you ever wired outdoor lampposts?”
“Only a couple thousand,” he said.
“Is there much to it?”
“Like wiring a lightbulb.” He blew the dust off a pad of paper, stood up, and came to the counter. “Wiring anything is simple: one wire in, one wire out.” He drew a circle on the sheet of paper. “That loop is called a circuit. A lightbulb, a lamppost, don’t matter which, interrupts the circuit-fits itself into the circle.” He drew a lightbulb on the line that made the circle. “There’s your lamppost.”
“You just need two wires to hook up a lamppost?”
“Basically.”
“Could you need more?”
“Sure, if you were using the lamppost electrical box as a kind of connecting point for other circuits.”
I told him I had to go to the car to make a call. Stanley wasn’t in; one of the guards said he’d gone home early. But the Bohemian was in his office.
“I want the ground under the lamppost dug up right away. Can you arrange that?”
He didn’t ask me for a reason. The tone of my voice must have been enough. He put me on hold for the five longest minutes of my life, then came back on. “It’ll be done within the hour, Vlodek.”
I told him I’d call him later and hung up. I went back inside A-1 Electric and gave Ziloski a hundred dollars to follow me out to Gateville.
A security guard stood talking with the same two workmen who had been there the day of the blast. Next to them, a fresh hole had been dug at the base of the lamppost. As Ziloski and I walked up, I paid particular attention to the second workman, the one who’d said nothing the first time. The Bohemian’s man. He avoided my eyes.
I looked down into the hole. The multicolored wires that had lain spilled at the bottom, like snakes of all colors, were now bundled and wrapped neatly with tape.
“Is Stanley here?” I asked the guard.
“Still home.”
“His wife?”
The guard nodded, then pointed at the hole. “How long will you need this open?”
“Not long,” Ziloski said.
I’d told him to just look, and tell me what he found when we were alone. Now, he knelt in front of the lamppost and, from a small tan canvas tool bag, pulled out a screwdriver and removed the access plate from the base. He used a penlight to peer inside the base cavity. After a few seconds, he reattached the plate and stepped down into the shallow hole.
I asked the guard if he’d been on duty the day the lamppost got blown over. He nodded.
“Did the blast knock out any other electrical fixtures in the development?”
The guard shook his head. “Just this light.”
I thought back to what Ziloski had told me about wiring. If thelamppost had been used to route wires to other fixtures, then those would have been knocked out as well. But that had not happened. Just the one lamppost had gone out; only this one lamppost had been wired with something special.
The guard and I made small talk for several minutes as Ziloski picked at the dirt around the wiring going into the base of the lamppost. He separated two loose strands of wire that were capped with little red plastic cones, then looked up. “Who reconnected the wiring?” he asked the guard.
“The same electrician who does all the outside stuff for Crystal Waters.”
Ziloski nodded and climbed out of the hole. “Best get back to the shop,” he said to me.
“You can fill in the hole,” I told the tall workman.
“You sure?” He grinned. “Someone else might want a peek tomorrow or the next day.”
I smiled back. “Be no big deal to dig it up again, right?”
His grin widened. “No problem at all.”
I walked Ziloski back to his truck.
“Tell me what you saw.”
“What are you looking for?”
“Just tell me what you saw.”
“There’s singe marks on the underground conduit pipe where the wires come out, like there was a fire recently. Whoever reconnected the wiring did a professional job, good splices, everything taped. The connections are all shielded, and on the wires they didn’t reattach, the ends are all tightly capped and taped.”
“Everything’s normal?”
“Whoa, I didn’t say that. Those wires they didn’t reattach bother me. There’s at least one extra pair of wires running close to that lamppost that don’t belong there. Jobs like Crystal Waters are bid, and usually go to the lowest bidder. Laying in extra wires jacks up the cost, and I just can’t see why those wires are needed.”
“There used to be a school bus shelter there. Maybe they were for that?”
“Those extra wires are too thin, more like doorbell wire, not thick enough to carry juice to lighting. Like I said, the ends were singed, like they were burned off. They were the ones capped recently, so, for sure, now they’re doing nothing. Makes no sense, why those thin wires were put there in the first place.”
I called the Bohemian from the Jeep and told him what was in the ground.
Fifteen
The Bohemian called back in two hours. By then, I was back at the turret, sitting on the bench by the Willahock, staring at the sky to the west, tensed for the first flash of yellow from the mother of all explosions.
There were no Vlodeks this time. “We’re set to meet at five thirty.”
“That’s the soonest?”
He swore. “That’s two hours from now. I’ve been on the phone since you called, conference calling with Chief Morris and some guy named Till at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. A.T.F. is not pleased.”
“Are you evacuating?”
“I recommended that to Bob Ballsard.”
“What did he say?” I remembered Ballsard. He was the chairman of the homeowners association. I’d met him at the Crystal Waters Fourth of July party the previous summer, the annual event the association held to let the Members think they knew the names of their neighbors. Ballsard was a nervous, rabbity little man, a partner in his father’s law firm. He had a deep tan and had wornTopsider shoes, no socks, and a yachtsman’s cap festooned with a battery-powered flashing American flag. And he had big, Teddy Roosevelt teeth. As he made party talk with Amanda, I became transfixed by those big teeth. They seemed too square to be natural, and I wondered if he’d had them specially made for clamping onto halyards or lanyards or whatever sailors call those ropes that make sails go up and down.
“Bob was noncommittal,” the Bohemian said. “He’ll be at the meeting this afternoon.”
“He’s got no choice. He’s got to clear the place out.”
“See you at five thirty,” the Bohemian said, and hung up.
I didn’t want to kill another hour watching for the sky to blow up, so I headed to the health center, did laps, then took a long shower. None of it helped. Getting on the expressway I was just as twitchy as I’d been earlier.
On the Eisenhower, the slow-motion horror of the day continued to unfold. An avocado-colored refrigerator had fallen off a truck onto the middle lane, backing up traffic for two miles. The world was full of threats. I got to the Bohemian’s office fifteen minutes late.
Griselda Buffy was not pleased with my tardiness. “Everyone’s been waiting,” she said through the dark maroon paint that made her mouth look like a wound. She led me to a different conference room.
This one was much larger, with blue striped wallpaper and a silver coffee service shining on a sideboard. It was a room for the reading of big money wills.
Several men sat on dark blue leather chairs, around the long mahogany table.
“Vlodek,” the Bohemian said from a chair on the left side of the table. He didn’t bother to force a smile.
Stanley Novak sat two places to his left, a vacant chair in between them. Stanley’s face looked dry and immobile. I had the fleeting thought that he might be in shock.
The man to the Bohemian’s right, sitting at the head of the table, looked up from copies of the extortion notes spread out before him and nodded. He was in his late fifties, had wiry gray hair cut short, and wore a brown suit. He looked me up and down like he was measuring me for a uniform.