Let's Play Dead (16 page)

This was going to be a pleasure. “Barney, I would be delighted to provide you with an honorary membership to the Society and assure that you will have free access to our sports archives, in exchange for your advice on our electrical systems. I’m sure we can even find another enthusiast among our library staff who would be delighted to help you. How’s that sound?”

“Sounds terrific.” He beamed.

But I wasn’t done. “Okay, Barney, we’ve got a deal. But I’ve got a condition, too.”

“Yeah?”

“I want you to explain to me how that poor man came to die at the Let’s Play Museum.”

As I watched his face fall, I felt sad to have burst his happy bubble. “Awful thing,” he said somberly. “Shouldn’t have happened.”

“So why did it?” I asked. “Or would it be easier to start with the
how
?” I checked my watch. “You want to take this someplace else, or do you have to be somewhere?”

“I got time if you do.”

“Shelby? You want to join us?”

“I wouldn’t miss it. How about the alehouse on Cedar Street?”

Perfect. An easy walk, and a pleasant place where we could talk without anyone listening in, and I figured Barney would be comfortable there. “Let me grab my coat and close up.”

We all stood, and Shelby and Barney headed toward the elevator while I took one last look around, turned off my computer and the lights, and followed.

Outside it was cool and damp—probably rain coming. Luckily we didn’t have far to go. Walking into the pub was like jumping into a warm bath of sound and color and smells, all good. We had no trouble finding a shabby booth in a corner that offered some privacy. We ordered a round of drinks (one of the plusses of taking the train in was that I could indulge—just a little—after work without worrying about driving home) and settled ourselves comfortably. The drinks arrived promptly, and we put in an order for a batch of bar munchies, which at least would be decently handled here, then we got down to business.

“All right, just how much do you know about electricity?” Barney began.

“I can plug something into a socket, and I know where my breaker box is at home. Assume that’s it.”

He sighed, a bit dramatically, I thought. “How about the difference between AC and DC?”

“We use AC in this country, right? And most of Europe uses DC?”

He looked disgusted. “Okay, I’ll take it in baby steps. You do know what an electron is?” I nodded. “Current is the flow of electrons through a conductor—that’s most often a metal wire—and it’s measured in amperes. AC is most popular because you can increase or decrease it through a transformer. Like the wires to your house—lots of amps in the overhead power line, but it’s stepped down to household level through a pole-mounted transformer.”

“Got it. So outside power lines have more juice than lines in the house, right?”

“Yeah, more or less. Now, by code these days, the plugs you use have to be grounded. That’s the third wire, if you take your line apart. You can see it in any box behind a plug or switch plate in your house. In the most basic terms, you’ve got three wires: the hot wire, the one that isn’t hot, and the ground. The ground is what keeps you from getting fried when you get between the hot and the neutral wires, because a ground wire has a lot less resistance than a human body, and current likes to take the easy way. Doesn’t mean it won’t hurt, though. Look, most of your household stuff is twenty amps, okay? A milliamp is a thousandth of an amp. You grab something with sixteen milliamps and an average guy can hold on and let it go. Twenty milliamps and you stop breathing; a hundred milliamps and your heart short-circuits.”

“That doesn’t sound like very much. Why aren’t there more fatal accidents?”

“OSHA—that’s the Occupational Safety and Health Administration—says there are maybe two hundred a year, and a bunch of those are electrical workers messing with high-voltage lines. Not many household accidents, because the circuit breaker usually blows before anybody gets seriously hurt.”

While I appreciated the general information, it wasn’t what I was looking for. “So what are you telling me? That the accident at Let’s Play required something out of the ordinary? Was it just a couple of crossed wires, or somebody forgot to attach something right, or would somebody have had to make a deliberate effort to increase the current and booby-trap it?”

Barney didn’t answer right away. He’d finished his first drink and signaled the waitress for a second, glancing at Shelby and me to see if we wanted another. We were both still working on our first, and barely half-finished. Luckily the food appeared at the same time as Barney’s fresh drink—I didn’t want him to get sloshed before I had the information I was looking for. Shelby and I exchanged a glance, and she shrugged.

When Barney finally spoke, he didn’t look at either of us, but stared into the depths of his drink. “I knew Joe Murphy. We’re—we were—in the same union local.”

“I met him before . . .” I left that thought unfinished. “He was working on the wiring at Let’s Play, right?”

“Yeah, but that was pretty much finished. He liked to help out—I guess Ms. Heffernan sweet-talked him into doing some extra last-minute stuff. We worked together on a couple of jobs. He was a real union guy—I’m a paid-up member, but I don’t get involved in stuff with the local. Joe liked all the political stuff with the union. And he was a good bit younger than me. But he was a buddy—if he knew of a job that needed some extra hands, I could count on him to put in a word for me. I keep working pretty steady that way.”

That made it a bit harder for me to ask my next question. “Look, Barney, I don’t want to get you or anybody else into trouble, and if you’re uncomfortable talking about this, I’ll understand. Do you think Joe might have messed up with the wiring?”

“I don’t think so. And there were other guys working on it, and the city inspectors checked it all out. Far as I know, it passed, no problem. No reason why anyone should have gotten hurt.”

“Would somebody have wanted to hurt Joe?”

Barney shrugged. “I didn’t know a whole lot about his personal life. He did okay with jobs. Better’n me. And he wasn’t married, didn’t have any kids to support. The union chipped in to help pay for his funeral, you know. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

I didn’t think Barney was going to say anything more about Joe. “That means that somebody else had to have rigged the wiring. Right?”

Barney nodded. He still looked uncomfortable—was he reluctant to point a finger at any of his colleagues?

I pressed on. “What I’d like to know is, how easy would it be to rig up something to shock someone on purpose? How much would they have to know?”

“I need another drink,” Barney said. He waved at the waitress and pointed to his glass, then turned back to me. “You think somebody screwed it up deliberately?”

I nodded. “Twice. Arabella swears she had it checked out by two different people after the first incident.” When Barney stared at me blankly, I added, “There was an earlier incident where someone was shocked, but he’s all right.”

“Damn. You talked to the cops about this? I mean, both of these problems?”

“Well, yes, I told them what I saw the first time it happened—they contacted me after the second incident. Look, Barney, I’m just asking for information, for my own sake. If there’s a way it could have been an accident—some rookie mistake or something came loose—then that will be the end of it. But if somebody set this up . . . Hey, it’s going to give whichever electrician did the work a black eye, won’t it? You have friends there?” I didn’t want or expect him to betray any of his buddies.

“Yeah,” Barney said reluctantly.

“So just tell me how this could have been set up without anybody noticing.”

“You seen this exhibit thing?”

“I have. A bunch of different animals with interactive features, scattered around so the little kids can walk through them. The kids poke or pull something on one of the animals, and something else moves or flashes or makes noise. The outer shells are some kind of plastic, I think—and there aren’t a lot of places where kids could stick a finger. So whoever tampered with one of them would have to have deliberately gotten inside one of them to get at the wiring. Or maybe the problem was somewhere else?”

Barney sat back when the waitress put his new drink in front of him. “Okay, sounds like typical residential-type voltage. You push the doohickey and it completes the circuit and the whatsis lights up or tweets or whatever. That too technical for you?”

“I’m with you so far. Simple circuit, with a switch of some sort.”

“And I’d put money on it that there’s a subpanel for the exhibit, running off the main feed. It wouldn’t have been worth the effort to run new lines. You see anything like that?”

“Yes, there was something in the same room as the exhibit, I think, and Arabella said the exhibit had its own circuit. But shouldn’t the breaker have tripped when Joe got shocked? It did the first time, with Jason.”

“Should have, if there was an overload, but obviously, it didn’t.”

I nodded again. I appreciated his information, but I wasn’t getting the answers I needed. What had gone wrong?

“There any water around the exhibit? A fountain? Or somebody spilled something?” Barney asked.

“I don’t think so.”

“Speaking of water, I’ve got to visit the head.” He stood up and made his way through the sparse crowd toward the restrooms.

Shelby looked at me. “Lady, what are you doing?”

“Trying to understand what happened. Trying to help Arabella. Heck, I don’t know. You know, if I hadn’t been there when Jason got zapped, I would have seen the article in the paper and thought, oh dear, how sad, and then forgotten about it. But I was there, so I know there were two separate events, and if somebody has a grudge against the museum or Arabella, it bothers me.”

“And so it should. But what are you going to do, even if you figure out how this could have happened? Don’t you think the police are doing the same thing?”

“I certainly hope so! This is just for my own peace of mind. Plus I’ll rest easier if I know that the Society is safe.”

“You think Barney thinks you’re crazy?”

I had to smile at that. “Maybe.”

Barney returned and sat down again. “Okay. So, no standing water. The critter wasn’t made of metal, so it’s not a conductor. That leaves the switch. If the switch wasn’t grounded right,
and
if there was some other metal conductor that the guy was in contact with . . . Was there?”

I tried to reconstruct what I’d seen. “I think—and this is only a guess—that Willy—” When Barney looked blank, I added, “That’s a weasel who’s sort of a friend of the hedgehog who’s the star of the show. The weasel is the one who zapped Jason. As I recall, Willy is standing behind a gate to greet visitors, and I’d guess the gate is metal, and is probably bolted to something below the floor. I remember wondering if it was meant to keep the smaller children from climbing on the animals, and this was their solution. They can reach Willy’s hand and his nose, I gather, but that’s about it.”

“Huh. I don’t suppose you know much about the building’s construction?”

I shook my head. “Nope. Old factory, brick exterior. But it’s easy enough to see—when they refitted it for a museum, they left a lot of the structure exposed, and you can see the old ductwork and girders from the first floor.”

“Ah,” Barney responded. “So let’s say the switch was the problem, and our guy was leaning over the railing to do whatever he was doing, and the railing was bolted to a metal girder for stability . . . that might just do it.”

“So if someone knew that the gate was metal and it was secured to a metal girder, then all they would have to do is mess around with the switch on Willy?”

“That’s about it.”

It sounded far too easy.

“What’s he do, this Willy guy? I mean, what’s the interactive part?” Barney asked.

“I think he shakes hands, or maybe hands out something. When I was there, Arabella wanted to show me Harriet first, and after that we were kind of distracted, so I never actually saw it working.”

Shelby spoke up. “I could make a good guess—I’ve given the books to plenty of my friends’ kids. Willy’s kind of a jerk, right?”

“So I gather, although apparently he has some redeeming qualities. He’s just misunderstood.”

Barney looked confused, but Shelby nodded. “Exactly,” she said. “So he’s going to be kind of smarmy, right? He wants people to like him, but he goes about it all wrong. Does he talk?”

“I don’t know—not that I heard.”

“Ladies, that stuff doesn’t matter,” Barney said. “As long as there’s a button to push, to make the model do whatever the heck it does, it completes the circuit.”

Obviously he was right. “So what does it take to change the switch and make it dangerous?”

“A screwdriver and a basic understanding of wiring. You could do it in a coupla minutes.”

That didn’t help at all. I checked my watch—it was getting late. “Thanks, Barney. I guess that answers my question. Given the way things were set up, sounds like almost anyone with some basic knowledge plus access to the exhibit could have rigged Willy to shock someone.”

Barney shrugged. “Like I said, it’s a simple switch, so any electrician would know how to do it quick.”

I wasn’t sure if I’d made any progress, but I had all the information I could handle at the moment. “I appreciate your help, Barney. Let me know when you want to stop by and do some research into our baseball records and I’ll set it up for you. And if I have any more questions about the Society’s wiring, may I contact you?”

“Yeah, sure—as long as you keep me in mind when you get the money together to do something about it.”

“I’ll do that, I promise.” I doubted we’d find funding before Barney retired, but I owed him that much. I stood up. “I’ve got to catch my train. Shelby, are you leaving, too?”