The Inspector Locked Me Out Before The Clock Could Strike

Wade Caskey put a red tag on my tool chest at nine seventeen. He checked his watch before he pressed down the tape.

"City property under investigation," he said.

"The chest belongs to me."

"Its contents may be evidence."

My polished ash dowel lay across the top tray. I used it to listen to tower clocks: one end against a bearing block, the other beside my ear. A worn bush could tell me more through that stick than a man could through a speech.

I was fifty-one, a Greek American man with olive skin, a bent nose, and black curls gone silver at the ears. I restored tower clocks for a living. I had worked on this one above the courthouse square in Terre Haute, Indiana, for six weeks.

Now it could cost me my shop.

The contract named me as Nikos Petrakis, sole proprietor. There was no larger company to carry the loss.

Wade Caskey was a white man of forty-four, with pale eyes, a pink scalp under thin fair hair, and a gray jacket that looked ironed on his body.

He held a clipboard between us.

"Three bronze weights," he said. "Missing from your work area. Estimated historic value, eighteen thousand dollars."

"You took them downstairs."

His pen stopped.

Outside the dial, a truck rattled over a street seam. The clock train stood still. I had secured it before removing the cracked weight hangers.

"Be careful, Mr. Petrakis."

"You collected them on Tuesday."

"I inspected the area Tuesday."

The courthouse belonged to the county. The city ran our clock grant under a signed agreement, which made Wade the project inspector. It did not make him the owner of every object he touched.

He handed me a notice. Contract suspended. Payment withheld. Suspected theft referred for investigation.

My contract was worth $46,800. The unpaid balance was $19,600. I had already spent most of the first payments on rigging, bearings, insurance, and wages for my helper.

"You can respond within ten business days," Wade said. "In writing."

"I can do that."

He glanced at the little notebook sticking from my shirt pocket.

"Dates and scribbles won't answer a property shortage."

I closed the notebook. Inside were tooth counts, oil points, and a sketch of a bent fan arbor. My business records lived somewhere else.

My father had taught me to keep two sets of measurements and one signed receipt for anything that left a job. He had lost a winter's pay over a church bell before I was born. I had never heard him tell that story without naming the missing receipt.

"May I take my stick?" I asked.

Wade wrote something, then handed it over as if he were granting bail.

At the service stairs, Bernice Holloway stood beside a mop sink that no longer belonged to her. She had retired the year before, but the county had asked her to help label old storage rooms.

Bernice was sixty, a Black woman with close gray braids and heavy work shoes. She knew which doors swelled in wet weather and which elevator needed its gate lifted by hand.

"He have you rushing?" she asked.

"He wants me gone."

"That wasn't my question."

I stopped on the landing.

She folded her arms. "He brought that long crate Tuesday. Used the north freight door."

"You saw the weights?"

"Saw your padded bundles go in. Saw him wheel the crate out. I don't see through wood, Nikos. I can tell what I saw."

That mattered. I needed facts with edges, not friends making guesses.

"Will you write it down?"

"After lunch. I write better when people stop treating my time like loose change."

At my shop near the Wabash, I set the dowel on the bench. Across the street, grain trucks moved toward the river bridge. I let three pass before I opened the steel file cabinet.

Folder nineteen held the weight photographs, the condition report, and a salvage-transfer manifest printed on yellow paper.

The form covered the temporary move of damaged parts for evaluation. A line in the middle said that ownership remained with the county. Another said no sale or disposal was allowed.

I had signed as the releasing restorer. Wade had signed as the receiving city officer. A city grant clerk had countersigned the pickup. The three weights were listed by mass and by the old marks stamped beneath their lifting eyes.

My copy held the pressure marks of all three pens.

I did not call Wade.

I called the clerk's office and asked how to submit a response with an exhibit receipt.

Then I photographed every page beside a ruler.

In a gear train, I left a sliver of daylight between the teeth. Too tight, and the whole thing bound. I gave my anger the same small space.

At four twelve, an envelope slid through my shop's mail slot.

Inside was Wade's demand for $18,000, payable within five days.