“Your leases?” Wilks said in some surprise.
“All of them. I had them in there. The whole folder’s gone. They’ve been stolen.”
Wilks rubbed his cheek. “Any idea who’d want your leases?”
“How should I know? You’re the policeman. You’re supposed to tell me. Take fingerprints. Do something.”
“In time, in time.” Wilks sat down at the desk and took out a notebook. “Let’s go about this systematically,” he said. “Who found what and what’s been touched?”
Watly, standing by, didn’t have a chance to explain his part in it. Restlin did it for him. “Ray here found the broken window and he called me. I came down and called you. Then I opened the safe, but nobody’d touched that. I looked through the files while we were waiting for you, and that’s when I found out the leases had been stolen.”
“You keep the file cabinet locked?”
“No. I didn’t see any point. The door’s always locked.” Restlin paced the floor as if he’d been wiped out. “I can’t understand why anybody’d want my leases.”
“You any idea, Mr. Watly?”
Watly shook his head. He was a tall, rather good-looking man, dark-haired, with a pale complexion, and he was calm about the whole thing. He sat on a corner of the desk watching his feverish employer. “I couldn’t imagine why anybody’d want those leases. What good would they do them?”
“Take fingerprints,” Restlin said. “He must have left some prints.”
“He might have,” Wilks agreed, “but with you opening everything, they’re probably spoiled.”
“I couldn’t wait all day. You took so long. You should take prints anyway. He probably left others.”
Wilks shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know that finding them would help us much.”
“Why not? They’d point to the burglar, wouldn’t they?”
“Only if we happened to have the burglar’s on file. I rather imagine we don’t.” He stared musingly at the open file drawer. “You’re sure nothing else was taken?”
“That’s the only thing.”
Wilks flipped his book shut and stood up. “I’d guess this wasn’t done by a professional burglar, Mr. Restlin. This was somebody who wanted the leases, or one such lease. You have any other record of who’s living where and for how long?”
“Yes, of course.” Restlin crowded Wilks aside to get into the middle drawer of his desk. He pulled out a ledger. “This wasn’t touched. Besides that, I can tell you everything about everybody, who’s renting what, who owes what, when their leases expire.” He tapped his head. “I’ve got it all right here. If somebody thinks I wouldn’t know without the leases, that somebody has another think coming.”
“Anybody owe you a lot of back rent? Anybody want to break a lease?”
“Hmmph. Well.” He peered at the sergeant. “You think somebody’s trying to do me out of something?”
Wilks said, “You have your tenants’ signatures on anything other than the leases?”
“Well, on some of the applications—where they applied in writing.”
“That wouldn’t be binding in court, would it?”
“Well, what do you mean?”
“I mean if one of your tenants wanted to skip out, you wouldn’t be able to sue him if you couldn’t produce a lease, could you?”
“Then you think—” Restlin stopped. His small, wizened face got tight with rage. “Now who would it be? Who’d try a dirty trick like that?”
“You may find one of the birds who owes you money has flown the coop.”
“Who owes us?” Restlin didn’t trust his memory on that and dove for his ledger. Wilks went to the door and stooped to examine the brass knob. He reached up to turn on the overhead fluorescent lights and examined it again. “There’re a couple of prints on the doorknob,” he said. “Either of you touch it?”
Watly said, “Mr. Restlin tested it.”
The sergeant nodded and stood up. “I’m afraid there aren’t going to be any prints in here at all.”
Restlin, running a darting finger down the pages of his ledger, looked up. “Why not?”
“It was below freezing last night. The broken glass looks as if a fist was put through it. There are smudged marks on the knob under your prints. The thief undoubtedly wore gloves. Fingerprinting would be a waste of time.”
Restlin scrambled around the desk. “Are you trying to say you won’t look for the man?”
“No, Mr. Restlin. We’ll try to find him for you. We’ll see what we can do.” He nodded at the ceiling. “Anybody live upstairs here?”
“Yes. There’s a family.”
“All right. I’ll see if they heard or saw anything, and m check the house across the street. Meanwhile, if you’ll look through your records and see which of your tenants might profit by having your copy of the lease destroyed, we’ll talk to them.”
“They’ll deny it.”
“I don’t see there’s much else we can do, Mr. Restlin.”
The little man stormed back to his books. “It’s a fine police department, that’s all I can say,” he threw at Wilks bitterly.
Chief Fellows was taking over at the main desk when Wilks came down the concrete steps to the large basement room in the town hall. The sergeant entered through the side door, bringing in a blast of winter air. “Jesus, it’s cold,” he said, pulling off his thick leather mittens and the blue wool cap with the ear muffs. He was wearing an army-surplus windbreaker with a wool collar, blue woolen police motorcycle trousers, and black leather boots. “It must be close to zero,” he complained. “I don’t know what I walked for.”
Fellows said, “What was it? A false alarm?”
“No, it was for real.” Wilks leaned on the desk to tell him the details. He was a husky man, six feet tall, with wide shoulders and a heavy frame.
Fellows listened in silence. He was a big man too, and older, but some of his weight was in the paunch around his stomach. “That’s the damndest thing I ever heard,” he said when Wilks was through. He hunched over
