Helga's Web (11 page)

Tuesday, December 10

Malone and Clements had to wait two days for the answer to their query to Interpol on the dead girl’s fingerprints. In the meantime they worked with the only other clue they had. “It’s the wrong half of the tab,” said the manager of the dry-cleaning chain. “If it was the other half it’d give us the number of the shop where the dressing gown was cleaned. This’ll mean going through every order book in every shop we have.”

“Then that’s what we’ll have to do,” said Malone. “Constable Clements will start in right away.” “Why me?” said Clements.

“Because I’m the senior bloke and because you’re better at figures than I am. Just imagine you’re reading the form sheets and looking for another winner.”

“What are you grinning at?” Clements said to the manager. “Listening to one cop telling another one what to do,” said the manager. He was a cheerful, stout man who looked as if he might be put through his own dry-cleaning process every morning; his shirt was immaculate, his trousers had a knife- edge crease, even his dark hair looked as if it had been cleaned and pressed. “Do you want to start here? This is our head office. We have another twenty-seven branches.”

Clements looked at Malone, his big dark eyes as mournful as those of a dog that had just been told it was going to be locked up in the pound. Malone took pity on him. “Okay, you take half, 111 take half.” He took the dressing gown out of its brown paper bag again and showed it to the manager. “When do you reckon that was last cleaned?”

The manager twisted his mouth in what Malone took to be a facial shrug. “I’d only be guessing. Say within the last three months.”

“Could we have all the order books from all your shops for the last three months? We’ll go around and collect em this morning.”

“That’s gunna be a bit of a bind, isn’t it?” said the manager. “Going through all that paper?”

“Most police work is a bit of a bind. It’s only in movies that cops have all the fun.” As they were going out of the shop he stopped and sniffed. “Doesn’t that dry, clean smell ever get you down?”

The manager nodded, smiling broadly. “Does it ever! Weekends, I don’t even shave or shower. Sat’day to Monday, I’m the dirtiest coot in Sydney. Good luck with your paper chase. You want any dry-cleaning done, bring it here. I’ll do it free.”

“Why?” asked Malone.

“I like a clean cop,” said the manager and creased his shirt as he bent over laughing.

“I love funny bastards,” said Clements as they got into their car. He looked down at the pile of order books the manager had given them from the head office. “Twenty-seven more. Maybe we should’ve brought a trailer.”

It took them three hours to collect all the order books from shop assistants who ranged from the eagerly co-operative to the aggressively antagonistic. “I’m too busy,” said the woman with hennaed hair, the pink-framed glasses and the mouth so

heavy with lipstick she had difficulty in opening it. “Come back t’morra and I’ll see if I got ‘em ready by then.”

“I’d like them now,” said Malone patiently. He stood aside as two women came in with armfuls of clothes and dumped them on the counter. He waited five minutes till they had gone, then said, “The order books, please.”

“I told you, come back t’morra—”

“If you don’t give me those books,” said Malone, “I’ll be back in half an hour with a warrant. I’ll close this shop up and you can explain that to your boss. Now get ‘em and stop mucking about!”

The woman, muttering like a distant storm, went out to the rear of the shop, came back with some books and dumped them in front of Malone. He thanked her sarcastically, picked them up and went out to the car. “Some days I think there might be something to be said for a police state. I’d have the time of my bloody life with some of these voters.”

“The day before I retire,” said Clements, weary, irritable and sweaty from sitting in the hot car, “I’m gunna book every bugger who even looks at me.”

They spent the rest of that day going through the books. They knocked off when their eyes began to cross from deciphering the variety of scrawls on the pink slips. “I’ve been seeing things here that I thought were extinct,” said Clements. “Camisoles, antimacassars—there’s something here that looks like a chastity belt. Who’d be wearing one of those these days?”

“The vice boys picked up a feller in drag the other night who was wearing one. He said he didn’t want to go all the way.” Malone threw down a book, rubbed his eyes. “Everything but a green silk dressing gown. You want to come back and finish these off tonight?”

“No,” said Clements. “I’m going to the dogs tonight, see if I can lose some of the money I’ve been winning on the horses.”

Wednesday, December 11

Clements came into the detectives’ room next morning shaking his head. “I can’t lose. I backed among last night that had only three legs and was three months pregnant and it finished up beating the bunny home. Twenty to one, it paid. At this rate I’m gunna have to retire pretty soon. Come up with anything yet?”

Malone held up a book. “Double Bay. A green silk dressing gown turned in by someone named Brand.”

Then Smiler Sparks, lugubrious as a camel, came in and dropped a sheet of paper on Malone’s desk. “Telex from Melbourne. Something to do with Interpol.”

Malone read the sheet, then looked across at the expectant Clements. “No doubt about these Germans, they’re efficient. They’ve given us everything here except her brassiere size.”

“Who was she?”

“Her name was Helga Schmidt. Or anyway that’s the one she was booked under-not very original. She came from Hamburg. She was a pro there. That probably explains the tattoos on her bum-the Germans like their sex a bit kinky. They first booked her in 1958 when she was supposed to have been sixteen. They haven’t had a record of her for the last six years.” He laid the sheet beside the dry-cleaning order book. “She’s our girl, all right.”

They drove out to Double Bay through another steaming morning. The bottom of the sky was smudged with haze; in the dazzling brilliance high overhead a plane melted and disappeared. It was not a day for good tempers. Malone walked into the dry-cleaner’s and the henna-haired woman glared at him through her pink-framed glasses. “I hope you haven’t lost any of those order books—”

Malone dumped the books, neatly tied with string, on the counter. Then he produced the green silk dressing gown. “Recognize that?”

The woman inspected it, her face tightly concentrated behind the thin screw of her long nose. “I’ve seen it—yes! A foreign girl—German, I think—”

“That’s the one,” said Malone. “Where does she live? It’s not on the order slip for this.”

“We only take the address when someone first comes in.” The woman was a little more amenable; obviously something was wrong and she was dying to know what it was. She reached under the counter for a master order book. “What’s the matter, might I inquire?”

“She’s dead,” said Malone.

Even the weight of lipstick couldn’t keep her mouth closed this time. “Oh migod, isn’t it terrible! Where did it happen? How?”

“The address, please,” said Malone, nodding at the book lying on the counter and now ignored by the woman. When he had first become a detective he had been impatient and frustrated by the scrub of obstructive people you had to beat your way through to get to a certain point. But now he accepted that detection work was much like old-time exploration: days and days of hard slogging till you reached a high ridge and looked out and saw something in the distance that kept you going. He had reached a ridge now, seen a name and an address. But it was really only the beginning of the journey and there would probably be more thorny obstructions like this woman before he reached the end of it.

He went out to the street and got back into the car. “The

address checks with one of those in the phone book,” he told Clements. There had been three H. Brands in the phone book, all of them with addresses within two miles of Double Bay. The greater majority of German-speaking migrants to Sydney tended to congregate in the area along the southern shores of the harbour: the map of Europe, with its national boundaries, was being re-drawn ten thousand miles from home. “Now all I’d like is for the feller who did her in to be sitting there waiting for us. I don’t want this bloody thing to drag on over Christmas.”

They drove round to the address they had been given and parked in a No Standing section of the curb. Clements had to squeeze the Falcon in between two other cars and he got out cursing drivers who ignored police signs. “I ought give the bastards a ticket/’

They went up into the flats and met more scrub that had to be beaten through. They rang the buzzer of Helga Brand’s flat, not expecting any answer and getting none. Then they rang the buzzer of the flat next door. The woman, garrulous as a disc jockey, took five minutes to tell them where they could find the managing agents. Clements went away to get the key and Malone went into the woman’s flat to have a cup of tea.

“I’ve never seen her, you know. We moved in a week ago, but I’ve never seen her, definitely. Milk? Matter of fact, haven’t seen anyone here except for the first day we come. There was two fellers here—matter of fact I thought one of ‘em was the hubby, you know what I mean? He had a key. But you said her name was Miss Brand, isn’t she? Down on her letter-box there’s just Brand, no Mrs. or Miss. Is she all right? I mean, there’s nothing wrong with her or anything, is there? Sugar?”

Malone was thinking: the gabby ones are often a help. The ones with the sharpest tongues are the ones with the sharpest eyes: Malone’s Law of Physiology. “You saw two men come here?”

“Oh, definitely. Separately, not together. She wasn’t a—?” The woman gestured.

“I mean, I wouldn’t wanna think the worst of anyone I hadn’t met—”

“No,” said Malone, giving Helga Brand the benefit of the doubt. “She wasn’t in business, Mrs. Woolton.”

“Wasn’t? You mean, she isn’t—I mean she isn’t dead or something, is she?” Malone nodded, and the woman whacked her head hard enough to knock it back on her shoulders. “Oh, migord, that’s a shock! Definitely. We come here for peace and quiet, we useta live up in Darlinghurst, and only a week and there’s a death right next door! She isn’t dead in there, is she?” She jerked her head at the wall that divided the two flats.

“No, she’s not there. Those two men—would you recognize either of them if you saw them again?”

“Oh, definitely. One was a tall feller, not bad-looking, with grey hair. But not old, if you know what I mean. Just gone grey early, I’d say. Dunno why we all don’t, the things we have to put up with these days. Oh, he was very well spoken, too. Real nice voice.”

“What about the other chap?”

“Well, I didn’t speak to him. Fact is, I’m not even sure he come to see her. But there’s only her flat and ours on this floor and he certainly didn’t come to see me, definitely. He looked sorta familiar, you know what I mean? Wore horn-rimmed glasses, very well dressed, sorta— smooth, you know what I mean? He could of been an estate agent or one of them fancy women’s doctors, you know what I mean? Very smooth, definitely.”

Then Clements came back with a young man from the agent’s; he didn’t look smooth, Malone thought, but perhaps he hadn’t been in the game long enough. Mrs. Woolton wanted to follow them into Helga Brand’s flat, but Malone assured her she wouldn’t be needed for the moment and gently closed the door in her face. He took one quick look at

the chaotic condition of the living room, then opened the front door again and nodded to the young man.

“Thanks. We’ll call you from here when we’re leaving.”

“But they said I had to stay with you—”

Still protesting, he was gently pushed out of the flat and the door was closed behind him, too. Then Malone went into the living room where Clements was already sniffing about like a bloodhound. I wish I could get the dog image of him out of my mind, Malone thought. One of these days I’m going to whistle him instead of calling him.

Malone put in a call for a police photographer and a fingerprint man, being careful to hold the phone only by its mouthpiece where he was unlikely to disturb any fingerprints left by a previous user of the phone. Then he and Clements set about searching the flat.

It was Clements who found the torn-up check in the waste-basket and Malone who discovered the manila folder under the heavy lounge chair. They found a lot else that might or might not be clues and they spread it all out on a sheet of newspaper on the small dining table.

“Five chocolate boxes—why do women save chocolate boxes? My mum does and so does my sister.” Clements shook his head at the inexplicable whims of women. “These coupla chewed matches—I don’t reckon they’d be hers. This bloodstained sheet—I found that in the laundry basket. There are some prints on those pieces of broken glass. And this key might have some on it.”

“We’re doing all right so far,” said Malone. “Keep the chocolate boxes. That’s an expensive brand of chocolate and women don’t buy themselves expensive chocolates. They always depend on men for that.”

“Not me,” said Clements. “A box of Black Magic is as far as I go, or Cadbury’s Milk Tray. What about these pearls and the broken bits? You reckon they belonged to her? She wasn’t

wearing any stuff when we found her, so maybe that could be the motive—robbery.”

Malone shook his head. “I’ve looked in the bedroom. There’s a stack of stuff there that wasn’t touched. Not much expensive stuff, but there’s a good watch and another strand of pearls. It wasn’t robbery. Why would he go to all the bother of carting her from here down to the Opera House?” He picked up the pieces of the check, laid them together till the pieces formed a ragged whole. Then he raised an eyebrow as he saw the name printed above the flourishing signature. “This feller, for instance, wouldn’t need to lift a few pieces of jewelry. Walter S. Helidon. The woman next door said she saw a man come down from this floor who looked vaguely familiar to her. That’s about all Cabinet Ministers are to anyone—vaguely familiar.”