Helga's Web

by Jon Cleary

  Helga straightened up, moved quickly to the door, closed it and locked it. She went back into the living room, looked at her hands and then saw the blood and the sliver of skin under her nail.

  She was in the bathroom when she heard the door buzzer ring. She turned off the tap and waited. It rang again, but she did not move. She did not want to have to face Norma Helidon again so soon. She had just witnessed the destruction of another woman and she was frightened and sickened by what she had done. And frightened and sickened by the thought that if they had continued to fight she would have

  killed Norma Helidon. When she had looked in the bathroom mirror she had looked deeper into herself than ever before and had seen the abyss of darkness there that she had never suspected.

  She waited another five minutes, but there was not another buzzing from the front door. She dried her hands, went out to the living room, got her sewing basket and moved to a chair. She slipped out of her dressing gown, fingering the torn collar, and was standing in the nude when the door buzzer rang again. She hesitated, then slipped on the gown again. She did not want another scene with Norma Helidon, but it was obvious the woman was not going to go away. New neighbours had moved in next door and Helga was enough of a hausfrau to know that one way of avoiding involvement with neighbours was to give them nothing to gossip about. The best thing to do was to let Norma Helidon in and see what else she had to say.

  She moved to the door, opened it, then stared in puzzlement at the man in the orange shirt who stood there. She had seen him before, but for the moment she could not remember where or when. Then recognition came, and with it shock; this was the man who, in an indirect way, had triggered off her decision to get home to Germany before Christmas. Suddenly afraid, she tried to slam the door.

  But Bixby was already pushing it back against her, was grinning widely round the matchstick stuck between his teeth.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Friday, December 13

  1

  Malone saw the calendar as soon as he opened his eyes in the morning. He knew what his mother would have done as soon as she had opened her eyes: an extra Hail Mary would have been said to ward off the Devil and the saints would have been told to get off their tails and keep a sharp eye out today for sinners like herself. Well, I’d welcome the Devil this morning, he thought, if he brought along with him the feller who killed Helga Brand. There were times when, if the murder had not been too brutal or disgusting, he enjoyed the actual detective work. A lot of it might be dull routine stuff where you plodded from point to point, but at the end of each day there was a certain satisfaction: you had advanced from where you had started in the morning and you had done it from your own reasoning and, he admitted, sometimes your own guesswork. It was the putting together of a jigsaw puz- zle, only in your case it was played for keeps and there were no prizes. No cop in his right mind ever considered a mur- derer a prize. But this Brand case was one he was not enjoy- ing, one that filled him with a sense of unease. Yet he could not explain why. Maybe it was the Irish in him, the pessi- mism of the Celt who would never really enjoy Heaven when he made it because he would know by what narrow margin he had missed the alternative; the pessimism that made an intelligent, unsuperstitious man scowl at a date on a calendar.

  The phone rang and he reached for it wearily: why couldn’t Russ Clements wait till he got to the office? But it was Lisa and at once he smiled and sat up. “Are you up, darling?” she asked.

  There had been girls he had known to whom he could have given a crude answer to that one; but not to Lisa. They were uninhibited in their talk when in bed together, but she was a lady over the phone. Also, he was learning about himself as he learned about her. “Darling, what’s the matter? How long have you been awake? Are you ill or something?”

  “I was just thinking, that’s all. How long does it take to become a gentleman?”

  “Longer than it takes to become a lady, I’m afraid. Gentlemen are born, ladies can be manufactured.”

  “Where’d you get that little gem of cynicism—some PR release?” He thought about it for a moment, then said, “Maybe you’re right. But it cuts me out.”

  “No, darling, it doesn’t. You’re a gentleman. You may not recognize yourself as one, but you are. Women look for different things from what a man looks for in a gentleman.”

  “Such as?”

  “What sort of conversation is this at this time of morning? I’m in my bra and pants, trying to get ready for the office—”

  “Just the time to discuss with a man whether he’s a gentleman or not. Go on.”

  “Well—” Her voice was disjointed for a moment, as if she might be struggling into a dress. “Well, a man judges a gentleman by the way he reacts to society as a whole. A woman judges him by the way he reacts to her. Or anyway this woman does.”

  What a wonderful girl! She knew just how to make a man get up and face Friday, the 13th. “I love you, Dutchy.”

  “I wondered.” Another pause, heavy with breathing.

  “What are you doing? You got another gentleman there with you?”

  “I’m trying to do up my zip. You didn’t call me last night.”

  “I didn’t get in till ten-thirty. We worked late—” He had left the office at eight o’clock, but, too tired to come home and cook something for himself, had gone out for a meal with Russ Clements at the Leagues Club. They had stayed on there drinking, neither of them getting anywhere near drunk but just enjoying the relaxation and isolation from what had occupied them since early that morning. It had been eleven-thirty, not ten-thirty, when he had finally got home. Much too late to ring a girl with excuses why you had not called her earlier, especially a girl who could smell beer on your breath even over the phone. No beery gentleman would call a girl at that hour. “What’s the matter? Our date’s on tonight, isn’t it?”

  “Unless you’re going to be working late again.” Sounds just like a wife, he thought. Mrs. Scobie Scold Malone. Then she said, “Scobie, Mrs. Helidon called me last night about nine o’clock.”

  He swung his legs out of bed, sat up straight. “Go on.”

  “She wants me to prepare a release that she is resigning from the committee of the Blue and Red Ball.”

  He sagged with disappointment, then began to laugh. “Is that all? Christ-”

  “Don’t swear at me, Scobie. No gentleman does that.” She managed to chide him without sounding priggish.

  “Sorry. But honestly—why tell me? I couldn’t care less what she resigns from. You know what I think of charity committees, those sort, the ones who never get their hands dirty—”

  “Darling.” She had forgiven him for swearing at her; her voice was gently patient, like that of a kindergarten teacher leading a child into the mysteries of human nature. “When Mrs. Helidon resigns from the presidency of the Blue and Red Ball, she is resigning from the human race. Kings have

  abdicated thrones with less space than this will get in tonight’s newspapers.”

  He stood up, idly scratching the itches that had built up during the warm night. He always slept naked and now, trying to sort out what Lisa had just told him, his brain still half-asleep, he pulled up the blind to let the morning sun stream in. A girl standing at a window in a house across the street looked at him, looked again, then waved appreciatively. He pulled the blind down again: he was in no mood to start the day right for strange girls.

  “Darling, are you still there?”

  “Yeah. Lisa—look, I appreciate you calling me. But do me a favour—don’t become a detective.”

  There was silence at the other end of the phone and he knew he had offended her. Then, stiffly, as if she had also just zipped up her voice: “All right, Scobie.”

  “No, don’t hang up! Darling, I know you’re trying to help me. And you have. What Mrs. Helidon is doing, well, it means she’s got something on her mind. But I think it’s best we start off on the right foot. We don’t want a married life where we both have headaches, I mean about
police business. I’ve thought about it and I don’t think I should have talked to you the other night about it. This case, I mean.”

  “Is it giving you a headache?”

  “I think it’s going to.”

  “Then I want to share them. I don’t want to be the sort of wife who is only wrapped up in her own affairs. I think those wives are dull—’

  He was about to say, We’re not married yet. But something told him that would not be a politic thing to say to a girl; he knew enough about women to know that they never took a statement for just what it was worth; not when they were in the mood that Lisa was in this morning. They could embroider it with more meaning than a school of philosophers; everything you might say was taken down and used as evi-

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  dence against you. He sighed. “All right, well share the headaches. But please—no detective work. I won’t be a PR character and don’t you try to be a policeman. Okay?”

  Lisa was a sensible girl: “Darling, I had no intention of doing any police work. For one thing, I don’t like violence— that is one thing we must never talk about. Promise?”

  You don’t know me, he thought. What ever gave you the idea I liked violence or even talking about it? “Promise.”

  “But when I pick up things like this— Don’t you think it’s interesting? I’ve never met anyone so socially ambitious as Mrs. Helidon. And then all of a sudden, just overnight, she decides she is going to retire. Why would she do that unless something serious, really serious, had happened to her or her husband?”

  “You’re starting to sound like a policewoman,” he said gently. “No, you’re right. But leave me to worry about it.”

  She sighed. “All right, darling. I’ll try not to be a busybody. But it has me intrigued why—”

  “Stay away from it,” he warned. “Now I’d better shower and get dressed. I’m standing here naked in front of the window and there are seven girls across the street making inviting signs—”

  “Pull down the blind!”

  He grinned. “I think you’re jealous. See you tonight.”

  He hung up, showered, dressed, then pulled up the blind. The girl across the street, tired of waiting, had gone from her window. He collected the morning paper from outside his door and read it while he ate his breakfast of toast and coffee. There was nothing in the paper about the Opera House murder; Helga Brand had been worth only a day’s run in the news; she would not make the papers again until her murderer was arrested. State Parliament had risen for the Christmas recess; Walter Helidon was not reported as having said anything in the Assembly. He looked at the latest cricket scores, but it was force of habit, a nostalgic reaction: ten

  175 “°-

  years ago he had played for the State and there was still the occasional regret that he had not tried harder, had not persevered to see if he could play for Australia. It was all behind him now, the muscles would never again have the strength they had had in those days, and he would never know how good he might have been.

  He scanned the other pages, but the rest of the news was forgotten as soon as he read it, a sure sign that he was worried. He had always done his best to have a detached attitude towards a case, but he had never entirely succeeded. Sooner or later he became emotionally involved and his judgement would suffer. So far there had been no emotional involvement in the Brand case, but he could feel the detachment crumbling away like a wall of sand. Against the grain of his cooler judgement, he found he was wanting the murderer to be Walter Helidon.

  Last night before he had left the office he had sat down and dredged his memory, bringing up things forgotten in the silt of all that had happened since. He remembered the facts that had emerged in the case of land exploitation in which Walter Helidon had been involved; the Fraud Squad had been called in not to collect evidence against Helidon, but against a man named Bax, his brother-in-law. In the final outcome there had not been strong enough evidence to warrant laying a charge against Bax, but Malone had learned enough to realize that Helidon was less than lilywhite, that Bax, though the principal offender, had not been the originator of the suspicious land deal. Malone and the other members of the Fraud Squad working on the case had shrugged and moved on, accepting cynically that Helidon was only one in a long line of politicians in New South Wales who had used their position for their own ends. There had been major rogues such as Crick and Willis at the turn of the century, but Helidon had been only a minor one and the memory of him had

  soon been lost as Malone, over the years, had gone on to cases involving larger villainies.

  But now he remembered that he had taken a dislike to Helidon because of the man’s egoism. Egoism, he had read in a psychiatrist’s report on another case, was the theory that self-interest was the basis of morality. He had been arrogant in his answers to the questions put by Malone and his senior colleague on the fraud case; and the same arrogance, though more controlled, had been there in the interview on Wednesday evening. A man’s arrogance and egoism was not enough to indict him, but it did not help a policeman to have an objective and dispassionate attitude towards him. Especially one like Malone who, despite his efforts to the contrary, could always become so emotionally involved. I’m a poor cop, he thought. The best cop was the one who thought like a criminal, who might even have been a criminal but for some hiccup of fate. The worst one was the cop who too often put himself in the mind of the victim.

  Malone washed his breakfast crockery, made his bed and re-arranged some of the dust on the more conspicuous furniture. His mother came in every Friday to do the flat properly, so tonight it would look spick and span for another week. As he was leaving he stood at the door of the flat and looked around at what was—no, not home. He had never called it home: it was always the flat or my place. Home was still the terrace house in Erskineville, even if he would never go back to it. But this flat was, for what it was worth, him: he had put his mark on it in a more subtle way than those people who hung their name on a plate at their gates. The Qantas travel posters of London and Rome, his dream of another life; the framed photograph of himself in action as a fast bowler, the relic of the past; the photo of Lisa standing against a cloudless sky, the dream of the future: all of it evidence against him. And the two rows of books, paperbacks and second-hand hardbacks, on the cheap do-it-yourself bookshelves: some

  bestselling novels, half a dozen detective novels by Simenon and Ross MacDonald, a history of crime and detection, a book on the psychology of the criminal mind, three or four travel books: the mental range of the accused. The rest of the flat had been there when he had rented it, a grab-bag of furniture that made it identical with a hundred other flats within a mile of it. Malone looked at it, compared it with the luxury in which Helidon and Gibson lived, and thought with a feeling of self-disgust: Maybe that’s it. You resent what the other fellers have got with their bending of the rules. YouVe become what you always swore you’d never be: a dissatisfied cop. It hurt to think that the feeling had only begun since he had asked Lisa to marry him.

  He went quickly out of the flat, slamming the door behind him. He found a parking ticket on his car, put it in his pocket and swore at a parking policeman, one of the Brown Bombers in their khaki uniforms, who could be so conscientious at eight-thirty in the morning. He got into his car, already warm with the morning heat, and drove into Surry Hills, the inner section of the city where the Criminal Investigation Branch had its headquarters. He found a parking spot, hoped there wasn’t another conscientious Brown Bomber in the area, went into the CIB and upstairs to the Fingerprint Department.

  CIB headquarters had once been a hat factory. A government short of money and imagination had bought it and converted it; in another ten years it would be obsolete and, Malone was sure, another government would look around for something else that could be converted. That seemed to be the official approach to so much in Australia: improvisation. As he rode up in the lift he remembered what he had seen of Scotland Yard when he had been in London
and thought of the shots you saw of Los Angeles police headquarters in television films. Some cops didn’t know when they were well off. Then he thought: Quit it, Malone. Next thing you’ll be lead-

  ing the university students in a riot against the Establishment.

  He got out of the lift and walked down the passage between the partitions that marked the various departments. Voices murmured behind the closed doors: they could have been muted echoes. He wondered what bewildered ghosts wandered through here in the shank-end of the night. Hatters’ formers, hardeners and stumpers, smelling of steam, they would wonder at the new tradesmen who occupied their old work-places, the fingerprint, forgery and ballistics experts who could re-construct a crime with the same skill as some of the ghosts might once have re-blocked a hat. As he came to the door of the Fingerprint Section he remembered when a man had been picked up who had had no fingerprints. Mystified, they had held him for further questioning, the old euphemism for what-the-hell-goes-on-here, and on the third day prints had re-appeared on his fingers. Then they had learned that the man was a hat stumper, worked all week with his hands in near-boiling water or under steam, and by the end of each week his fingers were smooth of prints. If he had worked in this particular factory, his ghost must be busting his ghostly gut laughing.

  The Fingerprint Section was the best in the country and one of the three or four best in the world. Malone, with the frank admiration of the unscientifically-minded man for those who had mastered the science of their craft, always enjoyed visiting the section. And the men who worked there always enjoyed having him: trapped among their filing cabinets, their eyes myopically focussed to the fingerprint sheets in front of them, they often felt their contribution to crime solution was overlooked and they always appreciated the opportunity to illustrate that a policeman was nothing without the aid of forensic science.