Helga's Web by Jon Cleary Page B

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.”
     
2
    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.