Helga's Web Read Free Page A

line. A ship went by, its decks crowded with passengers waving frantically at the wharf and the relatives they had left behind; streamers trailed the sides of the ship, giving it an air of tattered gaiety that must have pained its captain. The Manly hydroplane scooted by, hell-bent for the city with its load of housewives desperate to spend their money. No one has any time anymore, Malone thought, remembering his days as a kid when a ride on the ferry to Manly was an overseas experience.
    He gratefully took off the helmet, which was already giving him a headache, picked up the phone and dialled Police Headquarters.
    “Thought you’d have cars with radio,” said Kerslake.
    “We do. But the newspaper blokes listen in on the wavelength. We try to keep them off the scene as long as we can.”
    “That good public relations?”
    “We’re old-fashioned,” said Malone. “We don’t think murder calls for any public relations.”
    And left Kerslake with a mouthful of words that were useless.
    Malone asked for a police photographer, a doctor and someone to take fingerprints. He hung up, looked wistfully out at the water preening itself under its nor’-easter breeze, then turned to Kerslake and said, “Send up Mr. Malone.”
    “Your father?”
    “Mr. Malone,” Malone said emphatically, aware of the two mini-skirted secretaries poised like carrier pigeons on the edges of their desks: they’d be away as soon as he’d let them go, carrying gossip between their ring-of-confidence teeth. Kerslake went away, helmet bobbing on his head like a loose cranium, and Malone looked at the two girls. “Do you know why those rooms ‘way down below were boarded up?”
    The two girls looked doubtfully at each other; then the older of them, twenty-year-old face half-hidden between two scraggly scarves of dark hair, said, “It all happened while Mr. Utzon was here. You know, he was the original architect—” Malone nodded, trying not to look wearied by a story that even the metho drinkers in the Domain now knew by heart. “In Mr. Utzon’s conception—” There was no mistaking her tone: she was one of Utzon’s army. When the battle between the Danish architect and the State government had reached its peak, sides had been drawn on lines as distinct as those in the War of the Roses or the American Civil War; only the demonstrations over the war in Vietnam had produced as much heat. Malone himself had once been called out to separate two architects who, fired by drink and opposite aesthetics, had tried to demolish each other as a slum. The girl went on: “In Mr. Utzon’s conception all that space down below was not needed, it was just part of the basement structure. When he resigned—’ she underlined the word to emphasize
    that her hero had not been sacked—“when he resigned and the new people came in—” Malone waited for her to spit, but she had been to a good private school where spitting had not been permitted. “The new people said they needed that space down below/’
    “When were these changes known?”
    The two girls looked at each other and now the younger one, face as blank as a clock’s without hands, took her cue: “Oh, we’ve known about them for some time. In this office, I mean. I don’t know about the, you know, workers outside.” There were lines of demarcation here, too: the office workers and the, you know, workers outside. “Why, inspector?”
    “Sergeant,” said Malone, unflattered. He looked them up and down, wondering what they’d be like in bed; maybe he should have brought Clements up here with him, got his mind off his winning bets. The blonde sat higher on the edge of her desk, mini-skirt tucked into her lap so that it was almost invisible. I don’t know why rape is a crime, Malone thought. Being eye to eye with a girl’s crotch all day and half the night should give a man certain privileges. A man, unwittingly leaving his fly unzipped, could be arrested for indecent exposure; a girl,