The Night Bell Read Online Free Page B

had a very tastefully appointed office. Signed pictures of political celebrities. A baseball in a Plexiglas case. He had excellent hair and was tanning-bed orange, but his spoonbilled nose spoiled the effect. It hung down like a glob of raw dough in the middle of his face, and it was spidery with small red veins.
    “Who did
that
to you?” she asked, meaning his leg.
    “I fell down some stairs.”
    “I heard an old lady tried to drive your knee three hundred yards with a granite pen holder.”
    “Oh, no no no,” he said, suddenly laughing. He was going to try being affable. “It was just some heated words. I understand why people are frustrated, Detective. A development like Tournament Acres, you can’t predict all the challenges in advance.”
    “What did you tell Sergeant Macdonald? The same thing?” The man nodded. “Did he buy it?”
    “Buy it?”
    “Where did he go when he was done with you?”
    “He, you know, he went to talk to her.”
    “Honey Eisen. She said he was coming to see you.”
    “Oh no, he’s already been and gone.” There was a knock at the door. “What now?” Givens muttered, but Hazel got up to answer it. It was a woman in an OPS uniform, rail thin with sprigs of red hair sticking out from under her cap. The veins on her arms seemed to be keeping her muscles lashed to her body.
    “DC Torrance,” she said. “You must be the legendary Detective Inspector Micallef.”
    “You pronounced it right, at least.”
    “Have you gone over to see Eisen?”
    “Yes. She’s in a panic.” Hazel brought her attention back to Givens. He shrank under her gaze.
    “Getting the second course started is taking longer than we thought,” he said. “She wants us to move her.”
    “I don’t really care about that. I only want to know two things: what is this bone Mrs. Eisen is talking about, and where is my sergeant?”
    “I gave him the bone,” Givens said, pushing the whole mess away with his palms. “You people have what you need. But I just wanna say …” His eyes flicked back and forth between the two women.
    “What?”
    “Honey Eisen signed a
contract
.” He fixed her with a conspiratorial look. “You know what people are like. One person panics, then there’s the stampede. I’ve seen this before, people threatening lawsuits, people making stuff up, anything to get out of an investment if someone starts whispering things to them. But we’re going to do everything we said we’re going to do here. This is going to be a very desirable address.” He stopped to catch his breath and read her face. He decided not to say anything else.
    Hazel said, “We may want to talk to you again.” She nodded at DC Torrance to show she could leave first.
    “Oh sure! Come on back anytime!” His voice was moist with false bonhomie.
    It was funny what people told you by not telling you anything. It took a chessmaster’s intelligence to lie, and most people had already revealed themselves before a word was out of their mouths. You didn’t look at faces, you looked ateyes, mouths, teeth, ears. Anything that might give you a clue to what a person was really feeling. You had to use this knowledge against people. To keep them off balance or on their toes, to see what they’d do. Givens’s eyelids had not stopped ticcing the whole time Hazel was in his office. Through his face, he’d told her something was up. He’d pooched his lips out from time to time in a gesture that was supposed to look like he was thinking. But he was hiding something.
    Torrance was going to do a slow crawl around the development to see if anything seemed out of order. Hazel had barely had a chance to take a read of her Mayfair partner, but the woman looked like she could bend metal. She had a buzzy alertness that came from too many power smoothies.
    Hazel drove back to Eisen’s house and had to blink a couple of times: Macdonald’s cruiser was gone. What the hell? “Torrance,” she said over her