the whole world, including Saraub, was in on it. A genuine gaslight, just to drive her mad. They’d done the same to Betty. Jayne wasn’t even dead. The tenants had paid her off. All fun and games for the idle rich.
She took a breath. The floor was spinning. The walls were slanted. Nothing in this entire building made sense!
Donna opened her phone. She sounded cheerful, like maybe she got a commission for every lonely woman she helped lock up. “A van—”
Audrey interrupted. “No docore. I’maset…” She bit her lip. “She was my friend.”
“You sure?” the man asked.
“She’s my niece. Too many vodka tonics,” Loretta said, then clapped her hands together. “Back to Betty Ford for you!”
The detective waited for Audrey to answer.
“I’ma sore,” she said.
He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a business card. Audrey’s eyes were so bleary that she couldn’t read the number or title, only the name: AIDAN MCGIL-LICUDDY. “Well, when you’re feeling better, if you think of anything you want to tell me, give me a call.”
Aidan and Donna got on the elevator. The tenants closed in around her. More than twenty now. At least thirty. Loretta’s eyelids blinked over opaque cataracts. The wise, gray-haired man pulled out his needle, and masked Francis straightened her arm. Another shot. Fluid sloshed. The left side of her chest cramped like a charley horse.
The detectives closed the iron elevator gate behind them with a crash. It was then that she realized her mistake. “Waaaait!” she rasped. But by then, it was too late.
35
The Sound a Trap Makes as It Closes, II: A Little Insulin Never Killed Anybody!
The tenants closed in around her. Cold hands and loose skin. Her feet weren’t touching the floor anymore. She felt herself being carried back into 14B. “Soooop,” she moaned, as they walked the fifty-foot hall. Their hands were soft, as if they’d never washed a dish or lifted a bag of groceries. But like a game of light as a feather, there were so many of them that they each only needed their fingers to hoist her up over their heads. “No. Peeeease, no.”
Into the dark den to find rippling bits of clothes and chopped cardboard and Wolverine, all laced with her blood. Tiny red ants circled the hole in the floor. “I’m-get-you,” she said. “Even if I have come back an haunt-you.”
“My dear,” Loretta answered. “We’d be delighted!” They laid her on the floor next to the air mattress. Her feet felt cold and stiff, like ice. So did her hands. She was shivering even though she was sweaty and hot. Loretta and Marty stood over her, while behind, the rest cleared the smashed old door from the room, then piled more moving boxes in its place. To her left, someone returned the grisly rebar to the side of the piano, along with a shiny red toolbox.
“We can’t have you calling Romeo!” a man in a blue Armani suit from the early 1960s announced, then shoved her cell phone into his pocket, while an old woman unplugged her laptop and packed it under her arm, and another collected her soiled pants and shoes, so her only clothing was Clara’s sweat suit.
Marty held her wrist with shaking fingers while looking at his watch. She was convulsing now, and she didn’t dare take a deep breath. Her chest felt like it might split open.
“How much did you give her?” he called into the crowd.
“Nobody ever died from a little insulin. I take it every day,” a woman with coarse, dyed-black hair and more gold necklaces than 1980s Mr. T. answered. Marty pumped the plastic mattress with air, then helped Audrey on top of it.
“Oh, stop touching the girls, you dirty old man,” Loretta teased.
“Hear, hear, Marty Hearst! Don’t play with the girls; you don’t know where they’ve been!” Evvie Waugh shrieked, then slapped Marty on the ass with Edgardo’s cane. The sound was sharp, nearly wet, as if it had cut open Marty’s thin-skinned ass: Whhhack!
Marty grimaced. Tears gathered in the corners of his eyes. Loretta clapped. “Hear! Hear!” And then the rest were clapping, too.
In the commotion, Franics’ mask came loose. Audrey gasped. His face was badly scarred. Something had broken the bridge between his nostrils, and it had healed wrong. One side was closed over with skin, and the other had opened up too wide. His left eye was missing, and its socket swelled with infection. It was as if the man had smashed his own face through a window,