Murder Plays House

by Ayelet Waldman

  “I’m so sorry about that,” I said, as Susan and I sat down at the kitchen table on the far side of the room.

  “Oh, no. Please don’t apologize. It’s fine,” Susan said. She put another plate of cookies in front of me, and I popped a Thin Mint into my mouth before considering how I was going to question the woman with my mouth full of food.

  “She was a terrible person, that Alicia,” Susan said.

  I nodded.

  “Those hospital ‘tips?’ Did you see those?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “That’s what killed Dina. And Halley, too.”

  Tears had begun to spill down her cheeks.

  “What happened to Dina?” I asked gently.

  She wiped her eyes with a pale pink tissue she pulled from a box with a crocheted cover. “She drank the water in the toilet tank in her hospital room. Trying to fake weight gain. She was so weak from starvation that her kidneys couldn’t handle the strain. They shut down, and then her heart just stopped.” Susan’s voice was so quiet it was almost inaudible.

  “And you think she learned how to do that from Alicia’s website?”

  “I know she did. And it wasn’t just the site. That woman would instant message her. Email her. Encourage her. She killed my little girl. Alicia Felix killed my daughter. You can’t know what that feels like. You just can’t.”

  At the same moment, we looked over at Ruby who was trying to see how many cookies she could cram, unchewed, into her mouth. Susan reached out a trembling hand and gripped mine, tightly. “Hold on to her. As tight as you can,” she whispered.

  “I will. I will.”

  We sat there for what felt like hours, but was probably not more than a moment or two. We were silent, until we heard the front door open, and a voice called out, “Susan? Sue?”

  “In here, Duane,” she called back.

  Duane Kromm came back into the room, stopping when he saw Ruby. “Hello there,” he said.

  “Hi,” she replied. Then, for no reason that I can think of, as my daughter is not known for her willingness to share anything, especially not cookies, Ruby held the plate out toward Dina’s father. “Want one?”

  “Don’t mind if I do,” he said, taking a Tagalong.

  “They’re best if you just pop them in,” Ruby said. “Don’t chew until it’s all in your mouth.”

  Duane followed her instructions carefully. He swallowed, and then smiled at Ruby, his teeth covered in chocolate. “You’re absolutely right. That’s the way to eat them.”

  She nodded seriously, and then she turned her attention back to the television.

  He crossed the room and extended his hand. “Duane Kromm,” he said.

  Susan said, “This is Juliet . . . er . . .”

  “Applebaum,” I said. “We met at Halley’s funeral.”

  “She’s investigating the murder of Alicia Felix,” Susan said.

  The smile faded from Duane’s face, and he sat down heavily in the chair next to his wife.

  “I was hoping you could tell me a little bit about your campaign to shut down the Pro-Ana sites,” I said.

  Duane and Susan looked at each other. Finally, she said, “We . . . we haven’t really gotten very far.”

  “No?” I said, surprised.

  “We’ve been busy, with work and all.”

  “Work?”

  She nodded. Her face was flushed.

  “What do you do?”

  “We work in real estate. I mean, Duane’s a realtor. I don’t sell much anymore. I sit on the Board of Realtors.”

  I stared at her, comprehension hitting me suddenly. I opened my mouth, but no words came out. Finally, I said, “Why did you choose Marilyn Farley’s programmer, Susan?”

  Duane stared at me. His lips were bright pink, and a bead of saliva sat in the center of the lower one.

  At that moment, Ruby giggled, and I realized what I had done. I had brought my little girl into the home of a murderer. I stood up slowly. “Ruby, come here,” I said.

  Her head snapped up. She could hear the fear in my voice.

  Duane also stood.

  “No!” Susan moaned.

  I began to back up in Ruby’s direction. I held my hand out to her.

  Duane took a step toward me, and I flinched.

  “Stop,” Susan said. “Duane, stop.”

  He looked back at her, his entire face, even his head, flushed bright red. “She knows,” he said.

  “The little girl. Look at her little girl.” Susan’s voice was shrill, and tears had begun to course down her cheeks.

  Her husband looked at Ruby, who had stood up, her face smeared in chocolate, her lower lip trembling.

  “Mommy,” she whispered. I crossed the room and scooped her up into my arms.

  “He won’t hurt you,” Susan said. “He won’t.”

  I looked at her husband. He collapsed into a chair and put his head in his hands.

  “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter anymore,” he said.

  His wife rushed to his side and wrapped her arms around him. Suddenly, he looked up at me. “Susan wasn’t involved. She only changed the programmer to protect me,” he said. “I used her programmer to get in the door of the house. When I told her what I’d done, she took the programmer down to the Board office right away, in the middle of the night, and used the computer to reprogram it. She just picked the number randomly. We were lucky Alicia was alone in the house. We made it back in plenty of time to put the programmer back in and erase the other numbers.”

  “Hush, Duane. Hush,” Susan whispered, reaching her hand to her husband’s lips.

  He shook free of her. “There’s no point. She knows I killed that woman.” He turned to me. “I stabbed her, and I’m not sorry. She killed our little girl.”

  Susan, her voice ragged with weeping, said, “What are you going to do? Call the police?”

  My breath was caught in my chest, and I squeezed Ruby close to me. How was I going to get my little girl out of this house, safely away from him?

  He shook his head, very slightly. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said. “Or your beautiful little girl.”

  “What are you going to do?” I asked, willing my voice not to tremble.

  “It would be better for me if I turned myself in, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He sighed. “Okay then.”

  Thirty-three

  I called Felix and Farzad as soon as I knew for sure that Duane Kromm was under arrest. I had, in fact, watched from my car, Ruby strapped into the booster seat she was fast outgrowing, as Detective Goodenough pulled up to the Kromm’s house, accompanied by a police cruiser with two uniformed officers. I had called the detective directly, not really expecting that he would carry out the arrest himself. He had, though. It had been his hand on Duane’s shoulder, steering the older man out the door and into the back seat of the cruiser. The handcuffs had seemed unnecessary to me, although of course I knew that they were standard procedure.

  My conversation with Farzad, who had answered the telephone, had been brief. I outlined quickly what had happened, and I promised to come by the next day to give him more details.

  When I arrived the next morning at their house, I found Detective Goodenough there before me. He was out of mufti, dressed in a pair of jeans and a thin silk T-shirt rather than his usual suit and tie. The maid led me into the living room, where the three men sat drinking small cups of Farzad’s excellent coffee. I felt, for a moment, like I was interrupting something.

  “Detective Goodenough was . . . uh . . . good enough to come by on his day off to tell us about the arrest,” Felix said, smiling at his pun.

  I waited to see what the detective would say. Would he acknowledge my role in the arrest, or would he assume credit himself?

  The tall man raised a cinnamon-colored eyebrow at me and said, “I was just recounting the tale of your excellent detective work, Ms. Applebaum. You’ll be a force to reckon with if you ever get yo
urself certified.”

  I lowered myself into the remaining empty armchair. “Thank you,” I said.

  “I still don’t really understand it,” Felix said, leaning forward in his chair. “I mean, I can’t believe the man would blame poor Alicia for his daughter’s death, just because of those websites. It seems so crazy.”

  I slid my eyes over to Farzad. He sipped delicately at his coffee. I got the feeling that he understood full well why Duane had felt a murderous rage toward Alicia Felix. I certainly did. Detective Goodenough didn’t respond to Felix, and it seemed to me that he, too, comprehended the motive for the murder. Felix’s inability to do so probably stemmed from the fact that he loved his sister too much to imagine her as a kind of Pied Piper of anorexia, playing the girls to their grim deaths.

  “Will there be a trial, do you think?” Farzad asked.

  I looked over at Goodenough, who seemed inclined to let me answer for him. “I don’t know,” I said. “Probably not, given that he turned himself in. I think the prosecution will likely offer a deal to avoid a trial. A jury is likely to feel . . .” and here I paused.

  We were all silent for a moment, and then Felix said, “Sympathy. That’s what you were going to say, isn’t it? The jury will have sympathy for that man.”

  I leaned forward and placed what I hoped was a comforting hand on his knee. “Perhaps. Not because of anything about Alicia, but rather because Duane was a grieving father.” But of course it was because of the kind of woman Alicia was. Any defense lawyer worth his or her salt would make sure the jury knew exactly what she had done, the damage she had wrought.

  Felix sighed heavily. “So if there’s no trial, then what? How long will he go to jail?”

  I let the detective handle that.

  “We’ll be pushing for murder two,” he said. “The defense will probably ask for voluntary manslaughter. We’ll see how it pans out. I promise you, Felix, I’ll be calling the DA, putting pressure on for the maximum.”

  Felix nodded at the other man. I glanced over at Farzad who was chewing on his lower lip. Perhaps he felt, as I did, that there was not much to be gained, in the larger scheme of things, by putting Duane Kromm in jail for decades. I knew, however, that neither of us would ever say as much to Felix.

  “Do you think you’ll be moving to Palm Springs, now?” I asked.

  Farzad smiled and cast a sly eye in my direction. “Juliet wants to know if we’ll keep up our side of the bargain.”

  “What bargain?” Felix asked.

  I looked down at my hands resting on my belly. At that moment, the baby kicked me, hard, right in the ribs, and I grunted. “Sorry,” I said. “Baby’s kicking.”

  “What bargain?” Felix asked again.

  “You know Juliet wants to buy the house. That’s why she was here in the first place. I told her that if she found out who killed Alicia, we’d give her first shot at making an offer.”

  “You did not!” Felix said.

  “I did indeed,” he said.

  Felix glared at me. “And is that why you helped us?”

  Shame kept me from looking into his eyes. “I helped you because I wanted to find out what happened to your sister. And because you hired me. And, well, yes it’s true, because I wanted the house. But of course you’re under no obligation. Obviously.”

  Goodenough interrupted us. “Without Ms. Applebaum’s assistance, we may never have found the killer. It certainly would have taken us significantly longer. And who knows if we would have been able to obtain a full confession.”

  I looked at him, gratefully.

  Felix jerked to his feet. “I’m sorry. I’m just . . . this is all so hard to deal with . . .” He stumbled out of the room. I leaned my head in my hands, embarrassed at the hash I’d made of the conversation.

  “Juliet,” Farzad said gently. I raised my eyes to his. “Give him time. He’s angry now, but not at you.”

  “I know. I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I’ll call Nahid.”

  “No, really. I mean, let’s just leave that alone for now, okay?”

  He nodded. “And your bill?”

  I smiled thinly. “That I have,” I said reaching into my bag.

  Thirty-four

  “YOU have got to get rid of this wallpaper,” Stacy said, her head cocked to one side, and her hands on her hips.

  It really was awful. Flocked gold roses on a background of red velvet. It wasn’t however, as disturbing as the mirrored ceiling in the master bedroom. “We can’t. It’s original. Ramon Navarro apparently designed it himself. Or at least that’s what Nahid said. Still, even with the wallpaper, it’s a pretty great house, don’t you think?”

  At that moment, Kat walked through the French doors into the living room. “I don’t know what that inspector was talking about. That’s no fifty thousand dollars in dry rot damage.”

  “Thank God!” I exclaimed. What with covering over the fish pond in the kitchen and repairing the railings in all the various balconies overlooking the first floor from the second, there wasn’t going to be much money left for structural repairs.

  “That’s going to cost you at least one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Definitely. They’ve eaten through the foundation, for heaven’s sake! I’ve never seen that before.” Kat continued.

  I groaned.

  “Is Peter really going to use the dungeon as his office?” Stacy asked. “It’s so gloomy and depressing down there.”

  “Uh, Stacy? Peter? Gloomy and depressing?”

  “Right. Right. It’s perfect for him. Is it true that it has iron handcuff holders pounded into the walls?”

  “That’s nothing,” Kat said. “There’s an old wooden sawhorse down there. I can’t even imagine what Ramon was getting up to on that.”

  “If he really did own the house,” I said.

  “Oh, he owned it,” Kat said. “Not even Nahid would lie about that. I’m just not sure he ever lived here. He might have rented it to some other weird silent movie star friend of his.”

  “Or else kept it for one of his mistresses,” Stacy said.

  I looked down to the crook of my arm where Sadie rested, quiet for once. Moving with a newborn is not something I recommend to anyone. Between nursing and napping, I wasn’t spending much time unpacking. The bulk of the work was falling to Peter and the kids. That meant that we were still living out of boxes two weeks after moving in, and probably would be for the next couple of months. Every time one of the children needed a clean pair of jeans or wanted to locate a missing toy they would upend a box and leave the contents scattered on the floor. So far I still wasn’t able to bend over and pick anything up, but I was hoping to feel better any day.

  Felix hadn’t, in the end, sold us his house. Nahid Lahidji had put it on the open market and had started a bidding war the likes of which the LA real estate market hadn’t seen in months. Apparently, I wasn’t the only person not put off by the home’s grisly history. Truth be told, by the time Duane Kromm was arrested for Alicia Felix’s murder, I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted any more to do with that beautiful house. There were a few images I knew I’d never get out of my mind. One was Alicia in the bathtub, her skeletal body torn and stiff. The other was one I hadn’t seen but only imagined—that same woman, hunched over a computer, weaving her malignant web to ensnare those wretched girls.

  Felix had done me a more important favor, however. He had called Harvey Brodsky. I’m not sure what he told him, but it was enough to convince the man to offer us a contract. From now on, Al and I would be providing investigative services to Brodsky’s high-profile clients. The man had advanced us enough money to hire an exterminator, put Julio on salary as a part-time receptionist (with strict instructions to stay away from the computers . . . at least until we could convince his probation officer otherwise), and even, wonder of wonders, pay ourselves a little.

  Kat had also come through in the end. The house she found for us was nowhere near as impeccably done as Felix’s house; in fact i
t was pretty much a crumbling pile, but it was certainly fabulous. It hadn’t been touched since 1926, when Ramon Navarro had it built, which meant it had its original tile bathrooms, moldings and built-ins, and Maxwell Parish–style murals sprinkled throughout the house. It also had its original electricity, plumbing, and roof, but someday we’d have the money to fix all that. The fixtures were all a kind of Hollywood Gothic wrought iron and ornate, with the occasional ghoul’s head popping out of nowhere on a chandelier or sconce.

  Peter had fallen in love with the house at first sight. The dungeon was definitely his favorite room, but the ballroom on the first floor was a close second. He was already full of plans to redo the cracked black and white parquet floor himself. I wasn’t planning on holding my breath. The room was vast enough for the kids to ride their bikes in on rainy days. The whole house was huge, in fact. There were bedrooms galore, although many of them were oddly shaped and tucked under the eaves, or accessible only through a bathroom, or a closet. It was a strange house, which, as Ruby pointed out, was entirely appropriate, given that her family was pretty strange, as least when compared to those of the other kids in school. I took issue with that, vociferously. Peter’s an odd bird, sure, but I consider myself absolutely and completely normal. More or less.

  I could tell that the house was going to suck up every spare cent we ever earned, but somehow that didn’t bother me much. Perhaps because I had no time to be worried. Miss Sadie had made her surprise appearance a good two weeks before my scheduled c-section date. We’d planned on being moved in in plenty of time to welcome her home. Instead, the movers had loaded dozens of newborn diapers into their boxes, and I’d limped my way up the jacaranda- and jasmine-flanked front path with the baby in my arms. It didn’t really matter that I didn’t have the nursery set up for her; Sadie refused to sleep in her brother’s old crib. The only place she’d close her eyes was our bed. That wasn’t that unusual; both the other kids had spent a few weeks sleeping with us. The problem was that Ruby and Isaac had decided that what was good enough for the baby was good enough for them, and we had yet to spend a night without three extra sets of toes digging into our sides, and pushing us to the far ends of the bed. I was grateful that Mr. Navarro’s old bedstead was still in the master bedroom. I wasn’t sure where I was going so find a new mattress to replace the musty, sagging one—they don’t make them in that size anymore, if they ever did. He’d probably had to special order the king and a half we were currently inhabiting with varying levels of comfort from a special company that catered especially to silent movie Lotharios. I hoped they were still in business.