Murder Plays House (31 page)

Barbara sat up in her chair, shaking away my arm. I leaned back and looked at her. She took a shaky breath. “You probably want to know if I killed her, don’t you?”

I did, but I doubted she’d tell me if she had.

“The day she died was Halley’s first day in the hospital. I spent the whole day there with her. They let me sleep with her for the first night until they moved her to the ward. I almost wish it had been me who killed Alicia Felix, but it wasn’t.”

I
got the address of the Kromms and then left Barbara alone in her house. I didn’t want to. The idea of a mother grieving in a place empty but for memories of her child was nearly more than I could bear. Barbara was there, forced to stare at the beautifully framed photographs of her child, compelled to walk by the room with its pastel sheets and poster of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the stacks of CDs by Fiona Apple and Alanis Morissette, the outgrown stuffed animals and American Girl dolls gathering dust on the shelves, the iMac covered in stickers with its Grrl Power mouse pad. Halley’s room might have looked nothing like I imagined. The silence in the house, however, I knew would be exactly like that of my worst fears. The silence of a disappeared child is like no other.

I picked Ruby up from school, leaving Isaac for his father. I needed some time with my girl, and I figured Peter and Isaac could amuse themselves with Legos and superheroes for
a little while. Ruby and I had tea in her favorite café in Santa Monica, then we went on a drive through the Canyon. It was while we were winding through the narrow streets, counting Jacaranda trees, that I realized we were only a few blocks from where Halley’s friend Dina had lived. I rechecked the address and telephone number that Barbara Hoynes had given me, and then turned to Ruby.

“Hey, chickadee. Do you mind if we make a stop?”

She was chewing on the neck of her T-shirt. She spat out the fabric. “A work stop?”

“Don’t chew your clothes. Yes, a work stop. But a short one.”

She flicked out her tongue, catching the stretched out, damp bit of shirt in her mouth. “Okay,” she said.

“Don’t chew your clothes.”

“It’s all chewed up, already.”

The blue cotton was crumpled and wadded, full of tiny holes made by her teeth. There was no point in trying to save it.

Dina’s parents, Duane and Susan Kromm, lived in a stucco house set back from the road and nestled in a flower garden. It didn’t look any larger than my apartment, but given the neighborhood, probably cost well over two million dollars.

Susan Kromm answered the door. “Can I help you?” she said in a soft, sweet voice.

She glanced down at Ruby. “Hello,” she said.

“Hi,” Ruby said.

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

She smiled uncertainly.

“I hope you don’t mind us dropping by like this. I know this is a painful time for you. But Barbara Hoynes gave me
your name and address. I’m investigating what happened to Alicia Felix.”

Susan Kromm’s face paled, and she bit her lip. “Why are you here? I mean, we didn’t know the woman. We never met her.”

“I understand. I was hoping to talk to you a bit about the Pro-Ana websites. Barbara told me that you and your husband were involved in a campaign to have them shut down.”

Susan nodded.

“Do you mind if we come in?” I asked.

She looked at Ruby.

“Ruby will amuse herself,” I reassured the woman. “I have some paper and a pen in my purse.”

Still looking unwilling, and suspicious, Susan motioned us inside. “Does she watch television?” she asked.

“Yes, I do!” Ruby replied.

Ruby and I followed Susan into her kitchen. There was a small sitting area on one end of the room. She snapped on the TV, changed the channel, and handed Ruby the remote. “It’s on Cartoon Disney, honey. Don’t change it without asking your mom, okay?”

“Okay,” Ruby said.

“Would you like a cookie? I have Girl Scout cookies.” She turned to me. “They got delivered a few days ago. Dina must have ordered them from one of the neighbor girls.” The older woman’s cheeks twitched as she tried to hold back tears. “She ordered my favorite, Thin Mints, and her dad’s, Tagalongs. She never would have eaten them herself, but she liked to see us eat. I used to think she just liked to see us enjoying our food. Now I think it had more to do with feeling better than us, because she could resist a cookie, and neither Duane nor I could.”

I laid a comforting hang on her arm. “I’m fine,” she said, swallowing hard. She bustled around her kitchen, laying a small pile of cookies on a plate for Ruby, and pouring a glass of milk to go with them.

“What do you say?” I said, when Ruby had accepted the proffered plate and glass.

“Thank you,” my daughter mumbled, her face already smeared with chocolate. “Is this nonfat milk?”

“Ruby!”

“What?”

“Yes, honey. It’s nonfat. Is that okay?” Susan said.

Ruby nodded. “Good. Nonfat is the best.”

I resisted the urge to spank her. It wouldn’t have done any good. I satisfied myself with watching her gobble the cookies. Milk or no, she was getting plenty of good old fashioned fat into her body.

“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.”

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 yourself 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.”