17
Laurie was grateful that the other Wakelings were in whatever meeting they had either scheduled or fabricated to have an excuse to cut short their conversation with her. Now they were nowhere in sight.
She followed Tom to a small office cluttered with files and notebooks. It had a window view, but she imagined the other family members in much more luxurious work spaces based on her fleeting glimpse of the conference room.
It didn’t take long for Laurie to explain why she was there. Now that Under Suspicion was a hit show, she didn’t even need to lay out the nature of her work. She stretched the truth a bit by saying she had just met with his cousins Carter and Anna “to work out the details of their participation in the next special.”
“I assume you’ll be willing to sit down with us, too?”
He shrugged. “Yeah, no problem.”
Trying to appear nonchalant, she handed him a copy of their standard participation agreement.
While he skimmed the document’s contents, she asked how long he had been working at the company.
“Two years as of last Halloween,” he said, dashing off his signature and returning the completed form to her.
That would have been less than a year after Virginia Wakeling’s death.
Laurie had read in Robert Wakeling’s New York Times obituary that he had started the business with his brother, Kenneth, but had assumed sole responsibility over operations by the time Long Island City parking lots were being replaced by high-end luxury loft apartments. She asked Tom about the family history.
“God bless both Dad and Uncle Bob”—he made the sign of the cross—“but if there’s a lesson to be learned from that chapter in the Wakeling Saga, it’s ‘family first.’ They let the business get between them.” He sounded melancholy as he described how the two brothers shared a dream as young men to develop a pocket of land just beyond Manhattan into a thriving, modern neighborhood. But when their dream hadn’t yet come to fruition after five years of work, Tom’s father, Ken, grew impatient. Bob’s forte was construction. Ken was the architect in the family. “My father really was an artist at heart, while Bob was a natural businessman. Dad’s artistic side wanted—no, needed—to work on other projects. So Uncle Bob bought Dad out of the business, basically paying him the land’s purchase price. Dad was grateful for the return of his investment so he could move on to more reliable jobs as an architect, and his brother kept plugging away at their dream. For a while, everything was fine. Then all of the pieces of their Long Island City plan finally began to fall into place like dominos.”
It was a plan that would lead to a two-hundred-million-dollar fortune for Robert Wakeling. “Your uncle didn’t find a way of splitting some of it with your father?” Laurie asked.
“Nope. He said Dad made his decision. He quit, and Uncle Bob didn’t. Like I said, he was all business.”
“That couldn’t have been easy for your father to accept,” Laurie said.
He shook his head. “My senior year of high school, he sold our apartment in an Upper East Side high-rise and moved us to the west side because he couldn’t stand the sight of Long Island City on the other side of the river.”
“And yet here you are working at Wakeling Development.”
“My father died a year before Uncle Bob, also of a heart attack. I swear, I think they’d both still be alive if they had made peace with each other. Personally, I could always see both of their sides in the feud. Dad thought Uncle Bob cut him out of a fortune while Uncle Bob thought Dad bailed on their dream, and shouldn’t be rewarded for it.”
“But you weren’t some neutral third party,” Laurie said. “One of these men was your father. Not to mention, you had to watch while your aunt, uncle, and cousins became extremely wealthy people. Carter and Anna stepped right into the family business, straight out of college. You only landed here a couple of years ago.”
“Honestly, I didn’t resent them for it one bit. At that point I had jobs bartending at nightclubs, and life was a party. I told myself I was having fun.”
“And now things are different?” Laurie asked.
“Clearly,” he said, gesturing at the stacks of documents around his office. “If I had to pinpoint the moment it all crystallized for me, I think it was that night of the Met Gala, to tell you the truth.”
“Because of your aunt’s death?”
“No, although obviously that was horrible. I was at the museum, surrounded by the rich and famous. I saw the way my aunt and cousins were treated there, almost like royalty. Meanwhile, I knew I only got in because of my name. They were hobnobbing with celebrities and members of the board of trustees, and I was sneaking around the portraits gallery like a kid playing hide-and-seek with some ridiculous woman. We were complete fish out of water.”
“Your cousins mentioned you had a rather colorful guest with you that night.”
“Ah, Tiffany Simon,” he said smiling. “Absolutely gorgeous, and a ton of fun, but a complete wacko. That was our second date, as I recall. I saw her a few more times after that, but then I finally realized she loved drama. Every moment of life was like a scene in a play that she was writing as she went along. Get this: she would introduce herself to a stranger as a princess from some fictional island, just to entertain herself. It was exhausting. Anyway, running around the gala with her that night while she was drinking too much and telling insane stories about Granny the lover, I felt ashamed of myself in comparison to the rest of my family. I decided right then and there I was going to talk to my aunt and cousins to see if they had any advice for me to put my life on a different track.”
“And then your aunt died.”
“Talk about surreal. It was a wake-up call. I realized life is short. Suddenly, we were the next generation of Wakelings. I waited several months before approaching Anna and Carter for a job, but when I did, they welcomed me with open arms.”
“Do you mind if I ask where your mother is in all this?”
“Florida. After Dad died, it was going to be hard for her to keep up with expenses in New York. She sold the apartment and got a condo in Naples. She visits at least twice a year. I think she’s happy that the cousins and I were able to pull the family back together, even if it was too late for Dad and Bob to see.”
It was a happy ending to the Wakeling family story, but something about it didn’t ring true to Laurie. Tom had to have resented his cousins for hoarding the largess of Wakeling Development for themselves, even after their father had passed away. Carter and Anna hadn’t built that company any more than Tom had, and yet they were “treated like royalty,” as he described it, while he was a “fish out of water.” He might have indeed decided “right then and there” at the museum to turn his life around. He may not have even waited for the gala to be over. She pictured Tom pulling his aunt aside for advice. Virginia would have been distracted, focusing on the party and her mingling with other benefactors of the museum. She could have told him it wasn’t the proper time or place, or maybe she rebuffed him outright.
Laurie could almost hear Virginia Wakeling speaking from the grave, as if she were standing in the room with them. You’re even less dedicated than your father, with none of his talent. Too little, too late. Tom might have continued to make his case. Or maybe he said something worse. You never worked a day in your life, Aunt Virginia, and now you’re squandering your money on a gold digger.
Virginia would have been upset. She would have gone to her security guard, Marco, asking to go up to the roof for fresh air.
Laurie imagined Tom watching his aunt step into the elevator. She could see him tripping the alarm in the exhibit and then slipping into a staircase when the guards weren’t watching. Knock it off, she told herself. You were ready to decide that Ivan was the killer before you met him. Now you’re about to prejudge Tom because he sounds too good to be true. Don’t get ahead of yourself.
“Well, thank you very much for your time, Tom,” she said, forcing a warm smile. “I’ll be in touch when we start planning our production schedule.”
“I’m happy to go along with whatever my family wants me to do.”
• • •
Jerry and Grace were waiting in the back of the black SUV that would return them to Manhattan.
“We have good news,” Jerry said, looking excitedly toward Grace as Laurie climbed into the car. “You tell her! You’re the one who did it.”
Grace was smiling from ear to ear. “Anna’s assistant called Jerry five minutes ago. Apparently Anna, Peter, and Carter all agree to participate in the show.”
Jerry said, “She specifically mentioned they didn’t want a liar like Ivan Gray to present his side of the story on national television without a counterpoint, pretty much quoting Grace word for word.”
“Nice work, Grace,” Laurie said, offering her a quick high five. “We can add Tom’s agreement to the collection.”
She handed Grace the document Tom had signed.
“So how did things go?” Jerry asked. “Get any dirt?”
“Maybe. He says it’s all love and happiness between him and the cousins, but I’m not so sure.”
The only thing of which Laurie was certain was that their list of alternative suspects had just grown by one.