4
Only one word came to mind when Laurie saw Ivan Gray walk into her office: huge. The man was enormous. He was at least six-foot-three, but his height was not what stood out about his appearance. There wasn’t an ounce of spare flesh on his body. He looked trim and powerful. His hair was short and dyed brown. His eyes were hazel green.
She was almost afraid to shake his hand, expecting a grip that would crush her fingers. She was surprised when he greeted her with a normal, human handshake rather than a painful clasp.
“Thank you so much for inviting me in, Laurie.” She had not, in fact, invited him, and had not asked him to call her by her first name.
“Well, Ryan speaks so highly of you,” she said flatly.
“The feeling’s mutual,” Ivan said, giving Ryan a friendly punch in the arm. “The first time he came in for a session, I thought, This guy’ll be begging to leave in twenty minutes. But he trains hard. Might even be able to defend himself against one of my better fighters if he keeps up the work—the female fighters, I mean.”
It was the type of inside joke that immediately reminded the outsider—in this case, Laurie—that she wasn’t part of the gang. Laurie wished that Ryan would show the same kind of dedication to learning basic rules of journalism. She mustered a smile.
She would normally study a case for hours before interviewing the primary suspect. She was at a loss for how to transition from their banter about Ryan’s latest workout obsession to a woman’s murder. Once she gestured for Ivan to have a seat on the sofa, she decided to jump right in. “So Ryan told me you’re interested in having us reinvestigate the death of Virginia Wakeling.”
“You can call it a reinvestigation if you’d like, but if you ask me, the NYPD hasn’t investigated it for even the first time. All they needed to know was that a sixty-eight-year-old woman was dating a forty-seven-year-old man, and they made up their minds. They didn’t seem to care about the complete lack of any evidence against me.”
Laurie did the simple arithmetic in her head. Virginia had died three years earlier, making Ivan fifty years old today. He looked more like he was forty, but she suspected that he may have had some assistance in that area. His skin was tan, even though it was January, and that short hair might be hiding the onset of baldness.
The case had been in the news so recently that Laurie was able to recall most of the reported facts from memory. From what she gathered, Virginia’s money was at the heart of the original police investigation. Her husband had been a real estate genius, successful enough to leave Virginia an extremely wealthy widow. Laurie could only imagine what Wakeling’s family and friends thought when she began dating a personal trainer more than twenty years her junior.
But, despite what Ivan said, his age and profession were not the only reasons he became the leading suspect.
“With all due respect,” Laurie said, “to call it a complete lack of evidence is not entirely fair to the investigation, is it? Motive, after all, is a type of evidence. There were financial concerns, as I recall.”
After Virginia’s death, police discovered that several hundred thousand dollars of her money had been spent on Ivan’s various expenses. Her children were adamant that their mother had not authorized the expenditures. They speculated that their mother may have discovered that Ivan was stealing from her, and could have been planning to pursue criminal charges against him. That would give him a powerful motive to silence her.
“Nothing irregular at all,” he said. “Yes, she helped me with some bills. The Porsche was her birthday gift to me. I tried not to accept it. It was far too generous, but she insisted. She told me that she loved the idea of being driven around in it with the top down in the summer. She said it was more a gift to herself than to me.”
Laurie hadn’t remembered that an expensive sports car was involved, but even a Porsche didn’t amount to the kinds of expenditures at issue. “My recollection is that it was more than a car. Substantial funds were missing.”
“They weren’t.” He punched his right fist into his left palm to emphasize the point. Laurie found herself flinching. It wasn’t the first time that she had reminded herself she might be speaking to a killer. It was the nature of her work. She had a sudden eerie image of him lifting Virginia Wakeling and throwing her from the roof of the museum. Whoever killed her had to have been strong, and this man clearly fit the bill.
Ivan’s voice was calm when he continued his explanation. “The money wasn’t missing. Like I said, she covered some small bills of mine, plus the car. The rest of the money was an investment in PUNCH. That’s my gym.”
Laurie nodded to signal that she was aware of his business.
“It was a dream of mine, and Virginia knew that. She was a client. I’d have her do some boxing exercises—nothing heavy, mostly some rope jumping and shadowboxing. It’s a great workout, and totally different from everything else. People love it, and I knew that I had a winning idea. I never asked her to help me. I was absolutely shocked when she told me she’d give me the seed money. I found an old-school boxing gym and convinced the owner to sell it to me so I could transform it into a hot spot. He’s technically a partner, but the business is all mine. Virginia believed in me. She knew I’d succeed, and I did.”
Laurie could tell that he was proud of his accomplishments. Had they been built on the murder of an innocent woman? “How much money did she front you?”
“Five hundred thousand dollars.”
Laurie could feel her eyes widen. People had killed for far less.
“I don’t understand, Ivan. If she was investing in your business, why didn’t you have a written agreement or some other proof of her intentions? My understanding from news reports at the time was that the children were adamant that their mother would never have agreed to give you that kind of money.”
“Because that’s what Virginia told them. Her children are greedy. They’ve had everything handed to them, and it’s never enough. They took one look at me and assumed I was a gold digger. To get them off her back, Virginia assured them that she wasn’t giving me anything. She wouldn’t even let me tell them that she’d paid for the Porsche. They had to suspect she was hiding it from them. I made a decent living as a trainer, but I would never have spent that kind of money on a car. But then after Virginia was killed, they made me out to be some kind of thief to the police.”
“Spending money on luxuries like sports cars is one thing. You don’t think a mother would tell her children that she was investing a substantial amount of money in a business?”
He shook his head. “I know that she didn’t. Don’t get me wrong: Virginia loved her children, and was very close to them. But they didn’t really know their mother. Virginia was going through a tremendous change when she was killed. Bob—that was her husband—had been gone for five years. She was finally living her life beyond just being his wife and their mother. She was completely independent and finding such joy in her philanthropy. She had stepped back from some causes that were important to Bob and had chosen her own. That, of course, included a seat on the board at the Metropolitan Museum.”
Laurie couldn’t help but notice the gentleness in this big man’s voice when he spoke about Virginia. “And how did your gym fit into that?”
“My point is that she was happy—really, truly happy—forging her own identity. But her children second-guessed everything. They wanted her in a time capsule. They didn’t like the idea of her changing, and I was part of that change. We were very serious about getting married. I had already bought a ring for her. But she wasn’t ready to tell the family. Virginia believed that once my boxing business was off the ground, her children might start to accept me. That’s why she helped me, and that’s why she didn’t tell anyone about it.”
“But there must have been checks that she signed, something to prove she consented to the expenditures.”
“She did it all electronically. Virginia was older than me, but better online than I am. She could donate a hundred thousand dollars to a charity with a few keystrokes.”
Or alternatively, Laurie thought, you knew her passwords and figured she was so wealthy and generous, she would never miss the money.
“She wired about half of that money directly to my partner for my initial buy-in,” Ivan explained, “and then the other half went to pay for equipment, improvements on the space—the costs of starting up a business. But it wasn’t gone. It was in a business that she believed in, which would have been part of our income after we were married.”
Ryan had been quiet up until this point, but Laurie could tell from the way he was leaning forward in his seat that he was eager to interject. “It’s just like I said, Laurie. Ivan was stereotyped from the very beginning, but he didn’t actually have a financial motive to hurt Virginia. First of all, there wasn’t a shred of evidence to prove that the money Virginia put into PUNCH was stolen. Even if Ivan had stolen money from her—”
“Which I didn’t—”
Ryan held up a palm to cut Ivan off. “Of course not. But assume for the sake of argument that he had, it would have been Virginia’s word against his if she had accused him of taking the money without her permission. They were in a close, romantic relationship. They weren’t officially engaged yet, but had clearly discussed marriage in the future, as evidenced by the purchase of a ring from Harry Winston. She had obviously spent other amounts of money on him voluntarily, including the Porsche. I’m telling you as a former prosecutor, no lawyer could have proven a case of theft against Ivan beyond a reasonable doubt. In a worst case scenario, they would have reached some kind of settlement where he repaid her from the business, as if she were an investor.”
Laurie could see the logic of Ryan’s argument. If anything, the only consequence of Virginia’s murder would be to ensure that Ivan never got to marry into her money. Her death had also called attention to her finances, virtually ensuring that Ivan would be the leading suspect. She had to hand it to these two. In a short meeting, they had managed to spin her perception of Ivan on its head. From this new perspective, she could see Ivan’s argument that he had nothing to gain and everything to lose from murdering Virginia.
Ivan must have recognized that she was beginning to get pulled into his side of the story. “I swear to you, Laurie, I didn’t do it. I loved Ginny. That’s what I called her. She told me that when she was young that was her nickname, but her husband wanted her to be called Virginia after he started to become well known. We would have been married within months if she had lived, and we would have been happy.”
Ryan added, “Laurie, I know you hate it when I step on your toes around here, but I’m telling you: this case will be a hit for Under Suspicion. It’s perfect. And we’d be helping a good man.”
Normally by the time she asked the most important question, she had already mastered every publicly available fact about the case. But, at the risk of jumping in too soon, she asked it now, because she had to know. “If you didn’t kill Mrs. Wakeling, who did?”
When Ivan immediately looked to Ryan instead of answering the question, she believed her first instincts had been right. When the pause grew longer in silence, she began to stand from her chair. “Okay, I think I can mull things over from here—”
“No, wait,” Ivan exclaimed. “It’s not that I don’t have my theories. Trust me, I do, and facts to back them up. But I’ve got a training session in fifteen minutes with an A-list movie star, and I never expected you to hear the full side of my story. I’m not sure I want to start naming names unless you really think you might use Virginia’s case. I’ve managed to go on with my life, even though I know a lot of people think I’m a murderer. If I stir all of this up again, I want it to be for a good reason.”
She didn’t know what to think of Ivan’s logic. On the one hand, it seemed like an innocent person would drop everything for a chance to clear his name. On the other hand, she could picture Ryan cajoling Ivan into coming up to the studio, in which case Ivan might be having second thoughts about saying too much.
“Fair enough,” she said. “Let’s each take a day to mull it over. We can meet again tomorrow if we both think it’s worthwhile.”
Ivan nodded his agreement. “Thank you so much, Laurie, for your time and for keeping an open mind,” he said. “It means so much to me.” This time, when he shook her hand, the grip was tight enough to burn.