Ivan filled a good third of the long, low, white leather sofa that sat beneath her office windows. He assumed the pose she always associated with so-called “alpha” males: knees apart, feet firmly planted, taking up as much space as possible.
He was telling them about the last time he had seen Virginia Wakeling. “She looked so beautiful that night. Through my eyes, I didn’t even see our age difference. The dinner had just ended, and they were preparing the stage for the musical performances. My guess is it was around nine-thirty. We were working our way through the room—they set it all up around the temple,” he added, referring to the museum’s giant Egyptian showpiece, the Temple of Dendur. “Ginny was very much in demand. I would just nod and say hello. But when the museum director was talking to Ginny, his wife made a point of striking up a conversation with me. I told her I was a trainer, and she had endless questions about Pilates versus yoga, free weights versus cross-training. When I finally got free, I couldn’t find Ginny anywhere.”
“Where were you when you found out she had died?”
“In the main hall. I had worked my way there after not finding her in the temple. I was looking for her when I heard the sounds of people in shock, then a woman screamed something about a woman in a blue gown. I knew right then in my gut that something had happened to Ginny. A guard said later that she had asked to go up to the roof for fresh air. Someone must have followed her upstairs and pushed her.”
“You said you had thoughts about who that might be,” Laurie said.
“You asked me that yesterday: If I didn’t kill Ginny, who did?”
“It’s the question I always ask when we start to work a new case.”
“Well, to start with, you need to take the if out of the question. I’m an innocent man.”
Once again, Laurie thought he was more concerned about clearing his name than identifying Ginny’s killer.
“We know you are,” Ryan said.
Laurie ignored Ryan’s comment and spoke directly to Ivan. “You said ‘to start with.’ What other concerns do you have?”
“I need you to know I take no pleasure in pointing a finger at any of these people. I cared about them, whether or not they felt the same way toward me.”
“Fair enough,” she said.
Ivan took a deep breath, as if to steel himself for what he was about to say. “I’ve spent three years asking myself your very question, and can see the only explanation for Ginny’s death: it was her family.
“Her family hated me,” Ivan said, spitting out the words. “They despised me. Loathed me. Take out a thesaurus and pick any word. They looked at me as if I were subhuman. I tried so hard to get their approval. Any comment I made—that’s a nice dress, it’s a beautiful day—was met with a scoff or an eye roll, at best.”
“Which family members are we talking about?”
“Carter, Anna, and Peter. All three of them a united front of disdain.” Laurie recognized the names from Virginia’s obituary. Carter was the son, thirty-eight years old and apparently unmarried at the time of his mother’s death. Anna was the daughter, two years younger than her brother. Peter was Anna’s husband. She jotted down their names on the notepad in her lap.
Ivan’s tone softened. “Well, at least the grandkids, Robbie and Vanessa, liked me, but they were toddlers, and all I had to do was pick them up and spin them around and I was their best buddy.”
He smiled sadly at some memory he was having of the kids who might have been his step-grandchildren if things had worked out differently.
“Why did the family dislike you so much?” Laurie asked.
“If you asked them, they’d say I was too young, too poor, and only after their mother for one reason. But, honestly, I don’t think their feelings had anything to do with me personally. They would have found a reason to disapprove of anyone Ginny allowed into her life.”
“Her husband had passed on five years earlier. They didn’t want her to find happiness with someone else?”
Laurie remembered one of her last conversations with Alex. I know this sounds cold, Laurie, but it’s been six years. Six years since Greg was murdered, and, still, she had pushed Alex away so many times that he had tired of waiting.
“They didn’t want her to change. Ginny loved her husband, don’t get me wrong, but in the time I knew her, I saw her grow from under his shadow. She was sharper, funnier, more alive. And as much as I’d like to say it was because of me, it wasn’t. But that’s not how her kids saw it. They thought their mother was going through a phase. They wanted her to be the same exact woman as when she had been Mrs. Robert Wakeling.”
“That may have been a reason not to like you,” Laurie said, “but I’m afraid I don’t understand why you suspect them of killing their mother.”
“They were terrified that I was going to gain access to the family money. When Ginny and I were talking about our plans to get married, we discussed her plans for her fortune. She left behind a two-hundred-million-dollar estate, plus half the shares in Wakeling Development.”
Laurie resisted the urge to let out a whistle. She wrote “$200M” on her notepad and underlined it three times.
“So obviously, I was going to sign a prenup, which I completely understood. But she thought her children should be self-sufficient.”
“She was going to cut them off?” Ryan asked.
“Not precisely. After Bob died, Anna and Carter took over the family business and each held a quarter of the stock. She never would have taken control of the company from them. The plan all along was for Ginny to leave them the rest of the stock when she passed. But she was coming around to the view that people are strongest when they’re self-made.”
“As her husband, Bob, was,” Laurie noted.
“Precisely. She had no problem giving someone a head start—her kids inherited a successful company from Bob, for example, or the money she was fronting me for the gym. But she wanted them to have to work for a living, and, frankly, I think they always assumed otherwise. Bob’s major project in Long Island City was over and done with. She wanted them to have an incentive to work just as hard as he did. She was planning to change her will to leave the bulk of her estate, other than the company, to charity.”
Laurie had read articles about some of the nation’s wealthiest billionaires announcing that they were leaving almost the entirety of their money to charity. She wondered if Virginia had been influenced by those same stories.
“Did she tell the kids she was changing her will?” The family would have no motive to kill their mother to inherit under the current will, unless they knew she had plans to amend it.
“Well, that’s the hitch. I think so, but I can’t prove it. Anna’s husband, Peter Browning, is a commercial real estate lawyer. He was practically Ginny’s third child, she trusted him so much. He was also the executor of her will. My theory is that she talked to Peter about her plans. I told the police, but I have no idea if they ever investigated it.”
Laurie jotted down “Peter/executor/$$” on her notepad.
“So which of the kids do you think did it?” Laurie asked.
“I have no idea.”
11