The elevator came to a halt and they stepped out into the lobby.
“Fingers crossed,” Grace said, crossing two dark red fingernails. Her smooth, heart-shaped face was shining with pride.
Laurie noticed two men in the lobby halt their conversation to check out Grace. One, carrying a take-out bag from Chipotle, rushed to catch the elevator doors before they closed.
His friend waved. “Talk to you later, Tom.”
Laurie reached behind her with one hand, holding the doors open for the man named Tom. “Are you Tom Wakeling, by any chance?”
“Yeah,” he said, squinting at her, trying to figure out if he should recognize her.
With dark, wavy hair and short facial stubble, he bore no obvious resemblance to his fairer cousins, but he shared Anna’s high cheekbones and Carter’s long nose.
Without losing eye contact with Tom, Laurie said quietly to Grace, “If you have an extra participation agreement, let me have it.”
Grace quickly slipped the papers out of her tote bag and into Laurie’s hand.
The elevator began to buzz, and Laurie hopped into the car on impulse.
“I’ll meet you guys out front,” she said, leaving Jerry and Grace behind in the lobby. “Tom, I’m Laurie Moran.”
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.”