“Smart woman,” Laurie said.
“We split the check, of course. And then I assume he’s as anxious as I am to get out of there, but as we’re leaving he says it’s still so early that the shops are still open at the Time Warner Center. He wants to know if I’ll go to Hugo Boss with him to help him pick out an outfit.”
“That doesn’t sound so strange,” Jerry said.
“An outfit for his date the next night. He said, She looks a lot like you, so you probably have the same taste.”
When their laughter died down, Grace’s tone suddenly became serious. “Sorry, we’re rambling on too long. It’s time to get to work, I know. What do you need, Laurie?”
First, the change to Grace’s wardrobe. Now an apology for gossiping a little past nine in the morning.
Laurie decided she would bring up the wardrobe question later.
“To talk about the case with the two of you in my office in twenty minutes,” she said.
“Sounds good,” Grace said. “But do you want me to call Ryan?”
Laurie paused. On the one hand, Ryan was the one who brought in Ivan. On the other hand, she could already picture him rushing the investigation. Her gut was still warning her that they were moving too quickly. No, she did not need to “get out of her own way.” Ryan and Brett had her second-guessing herself, but she had gotten this far by listening to her own instincts.
She was missing something, and she was going to keep working on it with Jerry and Grace until she found it.
28
Once they were all seated in her office, Laurie started by making a list of the participants they had already secured, placing a check mark next to their names if they were considered a potential suspect.
Ivan Gray. Carter Wakeling. Anna Wakeling. Anna’s husband, Peter Browning. The cousin, Tom Wakeling.
Laurie placed check marks next to all five names.
“I thought you said the police cleared the cousin,” Jerry said.
“So far they have. Tom and his date, Tiffany Simon, both said they were together in the American Wing, looking at portraits on the second floor. The story rang true to the police, I guess. And they assumed this woman wouldn’t lie to protect Tom since they were only on a second date.”
Grace shook her head. “But the second date was to one of the most sought-after events in the city with a man whose last name was Wakeling. To some women, that might be a relationship worth protecting,” she pointed out.
“I agree,” Laurie said. “That’s why I still have Tom on our list of suspects. I want to talk to his date myself.” By all accounts, Tom and Tiffany had lost touch nearly three years ago. There’d be no reason for her to cover for Tom now. She wrote down the woman’s name—Tiffany Simon—in a separate column: Her to-do list. “Hopefully she’ll be easier to find than Mrs. Wakeling’s assistant, Penny Rawling. Have we had any luck with that?”
Jerry shook his head. “Ivan doesn’t have her cell phone number anymore, assuming it’s the same as it was then.”
Sometimes Laurie longed for the old days, when you could look up a number in the white pages or, in a real pinch, call 411.
She added Penny Rawling’s name beneath Tiffany’s, and then added a check mark. Penny wasn’t the most likely suspect, but she hadn’t been eliminated from suspicion either.
She tapped her pen against her notepad. “I wish we had a better handle on Virginia Wakeling’s children. It was hard to get a sense of them in such a short meeting.”
“If you ask me,” Grace said, “Anna seemed like the boss of the bunch.”
“Followed by her husband in the pecking order,” Jerry said. “Then a big step down before the brother, Carter.”
Grace, always willing to jump to conclusions, declared that if the children had anything to do with it, “Anna would have been the one to call the shots. I bet she tripped the alarm in the costume exhibit to create a diversion, and then her husband followed Mrs. Wakeling. How many men haven’t had a thought or two about pushing their mother-in-law off the roof?”
“It is so hard to imagine anyone coming up with a plan to murder his or her own parent,” Laurie said. “Maybe I’m being sexist, but it seems especially shocking for a daughter to kill her mother.”
“On the other hand,” Jerry said, “I could imagine Carter acting alone. We all agree he seems to live in his younger sister’s shadow. That could make him resentful. If Ivan’s telling the truth, then Virginia was thinking about changing her will so her children would need to support themselves through their own work for the company. Anna’s clearly the one running the show at Wakeling Development, so Carter might have been afraid that she’d find a way to force him out.”
“Or they all acted together,” Laurie said. “Or it was Ivan, or Penny, or Tom. In that case Anna and Carter are innocent people who lost their mother.” Once again, she felt as if they were grasping at straws. She realized how much she wished she could talk about the case—about everything, really—with Alex. “Whatever dynamics we noticed in the family, it’s obvious that the three of them are close-knit. They’re protective of each other. We need an outsider—someone other than Ivan—to give us a better idea of their relationship to their mother. That makes it all the more important that we find Penny Rawling.”
“I’ll keep trying,” Jerry said.
“I know,” Laurie said, not wanting Jerry to feel as if she were blaming him.
“What about the nephew, Tom?” Jerry asked. “He’s just a cousin. Maybe he’d be willing to give us the dirt?”
“I don’t think so. First of all, until I talk to Tiffany Simon, we have to consider him a suspect, too. More important, I talked to him in person. He may have been the black sheep in the family three years ago, but today he very much wants to stay close to the pack. He won’t say anything to jeopardize his position with the family.”
She looked down at her list. What was she missing?
“If we go to production now, we pretty much only have Ivan’s word against the family’s,” Jerry said.
Laurie shrugged. “That was my problem with the case from the beginning. I can’t imagine we’ll learn anything new.”
“Well, Brett can’t say you didn’t warn him,” Grace said consolingly.
“And I can at least make the episode gorgeous,” Jerry said, his voice lifting. “I hate to say it, but viewers will tune in just to see the dresses. Are you ready for a preview?”