Every Breath You Take, page 15
This was consistent with what Ivan claimed she’d been planning. “Why didn’t you tell anyone about this earlier?” Laurie asked.
For the first time, Penny looked away from them, glancing at her watch while she answered. “I didn’t think it mattered. It was just little notes balled up in her garbage—the way I scribble down notes about vacations I’ll probably never take. If she had made up her mind, she would have called a lawyer to make it official. And I didn’t want it to cause problems for the family—if, you know, Ivan tried to challenge the will or something. I wanted them to get what was theirs.”
Laurie suspected that Penny didn’t want anyone to know that she snooped into her boss’s private notes, but Ryan was pursuing another possibility.
“And you to get what was yours?” he asked. “You inherited also, didn’t you?”
Laurie wished Ryan hadn’t moved to hostile territory so quickly. Until now, Penny had been extremely cooperative.
“Seventy-five thousand dollars,” she confirmed. “I was very grateful. That’s what I made in two years as her assistant.”
“And those little notes you found: was she planning to cut your part of the inheritance as well?” he asked, pressing the point.
“I—I don’t remember.”
“And yet you remember an awful lot about what Ivan and her children might have been inheriting,” he challenged her.
Laurie interrupted, sensing that Penny was a few questions away from asking them to leave. Looking at Penny, she could see that she wasn’t strong enough to have pushed Virginia from that roof on her own. If she was involved in the murder—which was a big if right now—she had to have had an accomplice.
“Do you remember Tiffany Simon from the gala?” Laurie asked. “She was Tom Wakeling’s date—Virginia’s nephew.”
“Oh yeah,” she said, as if the memory was coming back to her. “Virginia said she seemed like a perfect match for someone on that half of the family. She took Bob’s side regarding the split with his brother, Kenneth, so there was no love lost, even for Kenneth’s son. She said that her nephew was just like his father—he wanted all of the rewards without doing any of the work.”
“That nephew works at Wakeling Development now. He’s doing quite well from what I’m told,” Laurie said.
A flash of resentment crossed Penny’s face. “Nepotism, I’m sure. He probably wore his cousins down once Bob and Virginia were both gone.”
“Well, his date from that night seemed to think that you were seeing someone at the time—maybe someone who was at the gala?”
Penny shook her head, and once again, her gaze drifted to her watch.
“Maybe even someone close to Virginia?” Laurie nudged.
“That’s ridiculous. Virginia’s friends were three times my age.”
“Her son, Carter, wasn’t,” Ryan said. “Neither was her son-in-law, Peter Browning.”
“Now you’re suggesting I had an affair with Anna’s husband? I’m so glad I decided to try to help you,” she said sarcastically.
“We’re just trying to be thorough,” Laurie explained. “Ivan also mentioned that he’d heard you on the phone with a boyfriend. If we knew who that person was, we could be certain it wasn’t related at all to Virginia’s murder. We want to turn over every stone.”
Penny was on her feet now, heading toward the door. “I’m on a tight timeline, so I’m afraid I need to get back to work.”
Laurie tried one last time. “I’m sorry we offended you. I just need to know: did you tell Anna, Carter, or Peter—or anyone—about those notes you found? If they knew Mrs. Wakeling was going to change her will—”
A look of panic crossed Penny’s face, and she suddenly seemed even more rushed to end the conversation. “I’ve told you everything I know. Good luck with your production. I won’t be speaking to you anymore.”
43
Laurie and Ryan rehashed their interview of Penny in his car on the way back to the office.
“Did you see how many times she checked her watch? She was expecting someone she didn’t want us to meet.”
Laurie had had the same thought.
“And how did she pay for that apartment?” Ryan asked. “Her seventy-five-thousand-dollar inheritance from Virginia wouldn’t touch the down payment. Even if she’s renting, that place has to be at least six grand a month. And when I asked about her job? She barely gave an answer. Real estate? That’s like us saying ‘media.’ Totally vague.”
Laurie tried not to be irked that he clumped their jobs together. “Maybe she moved in with a boyfriend,” she suggested. “I didn’t see a wedding ring.” She began to look up Penny’s address on her phone to see what she could find out about the cost of the apartment or the owner.
“Well, I solved one part of the mystery,” Laurie announced, holding up her phone. “The apartment? It’s listed online as ‘in contract.’ The asking price was an even four million.”
Ryan let out a whistle. “So Penny came into money well beyond Virginia’s will.”
“Nope. I’m looking at the original real estate listing here. The agent’s name is Hannah Perkins. She has her office phone, cell, and email address listed. And if all else fails, she also has a number for her assistant. Want to guess the assistant’s name?”
Ryan’s eyes widened. “Penny?”
“You got it. No last name, but the phone number’s a match.”
“So it’s not even her apartment? It’s a client’s? Why would she fake that?”
Laurie thought it over, trying to place herself in another person’s shoes. “Because she’s ambitious. She didn’t want us to know that her current position’s no better than the one she had three years ago.”
“I noticed how annoyed she seemed when you told her the nephew, Tom, has a good job at Wakeling now.”
“Exactly.”
“So if she found out Virginia was going to cut her out of the will instead of giving her the kind of job she felt entitled to, maybe she got mad enough to do something about it.”
Laurie shook her head. “No, I can’t picture it. Seventy-five thousand dollars is a lot, but it’s not life-changing. And Virginia’s death meant she wouldn’t have any job at all. It would also mean she lost entree to a world she desperately wanted to be part of. I doubt her current boss lets her tag along to the Met Gala, for example. If she’s lying—”
“Oh, she’s definitely lying,” Ryan said.
Laurie found herself agreeing with him again. “Ivan believed Penny was hiding a boyfriend. And then, completely separately, Tiffany Simon got the feeling Penny had her eye on someone in the family. It lines up. If Penny were secretly seeing either Carter or Peter, she could have mentioned those notes about the will, not realizing the damage that might be done. She looked scared when I mentioned the possibility. I think it honestly never dawned on her that the family might be involved.”
“If they were, it’s possible Penny’s the one who got Virginia killed, all because she snooped in her garbage. If only we knew for sure what was scribbled on those notes.”
“We do know what Virginia wrote in her own will,” Laurie said, thinking aloud.
“Right. I saw a copy of it in that big notebook you got from the NYPD.”
Irritated, Laurie wanted to tell Ryan she had been trying to make a point. “What I’m trying to say is that the will was hers, written solely for her purposes, shortly after her husband passed away.” Laurie’s eyes clouded, remembering how she had rewritten her own will more than a year after Greg was killed. It was another reminder that he was really gone. Her father had said he felt the same way after getting nagged by his lawyer to redo his will after her mother passed away.
Ryan was following her train of thought. “The original will written when Robert Wakeling was alive would have reflected what the two of them jointly decided, in the event something happened to both of them at the same time.”
“We should compare that to Virginia’s will. It’s a long shot, but maybe it will give us some indication of if and how she revised it.”
“That’s a good idea.”
“I don’t think I want to contact the Wakelings to ask for a copy,” Laurie said.
“Not a problem. I’ll get in touch with the Surrogate’s Court as soon as we get to the office. It’s public record once the estate’s in probate.”
“You’re willing to do that?” She would have thought that Ryan would see such a menial task as beneath him.
“Consider it done. Teamwork, right?”
• • •
When they returned to the studio, they nearly bumped into Brett Young as they stepped out of the elevator. He was carrying a mini-bag to transport what looked like three golf clubs. Laurie knew that Brett, in addition to annual winter trips to Scottsdale and the Bahamas to work on his golf game, kept his swing in check with regular lessons indoors at Chelsea Piers.
“Looks like a short game session today,” Ryan said, holding out a palm to stall the elevator doors while he chatted with the boss.
Laurie had no idea how Ryan could tell that from what she was seeing, but she guessed it was related to the fact that none of Brett’s clubs had cute, fluffy covers on them.
“Just sand, fringe, and greens,” Brett said.
He may as well have been speaking Farsi from Laurie’s perspective, but she knew that Ryan—as the nephew of one of Brett’s closest friends—was a frequent golf partner. “My handicap would be several strokes lower if I didn’t regress over the winter,” Ryan said.
“Let’s go, then,” Brett said, waving Ryan back into the elevator.
Ryan started to follow and then paused. “I need to get a document for our show,” he said.
“Laurie can do it. Can’t you, Champ?” The elevator was starting to buzz from being held, but Brett was planted firmly between the doors.
She watched, speechless, as Ryan stepped from her side to Brett’s.
“By the way,” Brett added, “we had to pull our Valentine’s Day special because Brandon and Lani are announcing their divorce tomorrow in People. Oops.”
Laurie recognized the name of the C-list reality-star couple that got married a mere two years ago after meeting on one of the studio’s multiple matchmaking series. “I swapped in your next special for the time slot. When love proves deadly—thought it might be a good tagline,” he called out as the doors finally closed.
When Laurie got back to her office, she started to look up the process for ordering a copy of a will that had gone into probate, and then decided that this ‘champ’ was absolutely not going to do it. She picked up her phone and left a message for Ryan, reminding him that he was tasked with the assignment. Reviewing the Wakelings’ joint will from more than seven years ago was a shot in the dark. She wasn’t going to slow herself down by doing an errand that belonged to Ryan, especially now that his buddy, Brett, had set an arbitrary deadline.
She had real work to do.
44
Margaret Lawson, the woman who was buying the Tribeca apartment Penny had tried to pass off as her own, arrived earlier than scheduled, less than five minutes after Laurie and Ryan left.
Thanking her lucky stars that she hadn’t been caught in an outright lie, Penny patiently waited while Lawson went over revisions she intended to make on the layout when she met with her contractor.
“Take your time,” Penny assured her. “Like my mother used to say, measure twice, cut once.”
“Given what this guy’s charging, I want to be sure he gets all this straight,” Lawson said grimly.
Penny tried to push away a pang of envy. Margaret Lawson was only five years older than she was, but was already a successful banker. She could afford not only to buy this apartment, but to remodel its perfectly nice bathrooms to her precise specifications. Someday, Penny vowed to herself, I’ll have a home as nice as this one, plus a beach house in East Hampton, right on the ocean.
When she had called the Under Suspicion producer, she really didn’t think she had anything relevant to say. She just liked the idea of seeing her face on the television, with “Penny Rawling, New York City Realtor” written across the screen. She had intended to be charming and articulate. She would speak warmly about all that she had learned from the Wakeling family and the trust Virginia had placed in her. She would seem like the type of person who attends the Met Gala, the type of professional a person of means might entrust with a listing.
And the fact that he didn’t want her talking to the producers was the icing on the proverbial cake. She still couldn’t believe that he’d had the gall to call her after nearly three years, only to pressure her not to speak to a television show. After the way he dumped her, he was the last person with a right to ask a single thing of her.
But the interview with the producers didn’t go the way Penny had pictured. She thought it would just be a few questions about Ivan and the party that night. She didn’t expect them to ask about her, let alone her relationship with him. Maybe I should have just told the truth, she thought, but that would have ruined the image I’m trying to project for my television appearance. I want to be seen as “Penny the Successful Realtor,” not “Penny Who Got Dumped by the Guy She Was Secretly Dating Behind Her Boss’s Back.”
She didn’t see the harm in denying the relationship, because it had nothing whatsoever to do with poor Virginia’s murder. But then they had kept pressing her for answers—about her boyfriend, about the family, about those little balls of paper in the garbage can.
Penny kept replaying Laurie Moran’s final question: “Did you tell Anna, Carter, or Peter—or anyone—about those notes you found? If they knew Mrs. Wakeling was going to change her will—”
After Margaret Lawson was finally finished with her renovation plans, Penny pulled up his number on her cell, still in her call list from when he had contacted her last week.
He picked up after two rings. “I’m surprised to hear from you,” he said. “Is everything okay?”
“That show called me, like you said they might.” She saw no reason to tell him that she was the one who had contacted them.
“I told you that you don’t have to talk to them.”
“Are you afraid of what I might tell them?” she asked.
“Of course not,” he said. “It’s just . . . no one really knew about us. Don’t you think that might be a complication?”
She felt all those old resentments returning. Of course no one knew about them. He had forbidden her from telling anyone, claiming that it could complicate her work for Virginia, that it could complicate the dynamics of the family, that his personal situation was complicated enough as it was. But the situation was never actually complicated. The truth is that he had been ashamed of her. She thought that after he saw her successfully mingling with all those fancy people at the Met Ball, he would see her in a different light. He would view her, finally, as an equal.
But he had ignored her all night, and then Virginia died, and things got even worse. She just didn’t matter to him.
“Is that the only thing you’re hiding?” she asked now. “Our relationship?”
“I’m not hiding anything.”
“I told you about those notes I found, including the ones about her will.”
There was a long silence on the other end of the line. She checked her screen to make sure they hadn’t been disconnected.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Penny.”
Was he serious? He was actually going to deny it? “What? Do you think I’m recording you or something? My God. Please tell me that you didn’t do it. Did you kill her because I told you about those notes?”
“With all due respect,” he said, “you sound like a crazy person. If you tell that show some ludicrous story about whatever notes you’re rambling about, I’ll tell them how Ivan wanted you fired because you didn’t work hard enough. That you shortcut your work to try to land a relationship with me instead. That we only went out a couple of times and you became obsessed with me. Is that really what you want?”
“Are you threatening me?” Penny demanded.
“I’m just speaking the truth. I could sue you for slander and tie you up in court for years. You might want to consider getting professional help, Penny. You sound unstable.”
The line went dead. Penny stared at the screen, wondering if there was anyone she could trust.
45
The following morning, Laurie was waiting with Charlotte in a conference room at Ladyform’s corporate offices when the Met’s former security officer Marco Nelson walked in for his nine o’clock meeting. Charlotte introduced herself as the head of Ladyform’s New York operations and introduced Laurie simply as “Laurie.” Marco was about six feet two inches tall, and Laurie estimated that he probably weighed around two hundred pounds. His dark gray suit was tailored to accentuate his athletic frame. He wasn’t as large as Ivan, but was certainly strong enough to have thrown Virginia Wakeling from a roof.
Charlotte began by giving Marco an overview of Ladyform’s security needs: a technician to review their data systems for protection from hacking and other cyber crimes, as well as physical security for fashion shows and other industry events. Marco was prepared with glossy handouts touting the various services provided by his company, the Armstrong Group.
“Who’s the Armstrong?” Charlotte asked.
Marco smiled. “There is no Armstrong. It just had a more security-oriented ring to it than the Nelson Group.”
“So you’re the boss of the shop?” Charlotte asked.
“Technically, but we all work as a team.”
“I got your name from a former co-worker of yours at the museum,” she said. “Sean Duncan?”
“Sean, he’s a great guy. He was second in charge when I was there, but he deserved that promotion. He’s a friend of yours?”
“No. Actually, it was Laurie who was speaking to him about another matter, relating to the museum.”
Laurie took that as her cue to jump in. “Sean made it sound like a dream security job. Why did you move on from there?” she asked.
