“Something like that,” Gregor agreed. “Do you have an alibi?”
“I don’t know. I can’t figure out what time I’d need to have an alibi for. The news reports have been very confusing.”
“Why don’t you just tell me what you did on the night Kayla Anson died?”
“I worked late. I do that a lot. We have a new ad campaign ready to launch. I was checking out the print ads. We’re doing some television, too—once L. L. Bean started doing television, the rest of us had to, but if you ask me, it’s a pain in the ass. But I wasn’t ready to look at the television stuff anyway. I just looked at the print.”
“Were you with someone while you worked?”
“I was all by myself,” Peter Greer said. “Chessy Barre would usually have been with me. She’s my personal assistant. But she’d been out all day. She had some kind of food poisoning.”
“And this was from when to when?”
“I don’t know what you mean by from when to when. I got to work at eight-thirty on Friday morning. I usually do get to work at eight-thirty in the morning.”
“And you stayed at work?” Gregor asked. “All day? Without leaving?”
“Oh, no. I left at five or a little after and ran up to Subway in Watertown to get something to eat. I usually pack something from here. I hate fast food. But I hadn’t intended to work late that night, so I was stuck.”
“And your office is where?”
“On the Litchfield Road, in Watertown near the Morris line.”
“And there were people who saw you at work when you left at—five?”
“Or a little after, yes. There were probably a dozen people who saw me then. We go from nine-thirty to five-thirty instead of nine to five.”
“How about when you got back? Did anybody see you then?”
“Not a soul,” Peter Greer said. “By the time I got back it was after quitting time, and they were all gone. I hear there are places in this world where people work late with joy in their hearts, but Goldenrod is not one of them.”
“Yes,” Gregor said. The FBI hadn’t been one of them, either, for most of the people who worked there. “So you got back at—?”
“About six-fifteen.”
“About six-fifteen. And you stayed until when?”
“I don’t remember. Eleven, eleven-thirty. Something like that.”
“And then you came home?”
“Yes.”
“Straight home?”
“Yes. There’s nothing much open at that hour unless you want to go into Waterbury. And I didn’t.”
“Was anybody here when you got home?”
“No,” Peter said. He finished his Perrier and went back for more. “There was a message on the answering machine, though. A message from Kayla. I didn’t think anything of it at the time.”
“Did you keep it?” Stacey Spratz asked.
Peter Greer shook his head. “It wasn’t a message to keep. It was mostly just hello and how are you and can we talk sometime. That kind of thing. It rather surprised me, really.”
“Why?” Gregor asked.
“Because we’d pretty much broken up,” Peter said. “I mean the whole thing was rather insane all the way along, wasn’t it? She was much too young for me. I don’t mean I was cradle robbing when we started seeing each other. She was eighteen, and she wasn’t an unsophisticated girl. But there were—gaps. Gaps in understanding. I should have reallzed that it wouldn’t work out.”
“What kind of gaps in understanding?” Gregor asked.
Peter Greer shrugged. “Gaps in understanding about work. I founded a company, and I run it. That takes a lot of time, and sometimes it means I have to take financial risks that leave me rather short of money. Kayla wasn’t used to not being the center of attention and she wasn’t used to not being able to do things because there simply wasn’t any cash. I don’t know. Maybe it was class as much as age. Do you see what I mean?”
“I see what you mean,” Gregor said. “Are you short of cash?”
“Right now? No. About three or four months after Kayla and I started dating, though, I took the company through an expansion period. It was either expand or die.”
“And you expanded.”
“Thank God,” Peter Greer said.
Gregor went to the wall of windows and looked out. He wished immediately that he hadn’t. He didn’t usually have a fear of heights, but this view gave him one. He retreated.
“So,” he said. “Tell me about Kayla Anson. And about you. Where you met her. What she was like.”