“Oh, so do I! Colin taught me the night he had that eight-to-one shot. He wouldn’t let them take our picture at the nightclub. We’d had it done on other occasions, but he didn’t want any records of that night.”

Leland kept quiet. He did not want her to think too much on how well her husband had known his way around that sector of life. If the Internal Revenue Service had suspicions of a man, it could easily turn up nightclub photographs as evidence of expenditures in excess of income. Most men—most tax dodgers—were ignorant of the depth to which the I.R.S. could research their finances. It had taken skill to get out of the track with the four thousand. MacIver knew more than the rudimentary elements of keeping his winning days in his pocket; he meted it out in little bits and let no one make records. Now Leland said that the things she had told him and what he had heard from the Kaminskys made him think that MacIver would have been a poor choice for a player in a game like Monopoly.

“He was too good, you mean? He was, but he played to keep the others in the game. He made easy deals and carried the ones who were losing badly. Once he won a game when the rest of us realized that he had made a series of deals with all of us that left him invulnerable to rents. By just going around the board, he would eventually collect all the money. Listen, are we really going to learn anything? I can’t help feeling that we’re going to get so far, and then have to give up. His mother and that woman told you just part of what they know. It isn’t fair. I have a right to know.”

“You have a need to know,” Leland said. “We aren’t done with them.” He told her what he had instructed Florence to do. “I want to know how he paid for his divorce so soon after finishing school, if he borrowed from his mother, and if he did, what he told her about what he intended to do with the money. There are good questions about her finances. Did he support her before he died? If he did, we’ll know that he was more involved with her than he let you know. Maybe he called her from his office.”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I think it was as he said. He didn’t have anything to do with her.”

“Did you look at his office telephone bills?”

“No.”

“I will.”

“Maybe he did borrow from her for the divorce,” she said. “That would explain why she was so against it and why she’s been friendly with Betty.”