She thought about it. The sky was a dark purple now and the headlights of the oncoming cars flashed through the windshield. She reached forward and moved a lever and almost immediately warm air began to pour from beneath the dashboard. The warmth and the car’s soft springing gave Leland a sense of insulation and lack of care. It occurred to him that he was learning his man in a way he could never measure. What he was doing now, sitting beside Norma as she drove, was something MacIver had done. Leland was not seeing it with MacIver’s eyes and he never would. It was a trick. MacIver was a set of things that had been. No one could guess what that set of things had seen and felt and thought—yet Leland could feel himself wanting to think that he could come close.

She said softly, “He handled money like no one else I’ve ever known. He carried his cash in his right hip pocket, folded once, without a clip or folder. When he bought something, he would take out all the money he had and count off. The singles were the outside and the larger bills at the center. He never used credit cards. You know when you play Monopoly, how people keep their money in severe little piles? When he played, he put it in the same arrangement he had in his pocket, one big pile but without folding, small bills on top and big ones on the bottom. He never made a mistake or got confused. He treated real money as if it were Monopoly money, and vice versa.”

“You have no explanation for the amount that man saw,” Leland said.

“No. Is there any way to fix the date? If it was a Saturday morning, the banks were closed. He was either carrying it from late the evening before or he picked it up somewhere that day. Do you think you could find out about it?”

“First I want to see if we have to. Think now. Could he have won it at the track?”

“Yes. Yes, if he had a really winning day. He liked to double up when he was ahead. But he would have told me if he’d done that well. He always did.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. He was like a baby when he had a big day. He wanted to spend it on me. Before we were married he had an eight-to-one shot come in and that night we spent almost a hundred on dinner and went to another place afterward, which was more. We spent a lot.”

“How much did he have on it?”

“Five hundred—at eight to one.”

“I should know more about this than I do,” Leland said. “I know the Internal Revenue Service ruling on racetrack winnings—”