Leland explained how the interview had come about. There had been nothing in Mike’s tone in his mention of Karen, and Leland thought that that was a good sign of how she was doing. He led the way back to the table he had had and took the same chair. The table had been wiped clean and the ash tray emptied. Mike was hungry. When the waitress came, he ordered bacon and eggs and coffee right away. Leland wanted more coffee.

Mike lit a cigarette and looked out the window. His mouth was pulled down at the corners. “Now you’re going to have to be patient,” he said. “Florence and I worked two hours last night trying to get it all into a report. We had to give up. What I have in my pocket is an outline—of what, you’ll hear soon enough—and it’s for you to use when you tell our client what her husband was up to. I pity her, Joe. You won’t be able to help thinking about what he did—what he started, because it’s still going on. I don’t know how it relates to his death, if at all. There was no evidence of threats or violence in his correspondence.”

He drew on the cigarette and looked out at the runways and the water. An old Taylorcraft was moving on the outer taxi strip. It was too far away to hear.

“I spent the first half of Wednesday going through his papers, setting aside the obvious things, office bills, copies of dunning letters. That left a lot. I read it all, whether I understood it or not. I put the letters in sequence, and that made things clearer. There were documents or photostats of documents. Put together, the letters and documents and books are a record of his part in a mess spread all over Port Smith. He called it Rainbow because he had a sense of humor. There can’t be any other reason.

“I don’t know why he kept a record. Maybe he thought that someday he would change his mind and blow the whistle on all the others. It wasn’t his insurance, what a man puts in a safe deposit box. And it wasn’t a rat’s nest; he wasn’t a compulsive saver. I could see in the way the things were boxed that he had them in files and drawers in a genuine, maintainable system. He wasn’t afraid, or he wouldn’t have kept some of the things. The most distinguishing feature of it all is its completeness. If he had been afraid, he would have disposed of or secreted some of it, but he didn’t.”

The waitress was coming. Mike turned to the window again, as if he simply could not expend the energy that small talk required. He waited a long time after she was gone.