Mike said, “The correspondence goes back six years. For some reason MacIver wrote his first letter to Herbert Davis, asking for an appointment to discuss—I’m sort of quoting—certain aspects of Public Law such-and-such. I can’t tell if Davis actually saw the letter and directed his staff man to act on his own. In any case, Davis was protected then and he’s protected now. There’s no record of participation by him in any part of the corporate tangle of Rainbow. What follows those first three or four letters is a series of invitations to individuals the staff man knew. There were meetings, apparently private, informal, and noncommittal. The next letters were written by MacIver. They were offers to sell participation, on the basis of the previous discussions. What follows are the organizational papers of the first corporations. I would assume that some of them were fraudulently drawn up—that the meetings reported never really took place. That would be impossible to prove. After that, Rainbow was off and running. There are gaps in MacIver’s information, but what’s there relates to the mechanics of finding people to do the actual work. That required contacts, which MacIver didn’t have. He came in with so little, in fact—some money of his own and, naturally, the idea—that it has to be some kind of tribute to him that his partners didn’t ace him out altogether.”

“All right,” Leland said. “This is important to our client. How much was he able to put into this?”

“Twelve thousand, at the start.”

Leland told him that MacIver had been married to his first wife at the time and had borrowed money from his mother to handle the divorce. He had even been a college student at the time Mike gave for the start of Rainbow.

“I knew he was married,” Mike said. “There is some correspondence from that period, including some stockbrokers’ reports that were addressed to a post office box in MacIver’s name. That wasn’t hard to figure out. The reports explain his money, too. At the beginning of the year before, he put a little more than two thousand in four strong issues, a pretty fair investment, assuming he had little in cash reserves. I had Joan check on them in my own books. By that summer he had made a few hundred. At that point I don’t know what he did, because the papers are missing. There is a report for December of that year, and he had nearly four thousand. He probably heard something about a particular issue. Anyway, from there I have to go to a newspaper clipping that he had with a later report. The clipping was dated early in January and had to do with a communications outfit. Joan checked that one, too. It went up forty-three points in the first three-quarters of that year. MacIver probably bought in when he read the item, but he sold fifty shares in July, one hundred in August, and fifty in September. I get that from a note he wrote to himself, so I don’t know if he had more of that issue. He could have, and a cash reserve, too. The twelve thousand was only the first installment. He went in for another five the following April, and then twenty in October. He was getting his first returns by then.”