“You’ve done a hell of a job, Mike. You and Joan.”

“I worked out my time. And Flo’s. I went on this on Wednesday morning and I’ve been with it straight through. You should charge our client four days for me and two days for Flo. That’s up until today, anyway. With your time, eleven hundred, plus expenses.”

“We’ll see. I want to know what it comes to.”

Mike hesitated, regarding him, then he nodded. He said, “MacIver’s codes coincide chronologically with the formation of the Rainbow corporations. I had the feeling that the codes came out of the left-hand language he had to use in the correspondence. For instance, there was a Lewis Street Realty Corporation, and it appears in the books as ‘Blue Lou.’”

“‘Blue Lou’ is an old swing tune.”

“I didn’t know that. The numbers are more difficult. In one case, they were substitutions. Four and two made thirty-six. Four turned out to be nine; two, seven; and thirty-six, sixteen. In MacIver’s own personal record, he made the entries backwards. Fifty thousand became a five preceded by four zeros. Instead of reading from left to right and adding from right to left, you had to read it from right to left and add from left to right. The column on the left was the units, the second the tens, and so forth.

“Now, the other thing you have to know is the way MacIver participated in Rainbow. You’ll understand why his widow doesn’t know anything about it. The way he handled the stock issue that took off gives a clue to the way he wanted to work, and maybe the fact that he had no holdings in Rainbow at the time of his death helps establish that he did kill himself, but even on those assumptions you still have no progress—I mean, while I worked on his books and papers I knew that I was in the presence of a bright and almost pathologically wary man. His letters show that he didn’t care about being friendly with his partners. His sense of humor worked into the letters, but I thought I saw that the recipients would misunderstand rather than laugh. What he did for fun was for his own private fun. He didn’t give a damn about the others. I had a picture of him but it didn’t go anywhere. He stayed the same—brilliant, timid like an animal, lonely like an animal in a cage.”

“There are cracks in that armor,” Leland said. “He was devoted to his wife and some people would say that that would have to take more than an average effort. He had an unabashed appetite for the expensive things of life. His car is in the parking lot, if you would like proof. There is his war record. But we’re seeing the same man, there’s no question of that.” He told Mike of their client’s impression of MacIver when he had come to work in her office. “He never did discuss his girl friend with his first wife. It seems clear to me that he borrowed that money from his mother to conceal the money he had accumulated on the market. This is what I wanted to ask you: on those lists of yours, are there any women who don’t belong—single women, married women whose husbands aren’t part of the scheme?”