Leland did not believe him.

“You look upset about something.”

“No, you were telling me something I had to know.”

“The way MacIver handled the stock that took off illustrates the way he protected his interests in Rainbow. I didn’t want to believe it; I spent quite a bit of time checking to see if he wasn’t somehow making his money work harder. The answer is no. MacIver methodically sold himself out. He couldn’t have been afraid of losses. He knew the layout of Rainbow better than anybody. He knew what his investments could realize. The letters show that some of these people are in it on their faith in their friends. He always sold his interests to one or another of his partners, and toward the end, he was doing it faster and faster. This year, three new corporations were formed and he wasn’t in on any of them as a stockholder. Two paid him consultants’ fees, and he was supposed to have done a survey for the third. He bought a considerable amount of insurance—”

“I know, all of it covered by the two-year suicide clause. Only a fraction paid off.”

“The rest went into blue chips and government bonds. There is some undeveloped real estate in Clausen, but there is nothing to show that it fits into any of Rainbow’s plans. That’s not saying that it doesn’t.”

“How much would you say he lost, playing it as he did?”

“At the most, a million four. That’s not accounting for a lot of unknowns. He might not have gotten the same breaks from his partners if he had not established a pattern of selling. Nine is a better figure. MacIver lost nine hundred thousand in his own scheme.”

“There’s nothing to connect Herbert Davis directly,” Leland said.

“That’s right.”

“What about Wendell Roberts?”

“He goes back to the announcement of the Suffolk Street Houses. He’s on the staff of a psychiatric clinic on Baxter Avenue, in the Suffolk Street neighborhood. In one letter he says that the staff members take turns at the various responsibilities of managing the clinic, but he’s seemed to have grabbed the Suffolk project as his own. He was chairman of the clinic when the project was proposed, and he steered the clinic into becoming one of the sponsors. All these projects have sponsors—organizations, schools—and that’s part of what makes Roberts’ position so difficult to assess. The other sponsors seem to have only a perfunctory interest—Roberts was absorbed in plans, design, and so forth. In several letters he professes ignorance, but then, in the last, he lists seventeen design objectives, things I never thought of, window placement, ventilation.

“The other item that makes his relationship to Rainbow so curious is that MacIver had no right or reason to possess any of Roberts’ letters. I told you that MacIver and Roberts were remote on the table of organization. The only explanation for the letters appearing in MacIver’s papers is that, at some time or other, MacIver created opportunities in his partners’ offices to go into their files and steal them.”