“I’m not doing anything for you,” she said.

He was thinking—at last, he had to reflect—that he had moved too suddenly for Roberts on Tuesday night, getting the papers to Manitou. Roberts would have prevented it, if he could have anticipated it. The idea led back to the letters.

She kissed him again, stood up, and put the souvenir book in his lap. “I’m going to bed. You wake me.”

“The more I think of it, the more possibilities I try, the more I’m convinced that it was Roberts who broke into MacIver’s office.”

She raised her hands in the air.

“Somebody did it. It happened. It wasn’t a coincidence. If it were part of a larger professional job, the people involved would be sitting in a car at the bottom of the bay. I’ve checked on him; he was making the arrangements for MacIver’s funeral. You can do that from a pay phone for a dime, that’s how much time it takes.”

The telephone rang. Karen was still looking at him. “We know who that is,” she said.

“We don’t know at all,” he said. “I’d like you to take it. If it’s somebody from the office, I’ll talk to him. If it’s the client, tell her I’m out on the case.”

“Why are you ducking her?”

There was no reason that he wanted to hear himself say. “Would you do this for me, please?”

She went to the telephone. He picked up the insurance file. She did not call him. He looked to the souvenir book, thinking again of the things that Betty Kaminsky had told him. Karen hung up. “It was her. She would like you to call her when you come in. She sounded upset. She sounded unnerved when she heard my voice.”

“Did you ask her what she wanted”

“Yes, and she said that it wasn’t important.” She turned to the bedroom. “I may call you to help me,” she said. “I’m going to disconnect the extension in here.”

“All right.”

If she wanted something more, he did not know it, because he was not looking up to see. The door closed firmly—she would argue that it had not been slammed. He tried to get his attention on what was before him.

He could have moved faster. Or he could have been more thorough, drawing up a chart of the evidence and the testimony so that his eyes could see what his intellect dictated was true. There was nothing wrong now with his ability to deal with the facts. Working carefully, concentrating, almost anyone could remember what he had seen and done during a preceding week. Leland could remember the face of the waitress who had served him coffee on Tuesday morning, when he had turned up his collar against the cold on Wednesday night, the faint, unpleasant odor of Phyllis Reynolds. It was clear now that no one had lied about matters of fact, however inadvertently. No one. There had been instances of bad judgment, but none of them ill-intentioned. If anything, this case was strewn with good intentions. None had been of any help to Joe Leland.