“You were on television this morning, I’d better not forget to tell you that. WTOU-TV. They called your apartment to tell you. I stayed over last night. I called Karen. She was on her way out but she said she would wait to see you.”

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.