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.