“I knew he was married,” Mike said. “There is some correspondence from that period, including some stockbrokers’ reports that were addressed to a post office box in MacIver’s name. That wasn’t hard to figure out. The reports explain his money, too. At the beginning of the year before, he put a little more than two thousand in four strong issues, a pretty fair investment, assuming he had little in cash reserves. I had Joan check on them in my own books. By that summer he had made a few hundred. At that point I don’t know what he did, because the papers are missing. There is a report for December of that year, and he had nearly four thousand. He probably heard something about a particular issue. Anyway, from there I have to go to a newspaper clipping that he had with a later report. The clipping was dated early in January and had to do with a communications outfit. Joan checked that one, too. It went up forty-three points in the first three-quarters of that year. MacIver probably bought in when he read the item, but he sold fifty shares in July, one hundred in August, and fifty in September. I get that from a note he wrote to himself, so I don’t know if he had more of that issue. He could have, and a cash reserve, too. The twelve thousand was only the first installment. He went in for another five the following April, and then twenty in October. He was getting his first returns by then.”

“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.