“Now, the other thing you have to know is the way MacIver participated in Rainbow. You’ll understand why his widow doesn’t know anything about it. The way he handled the stock issue that took off gives a clue to the way he wanted to work, and maybe the fact that he had no holdings in Rainbow at the time of his death helps establish that he did kill himself, but even on those assumptions you still have no progress—I mean, while I worked on his books and papers I knew that I was in the presence of a bright and almost pathologically wary man. His letters show that he didn’t care about being friendly with his partners. His sense of humor worked into the letters, but I thought I saw that the recipients would misunderstand rather than laugh. What he did for fun was for his own private fun. He didn’t give a damn about the others. I had a picture of him but it didn’t go anywhere. He stayed the same—brilliant, timid like an animal, lonely like an animal in a cage.”

“There are cracks in that armor,” Leland said. “He was devoted to his wife and some people would say that that would have to take more than an average effort. He had an unabashed appetite for the expensive things of life. His car is in the parking lot, if you would like proof. There is his war record. But we’re seeing the same man, there’s no question of that.” He told Mike of their client’s impression of MacIver when he had come to work in her office. “He never did discuss his girl friend with his first wife. It seems clear to me that he borrowed that money from his mother to conceal the money he had accumulated on the market. This is what I wanted to ask you: on those lists of yours, are there any women who don’t belong—single women, married women whose husbands aren’t part of the scheme?”

Mike shook his head. “I don’t follow you.”

“I’m trying something. A man can be quiet most of the time, but not necessarily always for the same reason. Suppose he cared for his girl friend and felt guilty over the way it turned out? You know what I mean. His reaction was so quick that night he came home bleeding, that you could believe that he had expected something bad. So he tried to make it up to her another way.”

“There’s no one like that on the lists, Joe.”

“You’re looking at me as if I had lost my mind.”

“She almost killed him. Why would he want to make anything up to her?”