“Now just one more minute,” he said. “No matter what you tell Norma or reveal to the newspapers, even if you limit your report to Rainbow alone, you’re going to have to tell your wife why it was necessary to steal my keys. That is, unless you go back tonight and tell her that you were mistaken from the start. I want you to think, Joe. When MacIver was at his worst, just before he did the thing that affects you so personally, that time of his life coincides with the time of your wife’s collapse. I saw it when she told me what she had done, picked up men in bars and so forth. She’ll know that at once. She’ll realize that it was only chance that kept them from running into each other. You’ll as much as force the idea upon her. She’s right in believing that she’s past a relapse in those terms, but she’s in a weakened condition now, no one could miss that, and the more you see of Norma, the worse she’ll become. You go on, and you’ll have her reliving the whole experience in more grotesque and degrading terms than ever. She’ll wonder how close she came to sleeping with MacIver, what he was and what he was about to become—”

“You’re a filthy son of a bitch. You’ll use anything.”

“At least you’re not trying to deny the truth of it.”

Leland shook his head unhappily. “I was going to come to you and give you a chance to explain your position in this. People think the world of you. I thought that I would get some common sense. You want to continue to fox around.”

Roberts held the arms of the chair. “I didn’t think my position was important. This is the first I’ve heard of Colin having my letters. You check on me, check my records. My house is mortgaged, I’m still paying my share of the debt contracted here. I’m solvent only because of my wife’s life insurance, which is in the bank, untouched. You check on that, too. No safe deposit boxes, no special savings accounts. You check on me, I want you to.”

“Why did you break into MacIver’s office?”

“You know that I did that?”

“It wasn’t hard. You made sure that it wouldn’t attract attention to him, but you didn’t think of someone already interested, someone trying to see into it. If you didn’t know about the letters, why did you do it?”

“Colin did something here—against my better judgment—that made me believe he might have written something. A statement. Call it a confession, if you like. I was thinking of Norma. In the wrong hands, it could have led to anything. He was trying to extricate himself from Rainbow, if you didn’t know.”

“I know,” Leland said.