“You had no trouble with his codes.”

“My partner said that breaking them took organization and imagination.”

“I never had a chance to see them. They probably would have been helpful to me. Toward the end, they embarrassed Colin. They were adolescent, he said. When he started keeping them, he was in a very confused state of mind. Was there anything in his papers?”

“A confession? No.”

“Then how did you find out? He thought that he was safe. The further along he went, the more convinced of it he became.”

“While he was alive, he probably was. He didn’t reckon on his importance to the people around him—you, Norma, even Betty Kaminsky. I saw her, but you guessed that.”

“No, I wondered.”

“You’ll never be a cop.” Leland looked at the revolver, turning it over to the left and then to the right. He put on the safety. Roberts did not relax. Leland said, “MacIver didn’t reckon that Norma would want answers and seek help. If he had stopped to think, he would have seen that she would have come to me. They had a conversation about me. There are private detectives in the yellow pages, but it stood to reason that she would come to the one she knew by name. You wouldn’t have stopped her—he would have seen that, too. I didn’t know him, he knew that, but he might have realized that I could get hold of a picture of him. It dated the scar on his neck—established that he had lied to her. His life insurance file closed the other end, after a fashion. It was in error, honest error, and I should have suspected it right away, but I didn’t because I worked for the company once, and I know what a slave it is to accurate records. So I saw lies and distortions where there weren’t any. I even gave up trying to resolve the conflict because, among other factors working on me, I couldn’t help liking and trusting the people I was dealing with. That is, all except you.

“I don’t think you could have done anything but draw attention to yourself. You were trying to protect Norma—you said. You thought you knew me and it caused you to make mistakes in dealing with me. You believed the lies Karen told Jerry Palmer and took me for some kind of egoistic authoritarian—”

“As a matter of fact, Joe, I felt sorry for you. I thought that you weren’t as unyielding as she had tried to make you appear. I remembered you from the war. I read about you in the newspapers. But Tuesday night, you presented yourself as single-minded, belligerent—worse than egoistic—”