The clubbing which followed left him mercifully unconscious for hours. When the doctor finally pulled him out of it, McKay would not talk. He would not move from his cot. He would not touch the unmentionable soggy food that was brought him in rusty metal trays.

He lay in a sullen stupor, closing his eyes, losing himself in a dream world where a lovely girl with clear brown eyes and firm, warm breasts soothed the tired ache of his body and held his head tenderly cradled in the sweet-smelling cleft of her bosom, against those ripe, delightful swells of rounded flesh, and then she opened her blouse to him and he buried his bruised face between her breasts, and their silky warmth took away all the pain, all the humiliation and agony, and there was only peace and calmness and love.…

He stirred uneasily. A guard doing his rounds heard him muttering thickly, “Why, Terry? Why…?”

10

10

In the meantime, Ned Lowry tried repeatedly to get into the cell to have a talk with McKay. But Hendricks, shrewdly suspecting that there was plenty more to Lowry’s interest in the case than the mere desire to pick up a good story for his column, made a special point of seeing to it that what could easily have been arranged was made impossible. But the papers had the side of the story which the police and the District Attorney’s office had given them, and Lowry, sitting in his office scowling behind his typewriter, felt a pang as he remembered McKay’s worn, handsome face and knew that the certainty of conviction of which the papers spoke so confidently was, indeed, a certainty.

It was a foregone conclusion. Lowry was able to visualize the public defender going through the mere motions of a defense that was no defense, just a hollow mockery of the due process of law. He could see it over and done with, whisked through the courtroom in jig time, quickly but not without pain.

Lowry lifted his big, well-knit frame out of the chair, snatched his hat from the rack, and went out, alerting his secretary to keep the office under control until he got back. Lowry walked four blocks to a tall office building and went up in the gleaming elevator to the tenth floor.

There he stopped in front of a frosted office door which said, in commanding gilt letters, PETER J. REYNOLDS, ATTORNEY AT LAW.

Lowry went in.

A decorative young receptionist in a tight yellow jersey smiled at him and said, “Yes, please?”

“I’d like to see Mr. Reynolds.”

“Do you have an appointment with him, sir?”

“I’m afraid I don’t. But I think he’ll see me, if he isn’t too busy. The name is Lowry, Ned Lowry. Yes, the one from the newspaper.”