“It’s Bob McKay. You know about it?”

“Only what I’ve read in the papers.”

“Looks bad, doesn’t it?”

“Pretty bad.”

“He’s innocent,” Lowry said with firm conviction. “Completely innocent.”

Reynolds shrugged. “That’s not unlikely. It’s been known to happen.”

“I don’t want it to happen this time. I like that boy. He doesn’t deserve to end up in the gas chamber on a railroad job.”

Reynolds leaned back, thrusting his thumbs into his waistband and looking interested. “Well,” he said, “I know the prosecution’s angles. What are yours? Then we’ll see. I don’t want to take on a lost cause.”

“McKay’s young, about twenty-eight or maybe twenty-nine. He’s a musician, a hell of a good one. He plays the saxophone and clarinet like nobody’s business.”

“I’m familiar with that.”

“He started a band of college kids a few years back and raised them right into the big time, right up to the top of the heap. They were good. Too good, as a matter of fact. McKay worked like the devil. Inside of absolutely no time at all, his orchestra was generally rated among the best swing bands in the country. McKay was averaging two thousand and better a week for himself. But it must have been a strain.”

“I imagine it was.”

“In that kind of work, you know, the drinks are right at hand with which to relieve the strain. It’s no trick to reach out and take a highball off a tray, when they’re on the house. So McKay drank. Too much. And he began to get into trouble.”

“What kind?”

“The night club kind,” Lowry said, shrugging. “You know. Fights with customers, fights with bosses. He hauled off and broke a customer’s nose one night because the guy was drunk and making insulting remarks about the band. Then a couple nights later he took a poke at the owner of the club. That finished him there, and the same thing happened at the next place. He started to lose jobs and the orchestra began to go down with him until one of his boys decided that the best thing for the good of everybody concerned was just to pitch him out on his butt before he wrecked the reputation of the entire group.”

“And so they pitched him out?”