“Not the exact address. But he did say he wanted to move out of the neighborhood he was in because of his kid.” McKay was silent a moment, trying to force his alcohol-soaked mind to disgorge the memories of that morning which seemed so many hundreds of centuries ago. “Yeah. I remember. I remember him saying it was a block of crummy wooden shacks on the other side of the river.”

“Good. Now, when you got to El Centro, you didn’t get a job, I suppose?”

“No.”

“Did you stand in line at the ranch offices for any length of time?”

“Sure.”

“And did you happen to talk with any of the men who were hiring?” Reynolds asked. “Did you leave your name on a waiting list, or anything like that we could use as proof?”

“No; I never even got to one of them. There was no hiring. And no waiting list to sign. We were just told to stand around and wait in case it turned out that they needed more men than they already had.”

“But they didn’t?”

“No.”

“Did you talk to any of the other hands who were trying to get work that morning?”

McKay nodded. “Yes.”

“Were there any you think we might stand a chance of locating?”

“No. We simply talked about work, about how bad times were when a guy had to apply for a chinchy job like this and just stand around and wait. I don’t know where any of them lived.”

“I suppose not,” Reynolds said sadly, mentally crossing off that line of approach. Changing the subject, he said, “Bob, did Doris Blair ever tell you anything about herself?”

“Only that she hated the way she was living, wanted to get out of it.”

“And that’s all?”

McKay smiled feebly. “You got to remember that I was very rarely in a condition to remember everything she told me, of course. But I really don’t think she told me more than that. How she hated the way she was living. She knew she should be doing better with herself.”

“Who were her friends?”

“I don’t know.”

“Were they the other girls who worked there?” Reynolds wanted to find out.

“No. I’m quite sure they weren’t. They didn’t like her very much.”

“That’s the truth,” Lowry put in. “She was rather superior to the rest of the lot and she made them feel their inferiority.”

“Offensively?” Reynolds asked.

“No, it was unconscious on her part. She was just a girl with class. She showed them up for the cheap dyed-haired floozies that they were, just the way a Federal bill is going to show up a bunch of lithographed counterfeits if you put them side by side.”

Reynolds’ lips narrowed.

McKay said darkly, “They’re gonna put me in the gas chamber, aren’t they?”

“Not if we can help it,” Lowry said.