By the time Reynolds and Lowry were ready to leave, McKay was a little buoyed up, although obviously his experiences with the law had left him deeply pessimistic about his chances of ever escaping from their sticky clutches.

Outside, Reynolds shook his head gravely. “I don’t like it much, Lowry.”

“You don’t think he’s got a chance?”

“I didn’t say that. As long as he’s on this side of the gas chamber, he’s still got a chance. But it’ll be hard, Lowry. Damn hard with those two witnesses for the prosecution and the little McKay has to tell. You get an average jury of nincompoops who just want to tell their grandchildren that they sat on a murder trial, and they’ll send him to his death without even biting their nails. Hell, he’s practically convicted in the newspapers as it is. The jurors are going to walk into that courtroom already convinced that they’re only going through the motions of a trial. That’s what I’ll have to fight against, Lowry. And I can’t do it without some solid evidence to back up his story.”

Lowry shook his head. “El Centro is out,” he said. “That would be a sort of needle in a haystack search, especially the way the men keep moving in and out down there. But I guess this Mack Wilson fellow he mentioned is first on my list, at any rate. A block of crummy wooden shacks on the other side of the river. There are plenty of those but the post office might help.”

Reynolds nodded. “If you could track down Wilson somehow, that would help. We may have something in that case.”

“May?”

“Yes. Because of course he also has to be a reliable witness. You can’t put a safecracker on the witness stand and expect to impress a jury.”

“I’ll see.”

Lowry’s next stop was at the post office. After bringing into play some high-pressure tactics that he had perfected in his everyday job as a reporter and columnist, he succeeded in getting the address of the man called Mack Wilson.

He drove quickly to a part of town which, though it is really nothing but a slum area, manages by virtue of the small ramshackle houses and the sorry-looking trees which grow here and there at the edges of the cracked sidewalks to look like a rundown suburb.