"All right, chum," the turnkey said to Benny. "Come on; we'll take care of you. We'll give you the bridal suite, and you can be making up your mind whether you want a blonde or a brunette to go with it."
Benny realized that was a joke so he didn't try to answer. He went with them along two corridors and up several flights in an elevator, then along another corridor and through a door into an office in which there was a desk with a young male clerk behind it.
At the desk they asked him for the cigar box; they opened it and the clerk counted it. When he called out and wrote down the total, it was the same amount Benny himself had counted it to be just before he'd left the newsstand. Meanwhile the turnkeys had asked him to empty his pockets onto the desk and he had. They patted him a few places and then gave him back what he'd taken out of his pockets except for one thing, a small penknife he used for cutting the rope around bundles of papers and for cleaning his fingernails. They asked him to take off his belt and he did. He wasn't wearing a necktie; he never wore one except to church. And they didn't take his shoelaces because he was wearing moccasins. Hard shoes hurt his feet and he always wore moccasins except on Sunday.
Then they took him down another corridor, through a steel door, past the barred doors of cells. Then they opened a cell door and the tall turnkey said, "All right, chum, this is it. Home, sweet home."
Benny went in and they closed the door behind him. The closing door made a loud clang and someone somewhere yelled out, "Quiet, you bastards!" And then they went away and left him alone.
The cell was long and narrow, about six feet by fifteen. Enough light came in from the corridor through the bars so he could see his way around. There was a double-decker bunk bed—with no one in either the upper nor the lower—two chairs and, back in the far corner, a commode. That was all, or it was all that he could see now, in the dimness.
He sighed and took off his suit coat, hung it over the back of one of the chairs and put his moccasins under the chair.
He started to get into the lower bunk and then remembered that he'd never slept in a high bed, an upper bunk, in his life and he wondered if it would feel any different, so he climbed into the upper and stretched himself out.
The lieutenant had told him there was something he should think about tonight and he tried to remember what it was. But within seconds, and before he could remember, he was asleep.