“That’s good, we’ll lock him up. Maybe he’ll talk then. You come along with us, too. We want you to identify the dead one.”
The city jail was but a few blocks away and all four of us walked there together. They took me inside and unlocked the handcuffs. A man at a desk asked my name and age. I was then taken out the back door, and across a yard into the jail building and locked in a cell with a solid iron door, in a remote corner of the building. They didn’t threaten to beat me up, and asked no more questions. A jailer came at noon with a trusty, who put a pan of very good stew, a tin cup of coffee, and half a loaf of bread in the cell.
I said to the jailer: “Mister, could I see a lawyer?”
He shut the door and locked it without answering me. The door wasn’t opened again till midnight. I was lying awake on a bunk fighting bedbugs in the dark. It seemed they were trying to eat me alive.
“Step out here, young man.”
I stepped out in my stocking feet.
“Put your shoes on, and come with us.”
They were the same two men that arrested me. They took me out and up the streets into the next block where we stopped at an undertaker’s. They led me to a back room and up beside a table on which a figure was lying, covered by a long, sheetlike, white cloth. I stood there beside the table between the two officers for a moment. Then, suddenly, one of them snatched the sheet away from the upper part of the figure. The other shook me violently and shouted:
“Did you ever see that man before?”
I knew Smiler was there before he snatched the sheet off. When we went into the undertaker’s I felt they were going to show me his body, but I couldn’t understand why. I learned later that some people are unnerved at the sudden sight of a gruesome corpse, and, weakening, talk.