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.