“I ’spose I may as well give it up,” I says.
“Not at all,” says he. “Wouldn’t do nothing of the sort. I don’t believe they’re going to get him just because they happen to be laying for him, and if you do you’re a fool.”
“Why, don’t you think he’s off for Montreal?” I says.
“Yes,” says he, “of course, but not that way. The taking of that berth in his own name is a dead give away. He’ll never go over the Central road.”
“How do I know?” says he, “but I’ve got an idea.”
I asked him what it was, and he told me to go down to the bank and try and find out where Mr. Camm had been living for the last few weeks.
“But I can’t find out that,” I says. “Others have tried it and failed. How can I hope to succeed?”
“Never you mind, Dave, you go,” he says. “Something tells me you will succeed.”
I had a note from Mr. Brady to the bank president, and he treated me civil enough.
“I don’t know where he lived, and no one else don’t neither,” he says. “He’s kept himself in hiding for more’n three weeks.”
“Ain’t there anything here what belongs to him?” I asked, for you see I’d been figuring it all out on the way down to the bank and it come to me somehow that this was what I wanted to say.
“Why there’s lots of things,” says the president. “There’s his old coat and two or three old hats, and an umbrella and a couple of pair of old shoes, but what does that amount to?”
He showed me a clothes closet where the things were along with a lot of other rubbish. I couldn’t make nothing out of them, although I examined everything carefully till I come to one hat--a plug--which looked to me to be new.
Now you may laugh just as much as you please, but I knowed right away as soon as I took the hat into my hands that I’d found what I was looking for.
“This is a new one,” I says to the president, who stood right behind me.
“Maybe. I don’t know nothing at all about it,” he says.
“But it is,” says I. “It ain’t never been worn at all. Did it come to the bank from the maker, or did he bring it?”
“You’ll have to ask Camm; I’ll never tell you,” he says.
Well, now I’d just like to have had the chance to ask Camm, you bet.
But there wasn’t any show then, so I asked the man whose name was in the hat. It was Silverstein in the Bowery, a little dried-up Jew.