“You have what I may call the usual type of mind. You look at usual things in the usual way. And yet the application of well-known principles to well-known people seems to benumb your usual mind most unusually. Now what do you gather from the Garrettson episode?”
“Nothing, unless it is that you made a lot of money by what seems to be a most unusual succession of coincidences.”
“Your voice,” said Robison, with a sort of sedate amusement, “exudes suggestions of the penitentiary. The idea of law and order has become an instinct. The lawful is usual. The unusual, therefore, is unlawful. It puts the blessed era of scientific anarchy as far off as the old maids' millennium—or as the abolition of stupidity among bankers and—”
“And newspaper men—what?” Kidder prompted, pleasantly. “Don't mind me. I enjoy it.”
“Kidder, you are a nice chap! That's why I asked your Paris man for a letter of introduction to the financial editor of his newspaper. It gave me what I as a stranger needed in Wall Street. It was easy to get. It is an American failing to give such letters promiscuously, because we are an irresponsible people. I have, I suppose, voiced a suspicion of yours about me?”
“I did not have it. I have it now, however.”
“If we talk about poor me any longer you'll be asking for my aliases and my Bertillon measurements. Now let's get to Garrettson. We know he left his house in his carriage at his usual hour and that he did not arrive at his office. We have the evidence of his coachman—a man above suspicion—of the newspapers, and of the cigar-ashes. We know, for you heard Jenkins call up the house, that Mr. Garrettson was not at home. We know that his disappearance must have been connected with alarming circumstances or his partners would not have been so badly upset as to allow that reputation-shattering slump in the Garrettson shares—led, I am thankful to say, by Consolidated Steel. We know that Jenkins rushed up-town to the Cressline Hotel and found Dr. Pierson, but no Garrettson there, as had been tipped off, thereby increasing the mystery or suggesting that a bear clique was at work and was taking advantage of the obvious possibilities of the situation. Merely out of curiosity I found out that the hotel people had rented Suite D to a man calling himself W. H. Garrettson, who was accompanied by a veiled woman. It wasn't Garrettson, though.”
“How do you know?”
“It was clearly a ruse—having a woman. Don't you see it? The gossip that would—”
“Very ingenious; but—”