The Deadly Tube by Arthur B. Reeve
"The Deadly Tube" is a short detective story by Arthur B. Reeve featuring Craig Kennedy, a professor of criminal science, and his companion Walter Jameson, a newspaper reporter who serves as the story's narrator. The tale begins when Dr. James Gregory, a respected X-ray specialist, arrives at Kennedy's apartment in a state of distress. A lawsuit has been filed against him by Mrs. Huntington Close, a celebrated society beauty, who alleges that his X-ray treatments caused her to develop a severe and disfiguring skin condition known as X-ray dermatitis, along with serious nervous prostration. Gregory insists that the treatments he administered were too few and too carefully conducted to have produced such devastating results, and he begs Kennedy to help clear his name before the suit destroys his professional reputation. Kennedy agrees to investigate and takes Jameson along as he examines Gregory's X-ray laboratory, which is equipped with sophisticated lead-glass shielding designed to protect patients from excessive radiation. The apparatus appears to vindicate Gregory's claims of careful practice. Kennedy then arranges to visit Mrs. Close herself at the private hospital where she is recuperating. Though she is embittered and initially hostile, she grants Kennedy permission to speak with her French maid, Marie, and to examine her rooms at the family residence. During the investigation, Jameson uses his newspaper connections to gather background information on the principal figures involved. He learns that Huntington Close, the patient's husband, spends little time either at the club where he is ostensibly staying or at the hospital visiting his wife. Instead, he appears to be frequently in the company of a wealthy Western divorcée named Mrs. Frances Tulkington. Jameson also discovers that Lawrence, Close's attorney, had previously represented Mrs. Tulkington in her divorce proceedings and that Close owes Lawrence a considerable sum of money. Furthermore, before Mrs. Close's illness began, Lawrence himself had been paying conspicuously close attention to Mrs. Close, though she had given no scandal any foothold. Kennedy asks Marie to spend a night sleeping in her mistress's room and to report how she feels the following morning. The maid does so and arrives the next day looking haggard and overwrought, having suffered a restless and disturbing night despite no apparent cause. Kennedy then visits the Close residence with a portable vacuum cleaner and methodically collects dust from the floors, walls, curtains, furniture, and finally from the mattress and the brass framework of the bed. Initial tests of dust from the general room surfaces reveal nothing, but the dust recovered from the crevices of the brass bed frame proves to be intensely radioactive. Kennedy identifies the substance as radium bromide. He traces a purchase of one hundred milligrams of the compound, ordered through a London dealer, to a buyer who traveled disguised as a diamond merchant. The radium had been carefully distributed in the metalwork of Mrs. Close's bed in quantities calculated to produce slow but cumulative radiation damage rather than an immediately suspicious acute injury. The X-ray treatments had been introduced into the picture, Kennedy concludes, simply to provide a plausible and innocent explanation for the symptoms as they developed, with the intention of ruining Gregory professionally while concealing the true source of the harm. Kennedy sends notes summoning Close, Lawrence, Gregory, and their respective attorneys to his laboratory for a final confrontation. He displays the recovered radium sealed in a lead casket, explains the mechanism of the crime, and outlines the motive: Close wished to be rid of his wife so that he could marry Mrs. Tulkington, a marriage that would also resolve his financial debts to Lawrence. When Lawrence and Close respond with contempt and bluster, dismissing the evidence as insufficient to implicate anyone but Gregory, Kennedy steps out of the room on the pretense of retrieving notes. During his absence, Close and Lawrence whisper to each other, believing themselves unobserved. They confirm that Lawrence traveled to London disguised to purchase the radium, acknowledge that the suit against Gregory must now be dropped, and discuss their hope that Kennedy cannot produce enough proof to prevent Close from obtaining a quiet divorce and proceeding with the marriage to Mrs. Tulkington. When Kennedy returns, he reads back to them a verbatim transcript of this whispered conversation, explaining that he had earlier concealed a microphone in the room, capable of amplifying sound sixteen hundred times and transmitting it to a stenographer in the adjoining room. Close and Lawrence are placed under arrest for conspiracy. The story ends with Kennedy calmly holding the room as the police arrive, the trap having been sprung entirely through Kennedy's application of scientific knowledge to criminal investigation.
By Arthur B. Reeve · First published 1916 · Genre: Mystery, Detective Fiction, Science Fiction