The Scientific Cracksman
"The Scientific Cracksman" is a short detective story featuring Professor Craig Kennedy, a Columbia University scientist who serves as an amateur detective, and his friend Walter Jameson, a newspaper reporter who narrates the tale. The story begins when Kennedy bets Jameson that the most significant story in that evening's newspapers is not the sensational Shaw murder trial but rather a brief notice about the sudden death of wealthy steel magnate John Graham Fletcher at his Long Island estate, Fletcherwood. Kennedy reveals that Professor John G. Fletcher II, the dead man's nephew and a bacteriology professor, has telephoned him urgently: the old man's safe has been expertly cracked, and the only item missing is a will that would have left the bulk of the fortune to endow a great school of preventive medicine, with the nephew appointed as its dean. Kennedy and Jameson travel to Fletcherwood and examine the evidence. The safe has been drilled open using an electric drill powered by the house's own lighting current, a technique Kennedy recognizes as having been used by sophisticated European criminals. The cracksman also left virtually no fingerprints, having apparently coated his or her fingers with liquid rubber, another technique known to continental authorities. Kennedy further notes that a remarkably small amount of force was required to jimmy open the interior compartment, suggesting the perpetrator may not have been physically powerful. Tire prints near the back gate of the estate, made by an anti-skid automobile tire, provide what Kennedy treats as a kind of mechanical fingerprint linking a specific vehicle to the scene. Kennedy visits the local electric power company and obtains the chart of current consumption for the night of the death, which shows an anomalous spike between eleven and midnight consistent with someone drawing current to operate an electric drill. He then experiments in the library himself, drilling a test hole with the same type of apparatus and confirming that the noise would not have been sufficient to wake a sound sleeper but might well have disturbed an elderly, wakeful man. Kennedy asks to be introduced to the elder Fletcher's grandniece, Helen Bond, who is staying nearby with relatives named the Greenes and is reportedly prostrated by grief. Kennedy insists that she knows something and that keeping it secret is destroying her mentally. Disguising himself and Jameson as nerve specialists, Kennedy visits Helen and subjects her to two psychological instruments then new to American practice: a plethysmograph, which measures blood pressure changes in response to emotional stimuli, and an association-time test, in which the subject is asked to respond immediately to spoken words with the first word that comes to mind, while the examiner measures the delay in response. Using these tools, Kennedy systematically moves through neutral words before introducing words connected to the crime, such as gate, road, electric light, safe, rubber, steel, lock, key, and finally will. Helen's blood pressure and reaction times betray her at every significant word, and when Kennedy says the word will, she breaks down entirely and produces the document from her own dress. The explanation Helen provides is remarkable. During a summer in Paris with the Greenes the previous year, she had deliberately sought out a notorious Apache criminal named Pillard, one of the most skilled safe-crackers in Europe, and persuaded him to teach her the techniques of breaking into safes, including the use of liquid rubber on the fingers and the electric drill method. Her motive was not simple greed but a calculated plan to protect what she regarded as her future with Professor Fletcher. She had learned from a lawyer, through carefully framed hypothetical questions, which legal clauses could make a charitable bequest contestable, and she had practiced forging her uncle's handwriting until she could insert such a clause into the will without detection. Her intention had been to steal the will, alter it to reduce the bequest to the proposed school and preserve more of the fortune for herself and her future husband, and return it to the safe before morning, afterward contesting whatever remained in court. The plan went wrong when old Fletcher, wakeful that night, entered the library and found her at work. His rage brought on a fatal stroke of apoplexy, and Helen, completely unnerved, fled with the will in its original state, unable to carry out the alteration. The shock of having inadvertently caused her uncle's death while in the act of robbing him had driven her to the edge of breakdown. Kennedy chooses not to expose her. He accepts her full confession privately, extracts the will from her, and then stages a discovery, rushing back to announce to Professor Fletcher that he and Jameson have just found the will tucked away in the old man's desk. Fletcher is overjoyed, the school is secured, and Helen is spared. Kennedy justifies his suppression of the truth on the grounds that no crime requiring punishment has technically been committed: old Fletcher died of natural causes brought on by his own passion, no property was permanently taken, and justice in the form of the valid will has been done. Jameson, characterizing himself as a romantic drawn entirely under Helen's spell, reluctantly goes along and silently mourns yet another newspaper story he cannot print.
By Arthur B. Reeve · First published 1909 · Genre: Mystery, Crime Fiction, Detective Fiction