“Oh, that is nice,” said Mrs. Garvey enthusiastically. “That’s just lovely. And I do so like that part about the blades in eternity. But I wonder now” — she paused, frowning — “shouldn’t you say a little something about the black-hearted devil what struck him down?”
“Good heavens, woman!” huffed Ponsonby. “This is a commemorative minute, not a news story of Professor Twining’s murder!”
“Maybe so, love, but I don’t see why that scoundrel Luther Cobb shouldn’t be given his comeuppance in commemorable minutes same as anyplace else.”
Ponsonby had started to reply, thought better of it, and subsided into an indignant silence, struck dumb once again by Mrs. Garvey’s matter-of-fact approach to life. He was not surprised that his Housekeeper should be seizing every opportunity to voice a self-satisfied “I-told-you-so”; she had often predicted a bad end for Luther Cobb, the drunkard, bully, and tavern brawler who had long been Briarwood’s leading ne’er-do-well. What was unsettling was that she should be so obviously pleased that the poor brute had proved at last to be a murderer as well. Or presumably so, since he had not yet been formally charged with the crime.
At the time Ponsonby had known only what all Briarwood knew about the murder of his former colleague. Professor Twining had been struck down in the library of his home on College Avenue shortly after eight o’clock on the previous Thursday evening. His assailant had used a cast-iron bookend as a weapon, then wiped it clean of fingerprints, and tossed it down beside the body before fleeing out the back door.
Professor Twining’s 19-year-old daughter Ann, who kept house for her widower father, had been upstairs at the time, displaying the fruits of a recent shopping spree to a friend. Hearing the commotion downstairs, the friend had happened to glance out a window just in time to see the assailant plunge off the back porch and disappear into the shrubbery, but all she had been certain of in the dusk was that he was a big man — a description which fitted six-foot-four, two-hundred-odd pound Luther Cobb to a T.
The girls had rushed downstairs to find Professor Twining unconscious from a blow on the head, and so he had remained after surgery, until Sunday evening when he had died. But on Monday morning the rumor had raced like wildfire through Briarwood that he had regained consciousness at the last, long enough to identify his killer.
And had he named Luther Cobb, Ponsonby wondered? To one who was a faithful subscriber to both the Briarwood newspaper and Mrs. Garvey’s grapevine, it seemed almost certain that he had. Not only had Cobb been seen in the Twining neighborhood on the night of the attack, but when picked up for questioning the next day he had been found to have $300 in his pocket — the precise sum which Professor Twining had withdrawn from his bank the previous morning.
At first Cobb had claimed he’d won the money in a crap game, but later, when confronted with the fact that his fingerprints had been found in the Twining library, he reluctantly admitted his presence there on the evening of the crime, insisting, however, that Professor Twining had hired him to repair his garage roof and given him a cash advance to buy the needed materials. Insisting, too, that he had left Twining alive and well.
“Garage roof, my Aunt Minnie!” said Mrs. Garvey suddenly, as though she had been reading Ponsonby’s thoughts. She had abandoned the watering can in favor of a feather duster which she now waved indignantly at her employer. “Nobody in his right mind would hire that rumpot to fix anything, let alone give him three hundred dollars.”
“It’s quite possible,” observed Ponsonby, “that Professor Twining was unaware of Luther Cobb’s reputation. Nicholas lived in a rarefied academic atmosphere, and had little contact with such mundane phenomena as small-town gossip.” Ponsonby smiled, remembering his eccentric friend. “Yes, Nicholas definitely stepped to the music of a different drummer.”
“Ah, so he was a veteran, too, poor man.” Mrs. Garvey had returned to her housewifely attack and was busily flicking the dust from a bust of Alexander Pope. “I wonder if maybe you shouldn’t have mentioned that in your commemorable minute? I know my Billy, God rest his soul, was as proud as Punch of his part in the war.”
Ponsonby glared at his housekeeper’s back. “My dear woman, I was merely alluding to an oft-quoted passage from Thoreau’s Walden. I was not implying that Professor Twining had served in the war.”
“No? Was he 4-F, then? Well, I guess you wouldn’t want to mention that.”
Ponsonby’s already ruddy complexion turned a shade ruddier. “I haven’t the slightest notion, Madam, whether or not Professor Twining ever served in the armed forces, nor do I think, in so far as my faculty minute is concerned, that it matters at all.”
“Of course it doesn’t, love, and don’t you fret about it. We’re all the same at the gate of Heaven, soldier and civilian alike.”
“Confound it, woman!” sputtered Ponsonby. “I didn’t — I was only — it doesn’t—” Only the timely peal of the doorbell saved Mrs. Garvey from one of the spirited denunciations to which the Professor occasionally subjected her, and which she good-naturedly assigned to a “sour stomach.”
The man whom Mrs. Garvey ushered into the study a few moments later was in his late twenties, short and stocky, with dark curly hair and a round, almost adolescent face that to Ponsonby seemed strangely denuded without its usual grin.
“Here’s Mr. Anders come to have morning coffee with us,” said Mrs. Garvey. “Isn’t that nice, now?”
Ponsonby regarded his godson with concern. “Well, Paul,” he said when the young man had dropped into a chair by the hearth and Mrs. Garvey had bustled off to the kitchen, “to judge by appearances you do propose to write an ode to dejection.”
“I beg your pardon, Uncle Amos?”
“Nothing, my boy. I’ve just been writing a brief memorial to Professor Twining, and Henry David Thoreau is on my mind.”
“Thoreau? I thought that was Coleridge.”
“The Ode, yes, but I was thinking of Thoreau’s one-sentence preamble to Walden. It goes: I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up. I don’t believe America has produced another writer who can match Thoreau’s ability to compose sentences that stick in the mind.”
“You mean like The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation?”
“My personal favorite has always been Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.” Ponsonby smiled; it was good to see his godson grinning again. “But tell me, Paul, why was Briarwood’s newly appointed Public Defender looking so glum this morning?”
“Because he’s about to go down to ignominious defeat in his first appearance as Public Defender, that’s why.”
“Oh? And who might the public be in this case?”
“Do you know Samuel Greatheart?”
“Ann Twining’s fiancé? I’ve met him once or twice. And of course I’ve seen him play — a fine fullback. But what trouble can he possibly be in?”
“He was arrested this morning for the murder of Professor Twining.”
Ponsonby stared at his godson. “Samuel Greatheart? But I thought Luther Cobb—?”
“So did the police, until a minute or so before Professor Twining died, when he regained consciousness long enough to identify his murderer.”
“Do you mean he actually identified Samuel Greatheart?”
“Not by name, but he came close enough to satisfy the County Attorney.” Paul pulled a paper from his inside coat pocket. “Here’s a copy of the preliminary deposition made by the detective who was present when Professor Twining died. And I’m told there are two witnesses who can corroborate this, give or take a word here or there.”