Black Mask Magazine (Vol. 31, No. 1 — January, 1948)

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Anna Maria Zwanziger, the passionate poisoner, was quite a gal, and McGavock was determined to follow her deadly trail — but the fact that she was executed in Bamberg, Germany, back in 1811, didn’t make things any easier.

McGavock was walking down South Elm when a man came out of an alley across the street, carrying a gun and a billfold. He was dressed in stiff new overalls and his hair was shaggy and flaxen in the arclight which filtered through the dusty magnolias; before McGavock could speak, he’d thrust the pocketbook into his shirt and vanished in the shrubbery behind courtsquare. Along the cracked sidewalk the dingy smalltown shops were blank and lifeless, closed for the night.

McGavock cursed softly. In town scarcely fifteen minutes and already he was watching the tail-end of a stick-up — with his gun in his Gladstone at the hotel. He crossed the street, hard-heeled and angry, turned on his pencil flash, and entered the alleymouth.

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