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

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.

The alley was narrow and filthy, flanked solidly on either side by moldy shopdoors. As he advanced, the beam of his flash swept the rubbish and the rutted clay. After about a hundred yards he came to a little court, a dead-end. Moonlight penetrated here, silvery and nebulous, dusting the alley and the small shed which blocked it. The shed was a small blacksmith shop with a sloping sheet iron roof and a decrepit door. The door was chained. He called: “Citizen, are you hurt?”

There was no answer.

Suddenly the whole picture came back to him. And he didn’t like it. He grasped the eaves of the shed and swung himself up onto the low roof.

The man in overalls had tucked the billfold in his shirt. A real stick-up man extracts the money, gets rid of the leather, and quick. The yellow haired man had saved it — because it was his own! The entire business was phony. A trap and a smart one.

A hot September breeze came down from the surrounding hills, sere and oppressive, and the metal of the roof was warm to McGavock’s palms. For five long minutes he waited, searching the shadowed court below him; he heard no sound nor saw any movement. He inched his way to the rear of the roof, detached his penknife from his watch chain, and tossed it outward into the court. There was a tinkle as it struck a window.

Instantly, hell broke loose in the alley. Four crashing shots, hand-running, pounded the still, hot air.

McGavock dropped to the ground, found himself in a vacant lot, and came out again on Elm, a half block away. He waited in the darkened doorway of a grain and feed store. After a little, the overalled figure of the yellowhaired man appeared from the alleymouth and sauntered down the sidewalk toward Main Street. McGavock followed.

On the east side of courtsquare, just before Main bisected Elm, a huge hackberry made a canopy of dense shadow over the sidewalk. The man seemed to vanish at this point. Warily, McGavock investigated. There was no passageway under the tree, only a small ramshackle shop with crooked, gaping clapboards and mossgrown shingles. A placard in the grimy, curtained window said:

Without breaking his pace, he continued on to Main, made a loop of the courthouse, and returned to his original course along South Elm. When the overalled man had staged his act, he’d given McGavock a good look at him. That meant they’d expected to kill him. This business was for keeps. He didn’t like any part of it. It had started off with that nutty zwanziger stuff, and now this.

He was still trembling with anger when he reached the home of his client.

The little cottage of white-painted brick sat at the end of the street, just as the hotel clerk had described. Beyond it, in the moonlight, was a silvery, rolling field and in the near distance against the blue night sky rose the black, wild hills. A block of orange light from the uncurtained parlor window fell across the cement porch, diffused itself in a porchbox of scraggly zinnias, and showed up the goodluck mule-shoe set in the cement steps. To McGavock, a student of homes and people, it seemed respectable, pleasant, and problematically prosperous. It didn’t seem the sort of home whose owner would bring a detective all the way from Memphis on a whim. He knocked on the door, and waited.

The man who answered was younger than McGavock had anticipated, possibly thirty-five, and dressed in baggy flannels. His face was long-jawed and aristocratic and the irises of his blue eyes seemed embedded in wrinkled pouches of wet chamois. McGavock asked: “Mr. Tennant?”

The man nodded. McGavock said: “I’m Luther McGavock, from the Atherton Browne Agency. Did you send us this wire?” He made vague gestures of searching his pockets; the telegram, as he well knew, was back in Memphis on file. Mr. Tennant said: “You mean about the zwanziger?”

“That’s the baby,” McGavock said coldly. “Send best employee immediately. Believe things critical. Am convinced we have zwanziger in town. Signed, Littleton Tennant.”

Tennant said gravely: “Come in, sir.”

They went down a short hall and turned into a door at the rear. Tennant smiled modestly. “My playroom, sir, a sort of rumpus room. I live alone. Excuse it, please.”

The room was small and crowded, tucked under the roof at the corner of the cottage; the ceiling sloped, following the roof-line, and everywhere there were books — stacked on the floor like pancakes, walling the room in from shelves on all sides. A green shaded student’s lamp threw a disc of white light on a brokendown easy chair, leaving the upper reaches swimming in vague shadow. There were old books in a dozen kinds of leather, and new books in bright wrappers, all bookmarked with matchsticks, or merchants’ bills, or paper clips. McGavock asked sternly: “Isn’t this hoarding? What if they should spoil on you!”

Mr. Tennant wasn’t amused. He smiled stiffly in polite response and cleared books from a bench by the wall. McGavock pivoted the gooseneck on the lampshade out of his eyes and sat down in the easy chair. He was a small man, wiry and tough, with tired, sharp lips. He was generally disliked on sight by strangers. He’d spent a lifetime in the business and had his own personal methods of getting results. He didn’t like to be pushed around, and he didn’t like fol-de-rol. He asked tightly: “What’s. a zwanziger?”

Mr. Tennant looked mildly surprised at McGavock’s ignorance. “The German Brinvilliers,” he said helpfully. “Executed Bamberg, September 17, 1811. Remember?” He paused. “Full name, Anna Maria Zwanziger.”

“Of course,” McGavock declared jocularly. “Now that you mention it. How memories get away from you! It was a beautiful autumn afternoon and along about a quarter to three a man came through the crowd selling pretzels on a stick—” He changed the subject. “Who knew I was coming?”

“Only a few of my friends and relatives. They didn’t know why I sent for you, of course—”

“Know a mean-looking fellow with high cheekbones and yellow hair? Wears overalls and carries a black billfold and a long-barrelled .38.”

“About the gun and billfold, I couldn’t say. The rest sounds like an unsavory native known as Railroad Brantner. If he’s back in town you can find him at the Cloverleaf. That’s a pig-joint down on Front Street, over the Acme Barbershop. Why—?”