Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 35, No. 10, October 1990

“I’m going to tell you exactly where it is, Geblick. So that you may be rewarded for your diligence, your hounding, your torture.”

“Where!”

“Are you listening, Geblick?”

“Yes!”

“Then here are the precise instructions, and the only instructions, you will receive. Geblick?”

“Spit it out, Snider!”

“Listen closely, then, as I tell you exactly how to find the money. It is hidden in the, hidden in the, hidden in the...”

Geblick stared at the turning record as the voice repeated the phrase.

Eyes wild, he stopped the machine and bent closely over the record to see that the needle was poised at the very edge of the final groove where there was a slight nick which appeared to have been created deliberately.

“No!” he whispered.

He started the machine again. The voice was ghostly and wavering, then it became clear again, as it repeated, “...hidden in the, hidden in the, hidden in the...”

Geblick fell back, and lay on the floor, listening. Finally, and although he had not done so in forty-three years, he began to cry.

The Message by Isak Romun

Someone threw a galley on my desk while I was out to lunch. I picked it up expecting to read a proof of my column. But it wasn’t that, it was the obits along with one or two slightly extended writeups on the deaths of the great, the near great, and the forgotten. One of the writeups told me that the last principal of the Hands Crusade had died.

The uncorrected article was brief and to the point.

Dorcia Brand, retired evangelist, died yesterday at the age of 58. She had been a guest at the Farnsworth Rest Home for upwards of a year. Death occurred as a result of an overdose of sleeping tablets.

Ms. Brand figured prominently in the late forties as the executive assistant to Buttolph de Strange, leader of the Hands Crusade. De Strange was executed in 1951 for the murder of Harry Gossett at the latter’s woodland cabin in California.

Funeral arrangements are incomplete.

“D, o, r, t, i, a,” I muttered. “She spelled it with a t.” Absently, I picked up a blue pencil and made the correction.

It was that galley, that writeup, that convinced me I should prepare this account. I suppose the brief two-paragraphs-plus-a-line made the next edition. I never checked.

It wouldn’t have mattered whether it made the next edition or not. Almost no one remembered Dortia Brand and few, I imagine, remembered De Strange. But between 1947 and 1950 those two shook up the country, were on the brink of turning it around as Butch de Strange promised he would. I wonder, futilely now, if he could have pulled it off if the then inexplicable and seemingly motiveless murder of Gossett hadn’t brought the whole thing crashing down.

The story really starts back in January, 1945, in a battered winter-whitened town called Bastogne. I won’t go into that part of it; even those who weren’t around then know about the Battle of the Bulge. Suffice it to say that Butch was in one of Patton’s tanks, speeding to relieve that nearly crushed outpost of American resistance.

From all accounts, and from his own story in a Crusade handout, Butch was not an atypical GI. Maybe more the happy heathen, but generally average. He drank, he caroused, he wenched, but unlike most of his olive-drab peers he didn’t feel accountably contrite about it when it came time to move out and face Jerry. He wrote that he used to kid the Catholic boys as they stood in line for confession before a move-up or a push. After Jerry, though, it was back to fun and games for Butch, for the boys in line, for everyone.

In England, where De Strange staged before Normandy, there was plenty enough to turn the golden-haired head of a Stateside country type, particularly if predisposed. But in France’s liberated cities, in the food-hungry and grateful towns between the cities, there were unlimited opportunities for a handsome swaggerer to swill deeply at life’s trough. Until it was time once again to persuade the Wehrmacht to give up yet more real estate.

That was how it was with thousands of GI’s, including Butch de Strange, until De Strange got to Bastogne.