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

“For old times’ sake, Oscar. We had some good sessions back then, some good talks. And you were fair — you didn’t find things where there was nothing to find. Even though you didn’t — couldn’t find anything wrong, you might have written a funny story, poked fun at the Crusade. You didn’t. Others weren’t so charitable.” He turned those watery eyes on me. “Why did I send for you? Do they still call them scoops?”

“Our younger people sometimes do.”

“I want to give you a scoop.”

“Okay, give me the details.”

He thought a while, then said, “How will a step-by-step account of the murder do? The anatomy of a killing, something like that?”

I replied that that would do nicely. I was right, too. Because of that story, I’m told, I almost won a Pulitzer. I also got the column, wide syndication, lots of visibility. That interview was my making in spite of the fact that I was dissatisfied with it. It merely reinforced the illogic of Butch’s act. I told him that, told him the story was short on motive.

“That’s all you can print — what I told you,” he said. “For now, anyway. If I told you more, could you keep it under wraps at least until the Crusade is forgotten, until all this is just so much uninteresting history?”

“Off the record? Sure. But don’t tell me anything you don’t want to tell me.”

He looked grim. “I have to tell someone. So someone will know why I did it. Before I’m a dead man.”

“There are appeals.”

“Not for me.”

“At least one is automatic. Isn’t that the way it works?”

“Maybe, but it won’t change things.”

“You want to die.”

“Yes. For what I did to Gossett. No one has that right. I found that out in Europe. You must know I fixed the trail that led them to me.”

“Why?”

“I stole those things to cover up the real reason I killed him. The hatchet was just a woodsman’s tool. When I started out, I had no thought of using it that way. Do you know who Gossett was? Can you guess?”

I shook my head, but in my mind I examined the possibility that Gossett had succeeded where others had failed and had dug up something about Butch and Dortia.

But it wasn’t that. Butch explained. “He’s the one who painted that sign and hung it on the statue. I’ve been trying since the beginning of the Crusade to find that man. I had expected him to come forward of his own free will and share the triumph of the Crusade with me. A number of men claimed to have hung the sign, but their stories didn’t check. But I had been getting leads, piecing them together, until Gossett’s name surfaced. No one else knew — only I knew. People gave me bits of information, but only I put them all together and got Harry Gossett. It was fairly easy to trace him once I had his name.

“So I went to that town, hiked up to his cabin, met him, and laid before him the prospect of his full partnership in the Crusade. He said yes, he made the sign, and that he had recently vowed to connect with the Crusade and make a statement to the press. But then he laughed, Oscar, and he told me why.

“I never realized that The Message could have more than one meaning, that you could read those words at least two ways and that I had read them only one. Gossett told me his — that the hands were the hands of man. Even before they were broken off. That the sign could have read just as well: I HAVE NO HANDS BUT YOURS BECAUSE I AM YOURS — YOUR INVENTION. Man made God — man is God. Oscar, Gossett didn’t believe!”

We talked a while longer, De Strange using the time arguing that he had done what he had done in an effort to protect the Crusade from Gossett. But even then, exposed to Butch de Strange’s persuasive powers, that wouldn’t wash. It was a cop-out. The Crusade would fail in any case. He could have explained Gossett away, said that God even worked through unbelievers, and so on. No, he killed Gossett for another reason, one he wasn’t telling me — perhaps wasn’t telling himself.

I’m reminded of something the Frenchman Jean Guiton wrote: What lies deepest in me, I believe, is a horror of premature certitudes, of beliefs and unbeliefs too hurriedly adopted.

De Strange didn’t want to die, as he said, because of what he did to Gossett. He wanted to die because of what Gossett did to him.

For just as the sign in that lost Bastogne church had, in an instant, changed Butch de Strange from heathen to Crusader, so had the truth, the substance of an atheist’s sick humor, returned Butch, full circle, to his former condition. A condition he was forced to accept, but with which he couldn’t live.

Storm Over Longvalley by Jessica Callow