Different Seasons(20)

“So one night, just for something to say, I go: ‘Who’d you kill?’ Like a joke, you know. So he laughs and says: ‘There’s one guy doing time up-Maine for these two people I killed. It was this guy and the wife of the slob who’s doing the time. I was creeping their place and the guy started to give me some shit.’

“I can’t remember if he ever told me the woman’s name or not,” Tommy went on. “Maybe he did. But in New England, Dufresne’s like Smith or Jones in the rest of the country, because there’s so many Frogs up here. Dufresne, Lavesque, Ouelette, Poulin, who can remember Frog names? But he told me the guy’s name. He said the guy was Glenn Quentin and he was a prick, a big rich prick, a golf pro. El said he thought the guy might have cash in the house, maybe as much as five thousand dollars. That was a lot of money back then, he says to me. So I go: ‘When was that?’ And he goes: ‘After the war. Just after the war.’

“So he went in and he did the joint and they woke up and the guy gave him some trouble. That’s what El said. Maybe the guy just started to snore, that’s what I say. Anyway, El said Quentin was in the sack with some hotshot lawyer’s wife and they sent the lawyer up to Shawshank State Prison. Then he laughs this big laugh. Holy Christ, I was never so glad of anything as I was when I got my walking papers from that place.”

I guess you can see why Andy went a little wonky when Tommy told him that story, and why he wanted to see the warden right away. Elwood Blatch had been serving a six-to-twelve rap when Tommy knew him four years before. By the time Andy heard all of this, in 1963, he might be on the verge of getting out... or already out. So those were the two prongs of the spit Andy was roasting on—the idea that Blatch might still be in on one hand, and the very real possibility that he might be gone like the wind on the other.

There were inconsistencies in Tommy’s story, but aren’t there always in real life? Blatch told Tommy the man who got sent up was a hotshot lawyer, and Andy was a banker, but those are two professions that people who aren’t very educated could easily get mixed up. And don’t forget that twelve years had gone by between the time Blatch was reading the clippings about the trial and the time he told the tale to Tommy Williams. He also told Tommy he got better than a thousand dollars from a footlocker Quentin had in his closet, but the police said at Andy’s trial that there had been no sign of burglary. I have a few ideas about that. First, if you take the cash and the man it belonged to is dead, how are you going to know anything was stolen, unless someone else can tell you it was there to start with? Second, who’s to say Blatch wasn’t lying about that part of it? Maybe he didn’t want to admit killing two people for nothing. Third, maybe there were signs of burglary and the cops either overlooked them—cops can be pretty dumb—or deliberately covered them up so they wouldn’t screw the DA’s case. The guy was running for public office, remember, and he needed a conviction to run on. An unsolved burglary-murder would have done him no good at all.

But of the three, I like the middle one best. I’ve known a few Elwood Blatches in my time at Shawshank—the triggerpullers with the crazy eyes. Such fellows want you to think they got away with the equivalent of the Hope Diamond on every caper, even if they got caught with a two-dollar Timex and nine bucks on the one they’re doing time for.

And there was one thing in Tommy’s story that convinced Andy beyond a shadow of a doubt. Blatch hadn’t hit Quentin at random. He had called Quentin “a big rich prick,” and he had known Quentin was a golf pro. Well, Andy and his wife had been going out to that country club for drinks and dinner once or twice a week for a couple of years, and Andy had done a considerable amount of drinking there once he found out about his wife’s affair. There was a marina with the country club, and for awhile in 1947 there had been a part-time grease-and-gas jockey working there who matched Tommy’s description of Elwood Blatch. A big tall man, mostly bald, with deep-set green eyes. A man who had an unpleasant way of looking at you, as though he was sizing you up. He wasn’t there long, Andy said. Either he quit or Briggs, the fellow in charge of the marina, fired him. But he wasn’t a man you forgot. He was too striking for that.

So Andy went to see Warden Norton on a rainy, windy day with big gray clouds scudding across the sky above the gray walls, a day when the last of the snow was starting to melt away and show lifeless patches of last year’s grass in the fields beyond the prison.

The warden has a good-sized office in the Administration Wing, and behind the warden’s desk there’s a door which connects with the assistant warden’s office. The assistant warden was out that day, but a trusty was there. He was a half-lame fellow whose real name I have forgotten; all the inmates, me included, called him Chester, after Marshal Dillon’s sidekick. Chester was supposed to be watering the plants and waxing the floor. My guess is that the plants went thirsty that day and the only waxing that was done happened because of Chester’s dirty ear polishing the keyhole plate of that connecting door.

He heard the warden’s main door open and close and then Norton saying: “Good morning, Dufresne, how can I help you?”

“Warden,” Andy began, and old Chester told us that he could hardly recognize Andy’s voice it was so changed. “Warden... there’s something... something’s happened to me that’s ... that’s so ... so ... I hardly know where to begin.”