Different Seasons(26)

“No, I’m not going to tell you that. My friend Jim was the one who set up the false identity. He started after my appeal was turned down, and the major pieces of identification were in his hands by the spring of 1950.”

“He must have been a pretty close friend,” I said. I was not sure how much of this I believed—a little, a lot, or none. But the day was warm and the sun was out, and it was one hell of a good story. “All of that’s one hundred per cent illegal, setting up a false ID like that.”

“He was a close friend,” Andy said. “We were in the war together. France, Germany, the occupation. He was a good friend. He knew it was illegal, but he also knew that setting up a false identity in this country is very easy and very safe. He took my money—my money with all the taxes on it paid so the IRS wouldn’t get too interested—and invested it for Peter Stevens. He did that in 1950 and 1951. Today it amounts to three hundred and seventy thousand dollars, plus change.”

I guess my jaw made a thump when it dropped against my chest, because he smiled.

“Think of all the things people wish they’d invested in since 1950 or so, and two or three of them will be things Peter Stevens was into. If I hadn’t ended up in here, I’d probably be worth seven or eight million bucks by now. I’d have a Rolls... and probably an ulcer as big as a portable radio.”

His hands went to the dirt and began sifting out more pebbles. They moved gracefully, restlessly.

“It was hoping for the best and expecting the worst—nothing but that. The false name was just to keep what little capital I had untainted. It was lugging the paintings out of the path of the hurricane. But I had no idea that the hurricane... that it could go on as long as it has.”

I didn’t say anything for awhile. I guess I was trying to absorb the idea that this small, spare man in prison gray next to me could be worth more money than Warden Norton would make in the rest of his miserable life, even with the scams thrown in.

“When you said you could get a lawyer, you sure weren’t kidding,” I said at last. “For that kind of dough you could have hired Clarence Darrow, or whoever’s passing for him these days. Why didn’t you, Andy? Christ! You could have been out of here like a rocket.”

He smiled. It was the same smile that had been on his face when he’d told me he and his wife had had their whole lives ahead of them. “No,” he said.

“A good lawyer would have sprung the Williams kid from Cashman whether he wanted to go or not,” I said. I was getting carried away now. “You could have gotten your new trial, hired private detectives to look for that guy Blatch, and blown Norton out of the water to boot. Why not, Andy?”

“Because I outsmarted myself. If I ever try to put my hands on Peter Stevens’s money from inside here, I’ll lose every cent of it. My friend Jim could have arranged it, but Jim’s dead. You see the problem?”

I saw it. For all the good that money could do Andy, it might as well have really belonged to another person. In a way, it did. And if the stuff it was invested in suddenly turned bad, all Andy could do would be to watch the plunge, to trace it day after day on the stocks-and-bonds page of the Press-Herald. It’s a tough life if you don’t weaken, I guess.

“I’ll tell you how it is, Red. There’s a big hayfield in the town of Buxton. You know where Buxton is at, don’t you?”

I said I did. It lies right next door to Scarborough.

“That’s right. And at the north end of this particular hayfield there’s a rock wall, right out of a Robert Frost poem. And somewhere along the base of that wall is a rock that has no business in a Maine hayfield. It’s a piece of volcanic glass, and until 1947 it was a paperweight on my office desk. My friend Jim put it in that wall. There’s a key underneath it. The key opens a safe deposit box in the Portland branch of the Casco Bank.”

“I guess you’re in a peck of trouble,” I said. “When your friend Jim died, the IRS must have opened all of his safe deposit boxes. Along with the executor of his will, of course.”

Andy smiled and tapped the side of my head. “Not bad. There’s more up there than marshmallows, I guess. But we took care of the possibility that Jim might die while I was in the slam. The box is in the Peter Stevens name, and once a year the firm of lawyers that served as Jim’s executors sends a check to the Casco to cover the rental of the Stevens box.

“Peter Stevens is inside that box, just waiting to get out. His birth certificate, his Social Security card, and his driver’s license. The license is six years out of date because Jim died six years ago, true, but it’s still perfectly renewable for a five-dollar fee. His stock certificates are there, the tax-free municipals, and about eighteen bearer bonds in the amount of ten thousand dollars each:”

I whistled.

“Peter Stevens is locked in a safe deposit box at the Casco Bank in Portland and Andy Dufresne is locked in a safe deposit box at Shawshank,” he said. “Tit for tat. And the key that unlocks the box and the money and the new life is under a hunk of black glass in a Buxton hayfield. Told you this much, so I’ll tell you something else, Red—for the last twenty years, give or take, I have been watching the papers with a more than usual interest for news of any construction project in Buxton. I keep thinking that someday soon I’m going to read that they’re putting a highway through there, or erecting a new community hospital, or building a shopping center. Burying my new life under ten feet of concrete, or spitting it into a swamp somewhere with a big load of fill.”