wife was murdered?' Andy's lawyer asked him.
'I was in great distress,' Andy said calmly, coldly. Like a man reciting a shopping list he
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said that he had considered suicide, and had even gone so far as to purchase a gun in
Lewiston on 8 September.
His lawyer then invited him to tell the jury what had happened after his wife left to meet
Glenn Quentin on the night of the murders. Andy told them ... and the impression he
made was the worst possible.
I knew him for close to thirty years, and I can tell you he was the most self-possessed
man I've ever known. What was right with him he'd only give you a little at a time. What
was wrong with him he kept bottled up inside. If he ever had a dark night of the soul, as
some writer or other has called it, you would never know. He was the type of man who, if
he had decided to commit suicide, would do it without leaving a note but not until his
affairs had been put neatly in order. If he had cried on the witness stand, or if his voice
had thickened and grown hesitant, even if he had gotten yelling at that Washington-bound
District Attorney, I don't believe he would have gotten the life sentence he wound up
with. Even if he had've he would have been out on parole by 1954. But he told his story
like a recording machine, seeming to say to the jury: this is it. Take it or leave it. They
left it.
He said he was drunk that night, that he'd been more or less drunk since 24 August, and
that he was a man who didn't handle his liquor very well. Of course that by itself would
have been hard for any jury to swallow. They just couldn't see this coldly self-possessed
young man in the neat double-breasted three-piece woollen suit ever getting falling-down
drunk over his wife's sleazy little affair with some small-town golf pro. I believed it
because I had a chance to watch Andy that those six men and six women didn't have.
Andy Dufresne took just four drinks a year all the time I knew him. He would meet me in
the exercise yard every year about a week before his birthday and then again about two
weeks before Christmas. On each occasion he would arrange for a bottle of Jack Daniels.
He bought it the way most cons arrange to buy their stuff-the slave's wages they pay in
here, plus a little of his own. Up until 1965 what you got for your time was a dime an
hour. In '65 they raised it all the way up to a quarter. My commission on liquor was and is
ten per cent, and when you add on that surcharge to the price of a fine sippin' whiskey
like the Black Jack, you get an idea of how many hours of Andy Dufresne's sweat in the
prison laundry was going to buy his four drinks a year.
On the morning of his birthday, 20 September, he would have himself a big knock, and
then he'd have another that night after lights out. The following day he'd give the rest of
the bottle back to me, and I would share it around. As for the other bottle, he dealt
himself one drink Christmas night and another on New Year's Eve. Then that one would
also come to me with instructions to pass it on. Four drinks a year -and that is the
behaviour of a man who has been bitten hard by the bottle. Hard enough to draw blood.
He told the jury that on the night of the 10th he had been so drunk he could only
remember what had happened in little isolated snatches. He had gotten drunk that
afternoon - 'I took on a double helping of Dutch courage' is how he put it -before taking
on Linda.
After she left to meet Quentin, he remembered deciding to confront them. On the way to
Quentin's bungalow, he swung into the country club for a couple of quick ones. He could
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not, he said, remember telling the bartender he could 'read about the rest of it in the
papers', or saying anything to him at all. He remembered buying beer in the Handy-Pik,
but not the dishtowels. 'Why would I want dishtowels?' he asked, and one of the papers
reported that three of the lady jurors shuddered.
Later, much later, he speculated to me about the clerk who had testified on the subject of
those dishtoweis, and I think it'i worth jotting down what he said. 'Suppose that, during
their chmvmhn fur witnesses,' Andy said one day in the xwulio yard, 'they stumble on
this fellow who sold me the beer that night. By then three days have gone by. The facts of
the case have been broadsided in all the papers. Maybe they ganged up on the guy, five or
six cops, plus the dick from the attorney general's office, plus the DA's assistant. Memory
is a pretty subjective thing, Red. They could have started out with "Isn't it possible that he
purchased four or five dishtowels?" and worked their way up from there. If enough
people want you to remember something, that can be a pretty powerful persuader.'
I agreed that it could.
'But there's one even more powerful,' Andy went on in that musing way of his. 'I think it's
at least possible that he convinced himself. It was the limelight. Reporters asking him
questions, his picture in the papers ... all topped, of course, by his star turn in court. I'm
not saying that he deliberately falsified his story, or perjured himself. I think it's possible
that lie could have passed a lie detector test with flying colours, or sworn on his mother's
sacred name that I bought those dishtowels. But still ... memory is such a goddam
subjective thing.
'I know this much: even though my own lawyer thought I had to be lying about half my
story, he never bought that business about the dishtowels. It's crazy on the face of it. I
was pig-drunk, too drunk to have been thinking about muffling the gunshots. If I'd done
it, I just would have let them rip.'
He went up to the turnout and parked there. He drank beer and smoked cigarettes. He
watched the lights downstairs in Quentin's place go out. He watched a single light go on
upstairs ... and fifteen minutes later he watched that one go out. He said he could guess
the rest.
'Mr Dufresne, did you then go up to Glenn Quentin's house and kill the two of them?' his
lawyer thundered.
'No, I did not,' Andy answered. By midnight, he said, he was sobering up. He was also
feeling the first signs of a bad hangover. He decided to go home and sleep it off and think
about the whole thing in a more adult fashion the next day. 'At that time, as I drove home,
I was beginning to think that the wisest course would be to simply let her go to Reno and
get her divorce.'
'Thank you, Mr Dufresne.'
The DA popped up.
'You divorced her in the quickest way you could think of, didn't you? You divorced her
with a .38 revolver wrapped in dishtowels, didn't you?'
'No sir, I did not,' Andy said calmly.
'And then you shot her lover.'
'No, sir.'
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'You mean you shot Quentin first?'
'I mean I didn't shoot either one of them. I drank two quarts of beer and smoked however
many cigarettes that the police found at the turnout. Then I drove home and went to bed.'
'You told the jury that between 24 August and 10 September, you were feeling suicidal.'
'Yes, sir.'
'Suicidal enough to buy a revolver.'
'Yes.'
'Would it bother you overmuch, Mr Dufresne, if I told you that you do not seem to me to
be the suicidal type?'
'No,' Andy said, 'but you don't impress me as being terribly sensitive, and I doubt very
much that, if I were feeling suicidal, I would take my problem to you.'
There was a slight tense titter in the courtroom at this, but it won him no points with the
jury.
'Did you take your .38 with you on the night of September?'
'No; as I've already testified -'
'Oh, yes!' The DA smiled sarcastically. 'You threw it into the river, didn't you? The Royal
River. On the afternoon of 9 September.'
'Yes, sir.'
'One day before the murders.'
'Yes, sir.'
That's convenient, isn't it?'
'It's neither convenient nor inconvenient. Only the truth.'
'I believe you heard Lieutenant Mincher's testimony?' Mincher had been in charge of the
party which had dragged the stretch of the Royal near Pond Bridge, from which Andy
had testified he had thrown the gun. The police had not found it
'Yes, sir. You know I heard it.'
Then you heard him testify that they found no gun, although they dragged for three days.
That was rather convenient, too, wasn't it?'
'Convenience aside, it's a fact that they didn't find the gun,' Andy responded calmly. 'But
I should like to point out to both you and the jury that the Pond Road Bridge is very close
to where the Royal River empties into the Bay of Yarmouth. The current is strong. The
gun may have been carried out into the bay itself.'
'And so no comparison can be made between the riflings on the bullets taken from the
bloodstained corpses of your wife and Mr Glenn Quentin and the riflings on the barrel of
your gun. That's correct, isn't it, Mr Dufresne?'
'Yes.'
That's also rather convenient, isn't it?'
At that, according to the papers, Andy displayed one of the few slight emotional reactions
he allowed himself during the entire six-week period of the trial. A slight, bitter smile
crossed his face.
'Since I am innocent of this crime, sir, and since I am telling the truth about throwing my
gun into the river the day before the crime took place, then it seems to me decidedly
inconvenient that the gun was never found.'
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The DA hammered at him for two days. He re-read the Handy-Pik clerk's testimony
about the dishtowels to Andy. Andy repeated that he could not recall buying them, but
admitted that he also couldn't remember not buying them.
Was it true that Andy and Linda Dufresne had taken out a joint insurance policy in early
1947? Yes, that was true. And if acquitted, wasn't it true that Andy stood to gain $50,000
in benefits? True. And wasn't it true that he had gone up to Glenn Quentin's house with
murder in his heart, and wasn't it also true that he had indeed committed murder twice
over? No, it was not true. Then what did he think had happened, since there had been no
signs of robbery?
'I have no way of knowing that, sir,' Andy said quietly.
The case went to the jury at one p.m. on a snowy Wednesday afternoon. The twelve
jurymen and women came back at three-thirty. The bailiff said they would have been
back earlier, but they had held off in order to enjoy a nice chicken dinner from Bentley's
Restaurant at the county's expense. They found him guilty, and brother, if Maine had the
death penalty, he would have done the airdance before that spring's crocuses poked their
heads out of the dirt.
The DA had asked him what he thought had happened, and Andy slipped the question -
but he did have an idea, and I got it out of him late one evening in 1955. It had taken
those seven years for us to progress from nodding acquaintances to fairly close friends -
but I never felt really close to Andy until 1960 or so, and I believe I was the only one
who ever did get really close to him. Both being long-timers, we were in the same
cellblock from beginning to end, although I was halfway down the corridor from him.
'What do I think?' He laughed - but there was no humour in the sound. 'I think there was a
lot of bad luck floating around that night. More than could ever get together in the same
short span of time again. I think it must have been some stranger, just passing through.
Maybe someone who had a flat tyre on that road after I went home. Maybe a burglar.
Maybe a psychopath. He killed them, that's all. And I'm here.'
As simple as that. And he was condemned to spend the rest of his life in Shawshank - or
the part of it that mattered. Five years later he began to have parole hearings, and he was
turned down just as regular as clockwork in spite of being a model prisoner. Getting a
pass out of Shawshank when you've got murder stamped on your admittance-slip is slow
work, as slow as a river eroding a rock. Seven men sit on the board, two more than at
most state prisons, and every one of those seven has an ass as hard as the water drawn up
from a mineral-spring well You can't buy those guys, you can't no, you can't cry for them.
As far as the board concerned, money don't talk, and nobody walks. pc other reasons in
Andy's case as well ... but that belongs a little further along in my story.
There was a trusty, name of Kendricks, who was into me for some pretty heavy money
back in the fifties, and it was four years before he got it all paid off. Most of the interest
he paid me was information - in my line of work, you're dead if you can't find ways of
keeping your ear to the ground. This Kendricks, for instance, had access to records I was
never going to see running a stamper down in the goddam plate-shop.
Kendricks told me that the parole board vote was 7-0 against Andy Dufresne through
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1957,6-1 in '58, 7-0 again in '59, and 5-2 in '60. After that I don't know, but I do know
that sixteen years later he was still in Cell 14 of Cellblock 5. By tben, 1976, he was fifty-
eight. They probably would have fatten big-hearted and let him out around 1983. They
give you fife, and that's what they take - all of it that counts, anyway. Maybe they set you
loose someday, but ... well, Listen: I knew this guy, Sherwood Bolton, his name was, and
