Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption Read online

  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 he could have passed a lie detector test with flying colors, 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.”

  “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 the police found at the turnout. Then I drove home and went to bed.”

  “You told the jury that between August twenty-fourth and September tenth 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 thirty-eight with you on the night of September tenth?”

  “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 September ninth.”

  “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 Road 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 tell the court 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.”

  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 fifty thousand dollars 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 1:00 p.m. on a snowy Wednesday afternoon. The twelve jurymen and -women came back in at 3:30. 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 snow.

  * * *

  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 humor 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 tire 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 sweet-talk them, you can’t cry for them. As far as the board in here is concerned, money don’t talk, and nobody walks. There were 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 plat
e-shop.

  Kendricks told me that the parole board vote was 7-0 against Andy Dufresne through 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 then, 1975, he was fifty-seven. They probably would have gotten big-hearted and let him out around 1983. They give you life, 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 he had this pigeon in his cell. From 1945 until 1953, when they let him out, he had that pigeon. He wasn’t any Birdman of Alcatraz; he just had this pigeon. Jake, he called him. He set Jake free a day before he, Sherwood, that is, was to walk, and Jake flew away just as pretty as you could want. But about a week after Sherwood Bolton left our happy little family, a friend of mine called me over to the west corner of the exercise yard, where Sherwood used to hang out. A bird was lying there like a very small pile of dirty bedlinen. It looked starved. My friend said: “Isn’t that Jake, Red?” It was. That pigeon was just as dead as a turd.

  * * *

  I remember the first time Andy Dufresne got in touch with me for something; I remember like it was yesterday. That wasn’t the time he wanted Rita Hayworth, though. That came later. In the summer of 1948 he came around for something else.

  Most of my deals are done right there in the exercise yard, and that’s where this one went down. Our yard is big, much bigger than most. It’s a perfect square, ninety yards on a side. The north side is the outer wall, with a guard-tower at either end. The guards up there are armed with binoculars and riot guns. The main gate is in that north side. The truck loading-bays are on the south side of the yard. There are five of them. Shawshank is a busy place during the work-week—deliveries in, deliveries out. We have the license-plate factory, and a big industrial laundry that does all the prison wetwash, plus that of Kittery Receiving Hospital and the Eliot Nursing Home. There’s also a big automotive garage where mechanic inmates fix prison, state, and municipal vehicles—not to mention the private cars of the screws, the administration offices… and, on more than one occasion, those of the parole board.

  The east side is a thick stone wall full of tiny slit windows. Cellblock 5 is on the other side of that wall. The west side is Administration and the infirmary. Shawshank has never been as overcrowded as most prisons, and back in ’48 it was only filled to something like two-thirds capacity, but at any given time there might be eighty to a hundred and twenty cons on the yard—playing toss with a football or baseball, shooting craps, jawing at each other, making deals. On Sunday the place was even more crowded; on Sunday the place would have looked like a country holiday… if there had been any women.

  It was on a Sunday that Andy first came to me. I had just finished talking to Elmore Armitage, a fellow who often came in handy to me, about a radio when Andy walked up. I knew who he was, of course; he had a reputation for being a snob and a cold fish. People were saying he was marked for trouble already. One of the people saying so was Bogs Diamond, a bad man to have on your case. Andy had no cellmate, and I’d heard that was just the way he wanted it, although people were already saying he thought his shit smelled sweeter than the ordinary. But I don’t have to listen to rumors about a man when I can judge him for myself.

  “Hello,” he said. “I’m Andy Dufresne.” He offered his hand and I shook it. He wasn’t a man to waste time being social; he got right to the point. “I understand that you’re a man who knows how to get things.”

  I agreed that I was able to locate certain items from time to time.

  “How do you do that?” Andy asked.

  “Sometimes,” I said, “things just seem to come into my hand. I can’t explain it. Unless it’s because I’m Irish.”

  He smiled a little at that. “I wonder if you could get me a rock-hammer.”

  “What would that be, and why would you want it?”

  Andy looked surprised. “Do you make motivations a part of your business?” With words like those I could understand how he had gotten a reputation for being the snobby sort, the kind of guy who likes to put on airs—but I sensed a tiny thread of humor in his question.

  “I’ll tell you,” I said. “If you wanted a toothbrush, I wouldn’t ask questions. I’d just quote you a price. Because a toothbrush, you see, is a non-lethal sort of an object.”

  “You have strong feelings about lethal objects?”

  “I do.”

  An old friction-taped baseball flew toward us and he turned, cat-quick, and picked it out of the air. It was a move Frank Malzone would have been proud of. Andy flicked the ball back to where it had come from—just a quick and easy-looking flick of the wrist, but that throw had some mustard on it, just the same. I could see a lot of people were watching us with one eye as they went about their business. Probably the guards in the tower were watching, too. I won’t gild the lily; there are cons that swing weight in any prison, maybe four or five in a small one, maybe two or three dozen in a big one. At Shawshank I was one of those with some weight, and what I thought of Andy Dufresne would have a lot to do with how his time went. He probably knew it, too, but he wasn’t kowtowing or sucking up to me, and I respected him for that.

  “Fair enough. I’ll tell you what it is and why I want it. A rock-hammer looks like a miniature pickaxe—about so long.” He held his hands about a foot apart, and that was when I first noticed how neatly kept his nails were. “It’s got a small sharp pick on one end and a flat, blunt hammerhead on the other. I want it because I like rocks.”

  “Rocks,” I said.

  “Squat down here a minute,” he said.

  I humored him. We hunkered down on our haunches like Indians.

  Andy took a handful of exercise yard dirt and began to sift it between his neat hands, so it emerged in a fine cloud. Small pebbles were left over, one or two sparkly, the rest dull and plain. One of the dull ones was quartz, but it was only dull until you’d rubbed it clean. Then it had a nice milky glow. Andy did the cleaning and then tossed it to me. I caught it and named it.

  “Quartz, sure,” he said. “And look. Mica. Shale. Silted granite. Here’s a piece of graded limestone, from when they cut this place out of the side of the hill.” He tossed them away and dusted his hands. “I’m a rockhound. At least… I was a rockhound. In my old life. I’d like to be one again, on a limited scale.”

  “Sunday expeditions in the exercise yard?” I asked, standing up. It was a silly idea, and yet… seeing that little piece of quartz had given my heart a funny tweak. I don’t know exactly why; just an association with the outside world, I suppose. You didn’t think of such things in terms of the yard. Quartz was something you picked out of a small, quick-running stream.

  “Better to have Sunday expeditions here than no Sunday expeditions at all,” he said.

  “You could plant an item like that rock-hammer in somebody’s skull,” I remarked.

  “I have no enemies here,” he said quietly.

  “No?” I smiled. “Wait awhile.”

  “If there’s trouble, I can handle it without using a rock-hammer.”

  “Maybe you want to try an escape? Going under the wall? Because if you do—”

  He laughed politely. When I saw the rock-hammer three weeks later, I understood why.

  “You know,” I said, “if anyone sees you with it, they’ll take it away. If they saw you with a spoon, they’d take it away. What are you going to do, just sit down here in the yard and start bangin away?”

  “Oh, I believe I can do a lot better than that.”

  I nodded. That part of it really wasn’t my business, anyway. A man engages my services to get him something. Whether he can keep it or not after I get it is his business.

  “How much would an item like that go for?” I asked. I was beginning to enjoy his quiet, low-key style. When you’ve spent ten years in stir, as I had then, you can get awfully tired of the bellowers and the braggarts and the loud-mouth
s. Yes, I think it would be fair to say I liked Andy from the first.

  “Eight dollars in any rock-and-gem shop,” he said, “but I realize that in a business like yours you work on a cost-plus basis—”

  “Cost plus ten per cent is my going rate, but I have to go up some on a dangerous item. For something like the gadget you’re talking about, it takes a little more goose-grease to get the wheels turning. Let’s say ten dollars.”

  “Ten it is.”

  I looked at him, smiling a little. “Have you got ten dollars?”

  “I do,” he said quietly.

  A long time after, I discovered that he had better than five hundred. He had brought it in with him. When they check you in at this hotel, one of the bellhops is obliged to bend you over and take a look up your works—but there are a lot of works, and, not to put too fine a point on it, a man who is really determined can get a fairly large item quite a ways up them—far enough to be out of sight, unless the bellhop you happen to draw is in the mood to pull on a rubber glove and go prospecting.

  “That’s fine,” I said. “You ought to know what I expect if you get caught with what I get you.”

  “I suppose I should,” he said, and I could tell by the slight change in his gray eyes that he knew exactly what I was going to say. It was a slight lightening, a gleam of his special ironic humor.

  “If you get caught, you’ll say you found it. That’s about the long and short of it. They’ll put you in solitary for three or four weeks… plus, of course, you’ll lose your toy and you’ll get a black mark on your record. If you give them my name, you and I will never do business again. Not for so much as a pair of shoelaces or a bag of Bugler. And I’ll send some fellows around to lump you up. I don’t like violence, but you’ll understand my position. I can’t allow it to get around that I can’t handle myself. That would surely finish me.”

  “Yes. I suppose it would. I understand, and you don’t need to worry.”

  “I never worry,” I said. “In a place like this there’s no percentage in it.”