he said. And I believed him. He sure looked like a man that could do some killing. He
was just so fucking high-strung! Like a pistol with a sawed-off firing pin. I knew a
guy who had a Smith & Wesson Police Special with a sawed-off firing pin. It wasn’t no good for nothing, except maybe for something to jaw about. The pull on that gun
was so light that it would fire if this guy, Johnny Callahan, his name was, if he turned his record-player on full volume and put it on top of one of the speakers. That’s how
El Blatch was. I can’t explain it any better. I just never doubted that he had greased some people. ‘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 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,