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 trigger-pullers 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 a while 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 grey
clouds scudding across the sky above the grey 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 trustee was there. He
was a half-lame fellow whose real name I have forgotten; all the inmates, me included, called him Chester, after Marshall Dillon’s sidekick. Chester was supposed to be
watering the plants and dusting 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.’
‘Well, why don’t you just begin at the beginning?’ the warden said, probably in
his sweetest let’s-all-turn-to-the-23rd-psalm-and-read-in-unison voice. ‘That usually
works the best.’
And so Andy did. He began by refreshing Norton of the details of the crime he
had been imprisoned for. Then he told the warden exactly what Tommy Williams had
told him. He also gave out Tommy’s name, which you may think wasn’t so wise in
light of later developments, but I’d just ask you what else he could have done, if his story was to have any credibility at all.
When he had finished, Norton was completely silent for some time. I can just
see him, probably tipped back in his office chair under the picture of Governor Reed
hanging on the wall, his fingers steepled, his liver lips pursed, his brow wrinkled into ladder rungs halfway to the crown of his head, his thirty-year pin gleaming mellowly.
‘Yes,’ he said finally. That’s the damnedest story I ever heard. But I’ll tell you
what surprises me most about it, Dufresne.’
‘What’s that, sir?’
‘That you were taken in by it.’
‘Sir? I don’t understand what you mean.’ And Chester said that Andy Dufresne,
who had faced down Byron Hadley on the plate-shop roof thirteen years before, was
almost floundering for words.
‘Well now,’ Norton said. ‘It’s pretty obvious to me that this young fellow