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.
‘I 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 a while. I guess I was trying to absorb the idea that
this small, spare man in prison grey 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’d 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 the 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 pack of trouble,’ I said. ‘When your friend Jim died, the IRS
must have opened all of his safety 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 S. S. 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