Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption.pdf

RITA HAYWORTH AND SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION

There's a guy like me in every state and federal prison in America, I guess--I'm the

guy who can get it for you. Tailor-made cigarettes, a bag of reefer, if you're partial to

that, a bottle of brandy to celebrate your son or daughter's high school graduation, or

almost anything else... within reason, that is. It wasn't always that way. I came to

Shawshank when I was just twenty, and I am one of the few people in our happy little

family who is willing to own up to what he did. I committed murder. I put a large

insurance policy on my wife, who was three years older than I was, and then I fixed

the brakes of the Chevrolet coupe her father had given us as a wedding present. It

worked out exactly as I had planned, except I hadn't planned on her stopping to pick

up the neighbour woman and the neighbour woman's infant son on the way down

Castle Hill and into town. The brakes let go and the car crashed through the bushes at

the edge of the town common, gathering speed. Bystanders said it must have been

doing fifty or better when it hit the base of the Civil War statue and burst into flames.

I also hadn't planned on getting caught, but caught I was. I got a season's pass into this

place. Maine has no death penalty, but the district attorney saw to it that I was tried

for all three deaths and given three life sentences, to run one after the other. That fixed

up any chance of parole I might have, for a long, long time. The judge called what I

had done 'a hideous, heinous crime', and it was, but it is also in the past now. You can

look it up in the yellowing files of the Castle Rock Call, where the big headlines

announcing my conviction look sort of funny and antique next to the news of Hitler

and Mussolini and FDR's alphabet soup agencies.

Have I rehabilitated myself, you ask? I don't know what that word means, at

least as far as prisons and corrections go. I think it's a politician's word. It may have

some other meaning, and it may be that I will have a chance to find out, but that is the

future... something cons teach themselves not to think about. I was young, good-

looking, and from the poor side of town. I knocked up a pretty, sulky, headstrong girl

who lived in one of the fine old houses on Carbine Street. Her father was agreeable to

the marriage if I would take a job in the optical company he owned and 'work my way

up'. I found out that what he really had in mind was keeping me in his house and

under his thumb, like a disagreeable pet that has not quite been housebroken and

which may bite. Enough hate eventually piled up to cause me to do what I did. Given

a second chance I would not do it again, but I'm not sure that means I am rehabilitated.

Anyway, it's not me I want to tell you about; I want to tell you about a guy

named Andy Dufresne. But before I can tell you about Andy, I have to explain a few

other things about myself. It won't take long.

As I said, I've been the guy who can get it for you here at Shawshank for damn

near forty years. And that doesn't just mean contraband items like extra cigarettes or

booze, although those items always top the list. But I've gotten thousands of other

items for men doing time here, some of them perfectly legal yet hard to come by in a

place where you've supposedly been brought to be punished. There was one fellow

who was in for raping a little girl and exposing himself to dozens of others; I got him

three pieces of pink Vermont marble and he did three lovely sculptures out of them--a

baby, a boy of about twelve, and a bearded young man. He called them The Three

Ages of Jesus, and those pieces of sculpture are now in the parlour of a man who used

to be governor of this state. Or here's a name you may remember if you grew up north

of Massachusetts--Robert Alan Cote. In 1951 he tried to rob the First Mercantile Bank

of Mechanic Falls, and the hold-up turned into a bloodbath--six dead in the end, two

of them members of the gang, three of them hostages, one of them a young state cop

who put his head up at the wrong time and got a bullet in the eye. Cote had a penny

collection. Naturally they weren't going to let him have it in here, but with a little help

from his mother and a middleman who used to drive a laundry truck, I was able to get

it to him. I told him, Bobby, you must be crazy, wanting to have a coin collection in a

stone hotel full of thieves. He looked at me and smiled and said, I know where to keep

them. They'll be safe enough. Don't you worry. And he was right. Bobby Cote died of

a brain tumor in 1967, but that coin collection has never turned up.

I've gotten men chocolates on Valentine's Day; I got three of those green

milkshakes they serve at McDonald's around St Paddy's Day for a crazy Irishman

named O'Malley; I even arranged for a midnight showing of Deep Throat and The

Devil in Miss Jones for a party of twenty men who had pooled their resources to rent

the films... although I ended up doing a week in solitary for that little escapade. It's

the risk you run when you're the guy who can get it.

I've gotten reference books and fuck-books, joke novelties like handbuzzers

and itching powder, and on more than one occasion I've seen that a long-timer has

gotten a pair of panties from his wife or his girlfriend... and I guess you'll know what

guys in here do with such items during the long nights when time draws out like a

blade. I don't get all those things gratis, and for some items the price comes high. But

I don't do it just for the money; what good is money to me? I'm never going to own a

Cadillac car or fly off to Jamaica for two weeks in February. I do it for the same

reason that a good butcher will only sell you fresh meat: I got a reputation and I want

to keep it. The only two things I refuse to handle are guns and heavy drugs. I won't

help anyone kill himself or anyone else. I have enough killing on my mind to last me

a lifetime.

Yeah, I'm a regular Neiman-Marcus. And so when Andy Dufresne came to me

in 1949 and asked if I could smuggle Rita Hayworth into the prison for him, I said it

would be no problem at all. And it wasn't.

When Andy came to Shawshank in 1948, he was thirty years old. He was a

short neat little man with sandy hair and small, clever hands. He wore gold-rimmed

spectacles. His fingernails were always clipped, and they were always clean. That's a

funny thing to remember about a man, I suppose, but it seems to sum Andy up for me.

He always looked as if he should have been wearing a tie. On the outside he had been

a vice-president in the trust department of a large Portland bank. Good work for a man

as young as he was, especially when you consider how conservative most banks are...

and you have to multiply that conservatism by ten when you get up into New England,

where folks don't like to trust a man with their money unless he's bald, limping, and

constantly plucking at his pants to get his truss around straight Andy was in for

murdering his wife and her lover.

As I believe I have said, everyone in prison is an innocent man. Oh, they read

that scripture the way those holy rollers on TV read the Book of Revelations. They

were the victims of judges with hearts of stone and balls to match, or incompetent

lawyers, or police frame-ups, or bad luck. They read the scripture, but you can see a

different scripture in their faces. Most cons are a low sort, no good to themselves or

anyone else, and their worst luck was that their mothers carried them to term. In all

my years at Shawshank, there have been less than ten men whom I believed when

they told me they were innocent Andy Dufresne was one of them, although I only

became convinced of his innocence over a period of years. If I had been on the jury

that heard his case in Portland Superior Court over six stormy weeks in 1947-48, I

would have voted to convict, too.

It was one hell of a case, all right; one of those juicy ones with all the right

elements. There was a beautiful girl with society connections (dead), a local sports

figure (also dead), and a prominent young businessman in the dock. There was this,

plus all the scandal the newspapers could hint at. The prosecution had an open-and-

shut case. The trial only lasted as long as it did because the DA was planning to run

for the US House of Representatives and he wanted John Q Public to get a good long

look at his phiz. It was a crackerjack legal circus, with spectators getting in line at

four in the morning, despite the subzero temperatures, to assure themselves of a seat.

The facts of the prosecution's case that Andy never contested were these: That

he had a wife, Linda Collins Dufresne; that in June of 1947 she had expressed an

interest in learning the game of golf at the Falmouth Hills Country Club; that she did

indeed take lessons for four months; that her instructor was the Falmouth Hills golf

pro, Glenn Quentin; that in late August of 1947 Andy learned that Quentin and his

wife had become lovers; that Andy and Linda Dufresne argued bitterly on the

afternoon of 10 September 1947; that the subject of their argument was her infidelity.

He testified that Linda professed to be glad he knew; the sneaking around, she

said, was distressing. She told Andy that she planned to obtain a Reno divorce. Andy

told her he would see her in hell before he would see her in Reno. She went off to

spend the night with Quentin in Quentin's rented bungalow not far from the golf

course. The next morning his cleaning woman found both of them dead in bed. Each

had been shot four times.

It was that last fact that mitigated more against Andy than any of the others.

The DA with the political aspirations made a great deal of it in his opening statement

and his closing summation. Andrew Dufresne, he said, was not a wronged husband

seeking a hot-blooded revenge against his cheating wife; that, the DA said, could be

understood, if not condoned. But this revenge had been of a much colder type.

Consider! the DA thundered at the jury. Four and four! Not six shots, but eight! He

had fired the gun empty... and then stopped to reload so he could shoot each of them

again! FOUR FOR HIM AND FOUR FOR HER, the Portland Sun blared. The

Boston Register dubbed him The Even-Steven Killer.

A clerk from the Wise Pawnshop in Lewiston testified that he had sold a six-

shot .38 Police Special to Andrew Dufresne just two days before the double murder.

A bartender from the country club bar testified that Andy had come in around seven

o'clock on the evening of 10 September, had tossed off three straight whiskeys in a

twenty-minute period--when he got up from the bar-stool he told the bartender that he

was going up to Glenn Quentin's house and he, the bartender, could 'read about the

rest of it in the papers'. Another clerk, this one from the Handy-Pik store a mile or so

from Quentin's house, told the court that Dufresne had come in around quarter to nine

on the same night. He purchased cigarettes, three quarts of beer, and some dish-towels.

The county medical examiner testified that Quentin and the Dufresne woman had

been killed between eleven p. m. and two a. m. on the night of 10-11 September. The

detective from the Attorney General's office who had been in charge of the case

testified that there was a turnout less than seventy yards from the bungalow, and that

on the afternoon of 11 September, three pieces of evidence had been removed from

that turnout: first item, two empty quart bottles of Narragansett Beer (with the

defendant's fingerprints on them); the second item, twelve cigarette ends (all Kools,

the defendant's brand); third item, a plaster moulage of a set of tire tracks (exactly

matching the tread-and-wear pattern of the tires on the defendant's 1947 Plymouth).

In the living room of Quentin's bungalow, four dishtowels had been found

lying on the sofa. There were bullet-holes through them and powder-burns on them.

The detective theorized (over the agonized objections of Andy's lawyer) that the

murderer had wrapped the towels around the muzzle of the murder-weapon to muffle

the sound of the gunshots. Andy Dufresne took the stand in his own defence and told

his story calmly, coolly, and dispassionately. He said he had begun to hear distressing

rumours about his wife and Glenn Quentin as early as the last week in July. In August

he had become distressed enough to investigate a bit. On an evening when Linda was

supposed to have gone shopping in Portland after her tennis lesson, Andy had

followed her and Quentin to Quentin's one-story rented house (inevitably dubbed 'the

love-nest' by the papers). He had parked in the turnout until Quentin drove her back to

the country club where her car was parked, about three hours later.

'Do you mean to tell this court that your wife did not recognize your brand-

new Plymouth sedan behind Quentin's car?' the DA asked him on cross-examination.

'I swapped cars for the evening with a friend,' Andy said, and this cool admission of

how well-planned his investigation had been did him no good at all in the eyes of the

jury. After returning the friend's car and picking up his own, he had gone home. Linda

had been in bed, reading a book. He asked her how her trip to Portland had been. She

replied that it had been fun, but she hadn't seen anything she liked well enough to buy.

That's when I knew for sure,' Andy told the breathless spectators. He spoke in the

same calm, remote voice in which he delivered almost all of his testimony. 'What was

your frame of mind in the seventeen days between then and the night your 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 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 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's worth jotting down what he said. 'Suppose

that, during their search for witnesses,' Andy said one day in the 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,

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