Different Seasons by Stephen King Page B

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, 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 triggerpullers 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 awhile 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 gray clouds scudding across the sky above the gray 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 trusty was there. He was a half-lame fellow whose real name I have forgotten; all the inmates, me included, called him Chester, after Marshal Dillon’s sidekick. Chester was supposed to be watering the plants 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-Twenty-third-Psalm-and-read-in-unison voice. “That usually works the best.”
    And so Andy did. He began by refreshing Norton on 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