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The DA hammered at him for two days. He re-read the Handy-Pik clerk's testimony 

about the dishtowels to Andy. Andy repeated that he could not recall buying them, but 

admitted that he also couldn't remember not buying them. 

Was it true that Andy and Linda Dufresne had taken out a joint insurance policy in early 

 1947? Yes, that was true. And if acquitted, wasn't it true that Andy stood to gain $50,000 

in benefits? True. And wasn't it true that he had gone up to Glenn Quentin's house with 

murder in his heart, and wasn't it also true that he had indeed committed murder twice 

over? No, it was not true. Then what did he think had happened, since there had been no 

signs of robbery? 

'I have no way of knowing that, sir,' Andy said quietly. 

The case went to the jury at one p.m. on a snowy Wednesday afternoon. The twelve 

jurymen and women came back at three-thirty. The bailiff said they would have been 

back earlier, but they had held off in order to enjoy a nice chicken dinner from Bentley's 

Restaurant at the county's expense. They found him guilty, and brother, if Maine had the 

death penalty, he would have done the airdance before that spring's crocuses poked their 

heads out of the dirt. 

The DA had asked him what he thought had happened, and Andy slipped the question - 

but he did have an idea, and I got it out of him late one evening in 1955. It had taken 

those seven years for us to progress from nodding acquaintances to fairly close friends - 

but I never felt really close to Andy until 1960 or so, and I believe I was the only one 

who ever did get really close to him. Both being long-timers, we were in the same 

cellblock from beginning to end, although I was halfway down the corridor from him. 

'What do I think?' He laughed - but there was no humour in the sound. 'I think there was a 

lot of bad luck floating around that night. More than could ever get together in the same 

short span of time again. I think it must have been some stranger, just passing through. 

Maybe someone who had a flat tyre on that road after I went home. Maybe a burglar. 

Maybe a psychopath. He killed them, that's all. And I'm here.' 

As simple as that. And he was condemned to spend the rest of his life in Shawshank - or 

the part of it that mattered. Five years later he began to have parole hearings, and he was 

turned down just as regular as clockwork in spite of being a model prisoner. Getting a 

pass out of Shawshank when you've got murder stamped on your admittance-slip is slow 

work, as slow as a river eroding a rock. Seven men sit on the board, two more than at 

most state prisons, and every one of those seven has an ass as hard as the water drawn up 

from a mineral-spring well You can't buy those guys, you can't no, you can't cry for them. 

As far as the board concerned, money don't talk, and nobody walks. pc other reasons in 

Andy's case as well ... but that belongs a little further along in my story. 

There was a trusty, name of Kendricks, who was into me for some pretty heavy money 

back in the fifties, and it was four years before he got it all paid off. Most of the interest 

he paid me was information - in my line of work, you're dead if you can't find ways of 

keeping your ear to the ground. This Kendricks, for instance, had access to records I was 

never going to see running a stamper down in the goddam plate-shop. 

Kendricks told me that the parole board vote was 7-0 against Andy Dufresne through