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marijuana reefers Scotch-taped to the wall. 

And his response to that second assumption must have been to hell with it. Maybe he 

even made a game out of it. How far in can I get before they find out? Prison is a goddam 

boring place, and the chance or being surprised by an unscheduled inspection in the 

middle of the night while he had his poster unstuck probably added some spice to his life 

during the early years. 

And I do believe it would have been impossible for him to get away just on dumb luck. 

Not for twenty-seven years. Nevertheless, I have to believe that for the first two years - 

until mid-May of 1950, when he helped Byron Hadley get around the tax on his windfall 

inheritance - that's exactly what he did get by on. 

Or maybe he had something more than dumb luck going for him even back then. He had 

money, and he might have been slipping someone a little squeeze every week to take it 

easy on him. Most guards will go along with that if the price is right; it's money in their 

pockets and the prisoner gets to keep his whack-off pictures or his tailormade cigarettes. 

Also, Andy was a model prisoner - quiet, well-spoken, respectful, non-violent. It's the 

crazies and the stampeders that get their cells turned upside-down at least once every six 

months, their mattresses unzipped, their pillows taken away and cut open, the outflow 

pipe from their toilets carefully probed. 

Then, in 1950, Andy became something more than a model prisoner. In 1950, he became 

a valuable commodity, a murderer who did tax returns as well as H & R Block. He gave 

gratis estate-planning advice, set up tax-shelters, filled out loan applications (sometimes 

creatively). I can remember him sitting behind his desk in the library, patiently going 

over a car-loan agreement paragraph by paragraph with a screwhead who wanted to buy a 

used DeSoto, telling the guy what was good about the agreement and what was bad about 

it, explaining to him that it was possible to shop for a loan and not get hit quite so bad, 

steering him away from the finance companies which in those days were sometimes little 

better than legal loan-sharks. When he'd finished, the screwhead started to put out his 

hand ... and then drew it back to himself quickly. He'd forgotten for a moment, you see, 

that he was dealing with a mascot, not a man. 

Andy kept up on the tax laws and the changes in the stock market, and so his usefulness 

didn't end after he'd been in cold storage for a while, as it might have done. He began to 

get his library money, his running war with the sisters had ended, and nobody tossed his 

cell very hard. He was a good nigger. 

Then one day, very late in the going - perhaps around October of 1967 - the long-time 

hobby suddenly turned into something else. One night while he was in the hole up to his 

waist with Raquel Welch hanging down over his ass, the pick end of his rock-hammer 

must have suddenly sunk into concrete past the hilt. 

He would have dragged some chunks of concrete back, but maybe he heard others falling 

down into that shaft, bouncing back and forth, clinking off that standpipe. Did he know 

by then that he was going to come upon that shaft, or was he totally surprised? I don't 

know. He might have seen the prison blueprints by then or he might not have. If not, you 

can be damned sure he found a way to look at them not long after. 

All at once he must have realized that, instead of just playing a game, he was playing for