em); the second item,
twelve cigarette ends (all Kools, the defendant‘s brand); third item, a plaster moulage of a
set of tyre tracks (exactly matching the tread-and-wear pattern of the tyres 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-storey 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

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