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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'i worth jotting down what he said. 'Suppose that, during
their chmvmhn fur witnesses,' Andy said one day in the xwulio 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, as I drove home,
I was beginning to think that the wisest course would be to simply let her go to Reno and
get her divorce.'
'Thank you, Mr Dufresne.'
The DA popped up.
'You divorced her in the quickest way you could think of, didn't you? You divorced her
with a .38 revolver wrapped in dishtowels, didn't you?'
'No sir, I did not,' Andy said calmly.
'And then you shot her lover.'
'No, sir.'