The person he asked was his partner on the laundry’s steam ironer and folder. The inmates call this device the mangier, because that’s exactly what it will do to you if you aren’t paying attention and get your bad self caught in it. His partner was Charlie Lathrop, who had been in for about twelve years on a murder charge. He was more than glad to reheat the details of the Dufresne murder trial for Tommy; it broke the monotony of pulling freshly pressed bedsheets out of the machine and tucking them into the basket. He was just getting to the jury waiting until after lunch to bring in their guilty verdict when the trouble whistle went off and the mangle grated to a stop. They had been feeding in freshly washed sheets from the Eliot Nursing Home at the far end; these were spat out dry and neatly pressed at Tommy’s and Charlie’s end at the rate of one every five seconds. Their job was to grab them, fold them, and slap them into the cart, which had already been lined with brown paper.
But Tommy Williams was just standing there, staring at Charlie Lathrop, his mouth unhinged all the way to his chest. He was standing in a drift of sheets that had come through dean and which were now sopping up all the wet muck on the floor — and in a laundry wetwash, there’s plenty of muck.
So the head bull that day, Homer Jessup, comes rushing over, bellowing his head off and on the prod for trouble. Tommy took no notice of him. He spoke to Charlie as if old Homer, who had busted more heads than he could probably count, hadn’t been there.
‘What did you say that golf pro’s name was?’
‘Quentin,’ Charlie answered back, all confused and upset by now. He later said that the kid was as white as a truce flag, ‘Glenn Quentin, I think. Something like that, anyway —’
‘Here now, here now,’ Homer Jessup roared, his neck as red as a rooster’s comb. ‘Get them sheets in cold water! Get quick! Get quick, by Jesus, you —’
‘Glenn Quentin, oh my God,’ Tommy Williams said, and that was all he got to say because Homer Jessup, that least peaceable of men, brought his billy down behind his ear. Tommy hit the floor so hard he broke off three of his front teeth. When he woke up he was in solitary, and confined to same for a week, riding a boxcar on Sam Norton’s famous grain and drain train. Plus a black mark on his report card.
That was in early February in 1963, and Tommy Williams went around to six or seven other long-timers after he got out of solitary and got pretty much the same story. I know; I was one of them. But when I asked him why he wanted it, he just clammed up.
Then one day he went to the library and spilled one helluva big budget of information to Andy Dufresne. And for the first and last time, at least since he had approached me about the Rita Hayworth poster like a kid burying his first pack of Trojans, Andy lost his cool … only this time he blew it entirely.
I saw him later that day, and he looked like a man who has stepped on the business end of a rake and given himself a good one, whap between the eyes. His hands were trembling, and when I spoke to him, he didn’t answer. Before that afternoon was out he had caught up with Billy Hanlon, who was the head screw, and set up an appointment with Warden Norton for the following day. He told me later that he didn’t sleep a wink all that night; he just listened to a cold winter wind howling outside, watched the searchlights go around and around, putting long, moving shadows on the cement walls of the cage he had called home since Harry Truman was President and tried to think it all out. He said it was as if Tommy had produced a key which fitted a cage in the back of his mind, a cage like his own cell. Only instead of holding a man, that cage held a tiger, and that tiger’s name was Hope. Williams had produced the key that unlocked the cage and the tiger was out, willy-nilly, to roam his brain.
Four years before, Tommy Williams had been arrested in Rhode Island, driving a stolen car that was full of stolen merchandise. Tommy turned in his accomplice, the DA played ball, and he got a lighter sentence … two to four, with time served. Eleven months after beginning his term, his old cellmate got a ticket out and Tommy got a new one, a man named Elwood Blatch. Blatch had been busted for burglary with a weapon and was serving six to twelve.
‘I never seen such a high-strung guy,’ Tommy said. ‘A man like that should never want to be a burglar, specially not with a gun. The slightest little noise, he’d go three feet into the air … and come down shooting, more likely than not. One night he almost strangled me because some guy down the hall was whopping on his cell bars with a tin cup.
‘I did seven months with bun, until they let me walk free. I got time served and time off, you understand. I can’t say we talked because you didn’t, you know, exactly hold a conversation with El Blatch. He held a conversation with you. He talked all the time. Never shut up. If you tried to get a word in, he’d shake his fist at you and roll his eyes. It gave me the cold chills whenever he done that. Big tall guy he was, mostly bald, with these green eyes set way down deep in the sockets. Jeez, I hope I never see him again.
‘It was like a talkin’ jag every night. Where he grew up, the orphanages he run away from, the jobs he done, the women as fucked, the crap games he cleaned out I just let him run on. My face ain’t much, but I didn’t want it, you know, rearranged for me.
‘According to him, he’d burgled over two hundred joints. It was hard for me to believe, a guy like him who went off like a firecracker every time someone cut a loud fart, but he swore it was true. Now … listen to me, Red. I know guys sometimes make things up after they know a thing, but even before I knew about this golf pro guy, Quentin, I remember thinking that if El Blatch ever burgled my house, and I found out about it later, I’d have to count myself just about the luckiest motherfucker going still to be alive. Can you imagine him in some lady’s bedroom, sifting through her jool’ry box, and she coughs in her sleep or turns over quick? It gives me the cold chills just to think of something like that, I swear on my mother’s name it does.
‘He said he’d killed people, too. People that gave him shit. At least that’s what he said. And I believed him. He sure looked like a man that could do some killing. He was just so fucking high-strung! Like a pistol with a sawed-off firing pin. I knew a guy who had a Smith & Wesson Police Special with a sawed-off firing pin. It wasn’t no good for nothing, except maybe for something to jaw about. The pull on that gun was so light that it would fire if this guy, Johnny Callahan, his name was, if he turned his record-player on full volume and put it on top of one of the speakers. That’s how El Blatch was. I can’t explain it any better. I just never doubted that he had greased some people.
‘So one night, just for something to say, I go: “Who’d you kill?” Like a joke, you know. So he laughs and says, “There’s one guy doing time up Maine for these two people I killed. It was this guy and the wife of the slob who’s doing time. I was creeping their place and the guy started to give me some shit.”
‘I can’t remember if he ever told me the woman’s name or not,’ Tommy went on. ‘Maybe he did. But in New England, Dufresne’s like Smith or Jones in the rest of the country, because there’s so many Frogs up here. Dufresne, Lavesque, Ouelette, Poulin, who Can remember Frog names? But he told me the guy’s name. He said the guy was Glenn Quentin and he was a prick, a big rich prick, a golf pro. El said he thought the guy might have cash in the house, maybe as much as five thousand dollars. That was a lot of money back then, he says to me. So I go, “When was that?” And he goes, “After the war. Just after the war.”