Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption - By Stephen King Page 0,4

of Andy Dufresne's sweat in the prison laundry was going to buy his four drinks a year.

On the morning of his birthday, 20 September, he would have himself a big knock, and then he'd have another that night after lights out. The following day he'd give the rest of the bottle back to me, and I would share it around. As for the other bottle, he dealt himself one drink Christmas night and another on New Year's Eve. Then that one would also come to me with instructions to pass it on. Four drinks a year -and that is the behaviour of a man who has been bitten hard by the bottle. Hard enough to draw blood.

He told the jury that on the night of the 10th he had been so drunk he could only remember what had happened in little isolated snatches. He had gotten drunk that afternoon - 'I took on a double helping of Dutch courage' is how he put it -before taking on Linda.

After she left to meet Quentin, he remembered deciding to confront them. On the way to Quentin's bungalow, he swung into the country club for a couple of quick ones. He could 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 oxwulio 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.
Chapter 4
'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.'

'You mean you shot Quentin