44
for burglary with a weapon and was serving six to twelve.
"I never seen such a high-strung guy," Tommy told me. "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 him, 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 he
....
, 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
....
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
....
highstrung! Like a pistol with a sawed-off
firing pin. I knew a guy who had a Smith and 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 the
46
I guess you can see why Andy went a little wonky when Tommy told him that story,
and why he wanted to see the warden right away. Elwood Blatch had been serving a
six-to-twelve rap when Tommy knew him four years before. By the time Andy heard
all of this, in 1963, he might be on the verge of getting out . . . or already
out. So those were the two prongs of the spit Andy was roasting on-the idea that
Blatch might still be in on one hand, and the very real possibility that he
might be gone like the wind on the other.
There were inconsistencies in Tommy's story, but aren't there always in real
life? Blatch told Tommy the man who got sent up was a hotshot lawyer, and Andy
was a banker, but those are two professions that people who aren't very educated
could easily get mixed up. And don't forget that twelve years had gone by
between the time Blatch was reading the clippings about the trial and the time
he told the tale to Tommy Williams. He also told Tommy he got better than a
thousand dollars from a footlocker Quentin had in his closet, but the police
said at Andy's trial that there had been no sign of burglary. I have a few ideas
about that. First, if you take the cash and the man it belonged to is dead, how
are you going to know anything was stolen, unless someone else can tell you it
was there to start with? Second, who's to say Blatch wasn't lying about that
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