Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption

Later on, after Greg Stammas took over the warden’s office, Andy became even more important — but if I tried to tell you the specifics of just how, I’d be guessing. There are some things I know about and others I can only guess at. I know that there were some prisoners who received all sorts of special considerations — radios in their cells, extraordinary visiting privileges, things like that — and there were people on the outside who were paying for them to have those privileges. Such people are known as ‘angels’ by the prisoners. All at once some fellow would be excused from working in the plate-shop on Saturday forenoons, and you’d know that fellow had an angel out there who’d coughed up a chuck of dough to make sure it happened. The way it usually works is that the angel will pay the bribe to some middle-level screw, and the screw will spread the grease both up and down the administrative ladder.

Then there was the discount auto repair service that laid Warden Dunahy low. It went underground for a while and then emerged stronger than ever in the late fifties. And some of the contractors that worked at the prison from time to time were paying kickbacks to the top administration officials, I’m pretty sure, and the same was almost certainly true of the companies whose equipment was bought and installed in the laundry and the license-plate shop and the stamping-mill that was built in 1963.

By the late sixties there was also a booming trade in pills, and the same administrative crowd was involved in turning a buck on that. All of it added up to a pretty good-sized river of illicit income. Not like the pile of clandestine bucks that must fly around a really big prison like Attica or San Quentin, but not peanuts, either. And money itself becomes a problem after a while. You can’t just stuff it into your wallet and then shell out a bunch of crumpled twenties and dog-eared tens when you want a pool built in your back yard or an addition put on your house. Once you get past a certain point, you have to explain where that money came from … and if your explanations aren’t convincing enough, you’re apt to wind up wearing a number yourself.

So there was a need for Andy’s services. They took him out of the laundry and installed him in the library, but if you wanted to look at it another way, they never took him out of the laundry at all. They just set him to work washing dirty money instead of dirty sheets. He funnelled it into stocks, bonds, tax-free municipals, you name it.

He told me once about ten years after that day on the plate-shop roof that his feelings about what he was doing were pretty clear, and that his conscience was relatively untroubled. The rackets would have gone on with him or without him. He had not asked to be sent to Shawshank, he went on; he was an innocent man who had been victimized by colossal bad luck, not a missionary or a do-gooder.

‘Besides, Red,’ he told me with that same half-grin, ‘what I’m doing in here isn’t all that different from what I was doing outside. I’ll hand you a pretty cynical axiom: the amount of expert financial help an individual or company needs rises in direct proportion to how many people that person or business is screwing.

The people who run this place are stupid, brutal monsters for the most part. The people who run the straight world are brutal and monstrous, but they happen not to be quite as stupid, because the standard of competence out there is a little higher. Not much, but a little.’

‘But the pills,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to tell you your business, but they make me nervous. Reds, uppers, downers, nembutals — now they’ve got these things they call Phase Fours. I won’t get anything like that. Never have.’

‘No,’ Andy said. ‘I don’t like the pills either. Never have. But I’m not much of a one for cigarettes or booze, either. But I don’t push the pills. I don’t bring them in, and I don’t sell them once they are in. Mostly it’s the screws who do that.’

‘But—’

‘Yeah, I know. There’s a fine line there. What it comes down to, Red, is some people refuse to get their hands dirty at all. That’s called sainthood, and the pigeons land on your shoulders and crap all over your shirt. The other extreme is to take a bath in the dirt and deal any goddamned thing that will turn a dollar — guns, switchblades, big H, what the hell. You ever have a con come up to you and offer you a contract?’

I nodded. It’s happened a lot of times over the years. You’re, after all, the man who can get it. And they figure if you can get them a nine-bolt battery for their transistor radio or a carton of Luckies or a lid of reefer, you can put them in touch with a guy who’ll use a knife.