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'I was hoping for the best and expecting the worst -nothing but that The false name was
just to keep what little capital I had untainted. It was lugging the paintings out of the path
of the hurricane. But I had no idea that the hurricane ... that it could go on as long as it
has.'
I didn't say anything for a while. I guess I was trying to absorb the idea that this small,
spare man in prison grey next to me could be worth more money than Warden Norton
would make in the rest of his miserable life, even with the scams thrown in.
'When you said you could get a lawyer, you sure weren't kidding,' I said at last 'For that
kind of dough you could have hired Clarence Darrow, or whoever's passing for him these
days. Why didn't you, Andy? Christ! You could have been out of here like a rocket.'
He smiled. It was the same smile that had been on his face when he'd told me he and his
wife had had their whole lives ahead of them. 'No,' he said.
'A good lawyer would have sprung the Williams kid from Cashman whether he wanted to
go or not,' I said. I was getting carried away now. 'You could have gotten your new trial,
hired private detectives to look for that guy Blatch, and blown Norton out of the water to
boot. Why not, Andy?'
'Because I outsmarted myself. If I ever try to put my hands on Peter Stevens's money
from inside here, I'd lose every cent of it My friend Jim could have arranged it, but Jim's
dead. You see the problem?'
I saw it For all the good the money could do Andy, it might as well have really belonged
to another person. In a way, it did. And if the stuff it was invested in suddenly turned bad,
all Andy could do would be to watch the plunge, to trace it day after day on the stocks-
and-bonds page of the Press-Herald. It's a tough life if you don't weaken, I guess.
'I'll tell you how it is, Red. There's a big hayfield in the town of Buxton. You know where
Buxton is at, don't you?'
I said I did. It lies right next door to Scarborough.
"That's right And at the north end of this particular hayfield there's a rock wall, right out
of a Robert Frost poem. And somewhere along the base of that wall is a rock that has no
business in a Maine hayfield. It's a piece of volcanic glass, and until 1947 it was a
paperweight on my office desk. My friend Jim put it in that wall. There's a key
underneath it. The key opens a safe deposit box in the Portland branch of the Casco
Bank.'
'I guess you're in a pack of trouble,' I said. 'When your friend Jim died, the IRS must have
opened all of his safety deposit boxes. Along with the executor of his will, of course.'
Andy smiled and tapped the side of my head. 'Not bad. There's more up there than
marshmallows, I guess. But we took care of the possibility that Jim might die while I was
in the slam. The box is in the Peter Stevens name, and once a year the firm of lawyers
that served as Jim's executors sends a check to the Casco to cover the rental of the
Stevens box.
'Peter Stevens is inside that box, just waiting to get out His birth certificate, his S.S. card,
and his driver's license. The license is six years out of date because Jim died six years