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Steven Killer.
A clerk from the Wise Pawnshop in Lewiston testified that he had sold a six-shot .38
Police Special to Andrew Dufresne just two days before the double murder. A bartender
from the country club bar testified that Andy had come in around seven o'clock on the
evening of 10 September, had tossed off three straight whiskeys in a twenty-minute
period - when he got up from the bar-stool he told the bartender that he was going up to
Glenn Quentin's house and he, the bartender, could 'read about the rest of it in the papers'.
Another clerk, this one from the Handy-Pik store a mile or so from Quentin's house, told
the court that Dufresne had come in around quarter to nine on the same night. He
purchased cigarettes, three quarts of beer, and some dish-towels. The county medical
examiner testified that Quentin and the Dufresne woman had been killed between eleven
p.m. and two a.m. on the night of 10-11 September. The detective from the Attorney
General's office who had been in charge of the case testified that there was a turnout less
than seventy yards from the bungalow, and that on the afternoon of 11 September, three
pieces of evidence had been removed from that turnout: first item, two empty quart
bottles of Narragansett Beer (with the defendant's fingerprints on them); the second item,
twelve cigarette ends (all Kools, the defendant's brand); third item, a plaster moulage of a
set of tyre tracks (exactly matching the tread-and-wear pattern of the tyres on the
defendant's 1947 Plymouth).
In the living room of Quentin's bungalow, four dishtowels had been found lying on the
sofa. There were bullet-holes through them and powder-burns on them. The detective
theorized (over the agonized objections of Andy's lawyer) that the murderer had wrapped
the towels around the muzzle of the murder-weapon to muffle the sound of the gunshots.
Andy Dufresne took the stand in his own defence and told his story calmly, coolly, and
dispassionately. He said he had begun to hear distressing rumours about his wife and
Glenn Quentin as early as the last week in July. In August he had become distressed
enough to investigate a bit. On an evening when Linda was supposed to have gone
shopping in Portland after her tennis lesson, Andy had followed her and Quentin to
Quentin's one-storey rented house (inevitably dubbed 'the love-nest' by the papers). He
had parked in the turnout until Quentin drove her back to the country club where her car
was parked, about three hours later.
'Do you mean to tell this court that your wife did not recognize your brand-new Plymouth
sedan behind Quentin's car?' the DA asked him on cross-examination.
'I swapped cars for the evening with a friend,' Andy said, and this cool admission of how
well-planned his investigation had been did him no good at all in the eyes of the jury.
After returning the friend's car and picking up his own, he had gone home. Linda had
been in bed, reading a book. He asked her how her trip to Portland had been. She replied
that it had been fun, but she hadn't seen anything she liked well enough to buy. That's
when I knew for sure,' Andy told the breathless spectators. He spoke in the same calm,
remote voice in which he delivered almost all of his testimony.
'What was your frame of mind in the seventeen days between then and the night your
wife was murdered?' Andy's lawyer asked him.
'I was in great distress,' Andy said calmly, coldly. Like a man reciting a shopping list he