Everything She Ever Wanted (15 page)

"You know we're good friends, Tom," Riggins began.
 
"I got a warrant

here for your arrest, and your granddaddy has called us and said you

were home.
 
I don't want any problems or anything."

"That's okay," Tom said.
 
"It was me who told Paw to call.
 
I won't

cause you no problems."

And he didn't.
 
Tom Allanson walked out the front door of his house at

3:00 A.M. and was arrested for murder.

Riggins read Tom his rights under Miranda and advised him that there

were two warrants charging him with the murder of his parents.
 
He

studied Tom Allanson's face for a reaction.
 
He saw no tears.
 
Nor did

he see surprise.
 
The man before him seemed mostly very, very tired-and

quite possibly in a state of shock.

Riggins didn't question Tom.
 
Rather, he held him in the Pike County

'all for the hour or so it took for Detective Georg I e Zellner and

Sergeants C. T. Callahan and Bill Vance to arrive to transport the

prisoner back to Atlanta.
 
Outside, the gray rain drummed against the

courthouse in Zebulon and the wind scattered scarlet petals from the

geraniums in the stone urns.

It was just before dawn in Zebulon when the East Point officers

arrived.
 
"You've already been advised of your rights, but we have to

do it again," Zellner explained to Tom.
 
"We've got two warrants here

charging you with the murder of your mother and your father-" "And

that's about as ridiculous as it can be," Tom answered, his voice flat

with fatigue.
 
He turned around willingly and waited while the East

Point investigators looked for a pair of handcuffs big enough to circle

his massive wrists.

They drove back to East Point in a deluge.
 
It was officially the

Fourth of July now.
 
The tape of the East Point investigators'

conversation with their suspect was blurred by the loud drum of rain on

the police unit's roof and the steady swish-swish-swish of windshield

wipers.

"What happened this afternoon?"
 
Zellner asked.

Tom explained that he and his bride had had a "big disagreement" two

nights before-July 2-and that they had continued their "fussing" during

their trip to her doctor's appointment.
 
"I finally just told her I was

gonna leave, give her the money, the house, and everything else-I

wasn't any good for her-I wasn't doing anything but hurting her-and I

Just left and started for home."

Tom estimated he had left Pat about 5:00 P.m. the evening before and

walked and hitchhiked his way back to Zebulon.
 
"But I mostly

walked."

Tom told Zellner that he had realized how bad he was for Pat, that it

must be him who was making her so unhappy and sick.
 
It didn't seem to

matter how much he loved her.
 
But then he had changed his mind.

"About halfway home, I realized that was the worst thing I could do,

'cause she couldn't get along without me."

His story was simple.
 
He had fallen asleep from sheer exhaustion once

he got home.
 
He wasn't running from anyone, he said, because he had

done nothing wrong.
 
He hadn't even known his parents had been killed

until his grandfather had called him.

Tom was voluble about his problems with his father, recounting all the

acrimony and infighting over his recent divorce.
 
Tom hadn't seen his

father outside a courtroom, he said, since he had been kicked out of

the family home the winter before.
 
He hadn't wanted to see him, and he

certainly wouldn't go over to his parents' house when his father would

just as soon shoot him as say " Howdy.

He suggested his father had had enemies-someone out to get him ever

since he had announced for judge.
 
"But I don't know why anyone would

want to kill my mother," Tom said quietly.
 
"She's a good woman.
 
She's

always been a good woman."

Tom told Zellner-just as Pat had-that his ex-wife Carolyn was a woman

completely out of control, particularly when she drank.

"But they've taken her under their wings-since the divorce.
 
They paid

for her lawyer, and she works at the office with Mother.
 
But she gets

drunk now and then, and calls and tells me, 'I want to see you dead."

" For a man in his precarious position, Tom talked too much, coming up

with theories and obscure suspects.
 
He couldn't seem to bear the

silences.
 
His drawl was laconic and slow, nothing like Pat's

rapid-fire speech, but he talked a lot.

"There was a girl that committed suicide on my granddaddy's farm," he

suddenly remembered.
 
"She was an alcoholic.
 
I flat know my daddy was

playing around with her.
 
My granddaddy said Daddy got all her stock in

her company when she died.
 
But I know for a fact my daddy was playing

around with her-that old gal would get drunk and she'd just talk and

talk and talk.
 
That's back when I was in college."

The woman had been married, Tom-explained.
 
"She used to come over to

the house all the time, get drunk, and crawl all over him all the

time.

My mother wasn't there, and I don't think [her husband] knew anything

about it.

Tom paused in deep thought.
 
"You know, I still loved him as a father,

but it was kinda hard to understand at the same time what he was

doin'."

Tom denied that he had a bad temper.
 
He had never had a fight or hit

anyone-"off a football field."

"Paw called me tonight," Tom said, recalling his conversation with his

grandfather.
 
"I asked him to call the sheriff's back there, and let

them know I was here.
 
He said, 'Are you all right?"
 
and I said,

'Yeah, except for I'm going to Jail."
 
He said he heard I was shot, and

I said, 'Well, I'm not."

Tom had a scrape on one leg.
 
That was all.
 
He figured he had got that

somewhere while he was walking home from East Point.

Sixty miles.
 
A very, very long walk.

Tom was adamant that he had not been at his parents' home earlier in

the evening, or anytime in the past several months.
 
He himself had

begun to wonder-after talking to Margureitte Radcliffe-if maybe

somebody was trying to set both him and his father up, some unknown

enemy stalking them.
 
Both Tom and Walter had been getting weird,

threatening phone calls.

Could that be possible?
 
Was there someone who didn't care if both Tom

and Walter Allanson died, someone who might even have something to gain

from their deaths?
 
It was a far-out theory.
 
Too far out.
 
A dozen

hours after the murder, the East Point detectives were almost positive

that they had the right man in custody.

Tom Allanson.

As soon as Tom arrived in East Point, he learned that Pat had hired an

attorney for him: Calhoun Long.
 
On his attorney'sand his

wife's-advice, he had nothing more to say to detectives.
 
. . .

All murder seems senseless.
 
But this double murder seemed more so than

most.
 
Two responsible, well-known citizens of East Point were dead and

their son was in Jail.
 
He wasn't a man with a criminal background, nor

a man on drugs or on the street.
 
He was a man with a new marriage, a

fine farm, a good reputation among horse people and with everyone he

had worked for.
 
He was a good old boy, easygoing, likable, and kind.

Nobody but his ex-wife and his parents had ever had a bad word to say

about him.
 
Why would Tom Allanson throw all of that away in a moment

of blind rage?

Even Tom's demeanor on the long ride back from Zebulon warred with the

image of a man given to blind rages.
 
Rather, he had showed no emotion

at all.
 
His parents had not been dead twelve hours, and yet the three

detectives had seen no tears nor heard any choking up in his voice as

he discussed their deaths.

That bothered them.

Susan and Bill Alford were far away from Atlanta when they heard the

devastating news of the double murder of Pat's in.

laws.
 
They were headed to Colorado to pick up some prize Morgan horses

for Kentwood Morgan Farm.
 
Before dawn, they received a call at their

motel telling them to come back home at once; there had been a

tragedy.

Both Susan and her great-aunt Alma had had some foreboding of disaster,

a sense that "something bad was fixing to happen," but this news was

beyond anything they might have envisioned in their worst nightmares.

Pulling a still-empty horse trailer, Bill and Susan Alford turned

around and headed home.

The East Point police investigators would not sleep for another day.

Nor would they celebrate the Fourth of July in the traditional way.
 
At

the first clear light of day, they were back at the crime scene.

Detective George Zellner, Sergeants Maulin Humphrey and C. T. Callahan,

searched the interior of the house, and Sergeant Bill Vance and a

uniformed squad combed the sodden yard.

As Vance and his crew worked their way through ivy and underbrush

between the Allansons' house and the house to the east, Vance found a

shotgun 135 feet from the basement steps.
 
It lay where it had

apparently been dropped, its stock protruding along the fence line on a

dirt path that ran between the Allansons'side yard and that of Paul and

Harriett Duckett, who lived next door.

The gun was 40 feet from the sidewalk.
 
It was an Excel singleshot

shotgun, exactly like the gun that Walter Allanson had reported stolen