Everything She Ever Wanted (99 page)

proved that she had not had an appointment to see anyone, and records

showed that she hadn't had her collarbone X-rayed as she had claimed.

To the best of the nurse's recollection, Pat had merely come into the

office, greeted the staff at the desk, and left.
 
She had been seen,

Stoop thought.
 
She had made damn sure she had been seen by

witnesses.

Stoop read and reread the old Allanson case, completely absorbed.
 
He

had little doubt that Tom Allanson had been in that basement on the

evening of the shooting, but he wondered who had cut the phone line and

pulled the circuit breaker.
 
He wondered how the gun had happened to be

in the "hole" in the basement, and he was particularly intrigued by the

ubiquitous Pat.

She had been as close to the site of the double murders as next door,

she had circled the block in her jeep, and she had bought fried chicken

to go and waited with it and her Fourth of July costume, sewing in a

darkening parking lot just a block down Norman Berry Drive.
 
But she

had claimed that she never saw Tom that day after he let her off at the

doctor's office.

What, Stoop asked himself, would Pat have had to gain if her in-laws

were dead?
 
And, taking it a step further, what would she have gained

if her bridegroom perished in a gunfire storm too?

Zebulon The Allansons had disinherited their son, but Pat had never

believed that.
 
She had always been convinced that Tom, as their only

child, was their true heir.
 
After all, her parents had forgiven her

everything.
 
She could not have even imagined parents who didn't

sacrifice for their young.
 
She had to have believed that Boppo and

Papa's martyrdom was the way things were in all families.
 
And, if she

labored under the premise that Tom would inherit everything Walter and

Carolyn Allanson had, she would naturally have believed that she, as

Tom's wife, was Tom's heir and would inherit whatever came to him.

There had been the huge mortgage on Zebulon, with balloon payments

looming on the near horizon.
 
A wealthy widow could handle all of

that.

There was another sorry thing to consider, especially after Stoop had

heard Tom pledge his love and devotion on fifteen tapes to a whiny,

manipulative woman whom most men would have long since grown weary

of.

Pat was rumored to have been bored with him within weeks of their Gone

With the Wind wedding.
 
Susan remembered her mother's growing

disinterest well.
 
Pat had dodged being alone with Tom.
 
Instead of

joining him in bed, she had sat on the swing with her aunt.
 
It was

only after he was arrested that she had become the complete tragic

heroine, pining and mourning for her lover.
 
Stoop suspected Pat would

have been just as happy-probably happier, and certainly less

apprehensive-if she could have mourned Tom in widow's weeds.
 
of

course.
 
Stoop had He grimaced.
 
Victo?ian widow's weeds, grown to know

the lady's preferences and obsessions all too well.

Maybe she even supposed that if she had Zebulon paid off, and if she

were a widow, then Hap Brown would leave his wife and come back to her

with his hat in his hands.

There was only one other person alive who would know what had actually

happened in and around the Allanson home on Norman Berry Drive on July

3, 1974.

And that was Tom Allanson.

With the assistance of Tom's parole officer, Don Stoop and Michelle

Berry met with Tom Allanson in the Canton office of the Georgia Board

of Prisons and Paroles.
 
Legally, Tom no longer had anything to fear.

No matter what had happened on his parents' murders, he had paid with

fifteen and a the night of half years of his life.
 
He could not npw be

put in double 'jeopardy.
 
He could never be tried again for those

shootings.
 
He didn't, have to talk with the D.A."s investigators, and

they wouldn't have blamed him much if he had refused, or if he was

annoyed at the intrusion into his new life.
 
But he had agreed to be

interviewed.

They had seen pictures of a young Tom, and this giant of a man seemed

not so different older, but not as old as they knew he was.
 
He was

almost fifty now, but he had scarcely any gray in his hair and his arms

were muscular and tanned.

If he was not pleased to be called in to talk about the woman who had

carved a big chunk out of his life, he was, at least, obliging.
 
He

reached out his massive hand to shake with Don Stoop.

Stoop probably knew the story of Tom and Pat as well as anyone did

now.

He had immersed himself in their lives-from the first interviews with

Susan and Bill Alford, the voluminou court transcripts of trials and

appeals, newspaper clippings, the endless Pat-and-Tom tapes, from

talking with Andy Weathers, and from Michelle Berry's interviews with

Jean Boggs.
 
So many of the players in the old script had told their

stories, and at first, the whole scenario had seemed too incredible to

be real.
 
Now, Stoop felt as if he had known the story all his life.

He threw out a few questions to hear it again, this time from Tom's

angle.
 
Stoop wondered if even now, even after all Pat had done to him,

Tom could somehow still be attached to the woman he had loved so

desperately, the woman he had sworn to stand by until death -but not,

Stoop reminded himself, enough to commit suicide for.

His first questions were about how they had met.
 
The answers were

familiar and came in single sentences.
 
Tom obviously didn't remember

dates.

He admitted he had been obsessed with marrying Pat all those years

ago.

"I don't know if she wanted to marry me or not," he said.
 
"I was the

most insistent one.
 
She kept telling me, 'No, you don't want to marry

me."And I wish I hadn't.
 
. . . My head wasn't screwed on right at the

time."

Stoop didn't comment.
 
Pat had known her quarry well.
 
She knew exactly

how much demurring it would take to reel Tom in.

"This is going to be a hard question," Stoop said, easing into the meat

of what he wanted to know, "but I need you to think and answer as

precisely and factually as you can.
 
We need to know, what was Pat's

involvement with you in the 1974 murder case?
 
I'm talking about what

started it, what led up to it, what transpired during the trial, and

after the trial while you were in jail.

"That is a hard one to answer," Tom began.
 
"My parents did not like

Pat from the very beginning....... She wasn't the reason for the

divorce.
 
She was the outcome....... She hated my parents and they

hated her."

"Okay.
 
At any time did she feed the fire?"

Tom allowed that Pat had gotten his parents worked up and then started

on him.
 
He said the shooting at Lake Lanier just about made his father

go "crazy."

"Do you think Pat did it?"

Tom shook his head.
 
"She was with me ... shoeing horses rifles and

down in Lithonia.... They [the police] took my checked, and there was

no way my rifles could have done that.

... He [Tom 5 s father] got all bent out of shape and went out and

bought a gun ... and he told all those people that it was gonna be over

by the weekend.
 
I was supposed to be in a parade in Atlanta.

The only thing I could figure out was he was planning on shooting me in

the parade."

"What did Pat say about all of this?"
 
frowned with the effort to "It

was a long time ago - Tom of stirred it up and made it worse.

emember.
 
"She just kind 'putative type person that .
 
. . Pat was a

very headstrong, mani would do anything to get what she wanted-and you

not know she was doing it.
 
She could take a married man and turn him

completely around .
 
. .

and talk him out of thirty years of marim not even know it.
 
. . .

Unless you'd been there, riage and h' imagine what it was like.
 
Pat

would have some idea you couldn't in her mind and she was going to get

her way.
 
If she came at you one way and you didn't do what she said,

she'd find another 'I you gave in to her.
 
way.

She'd just keep at you until Tom recalled that it was brought up in his

trial that phone calls had been made to his father the afternoon of the

murders.
 
"But I didn't see or hear her make them," he said.

Stoop asked Tom if he believed now that his father had exposed himself

to Pat.
 
person to do something "Naw.
 
My father was not the type of

like that."

"Why do you think she said that?"

"To get me stirred up."

"Did it work?"

"Well, it got me upset, but then .
 
. . I was scared to death.
 
I wanted

to know what was going to happen to me."

Tom's eyes clouded as he remembered his trial.
 
"It was a farce .
 
.

she was sitting there punching me in the ribs, and punching Ed in the

ribs, and the judge was having to tell her to be quiet and if she

didn't stop trying to run his courtroom, she was gonna have to

leave."

"Okay.
 
Let's go up to the murder Itself," Stoop said.
 
"You and Pat

drove up on that particular day together.
 
Correct?"

" I took her to the doctor."

Stoop could sense Tom's retreat; he would have to backpedal on his

questions and wait a while on the murders.
 
"Did she, in fact, go to