Everything She Ever Wanted (9 page)

"I want to tell you something, and show you something."

'Well, Mr.
 
Allanson, I'll be glad to talk with you."

"You'll come to my house She agreed to go, but as soon as she hung up,

her office staff surrounded her, aghast that she would even consider

such a thing.
 
The man was obviously unhinged and she would be putting

herself in frightful danger.
 
After all, he had already "shown

something" to Pat.
 
"You are not going over to that man's house," one

fellow worker said vehemently.
 
"If you try to go, I'll have to call

Colonel Radcliffe and tell him."

As it turned out, Walter Allanson was quite willing to come to the

dentist's office.
 
He drove up in a station wagon whose windshield was

crisscrossed with tape.
 
It looked as if it had been through World War

Il.
 
He motioned to her to look at it, and Margureitte was terrified

being so close to such a dangerous man.

Walter told Margureitte that he blamed Tom for the shooting.

She quickly replied that she knew for a fact that Tom and Pat had been

in Lithonia shoeing horses at the time Allanson gave for the ambush,

and that there were witnesses to prove it.
 
"Mr. Allanson, I told you

before.
 
Why don't you look for someone else?"

Allanson opened the station wagon door and beckoned her in.

"I was really shaking inside by that time," Margureitte said later."

'No sir, Mr. Allanson,' I told him.
 
'It's hot and I'm not going to

have much time to talk with you."
 
.
 
. . And then I said, 'Mr.

Allanson, I've met Tom's ex-wife one time, but I've talked to her

numerous times.
 
. . . Tell me really.
 
What kind of a person is she?

Is she a nervous person?
 
Is there any reason she would want to do you

harm?
 
Is there any way she would benefit .
 
.

. other than to hurt Tom?"

"Well," Allanson allowed, according to Margureitte, "she's a nervous

person and she has a quick temper, but I don't know why she would want

to do anything like this."

Margureitte continued to try to help him ferret out the real culprit in

the ambush shooting.
 
Fighting to stay calm, she once again suggested

that he must have a former client who hated him enough to do these

things.
 
And then she brought up the incident at Kentwood the previous

Friday, although it was painfully embarrassing for a lady to discuss

the exposure of male privates with someone she knew so slightly-much

less the alleged exposer himself.

Allanson stared at her as if she had taken leave of her senses.
 
"Mrs.

Radcliffe," he sighed.
 
"As a Mason and a gentleman, I swear I did not

come out to Pike County on Friday and expose myself to your daughter.

I have not been in Pike County for some time.
 
. . . Lady, I have high

blood pressure and I am under a doctor's care.
 
I take medicine for

that, and when you do this it affects your sexual life.
 
I have not had

sex for some time.
 
So why in the world would I go out there and expose

myself to your daughter?
 
In fact, Mrs. Radcliffe, if I were going to

be on display at a flower show, I would have to go as a dried

arrangement!

As Margureitte Radcliffe retold it later, the whole meeting with Tom's

father was thoroughly shocking, horrifying, and distasteful to a woman

with tender sensitivities.
 
But she was fighting for her child, and her

child's marriage.
 
She could scarcely force herself to keep talking to

Allanson after his crude revelations about sex, but she did it.

"Then just as I had to go, he turned around to me and said, 'Mrs.

Radcliffe, you tell Tommy that I will get him because in my heart I

know that no matter what you say, no matter what witnesses he's had,

that he is the one that is doing these things.

And I will kill him the first chance that I get.
 
You know what?
 
I

think it will be this weekend.
 
I think he'll try to get me.
 
Tell him

that he had better be able to duck better than he can shoot, because

I'm not afraid to die.
 
Yes, I think the whole thing will be finalized

this weekend."

Margureitte returned to her office and informed her fellow workers that

she felt Walter Allanson was a sick man, that he probably had a tumor,

and that he was very, very dangerous.

That was Margureitte's way.
 
If she could not reconcile other people's

behavior with her view of the world, she invariably suggested

"professional help."
 
Now the only thing "in the whole wide world" she

wanted to do was to protect Pat, and she had just spent an hour of

"absolute terror" with a person she considered a madman.
 
Perhaps Pat

should have waited before marrying into such a family.
 
But even so,

Margureitte would fight to the death to protect her child.
 
There

wasn't a thing she wouldn't do to see that Pat was happy.

Not one thing.

argureitte reported this latest encounter to Pat and Tom, but despite

all the uproar, or maybe because she and Tom needed a diversion so

desperately, Pat continued to look forward to an Independence Day

parade in which she and Tom were scheduled to ride, in costume, on two

of their finest Morgans.
 
She loved pageantry.
 
Tom smiled at how

childlike she could be sometimes, how she enjoyed dressing up and

pretending.

To please Pat, he had agreed to ride beside her, but by July 3 Tom was

fully expecting to die in the Atlanta parade, to be held July 6, the

Saturday after the official holiday.
 
He felt in his gut that his

father was going to shoot him right off his horse and all of Atlanta

was going to see it.
 
It didn't make any kind of sense -especially not

with his daddy running for judge-but what else could Tom think?
 
Mrs.

Radcliffe said his father wanted him dead, Pat said his father wanted

him dead, and Nona and Paw were of the same mind.

Tom was thirty-one years old, and he was deeply, desperately in love

with Pat.
 
But after only seven weeks of marriage, what the hell good

did it do him?
 
His life was draining away from him because of his

father.
 
He was probably going to be the top story on the weekend news,

only he wouldn't be around to watch it.

+ July 3, 1974, was a coolish rainy day in Zebulon, hardly propitious

for the holiday ahead.
 
On the one hand, things seemed completely

normal; Pat measured Tom for alterations to his costume for the parade

and tacked together the long skirt and bodice she would wear.
 
She

chattered happily about what a great showcase the parade would be for

Kentwood Morgan Farm.
 
But on the other hand, nothing was normal.
 
Pat

and Tom had gone down to Pike County to get a restraining order against

his father.
 
But the police and sheriff in Zebulon didn't take them

seriously.
 
"Everybody knew him in these parts," Tom said later.
 
"So

that went nowhere."

Tom no longer felt safe in leaving Pat alone on the farm.

She had him just about convinced to go see his father and have it

out.

They had to find some way to come to a meeting of the minds.

Tom dreaded the prospect.
 
He knew for a certainty his father would try

to kill him, but Pat kept urging him to do something.

They couldn't go on the way they were.

Walter Allanson and his friends were edgy too, and had been for

months.

Jake Dailey had lent Walter his own .32-caliber pistol earlier that

spring-just in case there was trouble.
 
At 10:00 on that Wednesday

morning, July 3, Jake had driven up the Allansons' driveway with a new

battery for one of Walter's boat engines.
 
He wasn't there more than a

minute or so when Lee and Mary Dorton-who lived two doors down'-hurried

over.
 
They hadn't recognized his truck and they knew Walter and

Carolyn were at work.

Everybody was jumpy.
 
Dailey and the Dortons grinned nervously as they

recognized each other, but they decided to check the house out as long

as they were there.
 
Lee Dorton and Jake Dailey noticed that there was

a light on in the basement.
 
That was peculiar, and Jake suggested that

they walk around the house and check all the doors.
 
They did that, and

found them all locked.

Everything seemed as usual.

At Kentwood Farm in Zebulon, the atmosphere was also laced with

apprehension.
 
Pat had been ill all during the night of July 2. She

told Tom she had exacerbated the injuries to her collarbone trying to

saddle a horse.
 
And she had a new torment.
 
"Your father-or if it

wasn't him, someone-called all night long and just breathed on the

phone.
 
Didn't you hear it ringing?"
 
she asked Tom incredulously.

"Between that crazy man and my collarbone, I didn't get any sleep."

They had a horse show to go to on Friday and the parade on Saturday,

and Tom insisted that Pat see a doctor.
 
She demurred at first-she had

to finish her parade costume-but Tom insisted and Pat finally agreed.

"I hadn't had any sleep since his father had started threatening our

lives," she said later.
 
"Tom said I just couldn't keep going on like

this, not with the high blood pressure and all the other problems I

had."

Pat couldn't get an appointment with her regular doctor, but Tom said

she should go to her orthopedist, Dr.
 
Thompson, anyway.

His office was on Cleveland Avenue just off Norman Berry Drive, not

more than two blocks from Tom's parents' house, but almost sixty miles