Byron's Lane

by Wallace Rogers

  “The Adams case” was a sterile phrase that welled up anger from my numbness. I was an integral part of “the Adams case” but had no investment in any of its process or even its outcome. My only reason for cooperating with authorities was that it allowed me a chance to crawl inside Mary Rose Vukovich’s head and find out why Jonathan Adams had to die; it also assuaged the fear that I was in some way responsible. The FBI agent stepped in front of Michaels and extended his hand to me.

  Agent Hutchinson was a short man. A lifetime of dealing with his stunted stature caused him to stand oddly straight, making him more imposing than he really was. His face was thin. Its sternly chiseled features were appropriate for a man whose carefully crafted appearance and rehearsed mannerisms suggested that his vocation was also his life’s greatest passion. As he introduced himself, he told me that he enjoyed breaking people down and making them say incriminating things about themselves and their friends. His arrogance caused me to feel odd twinges of sympathy for Sheriff

  Michaels.

  Hutchinson gave me a list of questions he wanted me to ask Mary Rose. His style and technique were apparently not good enough to make her tell him what he wanted to hear. I tuned him out as he reviewed each of his questions with me, while I mentally developed a list of my own.

  Mary Rose was a half hour late. She had been formally charged with Jonathan Adams’s murder earlier that morning upstairs in circuit court. Her sweatshirt and jeans had been exchanged for a bright orange county-issue jumpsuit that had the initials “D.O.C.” stenciled on its back. A weather-beaten, rumpled-suited, middle-aged man anxiously followed her and a jailer into our familiar room. The rumpled man—her court-appointed attorney—was loudly advising her not to talk to me. She was busy pushing him out the door. I stuffed Agent Hutchinson’s list of questions deep into the back pocket of my corduroys.

  After her interloping lawyer and the jailer had left the room, Mary Rose began our second meeting by thrusting her free hand across the table that separated us, reaching out for mine. I was repelled by the gesture, but didn’t pull my hand back when she touched it. I wanted her to feel comfortable in my company.

  “Guess what, Tom? This morning I’ve already had two meetings with my lawyer, a hearing in court that was covered by four television stations, and a telephone call from a brother who hasn’t talked to me in eight years.” She smiled, relishing the attention being paid to her, unfazed by the reason for it. I didn’t share in the celebration of her celebrity. I changed the topic.

  “Mary Rose, what have you been doing since we graduated from high school? I’ll bet it’s an interesting story.”

  The surface pleasantness of my request concealed its purpose. I wanted to spend only time enough with my friend’s murderer to find out what I needed to know and then leave her company forever. She eagerly told her life story, backing it up to the time of her grandfather’s death.

  When the Pavletich farm was sold and divided up between housing developers and the school district two years after the farmer died, everybody in our neighborhood assumed his family was financially set for life. I remember listening to my mother gossiping with a neighbor on the telephone about it when the Maplewood Post reported that the farm had been sold. I recall feeling assured that a financial windfall for the farmer’s relatives would eventually dissipate whatever guilt over his death still lingered in the air of four families’ houses on Byron’s Lane. Having rationalized that some good had come to the farmer’s family from the incident, I put that day behind me, out of sight and out of mind, for a long time. But my hopeful assumptions were false.

  The farmer had stubbornly retained his farm years after his neighbors had sold theirs to housing developers. His eighty acres became an island of agriculture, forest, and open space in the middle of an ocean of small lot single-family homes. In a move undoubtedly advised in Jonathan Adams’s textbook about land use and maximizing local tax revenue generation, Maplewood’s city government began assessing the value of Pavletich’s property at its “highest and best use”—single-family homes. Overnight, his land was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. It was similarly assessed for tax purposes. Tax assessments on the Pavletich farm started soon after Byron’s Lane was built. Reassessments occurred almost annually. There was no way Pavletich’s modest farm could produce enough income to support him and pay his current and back property taxes. Still, he had refused to sell even parts of his land to the real estate speculators who were always calling his house and camping on his doorstep.

  Pavletich paid his last property tax bill six years before his death. By the time his estate was probated, almost two years after he died, penalties, interest, and principal on what the family owed the city, the county, and the school district couldn’t possibly be covered by the farm’s assessed value. Real estate developers took advantage of the situation and bought most of Pavletich’s farm at fire-sale prices. The family gave away almost a quarter of the land to the school district to satisfy back taxes owed and for a promise that an elementary school planned to be built on part of the land would be named after Victor. The school board was persuaded to change its mind when the largest builder of homes in Maplewood offered a hundred thousand dollars for the new school’s naming rights. What was to be Pavletich Elementary School was instead named Antonelli Elementary.

  On her twenty-first birthday Mary Rose Vukovich married Danny Fillmore, the only child of Margaret Fillmore, the neighborhood instigator of the short-lived police investigation of our involvement in the farmer’s death. Danny was two years behind us in school—a mouse of a boy who grew into a rat of a man. By their second wedding anniversary he was serving ten to twenty years in a state penitentiary for killing a friend in a bar fight. Another twenty years were added to his sentence when he was convicted of murdering a fellow inmate. Mary Rose said she would have waited ten years for him, but forty was too much to expect. She divorced Danny Fillmore when she was twenty-six.

  Frequent disagreements with family members eventually drove her from her nest in Maplewood. She flew to Indiana. She went to technical college in Indianapolis and learned how to service mainframe computers. Life was good for five or six years—until large mainframes gave way to desktop computers. Instead of adjusting as the technology changed, Mary Rose opted for the glamorous life of traveling around Latin America and Africa, helping keep a dwindling number of her company’s dinosaurs alive, for clients who couldn’t afford to upgrade their computer capabilities or pay for her work. The company died. She was unemployed for three years. She eventually took a position as a crew supervisor with the Indianapolis Convention Bureau, setting up and taking down furniture at trade fairs, luncheons, and meeting rooms in the convention center.

  During that time she married a Turkish man ten years younger than her. The marriage lasted a week longer than it took her new husband to get his green card and a proper work permit. Her Turkish connection mesmerized the FBI and kept them hopelessly looking for al Qaeda’s involvement in Adams’s murder.

  Mary Rose leaned back in her chair and smiled at me.

  “If you had been as interested in me when we were in high school as you seem to be now, maybe I wouldn’t have killed Jonathan.”

  Her cold words hung frozen in the space between us.

  My astonished reaction to the tone of her statement was shattered when the door to the room crashed open, banging loudly against the wall. She jerked from her chair. I probably did, too. Our heads instinctively turned in the direction of the noise. Agent Hutchinson and two of his minions had burst into the room.

  Two steps inside, Hutchinson gathered himself, straightened up, and calmly walked to the end of the table where we sat. He reached under the table and retrieved a listening device. The surprised look on my face likely convinced Mary Rose I had nothing to do with his plan to entrap her. I hoped the effort was a part of his investigation and not its climax. I had edited enough crime novels in my time to recognize an interrogat
ion technique that might not pass a Fifth Amendment test.

  But what was to eventually become of Mary Rose

  Vukovich and whether or not she thought I was part of a plan that tricked her into confessing that she murdered Jonathan Adams was of no great interest to me. I had all the information I needed to process the circumstances of Adams’s death, and to understand the motivation and twisted psyche of his killer. I hadn’t the stomach to hear details about the act of killing Jonathan Adams. I didn’t want to see the pictures the police took at the crime scene or hear graphic descriptions of his gunshot wounds. I was thankful that Adams’s neighbor, Jim Brandt—the farmer-turned-writer I’d met at Christina’s party—had identified his body at the county morgue. I couldn’t have done so myself.

  As a jailer led her out of the room and back to her cell, Mary Rose looked over her shoulder and tried to dig her heels into the tile floor, slowing his effort to pull her out into the hallway. While she struggled with him, she smiled at me. The jailer loosened his grip on her arm. She pushed him and turned halfway toward me before the deputy recovered his hold on her.

  “Tom, my lawyer told me this morning that I might be in court again tomorrow. You’ll be there, won’t you? He says there’ll be lots of television coverage.” Her voice was eerily calm, given what her body was trying to do. Mary Rose Vukovich was in the hallway and out of sight by the time she finished her sentence.

  Agent Hutchinson transferred his attention from his clandestine listening device to me. “You didn’t do what I asked you to do,” he lectured. “It doesn’t matter. We don’t need any more of your help. You can go.”

  I handed him Mary Rose Vukovich’s blue envelope containing the death threat letter that I had stuffed in my pocket at the hotel when I left for the courthouse. I was anxious to get about the business of grieving my friend’s senseless death.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The next and last time I was in Adams’s house was a month after his murder. The memorial next to his mailbox had been abandoned. Left in the wake of the homage and emotion that built it was a pile of broken pinwheels, deflated balloon hearts, weather-beaten political signs, and handwritten notes whose messages rain had made unreadable. The bright rainbow of flowers that graced the top of this makeshift monument had turned the same colors as the leaves fallen from the trees that bracketed the road in front of his house. Dead leaves had blown up against the side of the mound and were in the process of covering it.

  Somewhere in the pile was Lisa Chandler’s poem.

  Adams’s sisters and their families had come and gone from Minneapolis by the second week in October. The last warm days of the year left with them. They had arrived at the crest of a spontaneous, sincere, and widespread expression of a great loss, and a celebration of a life well lived. His sisters had a chance to glimpse the significance of a brother they hardly knew.

  Adams’s last will and testament—surprisingly detailed, predictably outspoken, mildly controversial, and generally misunderstood—ordered that no funeral or public memorial service be held for him. But his constituents, his neighbors, his friends, and his colleagues and students outvoted him. Most people attributed his preference for no public send-off to his modest tendencies, or his carefully crafted propensity for understatement. I knew better. He didn’t want the event to turn out like Jay Gatsby’s funeral—a party he threw to which no one came.

  It all should have been of no concern to Adams. His friends and supporters, with his sisters’ blessing and coordination by the governor’s office, held a memorial service at Brookfield’s public high school on the evening of the second Wednesday after his death. The newspapers and local television stations reported that six thousand people attended. So many people came that the gathering had to be moved from the gymnasium to the football stadium. Like Adams’s infectious grin, exceptional weather smiled down on the hastily organized event. A former president of the United States was there—a closer friend of Adams’s than I realized—a talented man, like Adams, who shared some of the same demons. Christina Peterson was not. I don’t know if Linda McArthur attended. I looked for her, but didn’t see her.

  Lisa Chandler came. We talked for a half hour after the memorial service. She told me she would have left her husband and married Adams if Adams had asked her. She said he was, and would always be, the love of her life. She never mentioned the letter or the poem she had sent to him the day he died; neither did I.

  Kathy sent flowers. Jim Breech came back to attend the memorial service.

  Whatever Adams contracted on Byron’s Lane and carried with him like terminal cancer the rest of his life had proven benign. Jonathan Adams was a man whose grasp far exceeded what he believed to be the extent of his reach. It turned out Maplewood had not served Adams as badly as he thought. His experiences there forged a canon of values that positively touched thousands of lives in hundreds of small ways.

  The torrent of sympathy for Jonathan Adams washed away any sustained interest in digging deeper into Mary Rose Vukovich’s motive for killing him. After a terrorist connection was proven unfounded, the reasons for his tragic death were too complicated for the mass media to unravel a possible cause in a two-day news cycle. The public was unknowingly following the advice Adams’s father gave him years ago: confessions won’t change what happened, they’ll just cause problems and confusion; we need to get on with our lives.

  During the month I had been away, the leaves on the young maple trees that lined Adams’s driveway had turned from fading green to bright red to gold and brown. Almost all of them had fallen. They crunched under my tires as I slowly drove my rental car on the wet black asphalt. I stopped where the sweep of his driveway touched the cobblestone walk that led to his red front door. I turned off the ignition, pushed a button that rolled down my car window, and sat for a few minutes breathing in the cool country air. Dead leaves swirling on the pavement broke extreme silence that otherwise enveloped Adams’s cursed property. The sky over his house had produced an all-day chilling rain. Unlike a spring rain that caused plants to grow, a gray-day autumn rain only made everything wet and miserable.

  After the memorial service, matters related to Adams’s death remained worthy of space on the front page of the Minneapolis Star Tribune and Saint Paul Pioneer Press for one more week. Copies of these were piled next to his front door. I wondered out loud to the gray sky and swirling leaves why the newspaper carrier insisted that Adams receive his newspaper three weeks after his very public memorial service.

  I picked up the rolled-up newspaper that was least wet and most current. Tucked in the lower left-hand corner of the front page was a two-column story that reported that Mary Rose Vukovich had, through her public defender, entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. Her attorney was quoted in the article as saying that even if the judge and the district attorney didn’t accept her insanity plea, he thought his client’s case had a fair chance of being dismissed because her confession had been secured illegally. The news in the article didn’t surprise me. It didn’t bother me, either. I had little interest in how the State of Minnesota intended to deal with my friend’s murder. My job was to box Adams’s personal things and arrange to send them to his sister in Houston. The furniture and all other household items left behind were to be auctioned off as soon as Adams’s estate was probated. State and county authorities promised Sharon that they’d fast-track the process as a favor to the family.

  In spite of the sincere public show of sympathy the month before and the oft-stated pledge made by important people at his memorial service that Adams’s legacy would be remembered and built upon “for years to come,” most of his footprints on earth had already vanished from it forever. The only traces left of him were a fellowship for students at the University of Minnesota who were pursuing bachelor and graduate degrees in American history, and an obscure formula bearing his name that showed how property tax revenues related to land use. The Adams Fellowship would be f
unded by his savings, considerable investment income from a blind trust whose principal was fueled by royalties from his land-use book, and proceeds earned from the sale of his house and its contents. His fellowship was also structured to provide full college scholarships for his nieces and nephews.

  According to Adams’s will, his silver Porsche was to be given to the last woman with whom he had had a sexual relationship. I presented his Porsche to the attractive senior education major in his political science class who had persuaded Adams to give her three more points on her exam. Her name and telephone number were written in Adams’s black book. Tears and a heartfelt expression of grief when I gave her the keys suggested he was at least her mentor. This part of his will makes me grin every time I think of it. I’m sure he included it to make us either smile or wag our fingers at him. He didn’t care which, as long as it caused us not to forget him.

  Finally, there were supposed to be three envelopes in the top right-hand drawer of his desk in his home office. I had to collect them and make sure they were delivered to the people whose names were written on them.

  He wrote in his will that his body was to be cremated and that his ashes were to be tossed “unceremoniously” into the Mississippi River. That quietly happened the day after the coroner finished his required autopsy, three days after Adams’s death. As executor of his estate, I was determined to follow his instructions to the letter. Duties like this—helping Adams implement his carefully crafted plans—had been my job since I was seven years old.

  As I approached the front door to his house, I imagined that Adams and his ashes were probably well past Saint Louis by now and he’d be flowing into the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico by Thanksgiving Day.