Byron's Lane

by Wallace Rogers

  It was late afternoon when the small jet began its descent in an executive airport in one of Minneapolis’s southern suburbs. The red taillights of cars clogging the highways below us indicated the beginning of rush hour. The plane landed smoothly. The pilot quickly steered it next to a row of hangars. I wrote out Christina’s telephone number on my list as we pulled to a stop. The co-pilot emerged from the cockpit and opened the jet’s door. I gathered my things. I tried to pull myself together. I tucked my list into my suit-coat pocket, grabbed my carry-on bag, and descended the six steps on the plane’s stairway to the tarmac.

  The deputy waiting for me at the airport appeared to be in his late twenties, early thirties. He was a bit heavier than police officers ought to be. He was Hollywood’s notion of what sheriff department deputies look like if they work in rural counties, like the place where Adams lived. The officer had driven his police car onto the tarmac and had parked it close to where the plane had stopped. He was half-leaning against his car when I approached him, startling him in spite of my having been in his line of sight for ten yards. The deputy clumsily moved a Styrofoam coffee cup from his right hand to his left and shook my hand.

  He introduced himself as Todd Walker. He pointed to a black plastic nameplate above the breast pocket on his uniform that confirmed what he said. He told me that he’d been on the force for two years. To his disappointment, by the time I was seated next to him in his police car, we had already determined that we shared no relatives, in spite of our same last name. Then, breathlessly, he started to tell me that Jonathan Adams was his first murder case.

  As quickly as he spoke, he stopped and caught himself. Sensing that I didn’t share his professional enthusiasm, the deputy profusely apologized to me and offered his condolences. I accepted his apology and took an instant liking to him. Unlike his boss, the sheriff, there was sincerity and empathy in his voice, backed by a look on his face that matched what he said.

  I used my cell phone to call Christina’s house. There was still no answer.

  It was obvious that Deputy Walker wanted to atone for his insensitivity. He did so during our drive to the sheriff’s office, by telling me more than he should have about the murder investigation. I desperately needed to know everything I could about what had happened to Adams. Whatever I could find out about his killer and the motive would provide me that smallest measure of understanding I had to have to help break my emotional free fall. I encouraged the deputy to talk.

  A woman—not a man—had been picked up two miles west of Adams’s house early that afternoon. When police discovered her, she was seated against a tree on a riverbank, listening to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors album on an iPhone. They found her by following a trail she had made through the long prairie grass behind Adams’s house. A police dog helped, tracking her path through the woods at the end of the field. Deputy Walker said that the woman offered no resistance when they took her into custody.

  Fingerprints on a handgun found in the shrubbery next to Adams’s front door matched the woman’s fingerprints. As far as Deputy Walker knew, she had not yet confessed to committing the crime. The sheriff was sure she hadn’t acted alone. She was from out of town. Since last Monday afternoon, she had been staying at the Budget Inn Motel. I kept what I knew to myself.

  My friend’s alleged killer was registered as Mary Rose Fillmore. She had no criminal record. She drove a late-model Honda Civic with Indiana license plates.

  The FBI was convinced that she was a minor player in a terrorist cell. They figured she was set up to take the fall for the terrorists who had planned the murder. The FBI was in the process of rounding up a dozen suspects in the region who were on their terrorist watch list. They called in for questioning all the leaders of the Somali community.

  We traveled onto and quickly off an interstate highway that bounded the south side of metropolitan Minneapolis-Saint Paul. The road narrowed to two lanes. Mailboxes along it guarded long driveways that disappeared into seas of trees. Most of the cars we passed had headlights on—dusk was upon us and night was fast approaching. We entered Brookfield on its main street, Sibley Avenue, exactly opposite the direction into town that Adams and I took when we went looking for Linda McArthur the previous Saturday afternoon.

  Large parts of the countryside were being swallowed by Minneapolis’s sprawling growth, but Brookfield had managed to retain the distinctive characteristics of Norman Rockwell’s notion of what small-town America should look like: a vital downtown built around a town square full of stately oak trees; a large gray sandstone courthouse dominating the square; cars parked in neat angled rows on both sides of the streets; people in business and casual dress standing around and sitting on benches, chatting in the park that filled the square; storefronts and small offices with names stenciled on their windows and doors; folks walking on the sidewalk, crossing the street, going busily about their business before everything would close for the day. They all stopped what they were doing and stared at the police car when we made our fast, noisy entrance into the central business district. The only things out of place in this snapshot of Americana were the four television vans taking up all the parking spaces in front of the courthouse, satellite dishes on each of them pointed toward heaven.

  *

  Sheriff Michaels had just finished a press briefing. He was in full uniform, reporting the event to a woman dressed smartly in a dark-gray pinstriped business suit, well-fitted and nicely worn over a white silk blouse. He was describing the press conference to her play by play, as if it had been a football game. His excited voice indicated that he was pleasantly surprised at his performance. His demeanor reinforced my negative opinion. I didn’t like the man. He was fast becoming a target at which I could misdirect my anger and frustration about what had happened to my friend.

  I had been standing in the room for almost a minute before Michaels noticed that Deputy Walker and I were there.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Walker. Please come in. Thanks for picking Mr. Walker up at the airport, Todd. That’s all now. You can stand down.”

  I nodded a thank-you to the deputy before I turned in the sheriff’s direction.

  “Mr. Walker, this is our district attorney, Marcie Saunders.” I shook hands with the sheriff and the woman in the silk blouse. Saunders excused herself. As she left, she reminded Michaels to stop by her office upstairs before he went home.

  “Thanks for coming back to Minnesota on such short notice, Mr. Walker. I’m really sorry about your friend. Jonathan Adams was an important, respected, and well-liked person in this state. He’ll be missed.”

  That’s everything Adams ever wanted to be, I thought—well-liked, appreciated, and missed. From Adams’s point of view, those words would have made a fine epitaph. But they were too personal to be offered by a man who hardly knew him. I questioned their sincerity, although Adams never would have. He would have taken the comment at its face value and quietly reveled in it.

  “Mr. Walker, let me bring you up-to-date about what happened and where we are now in the investigation. Because it’s an open investigation, I can’t tell you everything, of course. But I’ll tell you as much as I can. The FBI is getting increasingly involved in this. You’ll have to find out from them what they know.”

  I stopped Michaels short. “Thanks, Sheriff. But Deputy Walker briefed me on the way in. May I see the suspect—this Mary Rose Fillmore?”

  The scathing look the sheriff shot in the deputy’s direction transformed Todd Walker’s friendly face into an expression of extreme apprehension. Then the sheriff turned toward me. In the process, he changed his scowl into a politician’s smile.

  “A civilian interviewing the prime suspect in a murder case is something we don’t allow in a criminal investigation, Mr. Walker. I don’t—”

  I interrupted him again. “I think I know who she is.”

  At first the sheriff looked startled. But, as I hoped would happen, he quickly saw an opportunity to m
ove his investigation in front of the FBI’s. His female suspect had refused to talk to his detectives and the FBI agents who had tried to interrogate her. She might talk to someone she knew. He could be miles ahead of the FBI by the time they arrived at his office in the morning.

  A few minutes later, another one of Michaels’s deputies ushered me to a room off a hall that connected the jail with the sheriff’s office. Having seen dozens of movies set in police stations, I expected the place to be windowless and sparsely furnished with a metal table, two or three straight-backed chairs, a two-way mirror filling one of its walls. But the room looked more like the sheriff department’s break room. It was brightly lit and sterile-looking, with a coffee maker and a microwave on a counter built against one of its walls. A water cooler and two vending machines occupied space on either side of the counter. In front of the room, nearest the door, were a sturdy-looking conference table and two squat oak bookcases filled with law enforcement manuals. A sloppy circle of brown folding chairs were scattered about, and the scuffed gray tile floor made the whole place seem perpetually cold.

  I was temporarily left there alone while the deputy went off to collect Mary Rose Fillmore. I fetched a folding chair, pulled it up to the conference table and uncomfortably dropped myself onto its cold metal seat. I extended my arms out over the old oak table in front of me and watched the fingers on my hands shake. I couldn’t make them stop. Everything around, about, and inside of me was out of control.

  The deputy returned a few minutes later with Fillmore in tow. She looked at me straightaway, giving no notice to anything else in the room. Her puffy face blushed, and then erupted into an ear-to-ear grin that turned her expression from astonishment into glib satisfaction. “Well, what do you know? The gang’s all here. How are you doing, Tom?”

  My knees were suddenly weak as I tried to stand. My mouth was open wider than it should have been. I had lied to the sheriff about knowing this woman. I’d lied to him because I wanted a chance to confront my friend’s killer so I could learn more about the conspiracy to assassinate Jonathan Adams.

  Pulling the handcuffed woman along with him, the police officer retrieved a folding chair for her to sit on and dragged it to the other side of the table. As the jailer handcuffed Fillmore’s wrist to the top of one of the table’s legs and released his hold on her, my mind raced, trying desperately to associate the name Mary Rose Fillmore with a person from my past. Her frozen smile and cold stare easily deflected my darting eyes as I searched her face for clues.

  Before leaving us, the jailer announced he’d be just outside if I needed anything. He said I could let him know when he looked into the room through the window on the door, which he announced to both of us that he would do every minute or two. He told me to knock on the door or signal him when I was finished. Then he turned and walked out of the room, into the hallway, closing the door behind him.

  I was suddenly alone with a woman who knew who I was, but who was a mystery to me. I was experiencing my first tsunami of gut-wrenching emotions that would batter me the next half hour as I struggled to catch my breath and keep my head above everything happening around me.

  Mary Rose Fillmore, if that was really her name, looked older than me. She was dressed in faded blue jeans, white socks, and muddy black tennis shoes. An oversized gray sweatshirt that had GAP written on it in big black letters, worn sloppily over a bigger white T-shirt that spilled out the bottom of the sweatshirt, suggested she was overweight. Her short brown-and-reddish hair, gray streaked, needed combing. Black-framed eyeglasses dominated her face. They were the same outdated style frequently featured in the high school yearbook I had found in Adams’s bookcase.

  The only thing I knew about this person was that it was she who had repeatedly called Adams’s house. Engulfed in anger and profound remorse, I wished to God that Adams had answered one of her telephone calls, signaling that he was home, on Thursday. I would have been there when she rang the front doorbell. Adams would still be alive. Maybe I could have prevented the whole thing from happening. My thoughts fast-forwarded to the shooting incident the Monday before. She surely knew who had done that, too. I was certain of these two things, but nothing else.

  “You don’t recognize me, do you, Tom?” She paused. “Neither did Jonathan.”

  Her expression turned from an unsavory smile to a combination of hate and disappointment.

  “When you were supposed to know me—when you never acknowledged me, even once—I was Mary Rose Vukovich. For three years in high school my locker was next to yours. Here’s the giveaway, Tom. Here’s the big clue. When we were sophomores, I drove the drivers’ education car into the school building. Jonathan’s macho basketball coach was afraid to ride with me the rest of the semester. They had to hire somebody else to teach me how to drive.”

  I didn’t need to be reminded about the day the drivers’ education car crashed into the mechanical drawing and wood shop. I knew who she was when she said that her family name was Vukovich. I was dazed and confused. I tried with all my might to keep my feelings and emotions pushed inside. I sought in vain to determine a motive for Adams’s murder that could somehow involve Mary Rose Vukovich.

  Mary Rose was a rare breed in Maplewood. She was a native. Her father operated a Sunoco gas station in the middle of town when we moved there. He kept the gas station open longer than he should have by fixing old cars in its two cramped service bays. I never saw anyone buy gas at the place. I remember stopping there once to put air in my bicycle tires. After I was finished, her father made me pay a dime for using his air pump. I was afraid of what he would have done to me if I hadn’t had fifty cents’ worth of change in my pocket. He was a mean-looking, intimidating man.

  As the space around the dilapidating gas station slowly filled up with cars her father couldn’t fix or sell, a newly incorporated Maplewood city council persuaded the Sun Oil Company to raze the building in which he worked. It had become an eyesore. The council decided that the property was better suited to be a parking lot for the Methodist church and funeral home that bracketed

  Sam Vukovich’s struggling business. Sun Oil built a new, shiny, white-tile and blue- and gold-trimmed service station half a mile away. Mary Rose’s father was left without a job and the responsibility to remove fifteen junk cars from the property in thirty days. He faced a thousand-dollar fine if he didn’t remove the vehicles. When he refused to pay, he did jail time.

  Mary Rose Vukovich’s father ended up working at Maplewood Lanes, a bowling alley that sprang forth from fill dirt piled behind the shopping center. He cleaned and distributed multi-colored bowling shoes that had their sizes marked in large numbers on the backs of them. He fixed the pin-spotting machines when they broke. Once in a while, he helped tend the bar.

  For reasons I was never able to understand, but never protested, Maplewood natives—kids like Mary Rose, whose unfortunate accident was to not have been born somewhere else—were ostracized from the cliques that formed and reformed, like mud puddles in May, among our school’s burgeoning student body. Our sheer numbers, and the housing developments in which we lived, had overrun them, their families, and the places where they worked—businesses that proudly bore their names, small commercial enterprises that had operated with modest success for many years before we descended upon them. Franchise stores and fast-food chains closely followed us into Maplewood, quickly and ruthlessly driving their struggling shops and restaurants out of business. The experience caused bitterness among almost all the adults in Maplewood who listed the town as their place of birth. Parents often passed their vitriol on to their children.

  But Mary Rose Vukovich was undeterred by the legions of us who constantly rebuffed her. Where Adams loathed rejection, Mary Rose was energized by it. She was always trying to fit in somewhere, anywhere, wanting to befriend someone, anyone. The frequency with which she was ignored drove the intensity of her effort. All the focus of her attention had to do was acknowledge any on
e of a hundred gestures of friendship she made. No one did.

  Our meeting in the basement of a courthouse in Minnesota was the first time I’d ever paid attention to her. By the end of our session I realized her relentless, painful quest for acceptance had been a desperate attempt to be pertinent—not perverse, as we had gossiped about.

  Mary Rose and I and six of our classmates shared a locker bay in a dark hallway in the bowels of the old high school building, underneath the glaring stares of her forgotten relatives who graduated in senior classes so small that their pictures hanging on the wall were oval portraits of individuals, not hordes of teenagers crowded onto gym bleachers. She’d always try to approach us in the hallway when our paths crossed. When we saw her coming, we’d feign involvement in a deep conversation with the people beside us. When she snuck up behind us, we’d say hello and pretend we were late for an important appointment.

  I was violently shaken from all these memories when she dropped another clue, which shed blinding light as to why we were renewing acquaintance at this particular place and time.

  “I’m Victor Pavletich’s granddaughter. Did you know that?”

  She had dropped the weight of heaven and hell on me. My body contorted. I pushed hard against the back of my chair. I was incapable of masking my feelings. The revelation drove rationality up my throat and out my gaping mouth in a silent scream. In some karmic way, I had been an accomplice in my best friend’s death.

  The farmer’s granddaughter stared at her hands calmly folded on the table. She continued coldly and matter-of-factly. “God came to me and showed me where Jonathan Adams—my grandfather’s killer—had tried to hide from us.” As Mary Rose spoke, I was as close to assuming a fetal position as someone can get sitting upright in a metal folding chair. Her words drifted in and out of my ears.

  “Your friend spoke at a convention at the place where I was working in Indianapolis two weeks ago. I recognized him when we passed in the hall. He looked at me, but he never saw me. But I knew who he was. I followed him back here.” Her eyes darted about the room as she spoke. They focused on my startled face. “This is the greatest thing I’ve ever done.”