Nothing Lost (2 page)

Yellow ribbons adorn the clothes of most people in Regent this week. Those who did not personally know Parlance remember his daily wanderings through town. “He was always smiling,” town librarian and resident local historian Marjorie Hudnut said. “He'd come into the library and say, ‘Miss Marjorie, give me something new to read.' He liked to read naval stories.
HoratioHornblower,
that sort of thing. I can't say he ever really finished any of them. I think the library was just a place for him to take a nap.”

It seems particularly ironic that here in the middle of the American heartland, Parlance would dream of the four winds and the seven seas.

No one seems to know exactly when Parlance sank his roots in Regent. “He was here, then he wasn't, then just as you began to miss him, he was back again,” Miss Hudnut said. “He'd be gone for a year, sometimes two, you'd say, ‘Gosh, I haven't seen Gar in a bit,' then he wasn't gone anymore. It was like he never left.”

“Gar was like that Forrest Gump fella,” Marcus Garvey Case, the local African-American undertaker, recalled. “He said there wasn't a state in the union he hadn't walked through.”

“Forrest Gump was a runner, Marcus,” Pastor Applewhite said.

“Gar was no runner,” Mr. Salmon said. “He was a walker. He had two speeds.”

“Slow and slower,” Miss Hudnut said.

Parlance had no known survivors. “He said his daddy run off when he was a little one,” Mr. Salmon said. “After his momma died,” Miss Hudnut said.

“That's when he first hit the road,” Loomis County Sheriff Brutus Mayes said. “Keep moving, that was Gar's motto.”

Mayes was a former All-Pro linebacker for the Detroit Lions until his knee blew out. When injuries forced him into retirement, he entered law enforcement in the town where he was raised. Last year, he was reelected to a second term, winning 72 percent of the vote.

Parlance lived in a tiny, immaculately clean one-room apartment above Claude Applewhite's garage. Its only decorations were a number of melted wax votive candles twisted into bizarre shapes.

Parlance never managed to put together enough money to buy even a used car. “Gar would say, ‘A car don't matter in a town this size,' ” Mr. Case recalled. “ ‘I got the best two wheels in the world—my own two feet.' ”

Perhaps the reason Parlance never drove is that when he was 19 he was sentenced to a four-year prison term at the Colorado State Penitentiary for stealing an automobile in Alamosa. “All I was trying to do was get back to Regent in a big damn hurry,” he told undertaker Case. “ ‘If I'd walked,' ” Mr. Case reported him saying this week, “ ‘I'd have got back here a lot quicker than that four I spent in Colorado.' ”

Sheriff Mayes said he occasionally had to lock Parlance up for public drunkenness, but he was always out by the next morning. No charges were ever filed, nor was any record of arrest registered. “It was just a place for him to sleep it off on a cold night,” Sheriff Mayes said. “It's a funny thing to say, but he was a pleasure to have in my jail. He'd talk my ear off about places he'd been. New Hampshire. Places like that. ‘They got no taxes in New Hampshire, Brutus,' he'd say. ‘You got to go there.' ”

Today in Regent, Sheriff Mayes, Miss Hudnut, Mr. Case, Mr. Salmon and Pastor Applewhite tied a yellow ribbon on the miniature Statue of Liberty outside the Loomis County Courthouse.

It will remain there until the killer or killers of Edgar Parlance are arrested and brought before the bar of justice.

Remember those votive candles.

Everyone wanted a piece of the Parlance saga. Johnnie L. Cochran announced that he would represent the Parlance family interest in any civil litigation and negotiate any subsidiary motion picture or literary rights. Even the Klan, after a fashion, signed on. In Waco, the grand dragon denied that the Klan had anything to do with the murder of “this so-called African American,” but he added that there were “many good white Americans” who felt as if they had been “bypassed by government toadying to the Negro rabble-rousing element, and may have decided that some sort of compensatory action was necessary.” When pressed about the definition of “compensatory action,” he did allow that “maybe the lesson went a bit too far.” Brutus Mayes became a chat-show regular, with more airtime than he had since he was in the NFL. “We don't have no Aryan Nation or KKK deal here in Regent,” he told CNN, Fox 5, and MSNBC. “Our friends in the white community are as appalled at this Parlance deal as black folks are.” At a prayer vigil in Los Angeles, Jamaal Jefferson of the Los Angeles Clippers announced that he would pay for Parlance's funeral, and said he had lobbied NBA president Steven Silver to set up an annual Parlance Trophy, to be given each year to that NBA player who best promotes the idea of racial tolerance and understanding. The first contributor to the Parlance Fund was Cyrus Ichabod, CEO of I-Bod, the sneaker and sportswear conglomerate that paid Jamaal Jefferson $11 million annually to promote its sporting goods.

Hollywood of course got on the bandwagon. A director named Sydney Allen said that he and his producing partner, Martin Magnin, were negotiating to secure the rights to the Parlance story. “This will be a major motion picture about race,” Magnin told CNN, “but we want to concentrate on the man.” Cyrus Ichabod said he planned to invest in the picture, his first venture in the film industry. “Jamaal Jefferson would be perfect for the part,” Martin Magnin told all available outlets. “It would open a whole new career for him. We see him as a kind of young Morgan Freeman.” That Jamaal Jefferson was fifteen years younger than Edgar Parlance did not pose a problem, or at least none that could not be remedied. “Maybe Morgan Freeman could play Gar, and Jamaal would be his young friend.”

What the late Edgar Parlance had become was a lottery ticket on the money tree.

If I may mix a metaphor.

I watched Edgar Parlance's funeral on TV. Bethany Methodist in Regent was the place to be in South Midland that day. An SRO crowd inside the church and closed-circuit monitors for the throng of public and press gathered outside. Speaking from the pulpit, Dixon McCall was in his let mode: “Let us inoculate the land against the fevers of hate.” Jesse was there, and Johnnie Cochran in an iridescent heliotrope Buck and the Preacher suit, and Jamaal Jefferson and Cyrus Ichabod and Martin Magnin, who let it slip to MSNBC as he entered the church that he would be “scouting locations” in and around Regent after paying his “last respects.” None of South Midland's political hierarchy could afford to miss the event. You'd never have known that Guy Kennedy, the Democratic governor in a generally Republican state, was the political equivalent of a dead man walking the way he bounced up the aisle shaking every hand as if he were entering the Hall of Delegates to address the state legislature. The Secret Service tried to direct the governor into a pew three rows behind the president, but Kennedy slipped past them and sat across the aisle from Dixon McCall with Jesse, Jamaal Jefferson, and Cyrus Ichabod. The Worm was also there. The Worm is Jerrold (“Gerry”) Wormwold, South Midland's attorney general. The Worm was gearing up to run against Kennedy, and even though he had not announced, the polls gave him a double-digit lead. The Worm was a born-again Christian, and he sat in the front pew next to Dixon McCall, practically hugging him. If you intuit that I am less than enthusiastic about the Worm, your instinct would be correct. More later.

Poppy was also there, sitting on the other side of Dixon McCall. Congresswoman Sonora (“Poppy”) McClure, La Pasionara of the Republican right wing, and the Worm's worst nightmare. Poppy had floated the notion that she might run for governor herself, and because of her combative high-octane style, she was the best-known politician in the state, one who, unlike the Worm, could guarantee maximum national media coverage. What the Worm was best known for was his unfortunate nickname, a name that gave Poppy an opening to make all kinds of allusions, veiled and otherwise, to squishy invertebrates absent backbones. I am not all that sure that Poppy could have beaten the Worm in a primary. I think she was counting on scaring him into folding by promising a scorched-earth primary that she was well aware could ultimately end up delivering the state to Guy Kennedy in the general election.

Outside Bethany Methodist at the end of the service, Jamaal Jefferson led the crowd in a hip-hop version of “Amazing Grace.” Poppy linked arms with Jesse and Johnnie Cochran and hip-hopped right along with them as if she had spent her life down and dirty.

The Worm thought Jesse and Jamaal and Johnnie were agents of Satan.

He did not think much more highly of Poppy McClure.

Coincidentally, two days after Edgar Parlance's funeral, South Midland was scheduled to conduct its first execution since 1959. Small potatoes when compared to Texas or Florida. The condemned man was a pedophile sex murderer named Percy Darrow, who had been convicted of sexually assaulting and murdering nine-year-old twin brothers named Patrick and Lyman James. The James twins were found buried and largely decomposed in a shallow trench in Phil Sheridan County by a brace of retrievers on the first day of duck season. I was the head of the Homicide Bureau in the state attorney general's office in those days, and I assigned myself to prosecute Percy Darrow. The legislature had just reinstituted the death penalty, I favor capital punishment, the case was open and shut, and at some future date, when all Darrow's appeals were exhausted, he would be strapped into the electric chair at the state penitentiary on Durango Avenue in Cap City. Durango Avenue is the oldest of the three maximum-security prisons maintained by the South Midland Department of Corrections (there was one in Halloween County and a recently opened supermax in Sunflower County), and the facility where all executions as far back as hanging days had historically been held. The Worm, however, had other ideas. Shortly after he was elected attorney general, he had me removed from the case. It's a long story that I'll get into presently, accounting as it does for one of the reasons I find myself narrating these events. I was replaced by my number two in the Homicide Bureau, James Joseph McClure. J.J. was also Poppy McClure's husband. The Worm no doubt thought he was not only getting rid of me, but doing Poppy a favor.

Proving that no good deed goes unpunished.

It was J.J. who would get to attend Percy Darrow's execution.

J.J., by the way, did not accompany Poppy to Edgar Parlance's funeral.

There was another story below the fold on the front pages of the Kiowa
Times-Ledger
and the Capital City
Herald
that week. The Rhinos from South Midland University were set to play Florida State in the Orange Bowl New Year's night for the national college football championship. In South Midland, football was the secular religion, more important than God, certainly more important than Edgar Parlance or Percy Darrow. What kept the football fever in check and the Orange Bowl coverage muted was whether the Rhinos' All-American nose tackle, Ralph (“Jocko”) Cannon, Jr., would be allowed to dress for the game. Jocko was not medicating a football injury. Rather, a coed named Brittany Barnes had accused him of dragging her down three flights of stairs in Rhino Land, the dormitory and student-center complex that accommodated all of USM's athletic teams, male and female, segregating them from the rest of the undergraduate population as the Romans did with their gladiators. Brittany Barnes's skull was fractured, her cheekbone shattered, and her two front teeth knocked so far into her palate that she needed oral surgery to dig them out.

Jocko Cannon was unavailable for comment. A university spokesman said he was in seclusion with the Cannon family minister and spiritual advisor, the Reverend Hardy Luther of the United Church of Almighty God. Rhino football coach Dr. John Strong promised to lead a campus candlelight vigil asking Jesus to watch over both Brittany Barnes and Jocko Cannon in what Strong called “their common hour of need.”

The Worm wanted no part of the Jocko Cannon case. USM
v.
FSU with Jocko Cannon unavailable to suit up for the Rhinos because of a possible criminal investigation conducted by his office was the Worm's idea of a political nightmare. Jocko Cannon's father, Ralph Cannon, Sr., was the finance chairman of the Republican Party in South Midland. Without the benediction of Ralph Cannon, Sr., the Worm as Republican candidate for governor was dead in the water.

So he did what he thought was the smart thing. He bumped the case to J.J. McClure. Let Poppy's husband handle it. Indirectly letting Poppy take the heat. Maybe Poppy was right: the Worm would fold if the pressure got too heavy.

There was one more newsbreak that week:

XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX NOVEMBER 4,
17:26:02 XXXXX

 

Two white men in custody for Parlance slaying

Duane Lajoie, 21, and Bryant Gover, 23, were arrested today in South Midland after trying to crash through a roadblock set up at the county line separating Loomis and Albion counties, the
Drudge Report
has learned. There was immediate speculation that the two men, both unemployed and both said to be ex-convicts, would be charged with the murder of Edgar Parlance.

MORE MORE MORE

CHAPTER TWO

Cline: originally Kleinbaum in the Galician railhead of Lemberg; then Klein in Graz, the family destination in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire after Marshal Pilsudski tried to cut a deal with the Russian Whites; then Cline in Galveston, where the former Kleinbaum/Kleins finally disembarked in the New World, after a stopover at Ellis Island. It is better for you Cline, the immigration officer at Ellis Island said as he stamped the papers and changed the spelling. His name was Helms, formerly Hersh. At least that was the story told by my great-grandfather, who spent every Shabbat wailing about the loss of the family name, as if it had been Connaught or Carnegie. Every Shabbat actually only meant the six weeks he spent in Galveston before he was run over by a Reo when he tried to cross a street waving his cane to stop the traffic, which did not stop. Imagine a Reo, my grandfather would say, as if the Reo's pedigree made the death of my great-grandfather, his father, somehow more honorable than a mundane street accident. The Clines moved north to Kansas, then to Nebraska, and finally to South Midland. My grandfather said the climate reminded him of Galicia, where actually he had never lived, having been born in Salina, Kansas. Nothing in this family history quite checks out, but telling stories was what the Clines were good at.

My name is Max Cline. I'm queer. I'm a Jew. And I'm a lawyer. In South Midland, that trifecta is not exactly a winning ticket in the social sweep-stakes. My significant other is named Stanley. Stanley Poindexter, M.D. Stanley is a psychiatrist. Another long shot in the local social sweeps. Stanley used to be a married psychiatrist in Kansas City, with children, but he switched leagues several significant others before me. I made the mistake early on of asking his ex-wife's name, and he told me it was none of my fucking business. Fair enough. So I called an investigator I knew in the Kansas City D.A.'s office and got the information. Wife Audrey, children Kara and Karl. Audrey has a boyfriend. First name Dutton, last name Fearing. Dutton Fearing. I wonder what it would be like to have a last-name first name. Grunwald Cline. After my mother's maiden name.

Grun Cline.

It doesn't make it.

Stanley is also an Episcopalian. I've often thought that an Episcopalian psychiatrist is an oxymoron, but there you are. We've been together four years. I've been monogamous, except occasionally in my heart, for the odd closeted movie star. Stanley attends five or six professional meetings a year, even one in London last summer. I try not to wonder how he behaves when he's out of town.

For sixteen years I was a prosecutor in the state attorney general's office. A lifer. I have no problem with the penal system. I don't want to reform it. Incarceration benefits society. Some people belong behind the walls. My opinion is: the rougher, the better. Coils of razor-sharp concertina wire, electric fences, the hole, cattle prods, the works. I once argued successfully that a fourteen-year-old should do his time at the Durango Avenue adult facility rather than at the juvenile correction center in Kiowa County. He'd crushed the skull of a Chinese takeout deliveryman with a brick for no other reason than that he had ordered General Tso chicken and in a mix-up of orders got Kung Pao shrimp instead. Because of his age, he only got nine-to-life. Of course he was buggered at Durango Avenue, and finally, at fifteen and a half, he was drowned by a fellow psychopath who held him facedown in a toilet full of excrement.

At the trial I made a meal about the deliveryman's pregnant wife and three children under four.

I didn't mention that the deliveryman was also running smack along with the MSG.

That I was queer was never an apparent problem when I was with the A.G.'s office. I assumed people knew, I was discreet, I didn't dress up, I had the highest conviction rate in the office, I played rugby for the Department of Corrections in a league composed of teams from the legislature and the state agencies (I lost four front teeth in a scrum during a match against the Department of Public Safety, a very butch thing to do), and I taught a course in criminal law at the university.

Then Gerry Wormwold was elected attorney general. The Worm never missed an opportunity to punch the Christian ticket on his way to higher office. Poppy McClure liked to say that he thought the initials “A.G.” stood for “aspiring governor.” A divorce from his first wife seemed to be a speed bump on the Worm's career highway, but the first Mrs. Wormwold agreed to sign an affidavit acknowledging that her infidelity was the predicate cause of the breakup. The first Mrs. Wormwold said it was the Christian thing to do, that she had renounced adultery and rededicated her life to Jesus, and that she had received no favors in return for the affidavit.

Objection overruled.

The second and current Mrs. Wormwold, the former Aphrodite Anderson, had her name legally changed to Nancy Reagan Anderson, in honor of the woman she most admired in the world, and when the A.G. announced their engagement, Nancy Reagan Anderson produced a doctor's certificate that she was a virgin, hymen intact, who would save herself for her wedding night with her fiancé, the presumptive candidate for attorney general.

During his campaign, the Worm had also pledged not to violate his Christian principles by appointing a gay person to a senior management position in the A.G.'s office. It was a pledge that really only applied to me. He could not legally fire me, which would have made him subject to a discrimination suit that I in fact never would have filed, but he could take me off the Darrow case. The grounds, never stated in so many words, were that as I was what he would call sexually ambiguous, I might have a conflict of interest. J.J. got the case, and I was reassigned from head of the Homicide Bureau to arraignment hearings and the misdemeanor courts. I quit the A.G., which of course was what the Worm was hoping I would do, and naturally he appointed J.J. my replacement, a move I suspect he has since come to regret.

I also lost my lectureship at the university law school. Again courtesy of the Worm. A word here, a word there, proposed budget cuts, a restructuring of course schedules, a cutback in electives, and I was gone. Not that it really mattered. I signed on as a night school professor at Osceola Community College's unaccredited law school. And I prospered, more or less, as a member of the defense bar, defending those I used to put behind bars, often, I regret to say, successfully.

That was a more efficient way to get under the Worm's skin.

About J.J.

He was someone who got where he was by playing the angles. When he worked for me in the Homicide Bureau, he had a reputation as an operator, a fixer, someone whose eye was always on the desired result. Where it remained when he took over from me. And as much as I dislike admitting it, he was also a very skillful attorney.

It was a skill inherited from his father. Walter McClure had been crippled by polio when he was in grade school in the town of Hamlet, in Parker County, and spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. Hamlet was not named after the Dane, but took its name from its size, and as it grew larger saw no reason to change. This was a part of South Midland where few words were wasted. Towns and counties bore names like Adverse and Badland, and the place-names established without unnecessary explanation local attitudes toward outsiders who entered the city limits or crossed the county line. Walter McClure had gone to South Midland University, then to the university law school, where he was on the law review, and after his graduation, had turned down corporate practice with the larger firms in Kiowa and Capital City to be a country lawyer in Hamlet. Where, at the age of thirty, he was elected Parker County attorney.

County attorney was a job Walter McClure said he loved, though it paid him only seventy-five hundred dollars a year (stretched out with some money from his wife, Emily, who was always referred to as a St. Louis girl, as if her Missouri genes explained the source of her dowry). The cases weren't much of a challenge—repos, unpaid taxes, DWIs, domestic abuse, drunk and disorderly, hunting or fishing out of season, bigamy, incest, crimes against nature (farmers and sheep), indecent exposure, embezzlement, fraud, grand theft larceny, a litany from the low end of the civil and penal codes—but Walter treated every one as if it would ultimately end up being reviewed by the Supreme Court. He was always cheerful, never complained about his useless legs, and for seven consecutive two-year terms he was elected president of the state bar association. It was an unpaid job nobody really wanted, and by electing someone who was handicapped, the state bar bureaucrats could congratulate themselves on doing a noble deed for good old crippled Walter McClure, what a damn shame, he could've been one of the best. What they didn't say was that having Walter on the case spared electing a Jew from Cap City or Kiowa. And I was never entirely sure that Walter disagreed with that assessment. He was, after all, from Parker County, which wasn't all that crazy about Catholics either.

To be honest, I could not stand Walter McClure. An unsentimental verdict about someone whose legs were wrapped in metal braces, and got a lot of unearned mileage out of it. I always had the sense that Walter was trying out for one of those “Most Unforgettable Characters I Ever Met” who used to turn up in the
Reader's Digest
but hadn't made the cut. He used to say he wanted to write a book about the life of a county attorney. And what was the most important thing he had learned as a county attorney?

That there were three stages in a man's life—birth, puberty, and adultery.

You see what I mean.

Walter and Emily had J.J., and then four years later, Emmett.

Emmett drowned when he was three, in the pond beyond the McClures' farmhouse in Parker County.

Five months before J.J. and Poppy were married, Walter McClure steered his wheelchair into the barn and shot himself with a single-action Colt .45 he had inherited from his father, who had inherited it from his father, and he from his father.

A story of the Old West.

I guess Walter was more complicated than I gave him credit for.

You can't discuss J.J. without discussing Poppy.

Born Sonora Ford, the Sonora from the state in northern Mexico where her mother's family owned 212,000 acres richly veined with minerals. Margarita Ochoa Reyes had married Jim Ford, a fly-by-night prospector, and done him the favor of dying the day after their only child was born. A postpartum hemorrhage that made Jim Ford a rich man and a single parent on the same day. He was a doting father for over three decades until he was hit by a bolt of lightning on a golf course he was developing for a resort hotel he had underwritten outside Tangier. Except for charitable contributions and cash bequests to loyal retainers, Poppy was the primary beneficiary of Jim Ford's largely unleveraged estate, which she used to finance her first congressional campaign and a substantial portion of her three subsequent races.

Poppy never discouraged the notion that her nickname was affectionately given her by her father, but in fact it was bestowed on her when she was a student at Foxcroft. Her four years at Foxcroft are never mentioned in her campaign biographies, only that she went from “high school in Virginia” (never identified) to Wellesley, where she was exposed to what she now called “the pernicious virus of liberalism.” It was at Wellesley, she claimed, that she learned to hate tree huggers. “The most beautiful thing about a tree,” she says in her campaign literature, “is what you do with it after you cut it down.”

The literature did not say that the line was lifted from Rush Limbaugh.

From the moment she took her seat in the House, Poppy was in demand. She was beautiful, she was rich, she would say whatever was on her mind, and she would say it outrageously. It was treason to imply that the world's ecosystem was fragile. Liberals only win elections by pretending they're not liberals. Feminism is a twelve-step program for homely women. Prison construction is the only necessary public housing program. She was preaching to the converted, but the converted ate it up, and faltering Republican candidates begged her to show up at their fundraising events. Poppy on the dais meant headlines for her and big bucks for the party coffers. Publicity was her crack, a microphone her crack house. The Sunday-show bookers all had her on speed dial, knowing that Poppy McClure on air guaranteed a quotable sound bite. I sometimes think that the network and cable anchors, and the talk-show hosts, knew Poppy better than J.J. did.

It occurs to me, as I am sure it had occurred to J.J., that death had twice been a fortuitous silent partner in the Ford family accomplishments. Poppy's considerable treasure allowed J.J. to forsake the uncertainties of the private sector and remain a prominent presence in the A.G.'s office, however uncomfortable that presence made the Worm. J.J. was also too smart not to know that his role as a high-profile prosecutor boosted his political asset as husband, another complication in his and Poppy's already complicated relationship.

J.J. in effect was a weekend husband. He saw Poppy only when she flew back to her district on those Thursday nights when she was not booked on a talk show the following Sunday. It was common gossip among the local political reporters who covered her that, on her daily schedule, Poppy and J.J.'s occasional coupling was euphemized as “Private Time,” as in “Sunday 12:30 to 1 p.m.—Private Time.” Unless there was a fundraiser. Raising money always took precedence over copulation. It is not surprising that J.J.'s eye occasionally wandered between Poppy's takeoff for Washington Sunday evening in the private jet she had inherited from her father and her return home to Cap City the following Thursday night. One can assume Poppy knew. There was little she didn't know. As long as discretion was maintained, it was a trade-off she could handle.

Poppy was a piece of work.

Occasionally I would see J.J. in the courthouse. He had stopped saying we should get together sometime for lunch. I think I had him nervous. I hope so. He didn't like to be read, and he thought I could read him.