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  Regent, SM, November 1—Everyone who knew him called him “Gar,” the diminutive of his given name, Edgar. And no one had a bad word for Gar Parlance in this sleepy cattle and farming community in the southeastern corner of South Midland tangent to Kansas and Missouri. He mowed their lawns, he hauled their trash, and when the weather was warm and jobs were available, and if he felt like it, he did manual labor for the Department of Highways or the Burlington Northern Railroad.

  And if he did not feel like it, which was more often than not, he would spend the afternoons napping and fishing out by Loomis Falls, a nineteenth-century man-made waterfall that diverted the path of the Albion River so that it irrigated the rich farm flatlands of northern Loomis County.

  “I’m like tumbleweed,” Parlance once told local barber Joe Salmon, whose lawn he mowed every Saturday afternoon until the snows came. “Wherever I go, I always tumble right on back to Regent.”

  His affection for his hometown is the main reason residents cannot fathom how Parlance became the victim in one of the most grotesque racial murders in recent American history, his flesh torn from his body with pliers, the letter P carved into his chest like an engraving, and his tongue severed from his mouth. For two days, his body went undiscovered until a dog belonging to farmer Eugene Hicks found his remains in a field outside town, and barked until his master came to see what was the matter.

  “I guess we just thought Gar was tumbling again,” Mr. Salmon said.

  “Regent—A Place Fit for Kings” read the road signs leading into town. “Pop. 3,679.” Claude Applewhite, pastor of the Bethany Methodist Church, looked sadly at the sign this week and remarked, “I guess we’re down to 3,678 now that Gar’s gone.”

  Regent takes its name from the English-owned Regent Cattle Company, which settled the town immediately after the Civil War, when younger sons of landed British nobility came to the New World to make their fortune. It was a rough-and-tumble time. The English aristocrats built the Loomis Waterfall, and the diversion of the Albion River nearly precipitated a range war with the ranchers of neighboring Albion County.

  The Regent Cattle Company went bankrupt around the turn of the century, when beef prices tumbled. A check of county tax and property records reveals that none of its English supervisors—people with names like Lovat and Angell and Simsbury and Stuart—chose to remain when times were no longer flush and the longhorns disappeared from the rolling plains. What they gave to Regent were the names of the four cobblestone streets bordering the Loomis County Courthouse, on the lawn outside of which stands a scaled-down man-sized Statue of Liberty.

  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 avai
lable 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.