Old School

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Cabot Nathanson was the chief deputy commonwealth's attorney in Kenton County, Kentucky. We had been classmates at the University of Cincinnati Law School and were in the same informal study group our second and third years. We had loosely kept in touch and I had attended his wedding a couple of years earlier to a fellow UC law student. I gave him a call.

"Lester, to what do I owe the pleasure this Sabbath morning," Cabot said, using his nickname for me.

"Well, got some sobering news this morning that my high school best friend had died in a one-car crash overnight that the KSP believes was suicide, so it's sort of a dark day," I said.

Cabot extended his condolences and asked me who he was, where it happened and when. All the things you'd expect a prosecuting attorney to want to know.

"I thought I'd call you after talking to the officer who led the KSP investigative team, a Sergeant Burnley."

Earl's response was initially silence. Then, "Tell me more."

"Well, he called me because they found a representation agreement with Danny, the victim, that I had roughed out on a cocktail napkin yesterday afternoon at Buffalo Wild Wings. Something had been troubling Danny for a long time and he needed someone to talk to. We were close friends, but he still worried that I might talk about what he told me, so I drew up the retainer agreement so that attorney-client privilege could legally guarantee confidentiality and I explained to him how that works," I said. "Anyway, KSP found that and other contact info for me in Danny's wallet and so Burnley calls me. Says Danny was going at least 100 when he hit a huge concrete piling in the median of I-75 that supports an overpass. He said they believe it was intentional."

"Uh huh. Go on," Cabot said.

"Well, it all was pretty normal til he told me he planned to get a search warrant to go toss Danny's apartment. That shocked me. I've never heard of a criminal investigation proceeding from a suicide where no one else was hurt. At that point, I invoked the retainer Danny had signed just hours earlier and told him I would not sit back and see Danny's rights trampled."

"You're planning a criminal defense of a dead man?" Cabot said.

"If this cop is trying to build a criminal case against a dead man, then damn right I am."

"I haven't heard a word about any of this," Cabot said joylessly. "He'd have to go through our office to get a judge to issue a search warrant, and if Burnley's looking to do it, I would be involved because I'd be the one to approve it."

"Would you? Would you greenlight a search warrant on a solo suicide victim?"

"Look, Les, I can tell you that's never happened in my experience with the CA's office, and I am not aware that such a thing has ever been granted in a case like the one you describe. I can tell you that, as a rule, we don't seek search warrants unless we have probable cause to suspect ongoing criminal activity beyond a limited, unique action like this. I'd have to hear what evidence Burnley has developed and what angle he's pursuing, but if it is as you say, just a guy who felt he had to end it all, I can't see us taking such a request to a Circuit Court judge."

"Yeah, and I have no idea what Burnley's looking into but he did say that he had questions about Dano's 'lifestyle,' whatever the fuck that means," I said, again mocking the way the sergeant had said it. "Since when does a lifestyle constitute a crime?"

"I guess we just have to let this play out and see what the KSP tries to do," Cabot said before another few beats of silence.

"Les, I never told you what I am about to tell you, OK? This has to be treated just like attorney-client, got it?"

I agreed.

"Burnley's kind of a nutjob and he's been a pain in the ass to the KSP and our office more than once. Belongs to some far-out church that really has it in for gays. After Obergefell, he asked us to seek a court order against a Pride Month parade a gay-rights group was organizing in Covington on grounds that it endangered public safety. We refused, and the next day, dozens of members of his congregation were outside our office chanting, waving signs, praying and trying to block people from entering. About a half-dozen arrests."

He was referring to Obergefell v. Hodges, a case the Supreme Court decided in 2015 that struck down state bans against same-sex marriage.

"Les, nobody knew that Burnley had made that request for a restraining order on the pride march except for himself and our office. We thought about pressuring the KSP to fire or demote him after that protest, but the CA decided against it because he didn't want to give the story more oxygen and risk uniting the fundamentalist churches against him in an election year. We also dismissed charges against the six people who were arrested."

"So Burnley suspects Dano was gay?" I said, bewildered. Of all the troubles my friend kept pent up inside, I never entertained the possibility that a life as a closeted gay man would be one of them.

"Good chance. Maybe something else, but I've never seen him get worked up to the point of abusing his authority about anything besides homosexuality and trans issues."

As foreign as Cabot's assessment sounded, it would explain a lot about Dano's erratic, self-destructive behavior. And that notion staggered me almost as much as news of his death.

I thanked Cabot for his time and insights and assured him that our conversation never took place. Then I put Ryder in his chest harness, grabbed his leash, loaded him in the car and drove to East Fork State Park for a very long walk on the wooded trails. This would require many miles to digest.

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At first, I didn't recognize Denise (Albertson) Catchings. Over the years, Dano's mother had grown corpulent, frail and rheumy.

She sat in one of the seven folding chairs in the shade of a funeral home tent just on an unusually warm October afternoon facing the vault in which the urn bearing the cremains of her only son, Danny Franklin Albertson, had been placed, suspended over an open grave into which it was about to be lowered. Her eyes stared vacantly, never spilling the first tear.

Denise's other child, Danny's sister, Tiffany, wept softly as she stared beyond the gravesite to the phalanx of floral arrangements on wire easels — the largest from his employer, the Cincinnati Bengals, bearing the NFL team's logo.

The reasons for her detachment from wasn't clear. Maybe it was the distance the decades had put between mother (an alcoholic at least since Dano was in kindergarten) and son (who picked up the disease sometime between his senior year at Dunbar and when he dropped out of the University of Kentucky in the fall semester of his sophomore year and joined the Air Force Reserve just as he turned 20. He mustered out after six years at the rank of lieutenant.

Maybe it was because whatever narcotic she had loaded up on before the funeral — prescription or otherwise — had left her in an uncomprehending torpor, her pupils dilated even in the bright sun.

"Mrs. Catchings, on behalf of the president of the United States, please accept the thanks of a grateful nation," a man in a blue Air Force Captain's uniform said as he crouched in front of Dano's only surviving parent. He handed her an American flag that had been meticulously folded into a triangular shape by an honor guard of other men in Air Force blue. From a distant corner of the cemetery came the strains of a trumpet playing "Taps."

Denise Catchings nodded wordlessly at the officer, her registering no discernible expression or emotion. It was a legitimate question whether she even grasped what was going on.

After the funeral director bade the guest to depart for an hour or so to allow workers to lower the vault containing Dano's urn and close the grave, Tiffany guided her mother out of the cemetery to a waiting pickup truck and helped her into the passenger seat. They drove away without interacting with anyone.

I had worked with Denholm's Funeral Home and Versailles Memorial Gardens to arrange the funeral and burial. All I did was follow the instructions in Dano's final letter to me. It was my job as his attorney.

Evidently, Dano wrote and mailed it to me that Saturday night just before he climbed into his car for his high-speed drive into eternity. It was three handwritten pages on yellow, lined legal pad paper. Evidently, it was what Dano meant in the note the police found in his wallet about explaining things to me "later" that so perplexed Sergeant Burnley.

The first page was spent apologizing. Torment seemed to scream from every word. The blue ruled lines were smudged in a couple of spots, the ink diluted by what I can only assume were teardrops.

I wish I could explain all this to you in a way that would make sense, but I can't. I know what I did won't make sense to most folks. They don't make sense to me, either. But I have tried for so very long to just keep going and can't anymore.

He said that until I spoke truth to him on his crazy fables, no one had shown the slightest interest in getting to the bottom of what was going on in his life. That, he wrote, was the sign of a true friend, but it also scared him because it opened a door he could not bring himself to pass through — the door to the awful truth that he could not bring himself to admit, much less confront.

My hand is shaking now just writing these words, and I am only able to do it because I know you have a legal duty to keep it secret and carry that secret to your own grave, he wrote. I tell you this as my lawyer: I have known for at least the past 10 years that I am gay.

Reading that in my friend's familiar longhand took my breath away. It wasn't really surprising, given my conversations with Burnley and Nathanson. I held no sense of disappointment over his sexual orientation. I was taught from early childhood that love is love, and to celebrate it when people find it in this world so filled with hate. I have close friends who are openly gay, some of whom prefer to keep it quiet but have acknowledged it privately to me. There are at least four lawyers on my floor in my firm who are gay or lesbian. I have attended two same-sex weddings in the past year; in one of them, I gave a Julia, a friend since my undergrad days, away in marriage to her faithful longtime partner, filling the role of Julia's father who had disowned her when she came out to her family a dozen years earlier.

What produced a crushing sadness in me was that Dano felt he couldn't be who he was, not even in the third decade of the 21st century, and not even with me. For whatever reason, the personal and societal pressures on him were not something he could overcome. For the first time since I got the news of his death, I allowed myself to cry.

What if he'd come to me years earlier? Why didn't I notice something years earlier? Maybe I could have persuaded him over time, before things got so far gone; before he had descended so deeply into his own mental and spiritual abyss; before hopelessness consumed all else.

Stop playing 'what-if,' I commanded myself. It was a mental exercise lawyers perfect as a way to cope with adverse verdicts and judges' rulings. But that's about business. This was about Dano.

Those thoughts consumed my mind as Dano's graveside service ended and a gentle autumn sun warmed me through my dark suit. As the gathering dispersed and Dano's mourners drifted off their separate ways, I just stood there, staring blankly at the hole in the soil that would soon receive my childhood friend's mortal ashes. I hadn't noticed someone standing patiently slightly behind me and just to my left until there was a pat on my arm.

"Les?" a woman's voice said.

I shook myself out of my all-consuming remembrance about Dano to see a pair of grayish blue eyes and a cherubic face framed by an unruly mop of curly auburn hair looking at me a couple of feet away.

"Kass." I said, a smile thawing my somber countenance.

"Yep."

NEXT: Chapter 2 — Kass