Old School Ch. 02: KASS

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance by any character or situation to any actual person or event is purely coincidental. All characters presented in this narrative are over the age of 18.

OLD SCHOOL

CHAPTER TWO

KASS

"Sorry to meet up with you after all this time under this circumstance," Kassie Felson said as we hugged at Dano's graveside -- two alumni of the Dunbar High classes of 2003 and 2004, both classmates and friends, back in the day, with the departed.

"So happy you made it. I wasn't sure you could, having to run a store and all. Things like this can't be easy on small, family-owned retailers."

"I asked Millie, an older lady who's my operations manager, to cover for me. It's Wednesday, too, the slowest day of the week. Just felt I needed to be here."

I nodded.

"Well, I'm pleased to see you again and I'm sure Dano would be." I said, looking directly into Kass's eyes, even as she squinted looking slightly upward at me and into the bright, sunny sky beyond. "So, are you heading straight back to Danville or do you have time for a late lunch or coffee?"

She shrugged. "Sure. Where?"

We agreed on Java Jukebox, a new and well-regarded breakfast-all-day café not far from the University of Kentucky campus, about a 20-minute drive from the time we left the Versailles cemetery and bade our last farewells to Dano.

I could tell that Kass was burning with curiosity about what Dano had said about her. Or so that's what I inferred from the observations she made about him and the questions she asked in exploring my general statement that our mutual friend had been increasingly troubled in the final few years of his too-short life.

But Kass respected the boundaries I had to observe under the retainer Dano and I signed. Even if I wasn't his attorney, what good would have come of benighting Danny Albertson's memory and burdening Kass's unassuming soul with the sick tales spun by a troubled soul?

"I'm just glad that Dano had you to talk to as whatever it was that haunted him got worse and worse. I wish he had reached out to more people, that's all," she said.

I hungrily finished up my Java Jukebox Breakfast Sampler plate as I focused on Kass's words.

"Kass, the fact that he called you and left that message in his final moments makes it clear that he understood that and that he valued you, that you mattered in his life. You have to believe that and not feel guilty. You were a blessing in his life at a time when he felt that he didn't have many," I said. "Dano's at peace now, a peace he could find on earth."

Kass smiled weakly, looked me in the eyes and nodded. She sipped at her chai latte.

"What about you, Les? Last time we saw each other, I think you had just gotten out of law school. What's it like now being a powerful lawyer in the big city?"

She was fascinated as I explained my field of practice, fraught with family feuds over family fortunes and the crazy intrigues and adulterous affairs that I have to familiarize myself with at the most granular levels. Divorces. Custody battles. Contested estates.

"You know what they say: where there's a will, there's a family suing each other over it."

She asked me about my family, a question I took to mean my family of orientation. Mom had moved to a suburban Louisville retirement living community (for active seniors, she stressed, and most certainly not to be confused with a nursing home) after dad died six years ago of early onset dementia, I told her.

"And you? I assumed, from your comment about watching football on Sundays with your dog that you're unattached." Kass had a mirthful glint in her eye as she asked the question. I was actually glad she asked the question.

I told her that I had dated a woman I had met at UC Law for a few years, but it was never serious and not much became of it. We were so busy getting our juris doctor, passing the bar, landing jobs in the profession and then, at least for me, putting in all those 12-hour days plus weekends and holidays that are expected of associates trying to make partner in big regional or national firms. It never went much beyond the stage of a casual courtship that was mutually subordinate to developing our careers.

"Friends with benefits then," she said.

"More friends than benefits," I replied. "We're still friends. She took a job in the legal counsel's office for a major corporation up in Columbus, and she's now in charge of its corporate U.S. regulatory and compliance issues. Went to her wedding a couple of years ago. She and Ezra are expecting their first baby in January."

"Now?"

I shrugged. "Nothing, really."

Kass cocked her head and furrowed her brow, surprised at my response, and let her silence ask the question.

"I've been out of the game for so long that I just haven't bothered to get back in. In fact, I'd be hard put to say I ever was in the game. I live a pretty boring, monastic life. I work -- a lot -- and by the time I'm done, it's pretty late and all I want to do is go home. I usually doze off on the couch with Ryder watching TV."

"Not what I'd have expected," she said.

"Why?"

"Successful, handsome and young big-city lawyer in a world where I suspect there are plenty of eligible ladies," she said, a wry smile on her face. "Just assumed you'd have a rather full social calendar."

I shook my head and chuckled.

"Nah. Never really been 'out there,'" I said, framing the last two words in air quotes. "Not that I'm opposed to it. Just... sort of in a routine and haven't been motivated."

"When we were in high school, for instance. That year we went to prom together, I think that was one of just two or three dates I had that whole year. The other, I think, was the homecoming dance and you had already been asked out. Prom is the only date I even remember. I enjoyed it."

I finished my coffee.

"Not that I wasn't interested back then. Just that I was,... well, sort of shy, a little socially awkward, maybe a lot clueless... had a lot of things I was determined to do so I never made it a priority," I said.

"So what about you, Kassie Felson? Who's the knight in shining armor in your world," I asked, turning the conversation around.

She shrugged and remained silent.

"Oh come on, I spilled the tea, now it's your turn," I said, a good-natured grin spreading across my face.

"Like you, very little to tell, actually," she said a bit wistfully.

"Well, 'very little' is still something."

"I had a relationship about seven or eight years ago with a guy, but that was after mom passed away, right as I was taking over the business and moving to Danville. I think he was more interested in me than I was in him. We dated for a couple of months, but..." She stopped.

"But what?"

"It just never really clicked, never went to the, you know, 'next level,'" she said, reprising (perhaps mocking) my air quotes. "I don't know if it was me or if it was him. The whole thing just sort of evaporated without fanfare or really even a goodbye. I still wonder to myself whether he was gay and just couldn't admit it to himself."

I could feel my eyes widen and nostrils flare for a split second before I caught myself showing surprise at her last statement. As a litigator trained in deposing witnesses and retaining a poker face, I had let my guard down in a personal chat with an old friend and let my reaction register. I couldn't tell whether Kass had caught my fleeting response and, if she had, whether it would unwittingly confirm her questions about what had tormented Dano. She continued.

"Charles joined the Navy Reserves shortly after we saw each other for the last time. He got called up to active duty and stationed on a carrier that was deployed to the Eastern Mediterranean when we were helping fight Isis. Haven't heard from him since."

"And now?"

She shrugged again.

"Life's pretty much business. Literally. Almost totally my focus. I converted the second floor above the store and made it my apartment and office. Full scale reno job. It's really nice," she said, smiling at her accomplishment.

"You should come see it sometime. Have you ever been to Danville?"

I had, but it was probably when we were in high school. "I think Dunbar played a baseball game there once."

"Well, some weekend when all you have going on is lounging on the couch with your dog and watching football, take a drive down and see for yourself. Getting away from Gotham's high rises would do you some good, put some pink back in your cheeks. Besides, Danville's a cute little town," she said, clearly warming to the subject and flashing her fullest smile of the day, a smile that lingered in my mind and revived other memories of my vivacious, giggling prom date a generation earlier.

"We've even got our own Starbucks now!"

▼ ▼ ▼

Lunch with Cabot Nathanson was unexpected. He called me early the Friday morning after Dano's burial and said he had to some business in the city and asked me if I was available. I had a consultation with a prospective client scheduled for 1 p.m., and I asked Denise to move it back 15 minutes so I could meet my old law school pal around the corner at Au Bon Pain.

We swiftly wrapped up the pleasantries in which I learned that his oldest had won a swim meet for young kids in his school district and his kindergartner was reading Dr. Suess books cover-to-cover at age four. I could tell that there was more pressing business on his mind, and he was straightforward about it.

"Look, Les, this lunch was just about old times, got it? You can appreciate the risk I am taking talking to you," he said.

"Got it. Should we discuss it in more private environs?"

He looked around. Nobody was within 15 feet of the table he selected in a far corner well away from the windows.

"We're OK if we keep our voices low," he said leaning forward in a hushed tone. "Things are about to get a little crazy in regard to your friend who died in the car crash."

"Danny Albertson? What do you mean?"

"I mean Sergeant Burnley. He was furious when he learned that you'd carried out Danny's final wishes and had his body cremated. He had come to us looking for an order to have his blood tested for narcotics and for the AIDS virus," Cabot said.

"When the coroner ruled it suicide and you already claimed the body and had it sent to Denholm's crematory, he came unglued. He had wanted an emergency court order to seize the body. By then, it was too late. Mr. Albertson was already ashes," Cabot said.

"What the hell is Burnley trying to prove?" I asked.

"Evidently that your client was gay."

"What possible relevance, what probative value would that have in any proceeding? And how would taking control of his body prove or disprove anything. I still don't get it? There's no one to prosecute."

"Preaching to the choir, Les. Burnley's so consumed with this militantly anti-LGBTQ religious thing that... frankly, he's unstable. He's a cop, he doesn't know shit about the law or judicial process. He can't think in the linear terms that a lawyer does in advancing a case to see where it hits a dead end. All he wants to do is prove to that bunch of zealots that he's at least as homophobic as they are by inflicting emotional distress on Albertson's family," Cabot said.

I reminded Cabot of what we both knew: that this case was a dead end, that it would get nowhere in any court of law, so I asked him. "What does this guy want?"

"Attention, Les. It's all about camera time and headlines, whether it's complimentary or critical. It all advances his standing in that... church," he said. "What I am hearing from the captain in charge of the KSP post is that Burnley's been talking about demanding that the CA's office bring you in front of a grand jury on a charge of tampering with evidence in a criminal investigation."

I was speechless, and Cabot recognized it.

"It's not going to happen, of course. It's utter foolishness and if he persists with it, we're going to say so publicly. But Burnley doesn't care. I've heard that he's threatening to hold a press conference outside our office if we refuse in which he will condemn us as 'groomers,' and 'pedophiles' and... whatever," Cabot said.

"His captain said that if he does that, the commissioner of public safety will personally fire him, but that only makes the story bigger. And if that happens, it will cause two situations, Les, and neither of them are good."

"First, it's going to posthumously out your client whether he was gay or not. Second, those church nutjobs will hold demonstrations outside your office and mine, and, if previous dealings with Burnley's folks is indicative, there will be threats made against both our lives."

"Jeezus," I muttered. A cold chill ran down my back. "What recourse do we have?"

"Well, none from a legal standpoint that I can see. We can fire Burnley, and we could even attempt to bring charges against him for abuse of process, but there's no way we can impose prior restraint on his speech, as false and slanderous as it might be," Cabot said.

"So where does that leave us? Fight free speech with free speech?"

Cabot shrugged and looked at me blankly. "Unless you can come up with something better."

▼ ▼ ▼

Gene Fassbinder is the guy we go to in a really tough divorce or child custody case. Our firm had contracts with a number of top-rated licensed private investigators, and his is the best.

Some were good at document digging, finding the unnoticed patterns or smoking guns buried in vast mountains of data, including receipts, phone records, flight manifests, automated toll stations on urban roadways.

Others were just dogged shoe-leather detectives, not too far from the sort Mickey Spillane created, who could blend in anywhere and follow the most savvy of subjects.

Gene is both. His findings had been the key to our clients prevailing in any number of nasty, salacious divorces, property disputes and custody battles. That's why Gene doesn't come cheap. High net worth clients don't bat an eye paying him upwards of $400 an hour plus expenses for his work. But this was coming out of my own bank account, and while I do OK for myself, I can't match the fortunes of most of my clients.

"Who's the client, chief," Gene asked as he leaned back in a chair across from my desk.

"Me."

He batted his eyes several times.

"You're not even dating anybody, much less trying to get out of a bad marriage. What's the play?"

"This involves a client I retained just a few hours before he died." I took an envelope from my top desk drawer with a check for his usual retainer, $6,000, inside and slid it across the desk to him. "What I'm telling you from here on is privileged."

"Sure," he said, tucking the envelope into the left breast pocket inside his navy blue blazer, not far from his shoulder holster where he normally keeps his Sig Sauer 9 millimeter pistol. In keeping with our firm's security policy, he had checked it with the guys at the desk downstairs.

"My client was named Danny Albertson. We've been friends since we were little boys back in Lexington. He lived in Covington and worked on the maintenance and grounds crew over at Paycor Stadium. I knew something was badly wrong from his behavior the past few years and especially the past several months. He'd tell these sick, explicit sexual fantasies and expect me to believe them. I finally called him on them."

Gene nodded his head and grunted, meaning he understood so far.

"So we were watching college football at the BW2 in Covington a couple of Saturdays ago when it all came to a head. He needed someone to talk to but felt that nobody could be trusted with what he had to say, so I came up with the idea of taking him on as a client so I would be legally required to protect the confidentiality of anything he told me. He gave me a dollar and I wrote out a representation agreement on the back of a napkin. He had it with him when he ran his car into a concrete overpass support column off I-75 just south of Covington later that night."

Gene nodded again. "So your friend Danny was gay?"

I was amazed that he had intuited right away something I had not mentioned, a fact about my childhood friend that had eluded me for years.

"Yeah. He was. I didn't know that 'til I got a letter that Dano had mailed to me, evidently just before he crashed his car. He explained how he felt he couldn't come out but he couldn't keep living with the possibility of being outed."

Gene grunted again.

"So I get a phone call from a state trooper in Kentucky early the Sunday morning after Danny died. He tells me he found the representation agreement on Dano's body along with another handwritten note apologizing and saying he'd explain it all to me later, apparently a reference to the letter he had mailed me. The conversation with this Sergeant Burnley goes pretty much as you'd expect until he tells me he's thinking about getting a search warrant for Dano's apartment."

"Huh?" Gene said.

"My reaction, too. He goes on with this bizarre theory that he had a crime to investigate because public property had been damaged and, well, suicide is a form of homicide," I said. "He also told me something even stranger: that he had questions about Dano's 'lifestyle.' At that point I told this sergeant that as the attorney for Danny and now his estate, he was on thin ice legally and he'd best move very cautiously."

"What the fuck?" Gene said.

"So then I call an old UC law classmate of mine who works in the Kenton County CA's office and I learn that Burnley's is part of this virulently anti-gay backwoods church that's like a cult, and he suspects Danny's gay. Since then, I learn that not only did he ask the CA's office to seek a search warrant for him, he also wanted a warrant to seize Dano's body and have the medical examiner test it for hints of drugs and the AIDS virus, and he became furious when he discovered that I'd already carried out Danny's wishes to be cremated."

"Chief, this is the craziest shit I ever heard."

"It gets worse, Gene. Now, this sergeant is telling folks within his department that he's going to demand that the CA's office put me in front of a grand jury on a charge of tampering with evidence in a criminal investigation. My buddy says that it's not going to happen and if he raises hell over it, Burnley will probably get fired. And when that happens, Burnley and members of that nutjob church will protest in front of this office and the CA's office. My CA's office source says Danny would be posthumously outed and that I'd get death threats. So now it's a security issue, too."

"So you want me to find out about this Sergeant Burnley." It wasn't a question. He was just stating what he rightly discerned to be my intent. I smiled and nodded.

"Chief, I think this is going to turn up something like we've never seen before, and we've seen a shitload, you and me," he said. "That's what my gut's saying, and my gut is almost always right."

"We can only hope, Gene."

▼ ▼ ▼

The oaks and maples were beginning to turn autumnal shades of orange, yellow and maroon after the first frost in northern Kentucky. Kass was right: getting out of the towers and diesel fumes of Cincinnati was uplifting. That was already true as Ryder and I headed down I-75, putting Kentucky's suburban sprawl of Florence and Independence behind me, en route to Danville, a little more than an hour southwest of Lexington.

It was Saturday morning, two weeks after I had last seen Dano. His death had reconnected two old high school classmates: Kass Felson and me.

She was also correct in describing Danville as a cute town. It is. At least the resurgent downtown is. Along West Main Street, there were old shops with new faces and updated purposes. A feed store was now an upscale day spa. A sushi restaurant occupied a renovated hardware store that had stood vacant for decades. And in the midst of it, at 370 West Main, was Felson's On Main, a store that had operated on the same site since just after World War II, but now painted a festive pastel yellow with a bright, modern logo and large, arched-top windows that flooded the first and second floors with sunlight. I parallel parked in front of the store and texted Kass: I'm out front.