Old School Ch. 02: KASS

Moments later, the door to the shop opened and there she stood, swooning at Ryder who was proudly riding shotgun in my Tahoe and clawing at the door, eager to meet Kass, stretch his legs and pee, hopefully in that order.

As soon as I opened the door, Ryder bounded over to Kass and reared up, putting his paws against her chest and beseeching her to pet him. And she did, cooing at him and scratching him behind his soft ears. He was in dog heaven, a glazed look in his eye and his tail wagging furiously.

"Well, you got here earlier than I expected," she said. "And this handsome guy must be Ryder!"

Ry's an affectionate boy... to me. I've never seen him take to another human that way. I said as much as I clicked the key fob to lock my car and ambled toward Kass and Ryder.

"Either he sees something special in you, Kass, or you just covered yourself in bacon grease." I said as Kass knelt down to Ryder's level, totally focused on this wiggling, 55-pound mass of happy dog, rubbing his belly and the loose fur under his neck. I watched for a moment.

"Maybe I should head on in and do a little shopping while you two get acquainted?" I said, jokingly.

"Oh, Les, I'm sorry," she said, rising to give me a hug. "Welcome to Danville and Felson's on Main! Didn't mean to make you feel like an afterthought."

Kass grabbed me by the hand and led me toward the front door to her store.

"I guess it's OK to bring Ryder in?"

"Absolutely. This whole revived stretch of West Main is designated as dog friendly. It's part of what's made us successful."

Inside, Felson's was a mix of the vintage and the new, antique meets avant garde, handmade displayed next to items bearing the Nike swoosh. It was exclusively women's fashion, but clearly aimed at Generation X and younger, especially active women. You could find what looked like Victorian-era sun bonnets on one aisle and North Face and Patagonia ski parkas in another. There was a section for yoga pants and designer sports bras, and there was a section for business casual suits that flourished after the pandemic, the sort I see women in my firm wear every day.

She introduced me as her long lost classmate to Millie, her trusted top lieutenant, and to Emily, a sophomore business major pursuing a degree in marketing at tiny Centre College just down the street in Danville -- one of several students who worked part-time at Felson's.

Saturday mornings are a crapshoot, Kass said. Some weekends, it's so slow that the day's receipts barely cover the day's electricity bill. Other Saturdays, she's had to call in part-timers to help cover the crush, particularly in the spring and fall, times when there are numerous festivals and "leaf peepers" out to take in the majesty of trees blossoming or changing color.

This one was somewhere in between. Kass had already scheduled Emily to fill the gap.

"Do you expect it to get busier today?" I asked her.

"Hard to tell, but probably not. Mid- to late morning -- like right about now -- is usually the peak on a given Saturday. Millie and I work alternating Saturdays, and this was her Saturday to run the store. I called in Em so you and I can sneak off for the afternoon," Kass said.

"Sneak off... where?"

She planned to visit an arts and crafts fair in Berea, about half an hour's drive to the east of Danville, and -- time permitting -- swing by a winery a short distance from Berea near Richmond, Kentucky, to sample a new Malbec that had gotten rave reviews.

"Actually, it's something of a business trip... but a fun one. I'm scouting for merchandise I can feature in my businesses. There's a weaver who makes these amazingly cute handbags out of hemp at the festival in Berea, and the wine is a local label I might want to feature in the restaurant," she said.

"Restaurant?"

"Yes. I opened it up just down the street about three years ago. It's named Lou and Emma's after my grandparents who owned this clothing store. High-quality, locally sourced and essentially American cuisine with a preference toward Southern palates. We can eat there tonight if you have the time," she said.

"Wow. You're a little conglomerate!"

She giggled and intertwined her fingers in mine. "I do OK."

Kass tugged me toward the front door. "Mind if we take your SUV? I can bring back merchandise if I like it and, besides, there's two-hour on-street parking and they'd ticket you or even boot your wheel so you can't leave it there."

"Fine with me. You and Ryder flip a coin to see who rides shotgun."

"We're gone, Millie," Kass called over her shoulder as we reached the door. "Call if you have to. Otherwise, don't wait up!"

▼ ▼ ▼

Kassie Lorene Felson is an amazing businesswoman. Her charming, almost girlish appearance and sweet, down-home manner masked a cunning business mind that played 360-degree chess five moves in advance and a staggering facility with math. She could correctly take the measure of the other party in a negotiation and exploit his or her weaknesses in a way that left them believing she had done them a favor.

When the purse maker at the Berea Craft Festival blithely said he could fulfill an order for a dozen purses a month at a 30 percent wholesale rate for retail sale at Felson's, Kass kept an eye on the vendor's wife whose arthritic fingers seemed to make negligible progress on a new purse during the 30 minutes her husband spoke with Kass. In a subsequent casual conversation with the craftsman's wife, Kass learned that she could turn out one small purse in about five days and a larger bag in about seven. That came to about six purses a month, half the number Felson's needed. When she asked the husband for details about how he made the purses, she saw that he did little to none of the work. So she parted with them saying she'd reach out later. She never would.

At The Charter Vineyards, a short drive away near Richmond, we arrived just as the small family winery was shutting its doors for the afternoon at 4 p.m. Kass handed a man at the door her business card and asked to see the owner. We were led into a cavernous room filled with wooden barrels. The owner gave us a personal tour, and she sampled the Malbec she had come to taste. She, the winery owner and I found a table in the empty tasting room and, within 15 minutes, had reached an agreement to buy five cases of Malbec a month for a three month trial period with an option to expand to as high as 20 cases monthly.

Back in Danville, as dusk painted the autumn sky orange and purple, we sat side-by-side at a small corner table in the sidewalk dining area at Lou and Emma's, two blocks from her women's clothing store. We shared one of the 12 bottles of Malbec she had bought and brought back with us. She still had state regulatory paperwork to do before she could legally resell it, but nothing stopped the restaurant owner from sipping it as we waited for dinner.

"You are an absolute force of nature, Kassie Felson. I never would have guessed it," I said as a tired Ryder sprawled on the concrete below, snuggled contentedly against Cassie's booted feet, sound asleep. "What else do you own in this town?"

Turns out, she was the half owner of a BP service station and convenience store along the bypass, one of three partners in a high-end shop that repairs and reconditions computers and mobile devices and is among 22 local investors who were attempting to purchase the city's struggling newspaper from a hedge fund that had acquired it three years earlier and drained away its resources before putting it up for sale.

I looked at her with wide, unblinking eyes.

"I wasn't far off when I called you a little conglomerate," I said. She smiled.

"Nothing more than common sense business I learned from mama and daddy and from Pap Paw and Miss Emma. Buy low, work hard building in value, know your market, and make sure you respect your customers. The rest takes care of itself. Works whether you're Felson's or Walmart," she said, her head turned to her right, looking me squarely and confidently in the eye.

"Your mama and daddy, and Miss Emma and Pap Paw would be very proud of the woman you've become. I am. I've always thought the highest of you, but you've made me a huge believer."

She smiled, a bit bashfully. "Thank you, Les. That means more coming from you than anybody I went to school with, because I've always thought the most of you, too."

She swirled the Malbec around the bowl of her long-stemmed glass, staring at it as she did, then she slowly exhaled, as though letting go of something.

"Truth is, I had this huge crush on you back then. When you asked me to prom my sophomore year, I thought I'd explode. I didn't think mama and daddy would let me go because I was just 15 and they had a rule against unchaperoned dates before I was 16, but.... well, it was prom... and my date was Les Walker, sooo... they made an exception," she said, her face blushing slightly.

"I never knew," I said. "I wish I had. I was pretty dumb about things like that."

"That prom night... I never wanted it to end. I was scared to death that you might not kiss me that night. But I was just as scared to death of what I'd do if you did," she said, punctuating her remembrance with a giggle.

"Well, you did... kiss me, that is. I remember it like it was yesterday. It was right there on our front porch. You had me home just before midnight, like daddy had said. It was so innocent but I thought I was going to faint."

She inhaled. And just like last time, breathed it out again... slowly.

"That was the first time, Les. You were the first boy I ever kissed."

I was speechless. Lawyers are rarely speechless. This time, I grasped her hand and laced my fingers among hers.

"Kass?"

"Uh huh?" she said, turning her sweet face my way again.

"Too late for a do-over?"

Our hands disentangled and my right hand gently caressed her cheek. She looked deeply into my eyes, and our gaze held until our lips pressed together -- slowly, with halting tenderness -- in the cool of the brand new fall night, there on West Main Street in the otherwise empty sidewalk terrace of her restaurant. We kissed.

Both my hands softly framed her face as I felt her hand run through the hair just above my collar. We pulled ourselves closer and our mouths opened, welcoming each other, without ever breaking our first kiss in 21 years; our first lovers' kiss. The first of too many to enumerate.

▼ ▼ ▼

It was 2 a.m. on Sunday before Ryder and I returned home to Cincinnati, to Hatch Street and my comfortable brownstone. I had lingered at Lou and Emma's and then in Kass's stylish, perfectly appointed second-floor apartment above her store at 370 West Main in Danville.

That kiss at Lou and Emma's surprised me. It and the many that followed as we entangled ourselves on her sofa before I pulled reluctantly away and departed just before midnight, left my life's compass hopelessly scrambled. Normally, I'd have struggled to fight off sleep on the nearly three-hour drive, but the strange reckoning between my mind and my heart kept me wide awake.

My mind strayed just once on the drive along the mostly deserted freeway: when I passed the massive concrete overpass support pillar on Interstate 75 where Danny Albertson's life ended in a mass of exploding glass, disintegrating fiberglass and ripped sheet metal exactly two weeks earlier.

Ryder, however, snoozed in the back seat the whole way.

After I got home, I took Ryder out for one last pee, locked all my doors and crawled into bed. That's when the previous hours spooled through the cinema of my mind in a continual playback loop. There was the eagerness with which Kass and I responded to each other, even in the outdoor dining area of her restaurant. The way she fit herself under my free arm as we walked with Ry the two blocks back to her place. The way we pressed ourselves into each other as we kissed, doing our best not to go too far too fast.

It felt like passion unrequited. But from what? A prom date a full twoscore years earlier?

In retrospect, there was no doubt my intention and urge toward Kass were there even before our "do-over" kiss. I felt it even before she told me of her crush long ago and that I was the first boy she had kissed. If I am honest with myself, I knew it before I loaded Ryder in the Tahoe and drove to Danville early on a perfect autumn Saturday. I had known it at some level before I saw her at Dano's graveside service and our leisurely late lunch in Lexington.

In some obscure chamber of my mind or heart or both, Kassie Felson had always remained a presence, waiting for my conscious self to find an occasion to see the priceless gem she always has been with fresh eyes. It took the violent, self-inflicted death of a mutual friend to do it. But she was there. She had never gone away.

Now, what looked like a linear roadmap for life just hours earlier seemed to be a labyrinth. What was I to make of this powerful and strange new force in my life? Would this become something greater? Something life-changing? And was I really meant to have the prize awaiting a successful passage through the labyrinth: My 2002 prom date, Kassie Felson?

As my mind spun, a calming influence settled upon me. It made sense. It distilled everything to one question. It appealed to my lawyerly logic and to my basic notion of rightness: Don't overthink this Les. There's just one simple question. Is Kass the one?

I exhaled. That question would clarify all else. And it's one that would ultimately answer itself. And with that, sleep overtook me.

▼ ▼ ▼

I was focused on depositions that had been taken in Sheila Moffett's increasingly frail divorce fight with her estranged husband, Earle. Nothing in the physical evidence collected or the sworn testimony taken to date pointed to anything but Sheila essentially being a slutty wife who got caught in flagrante delicto. And her husband's got the receipts to prove it.

Little Miss Moffett is in a tight spot and there's no way around a very frank conversation with this client straight ahead, I thought to myself just as my phone buzzed. It was Donita.

"Les, Gene Fassbinder's on the phone asking if you can spare a few minutes. Want me to put him through?" my efficient legal assistant said. Go ahead, I told her.

"Chief!" said the gruff voice of my private investigator. "Got some updates for you on the most recent matter you and I discussed, but I don't want to talk on the phone. Got a few minutes this afternoon?"

"I'm pretty slammed but I'll try to get a few minutes. How long do we need and am I going to like what I hear?" I said.

"Ten minutes. Fifteen tops. Some you're gonna like, some you're not. But I think we've developed some promising leads," he said.

I told him I'd forgo my midafternoon coffee break if he could be here at 3.

"I'll bring a coffee with me. Black, right?"

"As always, Gene. See you then."

It was pretty much pointless trying to make progress on matters I was being paid for. Every time I attempted to focus on Moffett v. Moffett, my mind drifted to whatever Gene had found. By 2 p.m. I had decided it was unfair to bill Sheila $85 every six minutes that passed when I was unable to really focus on her case for even three of those minutes, so I gave up and told Gene to come in early.

"What you got for me, Gumshoe?"

He hated the term when we first started working extensively together a decade back, but came to realize that it was a actually a compliment and accepted it as long as he could call me Shyster.

"Our boy Burnley is a complicated fella, Shyster," Gene said as he put an accordion file in the empty chair beside him across the desk from me and began pulling papers and an iPad out of it.

"In what way? Or ways?"

"Well, he's definitely a major figure in this Eyes of Ebenezer Holiness Tabernacle out in the sticks in Henry County. They don't handle snakes, but they take a real Old Testament view toward homosexuality and actually believe death is appropriate in cases where a gay person can't or won't have the, uh,... gayness prayed out of them," Gene said. "Here's some flyers and brochures that they hand out in shopping malls and other places all over the region... until the merchants call the cops to remove them from private property."

The material was sickening, loaded with drawings of an anthropomorphic Supreme Being raining flaming sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah, a Photoshopped image of RuPaul being cast into a burning pit, a pink sheet emblazoned with "DEATH TO FAGGOTS" in 48-point bold type and a meeting time and place for like-minded bigots to learn more about their movement. It seemed a simple business model: keep them scared, keep them pissed off and they keep on giving.

"Funny thing is, they don't seem to get too worked up about stuff like straight folks committing adultery, stealing, running scams and the like. There's been at least 47 complaints filed against this group with the Henry County Sheriff's Department in the past 36 months, mostly for things like threats, simple assault, petty theft, credit card scams, even an extortion attempt. Not one has ever gone to trial. Out in Henry County, they all magically go away," Gene said.

I nodded. What's that got to do with Dano, I asked him.

"I'll get to that. But the reason I mention this is that it's a pretty well-known open secret in Florence, where Burnley lives, and even within that church that Burnley's wife has been fucking a guy 10 years younger than her for at least five years. Burnley knows it and seems to be fine with it as long as she doesn't publicly acknowledge it and they remain married and cohabiting, at least to the outside world," Gumshoe said.

"What do you make of that, Gene?"

"I was a cop for a lot of years, a detective for most. I never -- not once -- met a cop who would stand for his wife banging another guy. At a minimum, they'd file for divorce. A lot of times, the cop and a lot of his buddies would find the guy and beat the living shit out of him and tell him nobody will ever find his body if he ever comes near the missus again."

"So his wife's a whore," I said. "I sort out the aftermath of those situations for a living. Where's this going?"

"I have this hunch that Burnley's hiding something. This marriage of his, he knows it's a sham but evidently it's important for appearances. And then there's all this over-the-top anti-gay activism. It's overkill. Too much. Sort of like your client, Danny, was going so far overboard with those crazy orgy stories... he was covering for something," Gene said, then fell silent.

"You think Burnley might be a deep-closet gay guy?" I said.

"That's my gut, Les. He's definitely deflecting something, and it's usually the thing a guy like him claims to hate the most," Gene said. "My gut is right more times than not, so I start looking in that direction."

My head was spinning.

"Got a lot more work to do to prove it, but I have some leads. Turns out Burnley travels down to Florida about once every quarter of the year. Tells everybody he's going to some 'church leadership' training thing around Jacksonville run by this congregation out west somewhere that's like the mother church of the anti-gay movement," Gene said.

"Well, I got a friend, let's just say in government -- and you don't want to know what you don't want to know. We do professional courtesies for one another so I called in a favor. I asked him to get cell phone data on Burnley from around the time of his last couple of trips. What he found was that Burnley went to Florida, all right, but it ain't Jacksonville and even if it was, there's no gay-hating church training anywhere close to it that anybody in law enforcement and national security knows of. Instead, Burnley's phone keeps pinging off cell towers going farther south. Miami. And not just Miami -- South Beach.