Old School Ch. 02: KASS

Another pause to let the gravity of it settle in. My eyes widened.

"Like 'The Bird Cage' South Beach. The gay Riviera South Beach. Guys walking around on the sand wearing banana hammock thongs -- that South Beach?" I said.

Gene nodded.

Holy shit, I mouthed silently.

"You see the grounds for my hypothesis," Gene said. "And right now, it's nothing more than that. I need a little more time and resources to put the nails in Burnley's coffin."

So here comes the ask, I reasoned. "How much more resources?"

"Another five grand?"

"Shit, Gumshoe, the only client I can bill this to is dead and had no assets other than a Toyota Camry that's now smashed into a billion pieces," I said. "This comes out of my pocket. Can you cut me a break?"

"I am cutting you a break, Shyster. The resources I need are pricey database searches by some serious nerds that don't work cheap. I also need to hire some trusted shoe-leather help in south Florida, too," he said. "You may wind up owing me more."

I sighed, looking in vain for my checkbook in my top desk drawer and finding none.

"Can I Venmo you the money?"

He nodded, sitting silent and conspicuously missing his cue to shake hands and say goodbye.

"One more thing, Les. The part I said you might not like. Another connection informs me that Burnley is curious why you drove last weekend down to Danville, Kentucky, and to a couple of places around that area. Is that correct?"

Now the shock on my face showed, followed closely by a building rage.

"What possible lawful grounds does Burnley have to track me?" I said, rising from my chair. "Did he plant a device on my car? Did he have me tailed by a trooper? There's no way he got a warrant to do that. I will have him fucking fired and prosecuted..."

Gene cut me off.

"No, you won't. Not yet anyway. You'd burn my source, you'd tip Burnley off, you'd waste the six grand you've already paid me and you could ruin what's likely to become an investigation by the Kentucky CA's office and probably even the U.S. attorney. Calm down, Les, and let this play out. It could get rocky, but if you really want to put this Burnley cocksucker and maybe that cult out of commission, let the pros do their jobs."

That's a first in my experience: the private eye telling the lawyer to calm down. But Gene was right. Frightening, but right. It was scary because if Burnley is tailing me, he may now be following Kass, and she's certainly done nothing to entangle herself with a dirty, vengeful cop with a lot to hide and with who knows how many soulless minions he controls.

"I visited an old high school friend of mine last weekend. We both knew Dano and reconnected at his funeral. I can't say there's a 'relationship' between us, not yet anyway, but there could be. Her name's Kassie Felson. She owns several businesses in Danville and works her ass off to keep them successful. I want you to do what you can to protect her. If you get wind of anything Burnley and his goddamn thugs are doing that could involve Kass, I want to know immediately."

"Got it," Gene said.

"When it comes to keeping Kass clear of this, I don't mind paying you more. A lot more," I said.

A vein in my temple pulses when I get really angry. I could feel it throbbing. Gene could see it, too. The depth of anger I felt that Kass might be victimized in this and my overwhelming resolve to protect her shocked me. And that reaction, I later reasoned, may hold a clue to the question that confronted me before I finally fell asleep after that magical day with her the previous Saturday: maybe she is the one.

"Understood, Chief," Gene said. He repacked his accordion file, put it under his arm and grinned as he turned toward the door. "And I hope it works out for you and your lady."

▼ ▼ ▼

I couldn't sleep after Gene Fassbinder's briefing, so I started searching the internet, doing a little amateur online sleuthing of my own for anything on this fucked-up church. I clicked on a Reddit post by an amateur "citizen-journalist." The byline on the post was "The Apostle," and there was no further information discoverable about the writer's actual identity, meaning that the story beneath it could be partly true, fully true or a total fiction.

The piece said that the pastor, interchangeably referenced as Elder or Brother Elmer Brewer, had come to see a younger version of himself in Mason Burnley, one of the most ardent members of his flock at the Eyes of Ebenezer Holiness Tabernacle, a plain, windowless, white clapboard meeting hall in a clearing of pines off a narrow county road about 12 miles off Interstate 71, the freeway connecting Louisville and Cincinnati. Brewer founded the sect in the late 1970s after he caught his older brother naked with another young man who was widely reputed within the community to "prefer men to women."

The family exiled and disowned its eldest son, who would descend into a life of alcohol and heroin abuse and die in 1988 in the pauper's ward of a Chicago hospital of a mysterious and uncurable new disease that destroyed human immune systems. He was buried in Cook County in an obscure public cemetery in a grave set apart only by a plastic marker with only a city government chaplain and two men with shovels who would cover his flimsy wooden casket there to act as official witnesses to the interment.

The family allowed no reconciliation with its outcast member as Elmer increasingly came to see homosexuality as a demonic and even apocalyptic scourge that had to be eradicated. He used the words of Malcolm X to give it emphasis: "By any means necessary."

Elmer was no student of the Bible, according to The Apostle. His family had never been religious and Elmer never evidenced any real call to the ministry. He didn't give a fractional shit about saving souls. But he rightly surmised that the best way to muster a committed army of easily led people in a crusade against gays and lesbians was religion. He viewed faith as merely a means to an end, so he cloaked his ad hominem hatred in some half-baked theology and soon had scores of like-minded people following him and giving him astonishing sums of money.

Over the years, Elmer grew fond of telling followers that he based the church name on references in 1 Samuel in the Old Testament where Israel, weakened by idolatry and negligent in its offerings to God, set up camp beside Ebenezer, meaning "stone of help," in advance of a disastrous loss to the Philistines. His church, he had said, stood for righteousness in combatting the seminal evil of the planet -- to him, anything other than pole-in-the-hole heterosexual coitus -- the way Israel hued to its "stone of help."

The truth was that he just liked the way the words rolled off the tongue one night when he and his father were putting away a case of Old Milwaukee and slinging around names from the Bible.

Over the years, Burnley had come to represent the full toolkit for waging Elmer Brewer's holy war on the gay community. Brewer saw him not just as a true soldier for his church's homophobic crusade, he could put his skills, his hair-trigger temper and his fetish for casual violence to devastating use in real-world ways because he possessed a gun, a badge and the rank of sergeant. Elmer had devoted a lot of his followers' money toward developing Burnley in any way he could, including helping him pay for and attend training every quarter on best practices for securing the Lord's own "natural order" at a camp hidden among the swamps and sawgrass in northern Florida.

But as the COVID-19 pandemic hit and cost many congregants at Eyes of Ebenezer their jobs in retailing, skilled and unskilled labor and manufacturing, money for Burnley's training junkets grew scarce. Elmer had to cut Burnley's honorarium in half, and that distressed the KSP sergeant greatly. So Burnley resorted to online crowdsourcing, creating a "Lord's One Way" GoFundMe account that, according to the Reddit post, brought in about $28,000, mostly donations of $50 or less, from all over the United States in just a week -- enough to cover several junkets to Jacksonville. Or, I thought to myself, the more distant, exotic and expensive South Beach.

I printed out the post and, at 1:30 a.m., made a PDF of it and emailed it Gene Fassbinder for follow-up. His reply took less than five minutes.

"Good stuff, chief. You should do this for a living."

I checked GoFundMe and found an account named "Lord's One Way." I clicked on it and it made no reference to Burnley, but it appropriated the Eyes of Ebenezer's name and mission in exhorting anti-gay individuals the world over to give generously. There was no doubt in my mind, however, that Elmer Brewer and Eyes of Ebenezer knew nothing of Burnley's crowdfunding effort and would see none of its receipts.

That was a solid follow-the-money lead for Gene and me, and it might just be enough for Cabot Nathanson and the Kenton County CA's office as well as the FBI and IRS to begin parallel criminal investigations. But for now, I had to trust Gumshoe and let him do what he does best: find frauds and liars and expose them.

▼ ▼ ▼

On the drive to work, I heard an alert on my phone that I had set uniquely to notify me when a call or text from Kass was coming through. It's the trumpet fanfare at the start of "Jump Around" by House of Pain.

"Siri, read messages," I commanded my mobile device connected via Bluetooth to my Tahoe's hands-free controls.

"You have one new message from Kass Felson: 'Missing you,'" the automated female voice said. "You have no more unread messages."

Warm feelings flooded me. I had thought of little else when not preoccupied with work the past few days, and after Gene Fassbinder's warning that a rogue KSP trooper had me tailed to Kass's residence and business in Danville, she was even more of a working presence when I was at my downtown office.

"Siri, call Kass Felson, mobile," I told my automobile. And a few heartbeats later, I could Kass answer.

"Hey, Les," said a voice still imbued with girlish mirth at age 37.

"Morning, sunshine. How's Friday treating you so far?"

"Livin' the dream. Sun's out, so maybe the customers will be, too," Kass said. "Make mama some money."

"I suppose this is Millie's weekend off and you're stuck in the store, right?"

"How'd you guess?"

"I was hoping we could meet at Keeneland tomorrow afternoon and maybe go for dinner somewhere in Lexington in the evening," I said.

"Keeneland's out. And that's a shame because I think it's the last weekend of the fall meet there," Kass said. "And seems a long way for you, especially to drive just for dinner."

I sighed, conceding her point.

"Been missing you, too, Kass. I really want to see you," I said. Then, sensing that maybe that sounded a bit heavy, I tried to lighten things and added, "... Ryder, too. He misses your belly-rubs."

"Well, Halloween weekend is next weekend, maybe something then?"

"Sounds promising. Let's put a pin in that. What kind of spooky ghoulie are you going to be for trick-or-treats?"

"Oh, I don't do much of that. You don't get many kids trick-or-treating in Danville's business district, especially if you live on the second floor over a store," she said. "But I could be whatever you want. You be Clyde, I'll be Bonnie. You be Ken, I'll be Barbie. You be Bogart, I'll be Bacall."

I liked her thinking. The notion of cosplay was enticing, even though the last bit eluded me for a minute. Kass is an encyclopedia of classic old movies. Had been since middle school. I recognized the name Bogart so I knew it had to do with cinema. I Googled Bogart and Bacall and instantly found a clip from their best-known romance, "Casablanca," the one with the famous line, "Here's looking at you, kid."

"Well, trick-or-treating is a thing in my neighborhood if you feel like visiting Cincinnati," I said. "Even for grown-ups. They have a Best and Worst Costume contest at my neighborhood bar. We could hand out candy to the kids at my house around dusk Saturday and then go down there after."

"I might like that," she said. "Let's decide this weekend what we'd dress up as. If I'm going to drive all the way there, I intend to come back to Danville with a best-costume trophy!"

"Deal," I said. "Can't wait."

"Me too," she said.

Images of Kass dressed as a French Maid or a naughty nurse or even as Barbie continued creeping into my mind, and I was increasingly fighting them off to focus on serious legal work as the day wore on.

I had never so much as glimpsed Kass in a low-cut top. She was the soul of protestant propriety in high school, and she was stylishly dressed every time I'd seen her since, including khakis, a flannel shirt and cowboy boots for our most recent Saturday together.

The hour or so we spent kissing and relaxing together on the sofa in her second-floor apartment was the closest we'd ever come to intimacy, but no clothing was even unbuttoned, much less shed except for her cowboy boots. There was definitely intensity to our make-out session, and there may have been various forms of arousal that went unmentioned and unexplored in our cautious first steps toward romance.

Unspoken but clear to both of us: let's pursue this at the right pace. And we had. Whether she noticed the swelling in my jeans as I kissed her goodnight and embarked on the drive back to Cincinnati, I don't know. But if I learned anything about Kass, she perceives a lot more than she lets on or that other people imagine.

For the first time since I was in high school, I genuinely looked forward to Halloween.

▼ ▼ ▼

It was scrawled in white crayon on the rear window of my Tahoe parked, as usual, in a driveway off the alley that runs the length of the block behind my house and other houses fronting onto Hatch Street.

"GROOMER... U CANT HIDE."

It was as if my blood turned to ice water. My stomach sank. You like to imagine you're secure in your person and your possessions, but unless you're in a locked compound in a city like Cincinnati, that illusion of security can get easily punctured. But this was different. This was a message directly from people who were trying to intimidate me for a very specific reason.

After standing there for a moment, I had the presence of mind to photograph it and text it to Gene Fassbinder. Then I remembered that a motion-sensitive security camera keeps watch over my small backyard occupied mostly by the driveway. I used the app on my mobile device and there it was: a man in a white hooded sweatshirt emerged from the passenger side of an car idling in the alleyway with its headlights dimmed, using only its parking lights. It appeared the culprit had taken extra steps to conceal his face with the sort of ordinary facemask that was ubiquitous during the pandemic.

He spent nearly 20 seconds behind my vehicle, evidently scrawling his semiliterate screed. Then he scurried back into the passenger seat of the car and it drove on down the alleyway before turning its headlights back on. I also sent the security cam video to Gene.

I didn't want to erase it or move the car until I got advice from him. And it didn't take long.

Stay put & send me ur location. Be there in 15 mins, Gene texted me.

I went indoors and made myself a second cup of coffee. I texted Donita that I would be a little late because of unforeseen circumstances at home.

When Gene arrived, he parked on Hatch Street and stood there. Moments later, an unmarked gray sedan parked not far behind him. I greeted him at the front door.

"Morning Chief. Say hello to Will Gustin, FBI special agent in the Cincinnati office," Gene said. "Take us to the vehicle."

I led the two men through the house, out the rear basement door and pointed to the Tahoe.

Gustin walked to the rear of the car and looked at the window, not so much at the graffiti as the glass and metal around it. He pulled a mobile device from his coat pocket and focused it tightly on a couple of spots he found. He studied the image, made a few taps and then placed a call, turning away from Gene and me as he spoke.

"Looks like he sees something interesting," Gene said. "Evidently they've been getting a lot of reports like this involving victims who are either active in the LGBTQ movement or are seen as aiding it in some way. At first, they were just dismissed as people copying those QAnon nuts after that idiot shot up a pizza joint in Washington, convinced that pedophiles were abusing kids in a basement under that store that doesn't even exist. Then they noticed specific differences and an increased frequency in stuff like this and violence against gay people in this region and they're pretty sure it's those Ebenezer's Eyes assholes resorting to some redneck intimidation tactics."

Gustin was walking toward us now.

"Mr. Walker, do you have to be somewhere immediately? I've asked forensic techs to come examine what looks like useable fingerprints and what might be some dried spittle on the back of the car that could give us a DNA sample," he said. "It'll take an hour or two to process it."

I shrugged. "I have a client meeting at 10. I could Uber in or maybe Gene could give me a lift unless you need him," I said.

"Not much I can contribute here. Will's got this locked down, right Will?" Gene said.

Gustin nodded.

"Let's go then, Chief."

It was only a 10- to 15-minute drive to the office usually, just enough time to ask Gene what the hell was going on.

"The feds, Gene? They're involved now?"

"Turns out they have been for a couple of months," Gene said. "It crosses state lines, it involves possible domestic terrorism and hate crimes, so it gives the U.S. attorneys in Southern Ohio and Northern Kentucky concurrent jurisdiction. They've formed a multi-jurisdictional grand jury. I went to Gustin after you told me about Burnley. His ears perked up. They've had their eyes on him for a while. He's how I know Burnley had you tailed. And you never heard a word of what I just said. You never saw Gustin or anybody else at your house just now either, got it?"

I swallowed hard and nodded my acknowledgement.

"Another thing Gustin told me last night and one of the reasons he wants the forensics team to look your car over with nobody around: there's a tracking device magnetically attached to the wheel well over your left rear tire. Been there a little over a week. Feds don't want you to remove it or tamper with it in any way. Do you understand?"

"Jesus, Gene...," I said. "How did I get mired in this shit just from signing Danny Albertson as my client in the final few hours of his life?"

"One last thing -- and don't lose your cool," Gene said, glancing toward me. "There's another tracking device underneath Kassie Felson's car."

"God damn it...," I bellowed. "I have to warn her."

"Les, I told you not to lose your shit. No, you can't warn her. There's folks blending into the woodwork in Danville who are protectively watching her. Have been for a couple of days. Just learned that this morning," he said.

"I know you care for her, but if you really want to do the right thing, leave this alone and don't spring the trap. If you do, these assholes get away clean and you'll have a federal grand jury looking to indict you for obstructing an investigation," Gene said.

He could see my vein throbbing again.

"Be cool and keep quiet, Chief. It's the best thing you can do for the good guys, for yourself and for your lady."

It took a couple of hours in my office to cool down. The good news: shutting Burnley and his goons down was a lot farther along than I ever dreamed. But the stakes were higher than ever, things were very unsettled, and every ounce of my being wanted to tell Kass not to get in her car.