Old School Ch. 03: Naked Justice

For nearly two years, the Justice Department had been watching Brewer, Burnley et al. It had been a full-court press by the feds: the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Homeland Security, the agents said. They had managed to turn some members into informants who had worn wires and gathered highly incriminating evidence at the heart of the conspiracy. They had also managed to infiltrate it with undercover agents. They had recently obtained court orders authorizing wiretaps and video surveillance of the phones and homes of key figures. The multi-jurisdictional grand jury had handed up sealed indictments against 58 individuals, including Brewer and Burnley. Earlier this morning, the attorney general of the United States had given the go-ahead to begin arresting all 58 and raiding the homes of all but one -- Mason Burnley, who was already in a Florida jail on numerous state charges. His home had been raided shortly after police frog-marched him out of the wired South Beach cabana he had booked to become his gay love nest.

"As we speak, we've already got 46 of them in custody, including Brewer, Brewer's wife, four law-enforcement officers -- three in Kentucky and one in Ohio -- and two who were public school teachers and were feeding Brewer with information on children who were known or rumored to be gay or trans in their districts," Gustin said. "Six of those indicted are being charged with kidnapping relating to those kids who were forced against their will into a conversion therapy camp hidden in the woods on property Brewer owned near his church."

"It staggers my mind what these bastards thought they could do," agent Corder said, staring blankly at a spot on the tabletop. "Most criminals are motivated just by money. These guys were motivated mainly by hate, but Brewer and Burnley were definitely in it for the money. We've discovered bank accounts tied to them worth over a four million dollars total already and we're sure there's more."

Fassbinder and I looked at each other.

"You were right, Gumshoe."

"Right about what," he said.

"When you said this would turn up some shit like we've never seen before," I said joylessly, then addressed the agents. "So my question is: on a day as busy for you as this one, why'd you bring us in here for a briefing?"

"We thought you should know; that you shouldn't have to learn about it on the evening news. Also because we'd like for you to testify for the government," agent Gustin said.

"There it is," I said to Gene. "What I've wanted to avoid all along."

"It would be helpful," Corder said. "And we can subpoena you and compel your testimony if we have to."

"Yeah, and I can assert attorney-client privilege for myself and my investigator," I said.

"And we can ask the court for an exception," Gustin said.

"With all due respect, Mr. Gustin, where are you licensed to practice law?" I said, glaring at him. "That exception has rarely been granted, and then only in extremely rare cases when the client was involved in ongoing fraud or when it was necessary to protect national security, and I don't think either applies here."

His bluff called, Gustin looked down at the table, his jaw muscle flexing, and remained silent. Gumshoe stared at me wide-eyed

"Why? Why testify? Why try to put me in open court and force me to divulge what I was retained by my late client expressly to keep confidential? That essentially puts the government in the position of carrying out what Mason Burnley wanted all along," I said, my anger rising.

"We've given you access to everything we've turned up -- without you even having to ask! Absolutely anything to which I could possibly testify is contained in those records. This shit has already likely destroyed my relationship with Kassie Felson because I stupidly tried to protect privilege in this matter and avoid divulging Dano's secret but also your investigation. And Kass... she allowed agent Corder to use her vehicle as bait to take down trooper Poynter who I now understand is cooperating with the government in exchange for immunity! What more do you want that we haven't given or had taken from us already," I said, my patience exhausted.

Now Gustin and Corder were both silent, but Corder -- the more senior of the two agents -- had the moral bearing to look me in the eye and at least hear me. The silence lasted longer than was comfortable.

"It's a serious question," I said. "You already seem to have more than enough to persuade multiple juries to convict these people."

Corder, a lean woman with a serious but thoughtful demeanor, nodded.

"Mr. Walker, I take your point. But in the end, it's not our decision. We're just the investigators. It's not even Mike Pinlok's decision. It's his boss's decision and he'll probably call Justice to get buy-in, so...," she said. "But I'll do what I can."

Gene and I looked at each other. We had been a team for so long we could tell by each other's body language and expressions what the other was asking or answering. He shrugged.

"OK, I suppose that's the best we can ask for, Agent Corder," I said. "Thank you."

She and Gustin rose, indicating that the meeting was over.

"We've still got a busy afternoon and evening ahead," Gustin said. "And then the fun and games with the press start. So if you'll excuse us."

We shook hands and parted. Gene had ridden to the briefing with me and as we drove back to the firm where he had left his car, he was quiet.

"Not like you to be this closed-lipped," I told him.

"Yeah. Just worried about how this might go. Not great for someone in my business to get tied up in a bunch of media. The less people know about guys like me, the better. And with the targets of this shit show being charged under RICO, who knows where it could all lead. Just nervous I guess. Occupational hazard," he said.

I nodded. "You're right. I don't like this either. I really don't like how this one-dollar retainer on a back of a bar napkin got us so smeared with so much dogshit. I don't for a minute regret defending a friend who's not here to defend himself anymore, but it's costing me a shitload of money, both in what I'm paying you and the billable hours I could use more profitably. But I could live with that. What's really fucked up is that it seems to have destroyed my life with Kass, and she'd changed the whole way I look at life, at the future."

"I'm sorry, Les. I really am. It was me who told you to keep quiet and you trying to do that is what got you in trouble with her," Fassbinder said. "This line of work destroyed my first marriage, but that was on account of me paying more attention to work than to her. Here's you finally figuring out there's more to life than work and... this..."

More silence. I flipped on the radio to fill the void.

"You think maybe it would help if I talked to Kass? Explained what I was trying to do?"

I smiled at Gene. Part of me wanted to say hell no, you've done quite enough already. But he meant well and genuinely felt guilty.

"I don't think she's ready right now to hear from anybody about this, Gene, but it's really good of you to offer, pal. I appreciate it. I really do," I said.

It had been an important day in this whole sordid mess I wish I'd never caught wind of. The gears of justice had not only engaged, the whole matter was now rolling ahead with startling speed. As Gene and I were cruising along the freeway on our way back to my office, genuinely bad people were being rounded up and booked into jail cells. It was an important and good day in the interests of applying naked justice to criminals of exceedingly malignant intent.

But all I could think of was Kass and whether all of this -- and my flawed handling of it -- had cost me the best thing in my life: a life with her.

▼ ▼ ▼

I had spoken to Kass by phone several times over the past month. Since the day the world exploded in my face, the day Kentucky State Police trooper Gordon Poynter had pulled over her vehicle the day before Halloween on Interstate 75 north of Lexington only to find himself face-to-face not with the woman I loved but with agent Sandrine Corder of the FBI and a cadre of her colleagues wearing black jumpsuits and armed to the hair follicles.

During that time, I had tried to assure Kass that I was having fruitful talks with the U.S. attorney who heads the strike force that had been presenting witnesses and evidence to a multi-jurisdictional federal grand jury for months, long before Dano Albertson's death. I had reason to believe that she would not be called upon to testify, mainly because her testimony adds little to the enormous mass of evidence against Brother Brewer, Burnley et al. But I couldn't deliver absolute assurance of that, which she found frustrating. Being a witness in a sensational, high-profile prosecution -- even when you're not accused and are one of the good guys -- is never good for business. And Kass had immersed herself in her business since our romance was ruptured on that Sunday afternoon from hell.

It wasn't that Kass was cold in our conversations. Instead, she sounded torn between anger and forgiveness. She would flare at me one moment, then sound mournful and hurt the next.

It was now the Friday after Thanksgiving -- appropriately known as Black Friday. Kass and I had spent the holidays apart. The cozy plans we had penciled in had been scattered to the winds.

I spent Thanksgiving in the guest bedroom of mom's retirement village apartment. Mom had flipped on one of the many season-ending college rivalry games that filled the weekend, perhaps thinking the inertia of it might keep Ry and I around for another evening. It didn't work. I gathered my things and was heading out the door around noon.

"Really was good having you here, son," she said. "Sorry things are sideways with you and Kass and I didn't get to see her."

I shrugged and showed her a defeated smile. "Me too, Mom."

She hugged me tightly. "Don't give up, son. I've been talking to the Lord about this and I have a feeling it's going to work out the way it's supposed to, the way that's the best for you two."

"Yeah. What's the way that's best for Kass and me?"

"Lord didn't say that part," she said, still holding me in her embrace. "That's what y'all got to figure out. But you'll both be OK."

I kissed the top of her head, squeezed her again, and Ry rubbed against her pants, sat beside her and looked upward with big, brown eyes that beseeched her, Give me goodbye loves too, grandmama.

I hadn't gotten off the Louisville outer belt and onto Interstate 71 when my phone buzzed. It was a number I didn't recognize, but it also said the call originated from Danville, Kentucky. Against my policy of letting calls from numbers I don't recognize default to voicemail, curiosity prevailed and I gave the Tahoe's hands-free Bluetooth system the OK to answer the call.

"Hi, this is Les," I said.

"Hi Mr. Walker, I don't think we've met. My name is Jerilyn Bates. I am a lecturer and adjunct professor at the Centre College Law School in Danville," she said.

She was right in that we had not met, but I had heard of her. She was a wunderkind in the world of litigation. Jerilyn had grown up on Danville, earned her undergrad degree from Princeton in three years and finished at the top of her Princeton Law class. She had clerked for Justice Anthony Kennedy on the U.S. Supreme Court, gotten a preferred associate spot in the Washington office of a powerhouse litigation firm, made partner before she was 30 and had won two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court before she shocked everyone and resigned at age 35. She had gone back home to Danville -- to decompress, focus on her children and her aging parents, she had told her powerful contemporaries in the exclusive world of Washington's legal elite.

"Hi Jerilyn. Big fan of yours. Your reputation precedes you," I said. "To what do I owe the honor of this call?"

She cleared her throat.

"OK, can we pretend after this call that we never had it?"

"I suppose. Tell me more."

"Well, we both have a very dear friend and she would never speak to me again if she knew I was talking to you right now," she said.

"I get it. Wish I was sure Kass still considers me a friend," I said.

"So I've heard," Jerilyn said.

"Is Kass OK?" I asked. "About the only times she'll take my calls is when I inform her of what I am hearing from the feds on this crazy Ebenezer's Eyes case that's all over the news now."

"I guess that depends on how you define OK. She's focused on her business interests like I've never seen. She's about to buy some old industrial buildings by the old Danville railroad depot and convert them into condos and use a couple as high-end bed-and-breakfasts."

"Well she's an amazing businesswoman," I said.

"She's a businesswoman with an edge now. Kass and I have been close friends for years, ever since I moved back to Danville. She always had a giggly sweetness about her, even after she lost her mom, that masked a steely sense of business. I think it was one of her strengths. She was so smart and so disarming at the same time," Jerilyn said.

But when the two met for drinks Wednesday night at Lou & Emma's, she told me, Kass didn't smile the whole evening.

"Les, she's confused and she's hurting and she's angry and she's scared and she's... miserable. And that's all because she's in love. But that determined mind of hers is dead set not to let her heart win out," Jerilyn said.

I let an awkward silence hang for a few minutes before deciding how and even whether I should continue this conversation. She hadn't told me anything I hadn't already surmised except the part about the new businesses

"She's filled you in on what happened, I assume," I eventually said.

"Well, from her perspective anyway," Jerilyn said. "I wanted to hear your take."

I explained that I had taken on a new client who had grown up with Kass and me. His suicide set off a bizarre chain of circumstances that exposed me to Burnley and, by extension, the homophobic, vengeful backwoods congregation that was now in serious criminal trouble.

"That's Dano, right?" she said. "I think privilege on Mr. Albertson is pretty much in tatters now. You can just use his name. But I can understand your need to safeguard everything about it back then."

She was right. Dano had been named in the indictment against Burnley as a victim of the brutal conspiracy the devious cop and Brewer's congregation were running.

"Bottom line, Jerilyn, is I shouldn't have lied to her. I know my motivation at the time. I was in a car making this same drive from Louisville to my home in Cincinnati and talking to Kass by phone when she mentioned the graffiti on her car and asked me if I knew what 'groomer' meant. I know what I was trying to do then -- keep her totally clear of this and protect Dano's dying secret," I said. "But in my haste and shocked by the question, I made up some crap about kids mistaking her for someone who bathes horses or prissy little dogs."

More silence.

"I'm still here. I'm listening," Jerilyn said.

"Well I could have -- should have -- done it without lying. I know that now. I knew it right after I said it, but wrote it off as a little white lie that was intended to be protective and wouldn't hurt anyone. I should have known that the people who did this were evil and weren't likely to leave her alone in their effort to get to me."

"I understand so far. Do you mind if I speak freely?"

"By all means, Jerilyn."

"What you did isn't so bad ethically, though misleading people is not something the bar smiles upon. Still, you had an absolute obligation to keep your client's secrets inviolate, and you did," she said. "But I'm not here to talk about what you should and shouldn't have done as a lawyer. That would be condescending of me."

"Uh huh."

"What I am here to tell you is that there are times to be a lawyer and times to be a boyfriend or love interest or fiancé or whatever...," she said. "Put aside the fact that it's never a good idea to provide legal counsel to someone you're in a romantic relationship with, and at that time I think it's fair to say the relationship between you two was forming. Am I right?"

"You are."

"Whether you meant to or not, whatever your motivation, you tried to 'lawyer' someone you love, and that can only bring you grief," she said. "Kass had fallen in love with you. She thought she knew you. Her world came crashing down that Sunday afternoon when the FBI showed up at your house as she was about to leave and she saw for the first time that as close as she believed you two were, that there was this legal shell, this forcefield all around you that she had not been allowed to penetrate, and it substantially affected her safety and wellbeing."

"She's having a very hard time getting past that, Les. She feels she was foolish to put an intimate level of trust in you only to learn this awful secret in the most horrible way. She doesn't know if it's you she can't trust, whether it's Les Walker Esquire she can't trust or whether they're one in the same, whether the person and the profession are fused into one inseparable entity."

Jerilyn Bates had just deconstructed me with the precision of laser surgery. I decided to pull off at the next exit up the interstate because it had become impossible to focus on the road and on the devastatingly accurate assessment she had made of my life.

"Yeah,... that's... you've accurately represented everything," I told her, wondering if she could tell just from my voice how shaken I was.

"Les, I don't really know you other than what Kass has said, and I'm really not here to beat you up. I'm just hoping that maybe something I can say will maybe be useful to you and possibly helpful to Kass because we both love her."

I inhaled and exhaled loudly. "So, can I fix this? And if so, how?"

"I wish I was as good at prescribing solutions to problems of the heart as I am at listening and figuring out what those problems are," she said. "But the Kass I know today is not the Cass I've known for the past eight years. She's already had one of the part-time college girls who worked for her quit because she's been so short with them, and another one is about to. I even had a call from Millie, her store manager, who said she's going to hang it up and just start drawing Social Security if Kass can't figure it out real soon."

"Maybe you can draw some parallels from my own story, Les -- the reason I had to leave my Big Law career before it destroyed me -- because you're headed that way," she said.

"The practice of law, at least as it's done in the huge multinationals like mine was and yours is becoming, is not healthy. It's not how law was intended to be practiced. It's all about new business, upselling current clients, billable hours... making sure this year's revenues exceed last year's and next year's exceed this year's," she said.

"Oh, we dress it up with fancy marketing slogans like 'delivering client-service excellence,' but the fact is that if you're a partner and you're not out there selling as much as you're doing legal work, you're going to wash out. Big Law is a bitch mistress, Les," she said.

"I was married for seven years to a guy I met at Princeton Law, and he was one of the top corporate litigators in New York. He was a magnet for Fortune 100 clients, and it took over his life just like appellate law took over mine. We lived 300 miles apart and spent half our weekends on the shuttle between LaGuardia and Reagan National or on the Acela. Even the weekends weren't off-limits to client calls and reading final proofs of pleadings and motions and... whatever. That was a strain, but that wasn't what destroyed us," she said, her voice now lower, tinged with sorrow.