48
ABBY AND JAMORRIS met Adam Foster in the main lobby of the jail as he arrived late for his shift. Both inspectors, trained to carefully observe, got the clear impression that he wasn’t happy to see them. Their first clue was that, despite knowing them both at least by sight, he asked for their identification and looked them up and down with withering contempt. He directed them to follow him back to his workspace, which was the anteroom and reception area for Burt Cushing’s office.
When they got there, Foster, still only marginally civil, indicated that the inspectors should take whatever seats they wanted. He walked over to the door with Cushing’s name on it, knocked, and pushed it open. Evidently, no one was there. Foster turned and went to sit at his own desk, obviously gathering his patience and even slapping on a veneer of politeness.
“All right,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
Abby Foley led off. “Mr. Foster, did you happen to get a look at Jeff Elliot’s ‘CityTalk’ column this morning?”
“I did.” Foster had his hands clasped on his empty desk. His knuckles shone white. “I got a couple of calls waking me up to tell me about it. Bunch of nonsense.”
“You think it’s nonsense?” JaMorris asked.
“What else could it be? I’m surprised they let the thing be published. Well, no, I’m not. Anybody wants a headline in this town, they lob some mud at this department. It gets old, but it’s not like we haven’t seen it before and won’t again.”
JaMorris nodded. “So you nix the idea that Maria Solis-Martinez is connected to the death of Alanos Tussaint in jail a couple of months ago?”
Foster dredged up a tired smile. “All of it. It’s total bullshit.”
“We ask,” Abby persisted, “because we’re on that case—Maria’s—and we’ve got nothing remotely resembling a lead.”
“I’m not surprised. How is some purse snatcher, probably tweeked out of his brain, supposedly connected to Mr. Tussaint? It doesn’t even make sense.”
“Well,” JaMorris replied, “you must know that at one point you were being investigated as the main suspect in the killing of Mr. Tussaint.”
Foster played his response as if he’d heard a good joke. “Really?”
“Yes, really,” JaMorris said.
“Okay,” Foster said, “let’s start with fundamentals. First, Mr. Tussaint wasn’t murdered. He slipped and fell and banged his head and unfortunately died of his injury. The medical examiner made the call on the cause of death, then the SFPD—you guys!—did a thorough investigation, and that was your decision, not mine. How I’m somehow on the hook for killing a guy who wasn’t even murdered, I don’t know.
“On top of that, when did this accident of his occur? That came up in the investigation, too, and would you look at that? I happened to be on an assignment down in San Bruno. I’ve got five witnesses, all sworn officers, who were working down there with me and testified to that fact. So what do I think of the theory tying together this Maria person and Alanos Tussaint? Best case, it’s some crazy person howling at the moon.”
“And yet, coincidentally,” Jambo said, “Luther Jones is suddenly dead in your jail as well.”
The silence lingered. Abby interrupted it. “So you did not know Ms. Solis-Martinez?”
“No. I couldn’t have picked her out of a lineup.” By now Foster had unclenched his hands and sat back in his chair, at ease. “Guys,” he said, his voice all sincerity, “listen. My heart goes out to the poor woman. She was one of us, in law enforcement. She must have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but you both know this happens every day. Now, I gather, if I’m a suspect in Tussaint, who wasn’t even murdered, I might as well fit the bill for this other person, too. And that’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”
With a sheepish smile, JaMorris conceded the point. “You know how it is, Deputy. We follow every lead, even if it’s unlikely to take us anywhere.”
Abby picked it up. “We figured we come down here today, do it the easy way. Ask you straight out what you were doing Wednesday night, and if it checks out, we cross you off and can forget about all these no-evidence theories.”
Foster rubbed his hands together, palm to palm. “Wednesday? This past Wednesday? What time?”
“Ten-ish,” Abby said without any hesitation.
Foster’s hands went to his mouth, templed at his lips. Suddenly, his eyes lit up. “I hate to ruin the fun,” he said as he straightened in his chair, his hands back on his desk, “but Wednesday I was at a poker game with some of my buddies from, I don’t know, seven or so until eleven, eleven-thirty.”
“At your house?” Abby asked.
Foster shook his head. “No. Mike Maye’s. One of my guys here.” He went to reach for the telephone. “I could call him down if you want.”
“How many other players were there?” JaMorris asked.
Foster cast his eyes to the ceiling, recalling, counting the names off on his fingers. “Mike, Steve, Eno, Jorge. Four. Five, with me.”
“Do all of them work here?” Abby asked mildly.
The question didn’t seem to raise a flag for Foster. “Mike and Eno, yeah. Eno Barani,” he spelled it out. “Mike is May with an E. Steve and Jorge, Smith and Perez, are in Evictions.”
JaMorris wrote it all down.
Again, Foster reached for the desk phone. “You sure you don’t want me to call Mike Maye? Get a statement from him. Take five minutes.”
The inspectors exchanged a glance. “Sure,” Abby said. “Save us another trip.”
Foster picked up the phone and made the call. When he hung up, he said, “He’ll be right down.”
“Cool,” Abby said. “Thank you.” Then, back to her friendly conversational tone, “So this poker game, Sergeant: How’d you do?”
“Pretty good. I left with about two-fifteen.”
JaMorris whistled at the number. “What’s your buy-in? I’ve got a regular game where the buy-in’s twenty, and I’m starting to think that’s too low.”
“Depends on the limit more than the buy-in,” Foster said. “If you can’t make it hurt to call, everybody’s gonna call, right? And if you can’t bluff, it’s not poker. What’s your limit?”
“Three,” JaMorris said. “Dollars. Not three hundred dollars.”
Foster shook his head. “Not near enough. We play a hundred buy-in and twenty-five limit. Three raises. Check and raise okay. It’s a serious game.” He broke a devilish grin. “Some hands get vicious, let me tell you.”
JaMorris gave him an open smile. He reached for his wallet, extracted a business card, got up, and slid it across Foster’s desk. “If you let in new players,” he said, “feel free to give me a call.”
“I might just do that.”
A sallow-faced, thin, balding man knocked on the doorframe. Foster told him to come in, and the two inspectors stood and introduced themselves, shaking hands all around. When they finished, Mike Maye asked how he could help.
Abby said, “We were hoping you could tell us what you were doing on Wednesday night. Two days ago.”
Maye thought about it for a couple of seconds, cast a questioning glance at Foster, then turned back to Abby. “He didn’t tell you?”
“We’d like to hear it from you, if you don’t mind,” she replied.
He shrugged. “There’s not much to tell. I sat in a chair in my house for a few hours and watched my money disappear in a poker game. Most of it went to Adam here. I’m surprised he didn’t tell you.”
“He mentioned a little of it,” JaMorris said. “Sounds like a good game.”
“Better if you win,” Maye said. “Which he did.”
“What time did it break up?” Abby asked.
Another shrug. “I don’t know, exactly. Oh no, wait. I know he called his wife on his cell at ten, told her he’d be a little late. I gave him some grief over it.”
“Over what?” JaMorris asked.
“Having to call his old lady.”
“You’re not married?” Abby asked.
“Used to be,” Maye replied. “Don’t miss it so much.”
JaMorris brought him back on topic. “So Sergeant Foster stayed till when?”
“Say eleven, somewhere in there. What’s this about?”
JaMorris answered. “Somebody thought your boss was somewhere else.”
“When?”
“Wednesday night,” Abby answered. “Eight to eleven.”
“Nope,” Maye said, then broke a small rueful laugh. “I wish he had been, though.” He turned to Foster. “No offense.”
“None taken.”
To the inspectors, Maye added, “If he’d left at ten when he was supposed to, I’d be sixty bucks richer, I’ll tell you that.”
“Everybody hates a sore loser, Mike,” Foster said. “It’s unbecoming.”
Maye broke a lopsided grin. “Easy for him to say.”
“All right, then.” Foster pushed back his chair, stood up, and addressed the inspectors, who also got to their feet. “So?” he asked them. “Are we good?”
“Good,” JaMorris said.
“Any more questions for Mike while he’s here?”
“Not necessary,” Abby said. “Thank you, Mike. And thank you, Sergeant. Sorry to put you through all this trouble.”
“It’s no trouble,” he answered magnanimously. “As I told you, I’m used to it. It comes with the territory. You know your way out?”
“We can find it,” JaMorris said. He pointed to Foster’s desk, where his business card lay. “And I’m serious about that game.”
“I’ll keep it in mind.”
They followed Mike Maye down the hall and left him as they turned off to the lobby. When they got outside the building, JaMorris said, “That was quite a performance.”
“For all of us, I think. I loved the poker riff. I didn’t know you played.”
“I don’t.”
Abby broke a wide smile. “Well, aren’t you just the pip.” Then she added, “So Mike Maye isn’t married. You get that?”
“It was hard to miss. And this means . . . ?”
“I’m not sure, except my gut says it’s significant.”