54
ADAM FOSTER’S FEET pounded on the treadmill. He didn’t give a shit about the signs that told all the exercisers to be thoughtful of the other members and limit their time on a machine to twenty minutes. F*ck that and f*ck them. He’d already gone a half hour and had barely gotten a good sweat going; he’d go at least that long again. The one thing you didn’t want to do if you worked with clientele like his was to get soft. He wasn’t about to let that happen.
As he jogged, his mind ran along, thinking that all this recent media hoopla about Alanos Tussaint and the rest of it was a pain in the ass for sure but that it shouldn’t really worry him. These things tended to go in cycles. He remembered, for example, when Wes Farrell had been running for DA and his main opponent, a liberal cretin named Ron Gabriel, had decided that conditions in the jail should be a main concern of the citizenry.
The incumbent DA, on his way out, hadn’t been nearly hard enough in investigating allegations of impropriety in the lockup, and Ron Gabriel was going to make a Sheriff’s Department cleanup a major priority in his administration. The poor inmates were being mistreated on a daily basis, and a city that prided itself on sensitivity to the plight of misunderstood and underserved individuals should not stand for it.
Adam Foster’s take on Ron Gabriel? The guy didn’t have a clue. First thing, most of the inmates lived the life of Riley, with more amenities than they had in their own rat-hole apartments, flophouses, crash pads, or whatever other cribs they might have called home. They got three square meals, and good ones, every day. Meat, spuds, gravy, bread, milk, green stuff if you wanted it. His fellow guards ate the same meals, and you never heard them complain.
On top of that, with a little cooperation, any reasonably motivated jailbird could get his hands on whatever else made his life good—drugs from weed to heroin to Oxy, alcohol, and television. Of course, none of that was free. There was even a charge for the choice bunk in each cell. But this stuff wasn’t free on the outside, either. If Ron Gabriel or any of his ilk wanted to ask the average inmate how he or she liked the jail experience, Adam Foster bet eighty percent would say it was just fine.
What Burt Cushing always came back to was true: It was a well-oiled machine. The oil that made it all work so well was the money the inmates brought in on their books from peeps on the outside, then spent on the goods he and Burt provided.
Once in a while you’d get some greedy douche bag who thought he was a player and could ease in on some of the action, and that’s where Adam came in, enforcing the status quo. He was their keeper, supplying protection so the majority would be safe while they were behind bars. Protection was a major commodity all over the world. Everybody understood that. It was only when some foolish or mentally challenged inmate, such as Alanos Tussaint, tried to upset the apple cart that action had to be taken.
Given the socioeconomic background of most of these animals and their marginal-at-best levels of sophistication, action had to be forceful, immediate, and unambiguous. No. Somebody stepped out of line, you whacked him back in, and if he still didn’t get it, what happened was unfortunate but had to be done for the greater good. They always brought it on themselves. Always.
Now they were in another cycle where the call for reform hovered in the air. Foster was surprised to see it coming from Glitsky, who, as a longtime cop in the Hall, must have been aware of the basic realities. And from Farrell, who had been the soul of benignly tolerant laissez-faire for the first three years of his administration. What the hell had gotten into these guys?
Well, okay, Solis-Martinez.
Maybe they’d moved too fast on that, didn’t think through the ramifications. But he wasn’t about to whip himself over it. She’d put herself into a situation that had been settled. If you stir up a hornets’ nest and don’t expect to get stung, you’re a dumb shit. And dumb shits have a tendency not to survive.
Despite the rants of that meddling Jeff Elliot, they had no chance to connect Foster or Burt to Maria Solis-Martinez. He’d done that job right. There was no evidence, and none, he knew, would ever turn up. Foster was a pro, and the truth was that random violence happened every night in the city. Glitsky and Farrell could believe what they wanted, but they’d never be able to prove a damn thing.
So, yeah, the next few weeks would probably be a hassle, but if there was one thing Foster had learned about his boss, it was Cushing’s ability to deflect not only most general criticism but especially official opprobrium. In six years, through at least three cycles of the kind of witch hunt they were experiencing now, no one had ever laid a glove on them. Every investigation into alleged crimes committed inside the jail had come to nothing.
Foster had no doubt that even the Tussaint situation, which had bred its own unexpected and festering sore, would be settled in the coming days or weeks. The Luther Jones case was a nonstarter. This time Foster had been careful that nobody saw anything. He would bet they wouldn’t be able to prove he was even in the jail when Luther OD’d. If there were alibi discrepancies for Tussaint—Foster was thinking of Hal Chase—he knew that an alibi problem, absent evidence of or an eyewitness to the crime, was all but useless. People mixed up dates and days and what they had done and when they had done it. The paperwork showed he’d been at Bruno. It would be a nonissue.
Right now he was more concerned about a call he’d gotten this morning about Hal Chase. The woman said she had important information and needed to see him in person but wouldn’t elaborate. She wouldn’t give her name and wouldn’t come to the office. He couldn’t get her to say if it was about the Katie Chase murder or something else, and it was the something else that worried him.
“I can taste it,” Abe said. “It’s all unraveling over there. This Tussaint thing is going to take them down.”
“Call Wes first,” Hardy said. “Don’t do anything dumb. Or should I say anything else dumb.”
“I’ll be the epitome of restraint,” Glitsky said. “But only for fifteen seconds after Wes gives the okay. I will talk to Burt Cushing, I promise you that. I wonder how he’ll take getting sweated. “
“There. That’s what I mean. You don’t want to talk to anybody else about this. As you say, it’s starting to unravel all on its own. This is when Wes really ought to call in the feds. Killing an inmate is a clear civil rights violation, a federal felony. They’ve got all the jurisdiction in the world, and they love this stuff. Plus, you lie to the FBI about any old thing, on that alone, you go to prison. They’ll have tremendous leverage you don’t have any part of. And there are how many liars on the San Bruno thing alone?”
“Six.”
“There you go. One of them will talk.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure, Diz. If any of them admits they weren’t in San Bruno, they’re essentially confessing to covering up a murder. All of them could wind up going down for conspiracy or worse. I don’t think Cushing or Foster is going to let them forget that.”
“The feds offer immunity, and that goes away.”
“Maybe, but maybe not. They don’t need immunity if they never cop to the lie, so why would they? Here’s another idea. How about your client?” Glitsky asked. “He’s one of the six.”
“On the advice of his attorney,” Hardy said, “Hal won’t be talking. Especially not to the feds. You want to know my real concern?”
“Sure.”
“If it comes to it, they try to pin Tussaint on Hal. The bogus alibi, if it comes out, doesn’t need to have been for Foster. Any one of the six would do, wouldn’t it? And Hal’s already up for murder. Why not stick him with another one?”
Glitsky was silent for so long that Hardy asked him if he was still there. “Just thinking,” he said. “You might be right.”
“I don’t want to be,” Hardy said, “but I don’t think it’s an impossible scenario.”
“It still depends, though, on one of the five giving up on San Bruno. And if I were one of those guys, I’d never admit it. Ever. To anybody.”
“No,” Hardy said. “Neither would I.”