My phone beeped with a text: Mazie letting me know she got off at five. I texted back that I’d swing by her house. Before talking to Jackson, I wanted to find out what I could about the white T-shirt he’d been wearing in the photo and see if she had any idea whether the ice cream stand had some sort of meaning for him. I was just trying to understand the kid. If I could do that, maybe I could get around whatever it was that had him too scared to talk to me about the arson. Not to mention too scared to tell me which prisoner or guard had been involved in the so-called fall that broke his jaw.
I knew Mazie always showered and changed after work—she didn’t want to smell like a greasy spoon all night long—so I didn’t show up at her place until close to six. She hollered to me to let myself in. When I got into the kitchen, she was pulling a cup of coffee out of the microwave. Two plastic-wrapped slices of pie sat on the counter. “The diner was just going to throw them out,” she said, “because they’re from yesterday. You want cherry? Or key lime?”
“Oh, whichever one you’re not having.”
We got situated and started eating. I said, “This is good, but I doubt it holds a candle to what you make yourself. Karl’s brothers had high praise for your pie.”
She laughed. “Yeah, tastes great, and it almost killed Karl. That definitely wasn’t part of the recipe.”
“Well, there’s things drunk people just shouldn’t do. Wolfing down pecan pie is one of them, I guess.”
“And going sailing at night,” she said. “Are they really sure he didn’t fall and hit his head?”
I winced at the memory of the photos in the coroner’s report. “Yeah, they’re sure.”
She sighed.
“It’s all down to Blount, then,” she said. “Ain’t it.”
“As far as evidence against Jackson, yeah. Speaking of which, I know he’s always wearing those death metal T-shirts, but does he have any white ones?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said, taking a bite of her key lime pie. “I tried to get him out of all that fireball-and-death stuff. At least for work, because I mean, skulls with worms crawling out of the eyeholes and whatnot, that just ain’t professional. You ain’t going nowhere in life looking like that. So I bought him a pack of plain white shirts, three of them. And he did wear them sometimes.”
“Any idea where those shirts are now?”
She screwed her eyebrows up like she’d just remembered something. “Oh,” she said, and looked at me. “He came home in one of those the next morning. Or, you know, right before dawn, right after Karl died. Oh my God. Not one of them black shirts like Blount was talking about.”
I nodded. “Tell me more.”
“Well,” she said, “I remember because it was such a mess. I had to put detergent on the stains and soak it a while before I could wash it. And it still didn’t come out right.”
“What kind of stains?”
“Just—” She caught herself and stopped. As she took a sip of coffee, she looked at me warily over the rim of the cup. Then she set it down and said, “I mean, it could’ve been from a campfire.”
“Mazie—”
“Look, my son is in enough trouble already. I don’t see how it helps to add arson to the neck-high pile of crap he’s already standing in.”
“It could change the timeline,” I said. “It could make it less likely that he would’ve had time to kill Karl.”
She nodded slowly, seeing my point. Then she covered her eyes with one hand and said, “Oh, Lord. Lord, I don’t even hardly dare hope, but thank you for this. Thank you for helping me remember this.”
When she finished her little prayer and took another sip of coffee, she said, “He was wearing one of them skull T-shirts before, that same night, but it got messed up in the fight with Karl. Blood, dirt, and I think it even got tore up a little bit. That’s why he changed.”
“Was there anything else on the white T-shirt when he came home? Any blood?”
“Not one drop. All the stains were black or, like, dark gray.”
“You still have it? And the one he had on during the fight?”
“Yeah. I washed them both, but yeah, they’re in his drawer.”
“Okay, hang on to them.”
I made a mental note to formally ask Ruiz to hand over any footage from the day of the murder that the prosecution might have. Most of the shops along the beach had security cameras, and the ones trained on the entrances would also pick up people walking past outside. If I could get a glimpse of Jackson wearing a white T-shirt that night, before the murder, then the selfie Noah had shown me from hours later would be even more powerful evidence. Ruiz was legally obligated to turn over any evidence that might exonerate Jackson—I didn’t even have to ask him for that—but I could see why, from his perspective, security-cam footage from hours before the murder wouldn’t seem to be in that category.
I drained my coffee, set it down, and asked, “About that ice cream stand. It’s been there since I was a kid. Do you remember anything that might have happened to him there? Or anything about the folks who own it? I’m trying to get a sense of why he might’ve targeted it.”
She sat back and crossed her arms. She was mad. “If we got the T-shirt,” she said, “if Blount was lying about what he was wearing that night, then what do we need the fire for? I didn’t ask you to help put my boy in jail on some other charge.”
“A first-time arson with no victims—and not even any possible victims, since the place was closed when it burned—is nothing like murder in terms of the sentence he could get. If he pleads to it and keeps up the good behavior, I
