When I was a prosecutor, no cop would’ve done that. I was still getting used to being persona non grata by virtue of my new sideline in defending people accused of petty crimes. And if that weren’t enough to dent my reputation, any connection to the Warton clan knocked a man down a notch or two around here. I’d never thought of Mazie that way, but I was realizing she was considered basically a Warton despite never having married Jackson’s father.
It occurred to me she’d probably taken refuge in the restroom just to get away from the gossip and the nasty looks. I wondered if she’d called me from there. I stepped out of the fray and leaned against a wall to shoot her a text saying I was here.
She came right out. She had the masklike expression I’d seen countless times. The mothers of murderers and murder victims, the wives of dead men and of perps, they nearly always had this look on their faces when they had to wade through crowds of reporters, cops, and curious onlookers. She was barely holding it together.
I stepped over to her and offered her a ride home.
As we drove, windows down because my AC was on the blink, she didn’t speak. I didn’t either; I didn’t want to upset her, especially not when we were still in stop-and-go traffic near the courthouse and the jail. She didn’t need some gawker snapping photos of her crying in my car.
When we turned onto the causeway, the long view over the water seemed to relax her. Since there was nobody around—the causeway only had two lanes, with nothing but rocks and palm trees on either side—I asked, “So, what all happened there?”
The floodgates opened. She started sobbing.
“It was Karl they found,” she said. Again, I wanted to kick myself for letting her find out from someone else. “It’s so awful. I hated that man, but nobody deserves that. His face was gone, Leland! His brothers had to identify him by his tattoos!”
I dug a pack of Kleenex out of my center console and handed it to her.
She took it and said, “And they kept asking me about Jackson. I don’t know where he went. I’m just glad they didn’t need him to identify the—”
She started crying again. When she’d blown her nose a couple times and started calming down, I said, “So… tell me, Mazie. Walk me through it. How’d you end up at the police station?”
“Well, I got home around six-thirty,” she said. “With the grease, I always take a shower after work. I was just drying off when the doorbell rang. When Jackson didn’t get the door, I yelled for him a couple times. They just leaned on the bell and started hammering, louder even than Karl when he’s drunk.”
I guess that made her nostalgic, because she went quiet and looked out at the water. The sun was getting low, and the palm trees were casting long shadows on the waves.
To get her talking again, I said gently, “What happened then?”
“Oh, I went and answered the door. And that Detective Blount, you know, he just blurted it out about Karl, like you’d expect him to.”
He was blunt, she meant. That was the joke in high school, on account of his last name. It was a nicer way of saying he lacked basic courtesy, to the point that I questioned his Southernness.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Oh, it ain’t nothing. Remember, I stayed here. I never had occasion to forget how he was. But Leland, the thing is, he kept asking about Jackson. Where he was, where he’d been the past few days. I went to get him, so he could set Blount straight, but he was gone. His window faces the back, and I guess he just jumped out. That’s going to give them the wrong idea, isn’t it?”
It was the kind of thing that would’ve gotten pride of place in my opening statement, back when I was a prosecutor: Ladies and gentlemen, when the police arrived to inform the family of Mr. Warton’s death, the defendant didn’t answer the door. Instead, he jumped out the back window and fled.
There was no point telling her that. I asked, “You have any idea where he might be?”
“Might want to ask your Noah. But no, I don’t. I didn’t even know he’d gone until we looked in his room. But that Blount, he right out accused me of stalling so Jackson could run! I was in a robe, my hair was all wet, and I still had to take him in the bathroom and show him the fogged-up mirror before he’d believe I really was in the shower when they got there.”
I didn’t like how aggressive Blount was being. I didn’t know if he was bluffing or just making assumptions, or, God forbid, if he had hard evidence.
That wasn’t a question that could be answered yet. “So how’d you end up down at the station?”
“They asked me to come. We got nothing to hide, and I didn’t want them thinking I wasn’t cooperating.”
“Oh, uh-huh.” I kept my voice casual. What she’d done was the opposite of what I would’ve recommended, but there was no sense making her feel bad now. “So what all did they want to know?”
“Oh, everything. Where was I on this day or that? Where was Jackson? They already knew he and Karl had fought, so they wanted to hear all about that. I told them it was Karl who started it. He came over drunk and raring for a fight. They wanted to know every single thing that happened after that.”
“Mm-hmm.” That did not sound
