"But a bite didn't kill Maudette." Gran wanted to be sure she had it straight.
"Nope, strangling." Jason had begun finishing his lunch.
"Don't you always get gas at the Grabbit?" I asked.
"Sure. So do a lot of people."
"And didn't you hang around with Maudette some?" Gran asked.
"Well, in a way of speaking," Jason said cautiously.
I took that to mean he'd bedded Maudette when he couldn't find anyone else.
"I hope the sheriff doesn't want to talk to you," Gran said, shaking her head as if indicating "no" would make it less likely.
"What?" Jason was turning red, looking defensive.
"You see Maudette in the store all the time when you get your gas, you so-to-speak date her, then she winds up dead in an apartment you're familiar with," I summarized. It wasn't much, but it was something, and there were so few mysterious homicides in Bon Temps that I thought every stone would be turned in its investigation.
"I ain't the only one who fills the bill. Plenty of other guys get their gas there, and all of them know Maudette."
"Yeah, but in what sense?" Gran asked bluntly. "She wasn't a prostitute, was she? So she will have talked about who she saw."
"She just liked to have a good time, she wasn't a pro." It was good of Jason to defend Maudette, considering what I knew of his selfish character. I began to think a little better of my big brother. "She was kinda lonely, I guess," he added.
Jason looked at both of us, then, and saw we were surprised and touched.
"Speaking of prostitutes," he said hastily, "there's one in Monroe specializes in vampires. She keeps a guy standing by with a stake in case one gets carried away. She drinks synthetic blood to keep her blood supply up."
That was a pretty definite change of subject, so Gran and I tried to think of a question we could ask without being indecent.