Page 23 of Den of Iniquity

Detective Sechrest came back on the line. “Got it,” she said. “Here’s the number.”

I jotted it down in my notebook. Visiting the warehouse would call for another drive up and down the I-5 corridor, but doing that in the midst of Seattle’s notoriously bad traffic made no sense. So that went on my to-do list for the following week. Darius had already been dead for going on two years. Obviously this wasn’t going to be a rush kind of job.

My next call was to Jojo’s, the bar where Darius had been working at the time of his death. “Does the owner happen to be in?” I asked when someone picked up the phone.

“Hang on. I’ll check.”

It took a while before someone answered. I was surprised when the person who came on the line was female. “Patrice here,” she said.

“Are you the owner?”

“Yes, I am. How can I help you?”

“My name’s J. P. Beaumont. I’m a private investigator doing some work for Matilda Jackson.”

“Looking into Darius’s death, I hope?” she asked.

“Exactly,” I replied. “His grandmother doesn’t believe he was using at the time of his death.”

“Neither do I,” Patrice said. “Darius didn’t drink and didn’t use. He was in recovery and serious about it. Sometimes it takes one to know one,” she added. “That’s why, when my mother told me about him, I went ahead and hired him.”

“Your mother and Mrs. Jackson are friends?”

“Not just friends,” she said with a laugh. “They’re forever friends, from kindergarten on. Neither one of them would be caught dead in a place like this. I ended up owning it after my husband died. We were both involved in drugs at the time. After he OD’d I decided to get clean. Most of the people who work here are in recovery from one thing or another, and if I find out they’re using again, I send them down the road.”

That was unexpected. Years ago there was a booze-free bar in Seattle. It disappeared decades back for unknown reasons, but finding a bar in the Rainier Valley—one popular enough to need bouncers—that required all their employees to be clean and sober came as a surprise to me.

“How long did he work for you?”

“Not quite a year, and he was totally dependable,” Patrice replied. “Never missed a shift. Always showed up on time. And he was big enough and tough-enough-looking that most people didn’t even think about messing with him.”

Except, I thought,someone who happened to have a syringe loaded with fentanyl.

“Any complaints about him in the days or weeks leading up to his death?”

“None that I know of. I know he had a girlfriend. She wasn’t someone who stopped by Jojo’s, and I didn’t learn until his funeral that they were about to become engaged.”

“You attended the funeral?”

“We all did,” Patrice said. “I had to shut the place down that day because everyone who worked here wanted to go to the service. Some of my guys served as pallbearers.”

I’ve frequented a lot of bars in my time, but this was one my mother would have called “a white horse of a different color.”

“What about customers?” I asked. “Did Darius have beefs with any of them?”

“Nothing that ever came to my attention.”

“All right,” I said, preparing to end the call. “If you think of anything that might be of use, here’s my number.”

I gave it to her, and I could hear the scratching of a pen or pencil on paper.

“What do you think happened to him?” Patrice asked.

If I’d still been a sworn officer, I wouldn’t have been able to answer that question. As a PI, I could. “I believe Darius Jackson was murdered,” I replied without hesitation.

“So do I,” Patrice declared. “Since the cops aren’t going to lift a finger to find out what happened to him, I hope to hell you do.”

“That makes two of us,” I told her, “and Matilda Jackson makes three.”

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