Page 15 of Den of Iniquity

Putting away my phone, I continued shopping. On my waythrough the store, in addition to my microwavable entrees, I picked up several boxes of macaroni and cheese. Back in my bachelor days, that was the one thing I for sure knew how to cook.

That evening Kyle and I dined on Hungry-Man frozen dinners. He ate all of his and half of mine. I was beginning to get a better idea of what it means to feed a growing boy. Once he headed for his room, I picked up my phone. Ben had sent me a text that contained Matilda Jackson’s name and phone number and nothing else. Whatever her issue was, I was going to have to find out about it on my own, without any help from Ben.

“Matilda Jackson?” I asked when a woman answered.

“Yes, who’s this?”

“My name is Beaumont,” I said. “J. P. Beaumont. Ben Weston gave me your number.”

“Oh, my goodness,” she said. “You’re the detective who gave Benny that teddy bear on the day his parents were murdered. He still has it, you know. He told me he keeps it in a desk drawer in his office in case he needs it again.”

I had no idea Ben had hung on to his teddy bear, but knowing what horrors await homicide cops on a daily basis, maybe having a teddy bear stowed in a nearby desk drawer isn’t such a bad idea.

“Guilty as charged,” I told her. “Ben mentioned that you might be in need of a private investigator.”

Matilda sighed. “I certainly am,” she said. “It’s about my grandson. His name was Darius. He died of a drug overdose in November of 2018. I want to know who killed him.”

“Mrs. Jackson— It is Mrs., correct?”

“Yes, Mrs. But you can call me Matilda.”

“Matilda, as I said, I’m a private investigator now. I’m no longera homicide detective. If someone murdered your grandson, this is something the police should handle.”

“Except they won’t,” she replied. “They claim he died of an accidental overdose—fentanyl. As soon as the medical examiner declared his death to be accidental, Seattle PD closed the case and refused to lift a finger.”

“But you believe Darius was murdered?”

“Iknowhe was murdered,” Matilda declared. “When he went to volunteer at the food bank that day, he hadn’t used in months. Why would he spend the day handing out free turkey dinners to homeless people and then walk away from the food bank and overdose in a dark alley? Answer me that!”

I happen to know a little about those kinds of situations. When drug addicts clean up their acts and go for a time without using, if they go back to it, they’re putting their lives in mortal danger. Amounts of their drug of choice that they could formerly use with impunity are now powerful enough to kill them because they no longer have their former level of built-up resistance working for them. I thought about all that but I didn’t say any of it aloud to Matilda. Clearly she had enough to worry about without my piling on.

“This happened on Thanksgiving Day?”

“Yes, and he was in high spirits when he left the house.”

“He was living with you at the time?”

“Yes, but he knew good and well that if he ever started using again, I’d throw him out and he’d be back on the streets so fast that it would make his head spin. The thing is, he never came home.”

“You reported him missing?”

“I thought maybe he’d decided to spend the night with his girlfriend, so I wasn’t really worried. I was just mad that he hadn’tbothered to let me know his plans. The next morning when he still wasn’t home and wasn’t answering his phone, I started thinking about calling in a missing persons report, but before I got around to it, two detectives turned up and told me that Darius was dead. The driver of a garbage truck spotted him in the alley earlier that morning and called it in. They found both his phone and his wallet. They also ran his prints, but they still wanted me to come in and positively identify him.”

“His prints were in AFIS?” I asked.

Matilda took a steadying breath. “My grandson had a few run-ins with the law and spent some time in jail, if that’s what you’re asking, Mr. Beaumont, and there were certainly times he deserved to be there, but he didn’t deserve to die. He was starting over. He was working. He was going to meetings for his addiction issues, and he was also going to church. He had even started seeing someone he met there—a young widow. He was looking forward to living a normal life, but now he’s dead, and the only person who gives a damn about him is me.”

That struck a chord. How many people think their kids and grandkids are doing fine when they’re not? You can count me as one of those. In spades.

“I’m so sorry to hear about this, Mrs. Jackson, but as I told you earlier, I’m no longer a police officer...”

“That’s the whole point. Benny explained to me that the cops won’t look into the case because Darius’s manner of death has been determined to be accidental. As far as Seattle PD is concerned, the case is closed. I need someone who isn’t a police officer to reopen it.”

God knows I wanted to say no, but that wasn’t really an option. Benjamin Harrison Weston had asked me to look into the situation as a personal favor to him, and look into it I would.

“I’m going to need a lot more information than I have so far,” I said at last. “Where do you live?”

“I used to live in the south end of Seattle. A few months after Darius passed, I had a stroke. After that, I couldn’t handle the stairs anymore, so I sold the house to someone who’s all wound up about gentrifying the neighborhood. I moved in with my sister down here in Renton. She’s a widow, too, so we look after each other and share expenses. Besides, her house doesn’t have any stairs—except for the ones on the front porch. Thankfully some people from church installed a wheelchair ramp for us.”

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