Peggy Stanton’s choice of a design for her personal checks is folk art reminiscent of Charles Wysocki Americana, a brick house with a white picket fence, a horse and buggy going past.
“Every indication is he took a fall so there was no reason for me to go rooting around inside an old toolbox,” Machado says. “Not unless I was looking for something in particular, which I wasn’t at first.”
“He may have gone down the stairs, but he may have been injured first,” I reiterate, and now I’m more convinced of it because of the check.
It’s handwritten in black ink, made out to Howard Roth for one hundred dollars.
“I don’t think it’s likely the fall is what killed him,” I add. “He died from hemorrhage and possibly respiratory distress caused by blunt trauma so severe segments of his rib cage separated from his chest wall with as many as two to four fractures per rib. He has severe underlying lung injury.”
The check’s memo blank has been filled in with “home repairs.”
“He has blunt-force trauma to the back of his head. Do we know how he really got that?” I ask.
“Couldn’t hitting concrete steps do all of it?”
“I’m very concerned,” I tell Machado, as we wait for the elevator to budge from the top floor. “More so now that there’s a connection between Peggy Stanton and him.”
“Easy to imagine. The basement door right next to the bathroom.” He’s not going to stop defending his initial belief that Howard Roth is an alcohol-related accident. “I figure he gets up in the middle of the night? Drunk. Opens the wrong door, and one small step for man, one huge tumble.”
Printed in the check’s upper-left corner is the bank account holder’s name, Mrs. Victor R. Stanton.
“Where was the toolbox?” I ask.
There’s no address or telephone number on the check, and I continue looking at it. I can’t take my eyes off it.
“Oh, geez, Doc. You got to picture it in your head, okay? This old run-down place, really small, a real shit can.”
“I’m going to need to review the scene photographs.”
Her signature is Peggy Stanton, and it’s not a good forgery.
“A dark pit, a dump,” Machado is saying. “One naked lightbulb and six concrete steps leading down, with a rope for a railing. The toolbox was down there. I guess he carried the check around with him in his toolbox.”
“He’s making the rounds in Cambridge. Maybe stopping by her place because he wanted his money. Obviously he never cashed the check.” I tap-tap the button for the elevator, which hasn’t moved, someone holding open the door, no doubt.
My impatience reminds me of Marino.
“Fayth House is a residential nursing home,” I then say. “It might be worth checking on whether Peggy Stanton did any volunteer work there. It could be how she connected with him and why she would have trusted him to do an occasional job for her. A hundred dollars isn’t insignificant. I’d say he did more than rake her yard or unclog a drain.”
I think of the substandard wiring that was recently done in her basement as the elevator takes forever to descend.
“What else do we know about him?” I ask.
“Apparently, he was a mechanic in the Army. Served in Iraq when we first went over there, and didn’t do so good after the fact. Came home with a traumatic brain injury, a TBI from an explosive blast. Was discharged, moved back into his Cambridge house, couldn’t hold a job, wife left him seven years ago. A lot of drinking.”
“His STAT alcohol was point-one-six,” I repeat what Luke told me over the phone earlier, our discussion about his problematic case quite brief and frustrating.
Neither Machado nor Luke took the case as seriously as I wish they had, because it seemed so obvious.
“His level of intoxication would have made him more vulnerable to anyone who wanted to hurt him,” I add. “If he’s cirrhotic, he’s also going to bleed excessively. I’ve not gone over his autopsy findings in detail yet. But I will.”
“He pretty much drank up his pension every month and made money any way he could,” Machado says. “All these garbage bags in his house, nothing much else, just bag after bag like a hoarder. Filled with cans, bottles that he obviously was turning in for money, probably digging through trash cans, taking them out of peoples’ recycling bins that they leave curbside.”
The check is dated this past June first, and I tell Machado I seriously doubt Peggy Stanton was still alive then.
“If she was,” I add, “she wasn’t in her own house, since it appears the last time it was accessed was April twenty-ninth, according to the alarm log.”
“Obviously someone was able to get enough of her information to impersonate her. Must have stolen some of her blank checks, got her PIN number for the ATM because there are some cash withdrawals, nothing abnormal but enough so you think she’s alive and well. He got the code to her alarm, who knows what all? Any signs of torture?” he asks, as the elevator doors finally slide open.
“She has some strange brownish areas that I’m not sure about.” I describe them. “No obvious injuries or marks I’d immediately associate with torture. But not everything leaves a mark.”
“Probably just scared the shit out of her and she told him whatever he wanted, believing he wouldn’t hurt her.”
“Did you talk to Howard Roth’s wife?” We ride up in what Marino calls “the slowest boat in China.”
“Yesterday. She came down here and ID’d a photograph, and I talked to her for a while and then called her back as I was driving here. Apparently, he’s a regular in Cambridge. In fact, I think I’ve seen him walking around, and a couple of guys I work with know about him. Doing the odd job, a pretty decent handyman, and honest, harmless, according to the ex. But she couldn’t stay with a drunk,” Machado says. “No car. Driver’s license is expired. A real sad case.”
I return the envelope to him, and he verifies that personal checks and checkbooks he found inside Peggy Stanton’s house are like this one, exactly like it, he says.
“That’s the other thing I find really interesting,” he adds. “She had all her bank statements in a file drawer, you know, with all her canceled checks? Years’ worth of them, but only through this past April.”
“Because someone began intercepting her mail.” We get out on the seventh floor, where Toby seems to be having difficulty pushing a cart loaded with boxes. “Are you considering that Howard Roth killed her?”
“It’s always smart to consider everything. But it wouldn’t make sense to think he had anything to do with it.”
“He had something to do with it even if he wasn’t aware of it,” I reply, as we follow the corridor toward the computer lab. “Are you the one holding the elevator door open forever?” I say to Toby, when we get to him.
“Sorry about that. I’m having trouble with a stuck wheel, then it turned over when I was pushing it out.”
“I thought you were off today.”
“Well, with Marino not here, I thought it was good to come in.” He’s not looking me in the eye and I notice the boxes are computer supplies.
Machado and I walk off, and I comment, “It says a lot that she continued using her husband’s name when he’s been dead thirteen years.”
Toby pushes the cart behind us, stopping every few steps to straighten out the wheel.
“Maybe she didn’t want people to know she lived alone,” Machado supposes. “My girlfriend’s like that, doesn’t have her address or phone numbers on her checks. Doesn’t want her information out there so someone can just show up at her door, doesn’t want strangers calling. Of course, being with me and hearing all my stories about what goes on has made her a little paranoid.”