The Bone Bed

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,