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