“This was in his toolbox. I didn’t look the first time because he’s an alcoholic who fell down the stairs into the basement, right? I mean, that’s where his body was found. He was in his underwear like he’d been in bed. And he’s got scratches, a gash on his head, broke ribs, is banged up like he went down the steps, and like I said, there’s blood on them and at the bottom of them.”

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.